It always brings a smile to my face whenever I see the all-too-rare RPG supplement dedicated to food, cooking, or similar themes. It’s not that such products often have a whimsical focus that’s too often lacking in the number-heavy books that seem to permeate the market these days, but rather is because RPG books about food lend themselves very well to jokes. As such, you can expect this review to be peppered with food jokes throughout. What can I say? I’m a rather seedy kind of guy.
The Simply Classes: The Foodamancer is exactly what it sounds like, a new class that can be summed up as a spellcasting chef. It’s published by Mad Scotsman Games under the OGL, which seems rather odd since I didn’t see a copy of the OGL itself in the book, nor a clear description of Open Game Content and Product Identity, which all OGL works must have.
But enough with the technical details, lets get right to the meat of the book. The Foodamancer opens with some flavor text describing such a character in-game, before moving on to the usual round of text you’d find when introducing a new base class (e.g. describing a foodamancer’s alignment, religion, etc.). I liked the description of foodamancers as being a sort of “domestic adventurer,” as they mostly adventure so as to find ways to improve their culinary capabilities; that said, the obvious reason for adventuring – to kill and cook exotic monsters – was surprisingly overlooked here.
Mechanically, the Foodamancer is somewhere between being a bard and a wizard in how it presents itself. The class has arcane spellcasting ability up to 9th-level spells, prepared beforehand, but has a number of class abilities, the majority of which are tied to ranks in Profession (cook). Initially, I thought the class was somewhat overpowered, as it has a d6 Hit Die and gives one more spell slot at each level than the wizard does, but upon noticing the spell list I backed away from that opinion. The foodamancer’s spells (the list takes up takes up the last five pages; or one-third of the book) are comparatively limited, and quite often have a spell being one level higher than it would be for a wizard (e.g. fireball is a fourth-level spell).
What really makes this book, though, are the nuggets of flavor text sprinkled throughout the crunch. For example, almost all of the weapons for the foodamancer’s weapon proficiencies are described as kitchen utensils, with a parenthetical note to treat it as a kind of weapon. For example, they’re proficient with meat cleavers (treat as hand axe). This is repeated for the spell names, such as with oatmeal skin (treat as barkskin, except the armor is oatmeal instead of wood). It’s these little morsels that really make this product work.
That said, the book was fairly spartan in a few other regards. Despite its brevity, there were no bookmarks to speak of. Similarly, the only illustrations here are the cupcake design on the cover, and a single pencil drawing of a woman in a dress (maybe it’s supposed to be an apron?) in the interior. Finally, it would have helped somewhat to have had perhaps an example NPC to help flesh the class out, and I personally consider it mandatory that when introducing a new base class you should have information on its epic progression.
Overall though, this was a book that was more sweet than sour. I quite enjoyed the tone and style of the writing, and the class seemed mechanically solid. I do think that there was more that could have been done, both in terms of exposition, and from a technical standpoint, but what’s already here stands well on its own. The foodamancer is a somewhat lighthearted class, but if you’re okay with that in your game, this will make a great dish in the banquet that is your campaign.
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