October 8th: Food Puns and Big Funds

So like the breaking news is that burger, chili, and a "frosty" joint Wendy's has produced an RPG game.This gag item is something of an elaborate gem if you as the player group have been sitting around after finishing The Forgotten Realms, all of them not just a scenario or two, and are looking for something to fill the hankering that you all have. Something with more than a little beef to it and can be as cheesy as a Monty Python quote thrown into a Pendragon game, to keep the GM from thinking the players really care about his penmanship. From the game mechanics, to a rather detailed world of puns, to an entire campaign of adventures set in that world then finally a little bestiary. Some aspiring and motivated adventure gamers can sit down and fill up weekends of a whole season with the Feast of Legends  product.

The whole thing is just under one hundred pages of content with some decent art and thought-through direction. Rather nicely there is some pacing designed into it. I can see High School teens and early college dorks, that have their own cars, making a Friday night festival out of the game. Drive up to a Wendys, grab everyone's dinner, throw the bags onto the table as players and the GM work out last minute problems... then just as the indigestion starts to set in, the first "Beef Bandit" raid occurs. The adventures in the book are just the right size for a semester's worth of adventuring. I wish a few would-be Kickstarter game designers could take a look at it to get the idea of how not to publish yet another 300- plus page dust catcher that 2-7 of them aren't filler. But then I am being unfair. Imagine that a corporation like Wendy's having enough money to spend on a give away that will appeal to a very unique portion in their marketing audience for as long as the product remains up; WOTC had to publish MTG for a decade before they could hire someone to answer the phones.  

Would I play it? Naw. Not these days. I do admire it though. I wrote a campaign called "A Heroes Bowl of Cereal" for T&T during my first college days, where in eight adventures everyone would be 20th level (5th Ed rules) just to fill up our Friday nights before partying on Saturday. Had I stumbled upon Feast around that time, ah hell yeah.

These days , it's just not cheesy or biting enough for me to find relishing. Overall, it's a Robo-Monster of an RPG on the Smurf-to-Godzilla scale. The writing is very proud of its humors subtlety, yet directed at a rival which it is scared to death of. The villains are definitely ugly, yet just unrecognizable enough not to be sued (by McDonald's), so they come off as pun-monsters and not very good ones. More than one fart euphemism is used and repeatedly at that. Most of  the types of adventurers available to play are menu items that won't be around forever, and it is indebted to the biggest rivals inventions of nuggets of yard-dwelling fowl as well as shaking chalices of frozen milk.  It leaves too much of the ashy taste of passive-aggressive backbiting to be the fastfood land of fantasy that will stay fresh for ages, unlike say the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer New Year's Eve Adventure cycle does for whimsical Santa marketing milieu.