Dungeon Cooking

The town is dying. The king fled before dawn. He took the treasury, the guard, and the last reason to hope. What was left were people who still needed to be fed, and nobody came forward. You are Dormer, assistant to Steward Grimvard. You run the kitchen, the warehouse, and the laboratory. You have thirty days. Heroes go underground for anything that can go into a pot. They come back with ingredients nobody knows anything about. Who do you test them on? A rat answers only one question: safe or not. It will not say how bad. Poison builds up in it after every test, so it needs rest between trials, and a strong enough ingredient simply kills it. New rats come from corpses. Read that sentence again, because the whole game rests on it. The better you feed the town, the fewer people die. The fewer people die, the fewer rats you have. The fewer rats you have, the more often you face an ingredient you know nothing about. Then it comes down to a person. A hero, if you can afford to weaken one, or a citizen, who may not survive it. A hero lost in the laboratory will not make the next expedition. A citizen goes on the list of the dead, with a name, a day, and a cause. You can also skip the test entirely and serve people something you never touched yourself. The pot has a bottom You combine two to five ingredients; the safe ones dilute the poisonous. A bigger pot feeds more mouths, but cooking eats hours you do not have. A dish splits into portions, one per person per meal. The same pot feeds the party below and the town above, so every campfire meal is food taken from somebody upstairs. Feeding the fed gets you nothing. The portions vanish, no strength returns, and at the first exertion someone brings it all up in a corridor or mid-fight and loses a turn. The cook grows practiced with ingredients she cooks often. She works faster, but she takes no responsibility for what comes out of the pot. The town eats at noon and at dusk You do not hand out meals yourself. The townspeople go to the warehouse on their own, at set hours, and take what you left there. The decision was made earlier, and at that moment you may be underground, two floors down. Safe food buys another day. Tainted food takes your morale first, then your health, then your life. An empty table kills too, only slower and quieter. Tainted dishes and deaths lower your reputation, feed the rumors going around town, and are written into the final reckoning. The town remembers what you fed it. You learn the dungeon over and over The corridors lay themselves out differently every time. You go down with three picked from six classes. The Torchbearer, the Cartographer, the Rogue, the Herbalist, the Ranger, and the Knight each solve different problems, and there is no lineup that covers everything at once. How long you stay down is your call. After dark you see less, morale sinks, and the dungeon starts filling with things that were not there in daylight. You can mark your way in your own blood, if you're willing to pay for every rune with the party's health and morale. A hero pushed without a break starts tripping over their own fatigue, and sleep debt is repaid only on a bunk at the tavern. You have to rotate the party, because sleep debt does not go away on the march. The game keeps no notes for you Combat runs on a spinning D10, but this is not classic dice rolling. The die spins on screen. You decide when to stop it. Every result is read from the enemy's hidden hit table and can mean a miss, a graze, a full hit, or a critical. Each enemy type has its own layout within a given expedition. The game will not show you the finished table. It will not fill one in after every attack, and it will not write what you have learned into the bestiary. You see a number and what happened after it. If you want to truly know an enemy, you watch, you memorize, or you keep your own notes. The way old games made you draw the dungeon map yourself, this one makes you reconstruct the dice. Within a single expedition that knowledge is yours. You know which numbers to avoid and which are worth stopping on. On the next descent the tables are shuffled again, and old notes stop being the answer. Heroes have their limits Low morale ends in panic, refusal to fight, supplies smashed in blind fury, or desertion. Hunger stacked on despair can tip into frenzy, and then, depending on the class, a hero attacks a companion, eats an ingredient they found, or throws themselves at the nearest enemy. Death is permanent. The rest of the party loses morale, and what the fallen carried stays below, gone for good unless you go back for it before you leave. The game will not stop the world to shield you from the outcome of one decision. Power does not ask your permission Grimvard gives orders and imposes reforms that change the terms of life in town. You do not pick them from a list and you do not get a vote. You are handed new rules and expected to keep working in a world that, with every passing day, looks less like a place that can be saved. Dungeon Cooking grew out of the old, unforgiving dungeon games, Beneath Apple Manor and Dungeon Campaign. It does not pretend it is still the eighties. It is a modern game built on an old assumption: your decisions can be wrong, and the game will show you their consequences. And all it will tell you is how much food is left.