Dungeon Room Index: Food Rooms

So, "Food Rooms" is a pretty lame shorthand, but truthfully I can't think of a better one (without sounding pretentious, at least), so here we are.

Kitchens, larders, breweries, and so on. "Rooms where food is created, prepared, consumed*, or stored".

This entry is a bit shorter. Here are the rooms:

Sustaining life

Dungeon architects need to eat. Dungeon denizens need to eat. The style and mode of eating depends on the residents; wild creatures may simply hunt and kill and eat as one continuous activity, but intelligent creatures are bound to do a little more planning around their eating. Thus the "food rooms".

When you have intelligent creatures in your dungeon (or when your dungeon is simply a product of long-gone intelligent creatures), ask yourself:

• What do/did they eat? Is this food utilitarian fuel, or verging on pleasurable recreation? (It's a spectrum of course.)
• How is/was it prepared? Boiled? Cooked? Raw? Seasoned or bland?
• How is/was it preserved? What methods or preservatives helped this stuff keep? Does it even need special care? How long has this room been abandoned? Is it full of fresh stuff, rotten mush, or fossilized mold?
• How is/was it served? Individually? Communally? Publicly? Privately?

This is right along the lines of my previous post on evoking history; If all you do is consider these questions, you should be well on your way.

Room Notes

Kitchens

The most natural food room of all. Kitchens. Where humanoids cook and prepare food. A standard kitchen should have some kind of counters or tables, and may also have shelves and hooks for cookware and kitchen tools. A kitchen may have a simple fireplace over which meats are turned or cooked on skewers, or it may have a cauldron hanging a fire for boiling and stewing, or it may have a proper oven for baking. (A good kitchen has more than one!)

I really went for a variety of layouts here. It's such a simple concept, but it allows for a wide variety of configurations.
I touched on this before, but given that dungeons are usually abandoned places, consider the visceral evidence that there used to be food here: does it smell like yeast or mold or rotten cheese? What sorts of things have been attracted by the rot to find something to consume?

This round kitchen features a large central oven, with doors on both sides.

This kitchen has a dual-purpose firepit and hanging cooking pot.

More kitchens! Small and large

This kitchen is especially cramped. Even though it's well outfitted with both an oven and a cooking pot, there's just enough room for a pair of cooks to be constantly in each other's space.

A large oven and cauldron and many long tables make for much greater space for a whole team of cooks.

Two massive cauldrons occupy these twin chambers. The cauldrons are so large that stairs are required to reach the top of the pot. The edges of the room are full of shelves and barrels of food supply.

Practically an industrial kitchen! Two large ovens with doors on several sides, five cauldrons boiling away. Multiple tables, and shelves abound. At each corner of the room are ladders to an upper storage loft with even more shelves and barrels of supplies.

Alternate kitchens

If a kitchen is just a place where you cook food, then a cavern chamber or burrow with some fires and spits for roasting qualifies.

This burrow kitchen includes dug out wall slots for storage, and a vertical shaft for letting out smoke.
This is worth noting: any kitchen which relies on fire must have somewhere for the smoke to go. That can either be a simple chute to the surface, or it can just as well be a shaft to an open cavern or similar! This can be interesting for a number of reasons: for one, if it's a shaft to the surface, it's a source of daylight and rain to leak into the dungeon. An open cavern could be interesting from either end; imagine finding an unexpectedly soot covered cavern while exploring a cave network, only to discover a chimney shaft! Or imagine the particularly curious player who asks "where does this chimney lead way down here?" and thereby discovers a series of natural caverns extending the dungeon. Of course the shaft might be too narrow for someone to climb, but these are just particularly narrow "hallways"!

Mess halls

A simple kitchen adjoining a simple eating space. The two rooms sort of blend together, as shelves surround the tables.

Similar concept, but the rooms blend even more; food may be cooked in the adjoining space, or directly over the firepit from the surrounding benches.

Meat

A simple table and a wall of meat cleavers; nearby large sides of meat hang from the ceiling. Perhaps there's even a cold cellar to help the goods keep longer.

Sides of meat hang on a rotating track, and adjacent smokers prepare them for enjoyment.

Mills and presses

Whether it's for grain or some other food source that needs crushing or pressing (Like olives! Or, I don't know, maybe bug carapace makes a great flour!). In this mill, a moderately sized mill stone is turned by hand.

A mill is a great excuse for some water. Attach a water wheel to it! (I didn't forget to draw the water... it's just dried up! Yep. That's what happened.)

This huge millstone is turned by several individuals pushing giant levers. Maybe they even hooked up beasts of burden. I imagine all that walking would wear a rut in the ground.

Vats

Some kind of liquid mixture needs cooking or stirring (or both) in large vats. Elevated walkways allow for inspection or access to huge ...stirrers? Mixing spoons? You know what I'm talking about.

Industrial scale! Rows of vats with adjoined stairs, and surrounding raised walkways for overseers to check on the work. Perhaps this was a grand brewery at some point.

Some vats are for stirring, but this is one of those where people stomped on berries or something similar to crush the juices from them. The juice is collected from a spigot at the front.

Storage

A kitchen may be where you prepare the food, but it's no place for preserving it. For that there will be some kind of nearby room, perhaps deeper and colder, or just better sealed. These simple larders are small and packed with shelves.

This storage area is much larger, a pillared hall with a low vaulted ceiling, brimming with sealed barrels and crates. Over time order has broken down until this room is functionally a maze. Whoever did it knew where they left things, but now it's just a mess.

Another vaulted and pillared storage hall, but this one is kept especially cold by a channel of water that flows under the room, exposed by several grates. The grates are rusted and the water no longer flows, but with the right tools one could gain access to the now cleared tunnels.

Storage need not be general: this is just a huge wine cellar with rows and rows of kegs. My favorite surprise for a room like this is a giant alcoholic-ooze that lives nestled within one of the barrels.

Where there is alcohol, there's an opportunity for recreation! The main feature here is three enormous kegs, but tables and an elevated terrace made room for people to enjoy this particular storage.

While wild creatures may not be as prone to "food preparation", they may readily make an effort to save morsels for later. This cavern is full of crisscrossing webs and tasty leftovers in webbed cocoons. Either the spider is saving them for when prey is scarce, or maybe the cocoons are accompanied by pulsating egg-sacs, ready to feast upon hatching.

Bonus: things to find in a "food room"

The room count is a little smaller and the notes are sparser, so let me take a moment to try and round out this post with some things to discover in a "food room"

• Unconventional weapons. A huge fork or a big old meat cleaver may not be refined weapons, but they certainly would be interesting ones.
• Rare recipes. Learning a particularly nourishing (mechanically: healing) recipe would make a search through an ancient kitchen particularly worth-while.
• Extremely rare vintage. An ancient bottle of wine is either a special treat, or an unconventional piece of high value (and fragile!) loot. It would give me wicked glee to have my players find such a bottle only to break it in a scuffle on their way out. (Not just wine either; there are a variety of foods that benefit from aging! Pickled goods, dry-aged meats. This is fantasy! Rare-magic-cow-cheese keeps for centuries and only gets better! It's probably really smelly too and bound to attract monsters...)
• Supplies. On the mundane end of the spectrum, these are great places to supplement a player's rations; perhaps some of the food here has just been remarkably well preserved.
• An active cook. Against all odds, deep in this dungeon is an active kitchen with an enthusiastic chef. I guess the confluence of rare ingredients and old recipes attracts the weirdest sort. This individual will turn monster parts into foo--Delicious In Dungeon style--and the local dungeon denizens think the food is just too good to get rid of them.
• Gluttonous creatures.
• Unusual oozes. I alluded to this earlier, but let me divulge what I think is one of my better ideas: oozes ought to be unique in their compositions, and affected by what they consume. So, picture an ooze that has glutted itself on wine, and has become intoxicating as a result. (On the other side of the coin, I think it's a neat "weakness" for oozes to be diluted by various substances; each ooze would have their corresponding kryptonite which neutralizes their potency.)
• Vermin. When I was a kid we found mice in a bag of macaroni in our basement. Now picture that mouse as a giant rat festering with disease, nesting in the remains of old barrels of grain. Or perhaps some giant cockroaches. Just take every gross thing that you don't want to find in your pantry and scale it up!
• Trash Eaters. As any food left in these rooms is likely rotted or rotting, outlandish creatures like the classic Otyugh might make their lairs here. Or maybe that thing in the trash compactor in Star Wars: A New Hope.
• Fire Spirits. I'm copying myself from the Armories entry, but where there's an oven there may just be some magical, lingering fire beings who once fed the flames.
• Undead animals. The chickens want their revenge.

Now go put some food in your dungeon!