One day I was eating a really good apple with one hand while typing in my "Mega-Lore" fantasy document with the other one. Incidentally, I had the wild idea of an adventuring party of medieval Food and Drink Critics finding each other in a tavern (Because there is no way more perfect than that!) in a highly developed, Game-of-Thrones-but-High-Fantasy* world. It would be a culinary rp, but with plots and politics on the side as "esteemed" critics start sharing tables (By accident or on purpose) with important and/or dangerous people, and becoming accidentally embroiled in political schemes, swept up in dungeoneering operations, and having little-to-no skills to deal with it, but being able to write to their paper about their experiences. (And possibly take credit for everything, if they're glib enough.)

Every region has different cultures and agriculture, so they all eat very different things. Different places even have differently flavored apples. And I’m subject to my own tastes, as well as definitely not an artist, so people will be free to make their own characters who are restaurant owners/tavern keepers/inn chefs/royal chefs/Chef Errants/Head Brewers/Bakers/Butchers/Public Soupsters/Et Ceteras. The problem is that these are reviewers, so unless they somehow involve themselves in the module of the day, the character and menus they worked on could very well get lost in the backdrop of the game very quickly. And not everyone’s going to meet the same people, or go to the same restaurant, so we meet the age-old issue of splitting the party up in ways that could potentially scatter them across the corners of a continent… Or, even scarier for a GM, [i]oceans[/i].

But most importantly, I’m worried about the fact that there’s going to be a fantasy world full of wars and dragons and giant pet pangolins and magic systems**, and I’m asking them to play as [i]cooks and restaurant critics[/i]. Ah well, even if everyone does end up flanderising their roles into full-on adventurers, makes more sense than sending a professional musician into a dungeon with a bunch of warriors, anyway.

*There's some overlap between high and low fantasy here. It decidedly takes place in a world alternate to our own, but follows a lot of real-world logic, to the point where fantasy things that are usually taken for granted (Elves, Orcs, token furries, Dragons and[s] Dinosaurs [/s]"Lesser Dragons"...) have their own evolutionary history. It isn't necessarily expounded on in great detail because I'm not a biologist and these things don't exist, but it is generally understood that certain scientific things we think about today happened. It’s high fantasy because insane things are taken for granted to exist, but it takes place parallel to our world and the fantasy things are bound by semi-realistic logic. I’m probably misdefining both terms pretty badly.

**Largely incomplete, because magic is trippy shit. I probably won't have much of a world to play in yet so much as a pile of mildly interesting puzzle pieces, but the point stands. When it's finished, it just seems like a strange place to have fantasy restaurant critics. Then again, I was planning on running a Freeform Dwarf Fortress thing in it, so I guess I really like this setting because its history is undeveloped and thus so open to fun fantasy game gimmicks.