Adventurers live in a very harsh, tense world. They regularly face monsters and evil-doers in mortal combat, often while on a quest to save their town, country, or even world. Given that, one would expect them to take at least some time to kick back and relax, perhaps even have a little fun. Unfortunately, there’s little in the game rules that are helpful in that regard, and so most players are left on their own to figure out how their PCs would blow off stress. But thanks to Healing Fireball, adding a lighter touch to your game is a piece of cake! How, you ask? With their light-hearted book The Sages Must Be Crazy: Let Them Eat Cake.

Let Them Eat Cake is a brief sourcebook for 3.5 gaming, and comes with two PDF files. The first is the main product, with the second being a printer-friendly version thereof (you could call that the icing on the cake). The printer-friendly version is printer-friendly largely because it removed the background coloring that the main file has, but it still kept the interior images. This isn’t really that bad, since these are small black-and-white pictures (along with the occasional sidebar graphic), but seems slightly unnecessary. Still, it’s unlikely to tax your printer too much. On the plus side, both files have bookmarks, which is always a plus.

Presented by the humorless sage Ebenzer Killjoy, this book is presented as a treatise warning against pranksters who would use delicious foodstuffs as a way of pranking a community with low-class magic. In that regard, the book is divided into three parts.

The first introduces a handful of new spells. All very low-level, these have things such as making a pie exceptionally sour, changing the flavor of an object, or deadening someone’s taste buds. There’s nothing here that’ll make you a combat expert, certainly, but I liked that these offered something new – when’s the last time you saw a spell that cursed someone with being unable to enjoy the flavor of food?

The second section introduces new cakes and pies that are made alchemically. Though the name of the book deals with cake, there are also pies and rolls of bread to be found here. From icing that has a purgative agent mixed into it to bread that explodes when you cut it to pie that makes it impossible to speak for a few minutes after you’ve eaten it, there’s a lot of creative prank ideas here. Perhaps best of all is the sidebar covering how to use a thrown pie as a weapon.

The final section is cakes that are actually created as magic items. From dough that magically expands beyond its normal confines to lead pound cake (it weighs ten pounds!), these are wacky foods as only spellcasters could create. My personal favorite was the cake that explodes, when cut, into a burst of confetti and balloons (with a sidebar on variant “flavors”).

Ultimately, Let Them Eat Cake is a product that isn’t for all occasions, but shines when you really need it. If you want a trickster character that is out to cause mischief and fun-tinged mayhem, this is an excellent arsenal of magic to arm him with. With this book, you can add a lighter side to your character, letting them have their cake and eat it too.