Cooking and Harvesting

These are detailed rules and mechanics for cooking in D&D 5th+ Edition using the cooking mechanics found in Dragon Stew as well as I Cut off its Snoot! from MCDM Arcadia Volume 11 and Monstrous Components from MCDM Arcadia Volume 8.
These rules have been combined together and then stitched with various homebrew mechanics and tweaks to make it all work together.

The Idea Behind these rules is to give incentive for players to invest time for their characters into cooking as well as give a bonus for characters taking time to sit down and have a proper meal rather than surviving off rations and Goodberry all campaign.

Meals offer some basic buffs such as Temporary HP. But cooking more specific meals will offer more unique and powerful buffs as well as sometimes some banes. The more powerful meal buffs are balanced by the rarity/ scarcity/ costly price of ingredients or preparation of such meals.

Harvesting is the act of collecting usable ingredients, either from the earth or from a dead creature.
The DC for harvesting usable ingredients from a dead creature is 10 + the creature’s challenge rating.
Harvesting is a Survival Skill Check.

The DC can be adjusted at the GM’s discretion, taking into account the frailty of the ingredient, the complexity of the creature’s anatomy, and the setting (butchering in a freezing wasteland is more difficult than in a temperate grotto).

A Wisdom (Survival) check determines the number of harvested portions, which refers to the amount of an ingredient needed to contribute to a recipe, not an individual serving for a creature.
A successful Harvesting check yields one portion.
If the check succeeds by 5 or more, it yields two portions.
If the check is a natural 20 and the check succeeds, it yields four portions.
Larger creatures also yield more portions.

• A Large creature multiplies the portions harvested by two,
• a Huge creature by four, and
• a Gargantuan creature by eight.

For example
if a Huge creature’s Harvesting DC is 14 and the result of the Dexterity (Harvesting) check is 19, the harvest yields eight portions.

A character attempting to harvest a creature must use a knife, or the check is made with disadvantage. Harvesting general plants as ingredients does not require any special equipment.

You can use any sharp blade to butcher a creature for component parts, but your best chance of getting an aboleth eye out of a socket in one piece is to use a suitable set of tools or have been trained in a specific class.

• Healer's Kit & Proficiency (Tools)
• Ranger (Class)
• Blood Hunter (Class)
• Artificer (Class)
• Background Training

You use a Survival Skill check When you harvest components from a creature’s remains using one of the above options. You also can harvest components from monsters without meeting the above requirements using any sharpened blade, but checks to do so are made with disadvantage.

The difficulty of removing a component depends on the monster’s type and the component you’re harvesting, as shown on the tables later in this article. You make one check to harvest all of one type of component a creature has to offer.
Example: you only need to make one successful DC 17 Survival check to harvest all three eyes from an aboleth.
Alternatively, at the GM’s discretion, checks can be made for every component.

The time it takes to harvest a component is based on the check’s DC, as shown on the Harvesting Time table below. On a successful harvesting check, you obtain the desired component. On a failed check, the part is destroyed. However you can Take a 20(Alternative Rule 8: Alternate Rules) drastically increasing the time(Not just 20 Minuets) required to harvest to guarantee a success so long as the check wouldn't be made at disadvantage.

Each creature has a specific number of usable components that you can harvest. For instance, planetars have more than thirty feathers in their wings, but only thirty that are of the right size and quality to be used as components. Finding and identifying these feathers is part of the harvesting process.

before you even think about stepping into a kitchen you should make sure you have not only the ingredients, but the tools, skills and suitable work area and any helpers you may have roped into working for you.
Cooking a simple meal while out adventuring isn't too difficult, A Veggie soup or Meat casserole is simple enough with a fire, a pot and basic ingredients. However if you want to make a meal that will really put a kick in the step of those who eat it, then you will need to meet some specific criteria.

• Recipes: Meeting the requirements for a recipe is the Key component to meeting a hearty moral boosting meal. Chucking whatever you vibe with works fine, but if you want some buffs and boons, Find and follow a recipe.
• Work Station & Tools: You will need access to a range of proper cooking tools as well as a place to cook. You can't be cooking in the middle of a blizzard or lost in the depths of a Abyssal nest. You also can't be cooking with any old rusted shorts word. Cooking Utensils and some sort of Kitchenet
• Skills: Many can cook, some cannot, but to really make something delicious, talent and skills are required. Proficiency in Cooks Utensils as well as proficiency in either Performance Skill, Wisdom Stat or Charisma Stat Also the Chef Feat Can provide bonuses to your cooking based on your DM.

While living off the land is always a viable option for any well-traveled adventurer, filling your pack with pantry staples before undertaking a major excursion is a smart move. The ingredients on the Food Staples table below are the backbone of many recipes and can be purchased in any town or city market (but can rarely be resold, as few people are interested in purchasing them from adventurers). Each entry in the table is enough for one portion, or the amount needed to contribute to a recipe. The pantry staples are broken down by category, but the GM (or the players) should specify the exact item offered based on the region, culture, or climate (for example, in the Kingdom of the Giant Bee People, honey is the available sweetener for purchase).

Shelf Life
Ingredients that aren’t cooked before they meet their shelf life become spoiled. Shelf life begins immediately when an ingredient is purchased or harvested by a character. An ingredient’s shelf life is either short, medium, or long.

• Ingredients with a short shelf life last for one week,
• ingredients with a medium shelf life for one month,
• ingredients with a long shelf life for four months.

Water is always accessible unless the party is in specific environments, such as a desert or a dungeon in the depths of a castle. If water is unavailable, the DC for the checks relating to cooking is increases by 4.

Spoiled Ingredients/ Components
Very talented cooks can revitalize ingredients long past their shelf life. A creature can attempt to cook a dish with one or more spoiled ingredients, but the DC to make the dish is doubled for every spoiled ingredient used. Recipes made with spoiled ingredients can’t be extra delicious. Alternatively, throw out any spoiled food because yuck.

Unique Ingredients/ Components
Anything harvested from a special/ magical creature or plant is considered a unique ingredient. These are sold only by rare specialty dealers. The price per portion of unique ingredients is a number of gold pieces equal to the creature’s challenge rating (minimum 1) times 10. These dealers may be interested in purchasing unique ingredients from characters at half the retail price, but not until trust has been established with rigorous vetting. Plant prices are determined by the GM. The shelf life of all unique ingredients is 4d6 days due to the inherent magic or other rare properties imbued in them.
General unique ingredients are listed bellow while more specific components are detailed in the Magical harvesting section.

Preserving Ingredients/ Components
There are several ways both simple and magical to preserve different types of things. Salt, Refrigeration, Sealing, specific spells and other options that may not be listed here.
Not all preservation methods may work for all different types of ingredients. It is important to be mindful. and if your not sure then try researching or asking other characters if they may share some insight.

Every creature belongs to a specific type. There are creatures that simply cannot be cooked because of the intrinsic characteristics of its type. The following creature types cannot be cooked if you choose to follow these rules, and if a character tries to eat a dish made with these creatures, you can use the same rules as if they had eaten two Monster Dishes on the same day.

However, we encourage every GM to make this ruleset theirs and change it to suit their individual needs. If you want to allow your players to cook these creatures, you are welcome to do so.

• Constructs: Most constructed bodies are not made of biological matter, which makes them impossible to cook. Those made from biological matter are too tainted by arcane energy for them to be cooked into a satisfying, or even edible, dish.
• Fiends: Its Rare for the bodies of Fiends to stick around long enough to be ready for cooking however if someone is skilled enough or has made the necessary preparations its certainly possible to harvest ingidents for cooking.
• Undead: The undead are either ethereal, and therefore incredibly hard to chew, or made of rotting flesh that has been animated by the darkest of magics. These characteristics don’t often make for the best ingredients to use when cooking a delicious meal.

A Note on Sapience: Eating a sapient being is generally looked down upon. We suggest that GMs use their discretion to ascribe sapience and to think about the implications of cooking and eating sapient beings carefully. At the very least, someone that cooks and eats a sapient being cannot be of any good or even neutral alignment if you use alignments in your game. If that act was discovered, they would be shunned by the rest of society or outright condemned and killed. Ask yourself the tone you’re going for in your campaign before ruling on these kinds of issues.

Cooking general meals normally means following in someone else steps. Its safe, secure and promises a good end result so long as you are a skilled enough chef. You sacrifice the room for creativity for something a bit more stable.
Cooking general means means following a recipe you have obtained. Written down or memorized or even following someone else guidance. Recipes make things easy to understand, you know what you need and how to prepare it. Its just down to your tools and skill to pull off any precices actions.

Cooking a General meal is done with a Recipe, recipies detail ingridents, actions, effects and the difficulty in the dish. General meals can be Good, Delicious or extra delicious, giving more benefits the better the meal is made.

There are a few General meals made with monster parts but being a recipe means its been tried and tested.

General meals cannot be altered with new ingredients. If you wish to make your own meals see the bellow 'Cooking Monster Meals'.

Cooking a General meal takes 1 hour of uninterrupted work, requiring the previously mentioned room to work (Kitchen) tools and skills. Serving Multiple People
Serving Multiple people is expected in a Chef's line of work, Simply increasing the portions of the recipie to match the number you are serving (Maximum Charisma + 3)

Any character proficient in Cooks utensils or has the 'Chef' Feat can choose one recipe as their personal specialty. Whenever a character makes their signature dish, they can treat a d20 roll of 9 or lower as a 10. They can change their signature dish with the GM’s permission.

Each recipe has a DC for the chef to beat in order to successfully complete the meal. However beating the DC by large amounts results in the meal gaining additional benefits.
Beating the DC of a recipe by 5 or more makes the meal Delicious. The meal will grant the one who eats it a choice between two unique benefits tied to that specific recipie.
If the D20 Roll is a critical and succeeds then the one who eats the meal gains both options they would have to otherwise choose between.

• If you have access to the entire body of a monster ready to be cooked. The amount of food that can be prepared using one monster depends on the monster’s size. This is because usually it’s not the entirety of the monster’s body that produces the benefits the characters wish to acquire. For example, several people could be fed by cooking a young red dragon, but only one can eat the cooked fire-producing organ of the dragon. This rule is here to limit the buffs that the entire party can gain from cooking a monster, as well as add an additional layer of strategy. This way, the party will have to choose carefully who eats what.
  • If you only have specific parts of a monster rather than the entier body then the amount of food made is based of the recipe you are using, If nothing is specified then it is 1 serving.

Amount: The number of dishes that can be cooked depends on the size of the monster. One must remember that it’s not the entirety of the body of a monster that produces the desired magical effect, but only one or a few organs. Therefore, even creatures that are considered Huge only produce four servings of food. A creature of a Gargantuan size could probably produce enough Monster Dishes to feed an entire town or more because of their extreme rarity and the campaign-boss nature of these creatures. So, we leave the specifics of how many Monster Dishes (if any at all) can be cooked to the GM.

• A character can enjoy the magical effects of eating a Monster Dish once a day; eating more than one dish a day proves to be too much for the character’s stomach. If a character eats more than one Monster Dish a day, the dish consumed last is replaced by the effect granted by the latest dish consumed. They take one level of exhaustion, and they must make a Constitution saving throw against the Monster Dish’s skill check DC. The character takes 1d12 poison damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. This, of course, does not apply to normal, non-magical dishes, even ones made of monster meat.

Size: The Size of a Monster determines the amount of time that the magical effect of a Monster Dish lasts once eaten, and how many magical Monster Dishes can be prepared from said monster. Any creature that is of size Tiny or smaller, including swarms, cannot be cooked into a useful Monster Dish.

• Time: Size Effect Duration
• Small: 1 Day
• Medium: 1 Day
• Large: 1 Day
• Huge: 1 Day
• Gargantuan 1 day

• Cooking any Monster Dish takes an 30mins - 1 hour in a proper kitchen, or 2-3 hours in an outdoor kitchenette.

Challenge Rating: The Challenge Rating of a monster determines the difficulty of cooking a Monster Dish using that monster. The higher the Challenge Rating, the harder it is to cook that dish successfully. The Challenge Rating of a monster gives us the Original Skill Check DC of a Monster Dish.
It’s extremely simple to calculate the Original Skill Check DC of a specific Monster Dish: (10 + CR of Monster)
In the section below we will explain exactly what the players need to do to cook a Monster Dish.

• Additional Ingredients: The Chef has the option to add a specific monster Component/Ingredient (Found in the References Bellow) which will add new buffs and/or banes to the meal. This process increases the DC of cooking a meal by 2.

Cooking a Dish: The process of cooking a dish can start once the ingredients have been obtained and the players have access to a kitchen. We recommend that the GM tell the players the DC they’ll have to beat. Cooking a dish is done in two parts. A maximum of four players can work together to cook, three in Part 1 and one in Part 2.

Part 1: Up to three players must explain how their character helps with the cooking process—taking care of the fire, cutting the ingredients, mixing, watching the fire to ensure an even heat distribution, etc. The GM then asks each character to make an ability check (d20 + ability score modifier), using the ability score that works best with the task they have described. More than three players can roleplay their participation in the cooking process, but only three may make ability checks.
Example:

• Player 1: “I’m going to watch over the fire to ensure an even heat distribution.”
  • GM: “Perfect, I need you to make a straight Intelligence check; roll a d20 and add your Intelligence modifier.”
• Player 2: “I’m going to cut everything up, so it’s diced before we boil it.”
  • GM: “Okay, please roll a straight Dexterity check. Once again, roll a d20 and add your Dex modifier.”
• Player 3: “I’ll mix every dry ingredient, so they’re ready for the wet ingredients.”
  • GM: “Awesome, please roll a straight Strength check.”

However, The Head Chef can take complete control of the cooking and conduct all the skill checks themselves if they wish for greater control. A Player with the Chef Feat Gains advantage on all checks needed for part 1.

If a player asks, “If I wanted to do X, what kind of check would that be?” we suggest you tell them and help them find an action that would suit their individual strengths. The way to calculate the DC for these tasks is also simple: (10 + CR of Monster - PC’s level) On a success, the overall Skill Check DC is reduced by 3; on a failure, it increases by 1. A critical success reduces the overall Skill Check DC by 6, and a critical failure increases it by 3.

Part 2: Once the other players have made their rolls, and the new Skill Check DC for the dish has been established, the last player rolls a d20 and adds either their Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom, or Intelligence modifier. This is to ensure that anyone in the party can be part of the cooking process. If you would rather have that player roll, for example, a Dexterity check and not let them pick what ability they get to use because you want this to be more challenging, you are welcome to do so. If the roll is higher than the Skill Check DC, the Monster Dish has been cooked successfully!
Example:

• A group of 4 level 10 adventurers has defeated a CR 13 creature.
• The creature has Fire Immunity,
• its creature type is Beast,
• and its size is Large.

Original Skill Check DC: 10+13 = 23

3 of the adventurers roll ability checks to help in the cooking process. Since they are level 10 and the CR of the creature is 13, this is their skill check DC: Skill Check DC for the three tasks before the final roll: 10+13-10 = 13
They need to clear a DC of 13 for each task. After rolling, they have 2 successes and 1 failure, which means that the original Skill Check DC goes down by 6 and up by 1: Final Skill Check DC: 23 - 6 + 1 = 18

The last of the adventurers can now attempt to cook the dish. They decide to do a straight Strength Check to cook it, and they roll a 19. Success!

The party manages to cook two Monster Dishes, and now two of them can eat it to have Fire Immunity for 10 minutes—perfect for that pesky red dragon they’re preparing to fight.

• Once a Monster Dish is cooked, it lasts for 1 day before it goes bad. The players can prolong the life of a dish by clever use of spells or equipment to the discretion of the GM, but we advise to never allow the extension of a dish’s shelf life for more than one week. This is to prevent the party from constantly cooking dishes and keeping them indefinitely in a bag of holding.
• Time To Eat: Eating a meal such as this requires time to properly enjoy it. Players take 1 hour to properly eat a Monster meal to gain its affects.

Boons & Banes of Eating Monsters
Monster dishes are offten made to provide people with buffs or unique effects, But eating strange creatures can all be glitter and gold. Be warned when eating a dish made of monster flesh. it could be too much for your stomach to handle.

• Basic: Immunities and Resistances: All monster meals provide a basic buff to the one who eats it. this comes as a damage resistance or in rare cases an immunity. When a character spends proper time to eat a Monster Dish, they gain one Damage Resistance or Damage Immunity that the monster possessed. There are only two guide-lines to determine what a character gains when eating a specific Monster Dish, and they are very simple:
  • A Monster Dish gives the player only one Immunity or Resistance, not several and not one of each. If a monster has several Immunities or Resistances, the GM either chooses, randomly selects one, or leaves it up to the players to choose which one they want the dish to give.
  • Damage Immunities take precedence over Damage Resistances. If a monster has both Damage Immunities and Resistances, the GM chooses one Damage Immunity that the dish will grant (or randomly selects one Damage Immunity).
• Unique: Boons and/Or Banes: Some Monsters or specific monster parts can offer additional buffs to those who eat such a meal. These effects are based around the effects granted by the unique mechanics around Monster Component spell casting detailed in the Unique Reference Section bellow. Many specific parts offer unique benefits and each one will be applied on a case by case base as it comes up based on the DM

Unique & Magical Components/ Ingredients