I picked writing back up again not too long ago, just having some fun with it. I also listened to Dungeon Crawler Carl and Everybody Loves Large Chests so naturally I started writing something similar.
Since the whole story has clear and obvious DnD influences, I’m hoping to find some inspiration with you guys for a character I like, but have a hard time developing.
The main idea of the character is that they’re a culinaromancer (yes I ripped that name from runescape). They’re a cross between a Chef and a necromancer. Think evil magic, but everything with a culinary twist, for example, the ability to use the eyes on a roast pig to spy on people in a different room.
Or, making an opponents food rot from the inside out and turn all their potions to vinegar and sewage.
Or, a peking duck as a familiar. Peking duck as in the meal.
I’m really just looking for inspiration and ideas. Don’t sweat about the powers or spells being over powered, or weird, or otherwise unbalanced within the confounds of the dnd rules. I’m not playing DND, but writing a fun and wacky story, but I feel you lot will probably come up with some ideas I could probably never imagine myself.
Curses like eternal hunger and eternal thirst would ruin people’s lives, same for everything tasting like one thing (disgusting or otherwise). Undead food would be quite gruesome if it were to wake up after being eaten. Even right before, or during.
Oh don’t you worry, there will definitely be food coming back to life
How about the diners becoming food themselves? What if they suddenly find they’ve been chewing on the wrong haunch?
For those rare occasions when magic won’t get them out of a pickle, their melee weapon is a large cast-iron.
Or a giant pickle, to get them out of a pickle. Yes, the book is gonna be littered by bad puns
Gluttony might be an interesting idea. It’s not necessarily necromantic, but the idea of using magic to force a person to eat until they cannot continue and literally rupture.
Or, and this probably sounds stupid, but you could have a modified form of the grease spell that’s just wet noodles. I don’t know if you’ve ever stepped/slipped on wet noodles, but it’s disgusting and traumatic.
I work in an Italian restaurant, stepping on wet noodles is a daily occurrence haha
Fondue Flow: Blast a cone of molten cheese that slows targets that enter in it’s field.
As someone who played Runescape and designed a Necromancer Cook specifically because of that, I am prepared!
The Culinaromancer’s tools of trade are the tools of the magic, a component pouch of ingredients that are specially crafted over years of hard work and diligence to the craft of magic.
Animate Dead using the skeleton of a freshly finished meal, imbuing into it the seasoned anger at how the nobles dared to salt it! Send that chicken after them for revenge! (While I am aware that animate dead specifically says humanoid, I had asked and my DM had permitted it, and also you are writing a story like you said so it works). Your master chef uses one of those old styled seasoning wands, a little cannister on a handle that you dust the special bone dust and seasoning that your magical craft is fueled by, forming the entity.
If you want to purely have it be D&D related, the Abyssal Chicken familiar would be perfect as the familiar of choice, tasting like a chicken but having the truly delectable presence of the Hellish realms behind it’s beak. Truly a master chef’s ultimate familiar signifying the willingness to dive to the harshest worlds for the best ingredients.
For some fun flavoring of spells, Toll the Dead as a cantrip, but it is the dinner bell being heard that echoes into the soul, reminding them that they are the meal tonight. The trusty cleaver brought out and cooked with the burning green fire to cook the meat as it carves it from the bone, a beautiful flavor! False Life is powered by alcohol, the seasoning that you spritz over the meal that empowers you with the strength to go further on. A dried pepper is brought out and added to the delectable meal as you breathe Dragon’s Breath, applying a dragon’s touch to the meal. Want to ask the dead how they want to be cooked? Sprinkle some of your graveyard dirt and basil blend before igniting it, letting the lovely aroma that only the dead can bring flavor the corpse as they can speak what they want to be cooked as for your people. Perhaps you want to make a creature be dead before preparing the feast, so that in the middle it returns to life before dying once more, letting the fear of sudden death add that delicious final seasoning, a truly delectable final meal! And of course, if worst comes to worst, feel free to grab your trusty chicken’s heart you keep on hand for adding that bit of flavor of dinosaur blood, and bring a nightmarish fear of being cooked poorly to these wretched souls who dare get in the way of your meal.
Maybe a cannelloni cannon? Cause/cure [light/moderate/greater] gastrointestinal distress? Maybe flavor a spell that’s just called Cheese? Lots of fire magic I imagine.
You could call fireball “lighter fluid mishap” or something I dunno.
