Food can be delicious or disgusting. It can create feelings of joy or anger or desperation. When we get hungry, we become different people. Few things that aren't listed in the Monster Manual can give your players as much trouble as food. Here are some ways to make it more fun in your games.

1. Every character has a favorite food - This allows your players to be involved in world building. They can pick their character's favorite food and tell you where they experienced it. It might be something exotic from across the sea, or it might be their dad's meatloaf. There is a story for that food to tell and it is fun to let your players come up with it.

2. Food Festivals - What if your dwarven mining town had an annual mushroom festival? What if the biggest holiday in the elven tree city was Lorianallee, otherwise known as the Day of Bacon? Giving your towns fun food festivals shows the characters a bit of the culture. It shows the what the townsfolk appreciate and what is important to them. 

3. Make characters be the food - Everything needs to eat, including the monsters. And the idea of being prey for a hungry troll or being hunted by a giant crocodile is both fun and scary. When the characters realize meat is back on the menu, they pay attention.

4. Give a region a special food - Maybe the little town near the woods raises goats and everyone in the town loves goat yogurt (yuck!). When wolves starts attacking the goats, the townsfolk are extra upset because of the yogurt. Maybe the olives of a certain tree are considered holy and therefore the clerics protect those olives with their lives. Maybe a town even plays tricks on travelers by telling them that a certain food is a special treat even though everyone in town knows it is actually pig food. Food gives the people of a town an identity.

5. Make your players hungry - You can describe food in great detail and talk about how good it tastes and what it smells like. Maybe next session they will bring some food for the game.

6. Resource Management - If the characters are crossing the sea on a ship, trekking through the desert, or taking the Pass of Caradhras, they need to eat. If they don't have the Goodberry spell, they will need to manage how much food they take. Sometimes this is boring, but other times it can create a lot of tension and new challenges that are different than just slaying monsters. 

7. Food can set the mood - You can use food to create a certain mood. Familiar foods are comfortable -- beef stew or fried po-tay-toes at the tavern can make the characters feel safe and comfortable. Maybe you want it to feel exotic and the characters can find bowls of worms or wyvern steaks or anything they are not accustomed to eating. If you want to gross them out, you can serve the characters fish or beans.

8. Give food a mechanical effect - Maybe a great meal at a tavern makes the characters feel so good that it gives them an inspiration for the next day. Fresh baked cookies could give advantage on a persuasion check. Lembas bread could improve morale when all else fails. Bad food could have bad effects such as the poisoned condition or a level of exhaustion. Hunger could make the characters irritable or angry and give disadvantage on persuasion checks or performance checks. Maybe the characters can't think straight when they haven't eaten in a while and intelligence checks are at disadvantage.

9. Food based adventures - Sometimes you can create adventures that are based on food. Maybe the party has to escort the royal wedding cake from the bakery to the castle. Maybe food shipments have stopped arriving at the city. Maybe the harvest was bad and won't last through the winter. Or the worst possible situation… the taco wagon owner died and there is a quest to find his recipe.

10. Interrrupt a good meal - Since we all love eating good food, we can all also understand how upsetting it is for that meal to be interrupted. Have monsters attack when the party is about eat. Maybe it is a big fancy banquet or the deer they just successfully hunted. The monsters could ruin the food and the characters might never get to eat that tasty meal.

Photo Credit – Eggplant, tomato, vegetable salad on a wooden plate by Farhad Ibrahimzade on Unsplash