Welcome back to Wilderfeast Restaurant! Our tasting menu offers a series of insights into the lore of the One Land and various aspects of the game mechanisms. In this second course, we will serve a hors d’oeuvres selection from one of the most important parts of the game: The Feast!
The iconic meals of wilders combine the roughness of campfire cooking with the ceremony of a holiday festival. These wilderfeasts are celebration and mourning, all wrapped up in one. During this important phase of the game, occurring at the end of each successful Hunt, you clean, prepare, and cook the Monster where it fell, turning it into a meal that both honors its legacy and gives you strength.
Preparing a wilderfeast is a process which can take hours or even days. You dress and butcher the Monster, purify it of its frenzy, and figure out how to cook it. While playing out a wilderfeast scene, wilders should answer a series of questions with their conversation, like “How are you cooking the Monster?”, “What are you doing to prepare the meal?”, “The next time you eat this meal, what will you remember?”, and more.
For each such question you answer, you can ask the Guide one question about the Monster, like how many levels it had in a certain Style or Skill, how many Traits it had, which one did it use to make you Frightened during the Hunt, and so on. In doing so, you learn about the Monster. The more you know about it, the better informed your decision when you choose what mutation to inherit.
Once you’re finished, the pack digs in. No waves of light or pulses of arcane energy accompany a wilderfeast. The only magic, at least as you eat, is the weight of food in your belly and the warmth of your friends beside you. After you eat The Feast, you choose a Style, Skill, or Trait in which the Monster has more levels than you do and permanently gain a level in that Style, Skill, or Trait.
Not every meal gives such dramatic mutations as a wilderfeast, but food is always magic in the One Land, even the most casual of snacks. Before setting out on the road, a merchant eats a meal full of hardy greens to give them the endurance for a day of travel; a guard, beginning their shift in a watchtower, chews on raptor jerky to sharpen their eyesight; a student brews tea with a night-blooming flower so they can stay up late studying. The changes caused by these meals are subtle and temporary, and they’re woven into the fabric of everyday life.
Though stories about wilders often focus on the grand wilderfeasts where you gain your powers, your day-to-day meals are just as important. They lend you a different kind of strength — that of small monsters dashing or buzzing through the brush, that of grasping roots and outstretched leaves, even that of the salt-laden sea or the dark, rich earth. Wilderfeast includes rules for cooking that allow you to create stat-boosting dishes and prepare for the challenges ahead.
When you have a cooking opportunity, such as when you Camp during your Journeys, you and your packmates can make a meal. To cook, you select Ingredients, determine how much Stamina the meal restores (typically 1 for each Ingredient used), and determine the meal’s effect, choosing among those of the Ingredients you used.
These meals can either be served fresh or saved for later and turned into Snacks (so that you can consume a portion when you need to restore Stamina or trigger other effects but you don’t have the time to stop and cook). Once you’ve cooked the meal, be sure to describe it! Tell everyone enough about the dish’s flavor, textures, or appearance that they can taste it in their head.
We hope you liked the flavor of this second course of our Wilderfeast tasting menu! Next time we will serve you a spicy soup allowing you to savor another important game phase: The Trail!
One final news: if you would like to hear more about Wilderfeast from the author’s own mouth, don’t miss the AMA session with KC Shi this friday!
If you have any questions about the game mechanisms, inspirations, development challenges, and whatnot, KC will be happy to answer them all. The session will start on Reddit on July 21 at 11:30 am EDT / 17:30 CEST and will run until 5:30 pm EDT / 23:30 CEST.
If you want to share your Wilderfeast experience with other players, don’t hesitate to join our Discord server! We want to hear your thoughts!
If you didn’t play the Wilderfeast™ Quickstart yet, instead… wait no further! Here’s the link, just in case you missed it the first time around.
Remember, Wilderfeast™ is launching on Kickstarter on September 5!
Follow the project on Kickstarter to be notified when it will go live!
Wilderfeast™ is a game by KC Shi, writer for tabletop RPGs such as Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soulbound, the Uncaged anthology, BEOWULF: Age of Heroes, and One More Quest. Cover art by Xulia Vicente.
