Flourish In The Food

Dear Veeky Forums,

I'm going to be doing some campaigns in a food kingdom, a literal land of milk and honey where there's scaling soup lakes, rivers of milk n' cream, pasta marshes (complete with garlic bred lily pads and parmasan cheese algae), sandwich forests (breaking off into scattered hot dog clearings and burger meadows), where even the ground itself is really just layers of basic carbs and starches with the lowest levels being grease, fat, sugar, salt, and finally mundane mineralization at the bottom.
My question is, what exactly is life like in a land of Food? What is daily life like in a realm where the basic foundation of survival: acquiring food, is so graphically available?

-What do people do for Jobs?
-What is VALUABLE in such a crazy kingdom?
-How do people simply not over eat to death?
-What sort of monsters would be appropriate to find in such a place?

*Context Disclaimer:
-It's an extremely fantastical realm and the focus isn't on how it physically could or 'can' function, but how the "normal" people residing in it DO.

Help me out here Veeky Forums and lets discuss this in length.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=1JTHmbKNhiw
youtube.com/watch?v=stawOB28FH4
nuco-comic.com/comic/1
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Everything would rot.

>Everything would rot.

Thanks, Dorkly.

Giving my thread a sad bump because at the very least I would like to flesh out the encounter table somewhat.

Beyond just the mandatory 'Bread Golem' I told myself I'd absolutely have to include.

>What do people do for Jobs?
Scavenge choice bits of tasty food.
Scavenge sturdy bits of food.
Build housing out of food.
Build tools of of food.
Build clothes out of food?
Cook food?
Remove (burn?) rotting food.
(Maybe they just migrate away from rot until it becomes fermented?)
>What is VALUABLE in such a crazy kingdom?
Choice bits of food.
Sturdy materials that don't rot (imported?).
>How do people simply not over eat to death?
Extensive philosophical musing (hunger and desire to learn are the same part of the brain).
>What sort of monsters would be appropriate to find in such a place?
Rot monsters.
Whatever is cooking the food.
Things that like to eat (are the people made of food?).

>-What do people do for Jobs?
Well i guess that because theres no scarcity of food most people will work to make others happy, the primary currency will represent happyness. Maybe making more artisan type foods out of the raw ingredients is a vocation. Perhapse everyone has their own secret family recipy, or perhapse is working on creating a new recipy.
>-What is VALUABLE in such a crazy kingdom?
Happyness and contentment.
>-How do people simply not over eat to death?
Well, everything in their ecosystem is edible. Just like how humans can survive off of eating frogs and flies. But obviously only the most nutritious foods such as cooked meet and artisnal items are enough to maintain an advanced brain and body. Perhapse their bodies are more healthy than most other peoples, able to backflips and the like.
>-What sort of monsters would be appropriate to find in such a place?
Creatures which eat ANYTHING which is sufficiantly advanced. Such as cannibalising lifeforms like mario. Maybe they look like meatball tumbleweeds. Maybe in a land of food, they choose to steal other peoples food.

Maybe there are crussaint crabs. Snibbidy snib.

Sounds terribly sticky and greasy

So it's basically going to be Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs 2?

There might still be a particular substance that is still rare and valuable. In The Land of Wholesome Vegetables, sugar is in short supply. The Land of Milk and Honey badly need salt. The Delicatessen Territories are stricken with terrible indigestion without the assistance of The Bread Lands etcetera.

Living in the Land of Cake and Tea has lead to a plague of diabetes. You can die of thirst easily in any territory lacking proper beverage sources.

Also stay the fuck out of Coffee town. They’re all stimulant-riddled mutants trying to steal your precious sugar cargo.

Even if food isn’t scarce, people still rely on trade and manufacturing to survive. There is a delicate balance of power maintained by the Grand Food Pyramid. Wow betide the lands should they topple.

*woe betide

Fuck spellcheck

>Beyond the civilised Food Lands are vast wastes of grease, filled with abominations called transfats. The visage of these creatures are said to be so frightening that they cause cardiac arrest. Those who are stationed near the border along the grease wastes also hear whispers from beyond, tempting them to taste the terrible, seductive foods which emerge from somewhere deep within the grease's evershifting tides.

>A land of meat tumbleweeds
So a race of Meatwads?

In such a land, the most valuable people would be chefs. Thus, the strongest in the land are chefs.

Come, if you dare, outsider, face the trials of The Kings of the Kitchen, the rulers of this bountiful land, if you can survive their devastating culinary martial arts you may just make it here.

...

>What do people do for Jobs?
-cook
-scavenge the land for ingredients
-build food houses
-bartering for iron ore to make cooking utensils
-smithing said ore into cooking utensils and over sized items (sword sized steak knives, pot lid shields, tenderizer war-hammers, etc...)
-barter for spices from other kingdoms
-taming and saddling lava bubbles (the hopping fire guys in the lava)
-patrolling Mount Volbono in case Cookatiel comes back
-Looking for rare and tasty ingredients in monsters dens (exceedingly dangerous)
>What is VALUABLE in such a crazy kingdom?
Exceedingly rare ingredients, spices, Chrometal (stainless steel, makes for longlasting utensils), and recipes.
Each family has their own set of signature recipes. Ownership of certain recipes can be traded among townsfolk.
If you aren't in possession of a signature recipe, you aren't legally allowed to cook that dish.
A good majority of recipes are public domain.
For example; basic ass apple pie is public domain. Grandma Stuffem's Secret Super Sweet Apple Pie is a dish reserved for the current owner of the recipe.
>How do people simply not over eat to death?
By being extremely picky eaters and refusing to eat raw ingredients.
>What sort of monsters would be appropriate to find in such a place?
Rat-folk, giant ants, Alaskan Crab, Lobster, Unagi, Squid, Puffer fish, Bison, Dodo, food golems, etc...

>The border of the food lands is actually an immense river of fresh, clean oil. Said oil had come up from the Fry Caverns, the source of the lands free flowing oils. The one in charge of border control is also the land owner of the Fry Caverns, the kingdoms greatest deep frying culinary master, Frieda of the Iron Baskets.

Would the natives just be the utensil cook dudes like in Odyssey, or humans?

To add to this, wouldn't wood also be a valuable commodity? You can't have a cooking fire without something to fuel it and wood itself is used in certain cooking methods to add a distinct flavour to food, like smoking.

Would there be a normal world in addition to this food land, or is the whole world fooded?

Also, dentists in candyland would live like kings.

To the east I'd an immense forest land, known as the Smokey Woods. Within it are a vast assortment of flora, and fauna, rare anywhere else in the land, but abundant in these woods. It's one of the only locales that not only provides a variety of spices and herbs but also the only location on the land that provides wood, plain, normal wood. The Smokey Woods are named and most famous for the Smoke Stacks, a species of tree that has a sturdy, fire proof bark, hollow on the insides, and have large holes gong out the tops, the roots grow deep, close enough to the hot oil rivers beneath the ground, the heat from the oils transferring up the roots and into the hollow trees, thus foliage from the inward facing branches, tends to burn inside these trees, creating the smokey nature of the forest. The art of smoking various foods in these natural smokers is an ancient tradition and requires years of training to become skilled in it.

Food worlds are like my most fun worlds simply for all the interesting stuff you could do, like have food containers lead to other food lands

For example, take the Castle/World of Illusion series, it has a milk bottle level and a sugar cube container mini zone

castle:
youtube.com/watch?v=1JTHmbKNhiw

world:
youtube.com/watch?v=stawOB28FH4

If I was doing a food land RPG, I'd just steal from Cornucopia wholesale
> nuco-comic.com/comic/1

Glad to see the thread is still up and has some actually constructive content, let me just provide some context and answer some questions:

>Rot

In a food land, rot does not operate on the same principles or expectations as a normal or mundane world, food realms are highly magical after all. In the land of food nothing goes stale and nothing rots, when organic or normal creatures, though, perish -for whatever reason- their bodies are assimilated, subsumed, and broken down into more thematic appropriate "food" with bones, hair, and nails being broken further down into salt and or sugar.

>Grease

I do, though, have grease planned: the grease traps if you will, grease accumulates on the far-end borders of any food world where it's magics and majesty begin to fade and the mundane world sets in. Grease swamps, grease bogs, are horrible, just awful, flammable, humid, hot, sarrows of disgust, rot, flies, cockaroachs, fly demons, otyughs, and muck. The same could be set if you dig deep enough below the food world: you'll eventually strike grease, fat, basic startch, etc.

>You can't have a cooking fire without something to fuel it

While I can't imagine where they'd get the 'first' fire or sparks or wherever, but wouldn't they have grease or cooking oil lamps? Everybodies house smells like french fries?

>While I can't imagine where they'd get the 'first' fire or sparks or wherever, but wouldn't they have grease or cooking oil lamps? Everybodies house smells like french fries?

Even so, the wood itself could be a cooking commodity due to cooking techniques like smoking. Different types of wood imbue different kinds of flavour. And maybe some people wouldn't like their homes smelling like french fries all the time, I dunno.

Then, with that said, since it's a land of food n' so forth: Smoking and BBQ Woods would most likely be a biome that would fit right in with all the other food-thematic based environments and ecosystems.
Much like how the lakes of soup are always simmering the perfect heat, the rivers of milk are always cool and fresh, a smoked wood would operate pretty much as how you've said over here: The only thing I'd add is maybe how the BBQ'd meats grow like ferns and moss on some of these trees- entire racks of ribs forming carpets and layers, smoked sausages like twisting kud-zu, and so forth.

Like one of those redwood or pacific northwest rain forests except all smokehouse n' barbecue sauce humidity.. Be a great place to visit, but terrible to stay.

Volcanoes would be giant smokers

The legendary Don of Sauce, lord of the BBQ lands and master of its techniques, is said to be the sole man in the land to master the art of volcanic BBQing, a dangerous art, as it requires being around intense, choking smokes and heat that can burn meats to ash in an untrained chefs hand as well as the risk of being caught in the sauce flow, molten hot, flavorful sauces that bubble within these volcanoes.

In the BBQ lands, the ground is made of brown sugars, pepper, salts, paprika, assortments of spices, and carpeted in fields of herb grass.

>I do, though, have grease planned: the grease traps if you will, grease accumulates on the far-end borders of any food world where it's magics and majesty begin to fade and the mundane world sets in.
So there is a mundane world past all of this? How advanced is the technology in this setting? Are foreigners a common thing?

Don't think too hard about it.

>So there is a mundane world past all of this?
Yes, there is a normal (as normal as high fantasy can be) world beyond the borders of the food lands, but there are multiple food realms, food kingdoms, and is largely self contained chain of territories & regions.

>How advanced is the technology in this setting?
Average is about 1600's level of technology, but some places are a little higher and some places are MUCH lower due to the anachronostic effect of magic and fantastical'ness.

>Are foreigners a common thing?
I would say they're 'uncommon'. Outsiders know "of the place", it's a landlocked region, and foreigners show up every once in a while, but to consistently travel to these realms from the outside world still remains dangerous and impractical given that it must be done so either on foot or by air.
There's also the "explorers age" kind of issue where people 'have' heard of it, but largely do not believe such a land exists, or just the same, DO access the border of grease and think the myths to be exaggerated and see it as a putrid, vile, demonic land of flesh and misery.

Forgive me if my grasp of physics is wrong, but since grease is less dense than water, it'd probably be harder to cross a sea of grease than a regular sea in a boat, right? Perhaps that's part of the reason why the realm is isolated

I forgot to ask this in the OP, but wtf is everybody making their houses out of? Bread? Is bread unironically a decent housing construction material? Bones? Chocolate or Cookies?
The only problems I'm concerned about is stability, really, since it isn't gonna go stale or rot or mold... I mean, you could piss off your neighbors and they could fucking eat your house I guess?

But if it's a land of food they'd need to be SOMEWHAT water proof as well or they'd just fall apart when it rained... Rained Milk? Water? Stew puddles? Donut hole/timbit hail?

>what type of monsters
Diabetes

>What jobs do people do
Make insulin and be endocrinologists

>how do they not overeat to death
Hyperglycemia will have you puking really fucking fast if your blood sugar skyrockets

>What is Valuable
We are born of the insulin, made men by the insulin, and undone by the insulin.

DIABEETUS, THE ROLE PLAYING GAME
I hope it is funner than it is IRL.- t. type 1

I imagine the cheapest houses would be made of hardtack. And from there steadily build up to note appetizing materials, where lower middle class are building their homes out of Asiago cheese crisps. Upper class would of course get really fancy and sturdy yours of various sweets, large log style mansions made of wafer sticks, cookie walls, hard candy roofs, stuff like that. I bet the super rich would have extravagant palaces made of pure crystallized sugar.

And I also imagine housing material changes depending on regions. Like the areas of the kingdom near water where seafood is gathered probably use large shells from lobsters and crabs and muscles to fashion homes.

>Like the areas of the kingdom near water where seafood is gathered probably use large shells from lobsters and crabs and muscles to fashion homes.

Sounds pretty adorable.
I'd imagine they'd live surrounding a large lagoon or very small inland sea (big lake I suppose) of Chowder or Gumbo. Little homes up on the hill, that intoxicating smell from the gently simmering sea just sort of wafting over the whole area, the humidity on their roofs drying in the sun to cake them in seasonings and spices, with the tide gently rolling in pieces of okra, vegetables, maybe a hunk of shrimp as small as your hand to as big as a bath tub.

The locals fishing out the shells to make their houses, boats, and tools with so they can skim for fresher ingredients out on the open water, with the truly brave and bold going through special training to accustom their bodies enough to dive down deep into the broth to really get the most flavorful of items.

Schools of shrimp scampi swimming through the chowder currents alongside boiled crabs and buttered lobster, and in the distance, were the hot oil rivers meet the broth sea, deep fried sea food frolicking freely, as only the strongest of fishermen date to brave the oil.

And in the BBQ lands, charcoal and cleaned bones are used for architecture, massive spires of swirling rib bones peak out from the smokey woods to indicate the kingdom of bbq

Would a lot of these places, environments, and natural formations within a land of food be, well, extremely fucking dangerous? Many of these environments specifically operate on the basis of keeping the food that germinates in them as delicious and ideal as possible: some places naturally 'smoke', some places have boiling or scalding bodies of water with some just having pits of boiling oil for deep fried items.. Many of these places would be, what? Super Hot? Like maybe over 30 Celsius just from ambient temperatures?

Not even mentioning the frozen food sections, but they might actually be a little nicer if only 'cause you don't need as extreme temperatures for things like Ice Cream to really 'keep', it just needs to be 'cold enough'. Cute little cabins in the desert hinterlands maybe?

That is why to truly flourish in this land, you must be a master of Gastromancy. The teachings of Gastromancy say that if you can master it's arts, the broiling waters of the stew lakes will be as lukewarm as afternoon tea, the biting cold of the northern vanilla winds will seem as refreshing as a cool gilato on a steamy summers day, it is mastery of your stomach, and to master your stomach is to master the foundation of your self, for we all grow from our guts.

Some key questions to keep this kind of setting internally consistent
>Is the entire land solely food based, as in, every piece of geography is related to food in some way, or is there normal land as well, like locations where ore can be mined and refined, or does the kingdom have to outsource for metals
>Are animal based ingredients naturally found just growing from the land? Like, can you go through a forest and pluck bacon from a bacon willow? Or is it a mix of naturally grown animal products, but also native fauna that are hunted and harvested?
>Is all food in this land raw, or is it a mixture of raw and cooked naturally occurring food? Are their things that occur naturally that would require a lot of processing? Like pasteurized milks, cheeses, sodas, ect.
>How big is this land, and does it contain all kinds of foods, or are there still some ingredients that do not exist in this land of food?
>Is the weather also only food based, or do they have normal weather conditions too? Are the clouds above this kingdom food based? What about the water sources? Does the kingdom have access to normal water, or do they sustain themselves solely on harvesting water from ingredients and the only natural liquids are alcohols, juices and other such beverages?

In food-land everything is edible! Even YOU.
In a world of food plants and animals indiscriminately feed on each-other, the ground, or any strange visitors.
>What do people do for Jobs?
There'd be all the regular jobs needed to sustain society, some with food-themed twists. People would still need to hunt/gather/cultivate to get the choicest food even if starvation isn't as much of a concern and processing food would probably be a lot more significant.
>What is VALUABLE in such a crazy kingdom?
There could be all sorts of rare and fantastic food creatures and plants, magical delicacies that do everything from change your hair color to let you float in the air, and secret seasoning spells. Food-land food decaying at a delayed or slowed rate could also make it more valuable for trade as travel and emergency ration and would have the added benefit of helping with the problem of everything rotting.
>How do people simply not over eat to death?
Even with magical modern nearly unlimited food availability most people don't eat themselves to death. Getting fat and slow will also make you a more attractive target for the food to bite back at.
>What sort of monsters would be appropriate to find in such a place?
Jelly slimes, rock-candy "earth" elementals, cotton-candy-web spewing gumball spiders, undead french toast, every flavor of food-dragon, ice-cream yetis, terrifying transforming sandwich gobilns that can trade ingredients to match any threat, charcuterie golems, sphagetti stranglers, carnivorous flying cream pies, gummy bear cannibal pygmies, p'orks of every preparation. Really, anything that's a cringe-inducing pun. Anything from cloudy with a chance of meatballs and its sequel or sugar rush from smash it steven.

Normal life rots too, but usually not when it's still alive. Maybe one of the valuable resources of the land is that the living food doesn't go bad or does so only after dying from starvation.

>>Are animal based ingredients naturally found just growing from the land? Like, can you go through a forest and pluck bacon from a bacon willow? Or is it a mix of naturally grown animal products, but also native fauna that are hunted and harvested?

Op here, I've been nursing this thread since I do want material, but this is something I personally do not have a good response to beyond the fact that I do want 'normal' people in the Food Land, but the rest of the fauna is up in the air.
Going from the bottom to the top. my thoughts:
-Microbes, etc.. I had all that planned out from the start to be incredibly self-sustaining, aggressive, and both very dangerous and very useful to the outside world because in a way that's how this entire magical ecosystem runs on: organic material being assimilated into cute, thematic-appropriate, food. I thought you'd have Wizards or Alchemists, who'd keep terrariums of food-world matter and slowly feed it to study it's development.

-Insects, Ants at a picnic, I don't think I'd be able to include 'real' insects and have the system still work, they'd have to be candied or thematic-appropriate insects or just something else lest the whole place fall apart from being nibbled to death... Also food bugs might look pretty.

>Is the weather also only food based, or do they have normal weather conditions too? Are the clouds above this kingdom food based? What about the water sources? Does the kingdom have access to normal water, or do they sustain themselves solely on harvesting water from ingredients and the only natural liquids are alcohols, juices and other such beverages?

Yes. There is no 'normal' water: the entire weather system is thematically and magically orientated to encourage both the development, delicious'ness, and quality of the food, ergo: warm tea ponds, cool rivers of milk, hot lasagna swamps, etc.. Most places it doesn't rain, so much as it just keeps itself seasoned and humidified by it's own simmering.

>Yes. There is no 'normal' water: the entire weather system is thematically and magically orientated to encourage both the development, delicious'ness, and quality of the food, ergo: warm tea ponds, cool rivers of milk, hot lasagna swamps, etc.. Most places it doesn't rain, so much as it just keeps itself seasoned and humidified by it's own simmering.
I see. Then I can see a simple job for some folks to be just water collecting. Whether it's harvesting it from plants, or setting up catchers to gather humidity from the broth and stew lakes, water could be a high commodity.

I don't have a whole lot of ideas for a food-based world, but here's some concept art from a (failed) game project I was part of years ago. Maybe it'll give you ideas.

Here's the cinnamon desert, with licorice cacti and cinnamon roll tumbleweeds. The game was in the style of the Mexican Day of the Dead, to explain the sun's design.

The some licorice cacti were enemies, by the way. More of an obstacle since they were stationary and could only hurt you by surprise.

Here's the picture for when the player gets close, but not close enough for it to attack. Maybe you could use it as a base for a monster token or something.

They attacked by unraveling their licorice strands and whipping them in a circle. There was originally supposed to be a part of the game where all of the hostile licorice cacti were just the roots of an enormous licorice-themed boss, but we scrapped the idea early. I'd be happy enough if the idea gave you some inspiration, though.

Here's a candy ent, it's one of the enemies (or perhaps just a friendly NPC) in the candy cane forest. Most of the body/bark is a bunch of differently-colored pieces of taffy that kinda grow like scales, while the 'leaves' are cotton candy.

More setpieces from the game that you're free to cannibalize for your own, though they're mostly mexican-themed. We had a couple designs for what cacti were going to be, but settled on licorice.

Aaand that's it for food-based concept art, everything else was character design. Ignore the little dinosaur guy, he's just there to show the scale of the place.

A licorice hydra would be pretty sweet (hahahahaha) actually.

A segmented chocolate bar would also make a good golem.

what kinds of playable entities would inhabit the land?

Jell-O girls!

JELL-O GIRLS!

The antagonist should have something to do with rot

Have the villain be an intelligent species of mold/fungus. A hivemind that doesn't care about anything but spreading and eating.