How to Serve Dragon and Other What’s for Dinner Answers aka All About Fantasy Cuisine by John Josten is a generic role playing game supplement published by Board Enterprises. This is part of the Small Bites series and is the “World Walker” version of the supplement; the full version is only available to Patreon supporters and is a dozen pages longer.
The supplement is available for free from DriveThruRPG as a 51-page PDF. One page is the front cover.
The Introduction explains that, though they may have recently covered food (in The Headwater Hills), this covers cuisine. Food is eating to live; cuisine is eating for enjoyment.
The Fletnern Wiki extracts are all substances, and food related ones at that. Most are essentially ingredients; some could be considered finished items.
The Sounding Board contains duplicated blog posts and starts with A Barbarian’s Feast. This considers how a barbarian would consider those who eat a lot of vegetables to be rich, and a shepherd those who eat a lot of meat to be.
Those Stupid Fools and their BS Beliefs about Medieval Cooking self-describes as a rant about mistakes made when describing medieval cuisine, that nobles didn’t eat rotten food that was disguised with spices – because it will make you ill – and peasants didn’t eat bland, flavourless food – because they still had access to herbs and spices.
How they misunderstand the foragers explains that those who think hunter-gatherers spent all their time collecting food are wrong; for one thing, that would result in more food than could be eaten before it went off.
The Spice of (Fantasy) Life has a couple of examples as to food flavourings in a fantasy setting.
What Kind of Sandwiches Do They Eat? considers whether fantasy people would even eat sandwiches.
Lifestyles of the Magical and Mundane considers the different cultures of the Fletnern setting and their food. Each culture is covered individually, with sections on bread, meat, dairy, fruit and cooking methods for the majority. The non-human races are considered as individual cultures, even if there are differences between groupings. Finally, there is a general section on cuisine.
Wet Behind the Ears has some rumours about food.
News of Fletnern starts with the Rhum Waurglar Wars, which were conflicts within Rhum between a number of restaurants. The Flintpoint Rebellion is how a group of dwarves rebelled against the central communist authority of Rock Cove after being left in the lurch, and how this has started to highlight problems with the society; why strive to achieve quotas when you will be provided everything you need anyway? Population Explosion explains how the population of Forsbury has increased since the invasion of Parnania and how that will affect food supplies in the long term.
Tavern Talk covers the best drinks to find in various places.
Church Bells covers The Cult of Mother Bullevenn, a not-exactly-religious grouping that follows certain practices they consider to be the healthiest.
Silver Sense covers Portable Soups, ways of transporting soup around in a solid form.
What’s Missing? explains what’s in the full version.
In Conclusion wraps things up and has various links.
The final two pages have a Chart of Cuisines.
How to Serve Dragon and Other What’s for Dinner Answers aka All About Fantasy Cuisine in Review
The PDF is well bookmarked with major and minor sections linked. The Table of Contents is less thorough, covering only the major sections, but is also hyperlinked. There are also a number of external links to relevant material. Navigation is very good. The text maintains a two-column format and appeared to be mostly free of error. There are a variety of appropriate black and white stock illustrations. Presentation is okay.
As with most of these supplements, this is a collection of material generally on the same topic, though in this case the focus is a lot tighter. The supplement is also a lot longer than usual, and there is less difference, in length, between this and the full edition. The majority of the supplement by far, with 30 pages of material, is Lifestyles of the Magical and Mundane. Some of the material on food could be scavenged for another setting and, as usual, the author has gone into far more detail than the majority of world builders would. How to Serve Dragon and Other What’s for Dinner Answers aka All About Fantasy Cuisine is an interesting collection of articles about food and it can be downloaded for free by clicking here.
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