Field Guides #5 - The Feast in Weeping Alleys
22 March 2024
Contents
- Contents
- Intro
- What's The Vibe?
- Dining Spots
- Notable Gluttons
- Food That Fights Back
- Hooks
- Touchstones and Inspiration
Intro
There are banquets everywhere, for those with stomachs to feed.
The Feast in Weeping Alleys is God's gift to gluttons. Once a year hordes of gourmands hijack Bastion's rattiest slum with their instruments of yearning: pounds of flesh, bulbous fatty organs, unmarked mesh sacks dripping with oil, and rows and rows of ragged teeth waiting to rip into it all. There's no leader, no advertisement - foodies worldwide simply know in their hearts when festivities begin. Their family members know the omens by now. A twitch of the nose and a cold sweat are your signs to say goodbye before your loved one is off, crawling slavering through the streets, following their stomachs to the beckoning feast.
What's The Vibe?
Sizzling ovens in crumbling shacks, pop-up bars making space in filthy apartments, pools of grease and offal cooling to sludge in the gutters. Someone to your left unhinges their jaw and throws back a drink the size of your head. Vendors beg for attention and live music rattles your skull; the crowd flows endless through bright tents and an obliterating wall of smell. Time is no object to gluttony - once the feast starts, it only ends when the food's all gone. Tired, shambling feasters dig through days-old meat with their bare hands for tasty scraps. They say it's the closest they'll get to heaven. And they're right.
How do you pay for all of this?
Your money's useless here, if that's what you're thinking. These chefs are in it for the love of the game. Feast culture suggests paying tribute to your favorite cooks by prosletyzing, and the alleyways are filled with sweat-soaked pigs spitting words of praise at all passersby.
That's not to say the feast is free, though. The Yellowbellies - the closest thing there is to a security force - wait drooling at all major exits, tapping a playful rhythm on the alley walls, syringes ready and waiting. If you want to leave, you'll have to give them the only thing they require: the nutrient cocktail swirling around in your guts.
Nutrients
Special: When a character eats feast food, roll on the table below to determine the dish's nutrient type. When they've eaten ten unique foods with that nutrient, their bodies produce a special effect.
It's not just taste that does a body good. Feverish back alley gastro-scientists have tapped into a previously unknown vein of nutrition, imbuing feast food with that little extra zhuzh we all love. Is it something in the air? A chemical combo brought on by years of slumline mistreatment? If those scientists weren't too busy stuffing living, screeching birds down their throat they might find an answer. Newbies just get a fresh kick to the hormones and keep eating, but true gluttons know this: a varied diet is the key to Nirvana.
Don't want these extra compounds living rent-free in your gut? You're in luck! Nutrients can be extracted via public access Yellowbelly tech. Their cleansing tool takes the form of long, chemically treated syringes inserted directly through the navel, sucking out all those foreign substances while leaving the good stuff untouched. Undergoing such a procedure is the only way to leave the feast through proper channels, but they're not the only ones to use the tools. Rumors abound of hidden markets dealing in strange trade with nutrients as payment, if you can find them.
Nutrient types and effects
| d4 | Nutrient | Effect at ten doses |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Regic Acid | Royals recognize you as one of their own. |
| 2 | Vitamin Aleph | Can telepathically commune with the nearest god. |
| 3 | Jenganese | Can identify the weakpoint of any manmade structure at a glance. |
| 4 | MUCHO | Your voice can always be heard, no matter the ambient noise. |
There is another, considerably less common, nutrient: Samsaridium. Its effect at ten doses is unclear, because it only exists in the body of single creature, the Fool, which has never been caught, harmed, or tasted.
Dining Spots
Local flavor's always better.
wysh
What do you consume when earthly delights have grown stale? The bold, forward-thinking gastroturges at wysh (pronounced wish) combine an unquenched hunger for more with a stretched-thin definition of veganism to bring you dream cuisine: the hottest innovation in brain-to-table style.
Each morning one lucky volunteer is harvested from nearby slums and hooked up to the Slake Mouth, a wetware circus made for one purpose: birthing raw, unformed dreamstuff into our reality. The Mouth works like a memory thresher, parsing through all the yummy feelings that swirl into your nighttime soup, collating them into physical material, and funneling them right out onto a sizzling grill. Sentient? Maybe. Tasty? Definitely! Mostly these little fellas only know a few seconds of life before the searing heat turns them into food, but escapes do happen, and half-formed dreams have intermingled with local fauna to unclear results. Some might see a mistake; wysh calls it giving back.
For slobbering customers, this means fresh, never-before-seen flavors with no harm to real animals. Yay! For the volunteer, it means permanent loss of potentially fundamental memories. Stay too long and the Mouth will leave you a husk with no past or present, still alive, just unthinking. But don't worry, their relatives are always fairly compensated. At wysh, community is family™.
What creatures have escaped from wysh's grill?
| d6 | Escapee |
|---|---|
| 1 | Rolling eyeball, blush-red, anxious. When it's scared, touching it causes your teeth to start falling out. |
| 2 | Fuzzy, unclear copy of the current volunteer. Perpetually in slow motion with big, exaggerated movements. |
| 3 | Diseased, filthy hand, waaay too many fingers. Reproduces asexually - the fingers split off and grow new hands behind them. |
| 4 | Shambling, semi-transparent cloak under a ghoulish mask. Ripping off the mask always reveals a different one underneath. |
| 5 | Self-consuming replicant. Twisting, moldly flesh, eating itself just as fast as it's regrowing. Moves like a bull in a china shop. |
| 6 | Erratic fog of rutting insects. Each one has a lifespan of ten seconds. Tiny corpses trail in its wake. |
Spitswap Chop Shop
Housed in an abandoned textile mill and muted by the trickling snowfall of asbestos flakes, the Spitswap Chop Shop feels closer to a temple than a butchery. Employees work with grave focus, wandering with bloodstained robes amid a forest of skinned corpses. Through solemn ritual they have discovered the means to carve edible meat from any living thing, thus condemning them to spend their lives surrounded by death. Sound is softer here, and easy to discern: knives sharpening, blood spilling into gutters, and hushed bartering from the crowd outside, clutching small cages to their chests, waiting to feed the guillotine.
The Chop Shop isn't killing animals for the sake of it, they're a business. Funded by renegade philosophers Lockjaw and the Itis, the shop facilitates their holy mission of consuming every possible creature. There's a bounty board out front offering hopeful hunters their next prey - the shop pays handsomely for animals on the board, but only if they're brought back alive.
The butchers' rituals don't work on anything that's already dead. The shop is a home for ferrying creatures from this life to the next, but they do their best to treat the little ones kindly. Each creature gets a last meal, a prayer, and a name. It's the least they can do.
What's on the Spitswap bounty board?
| d6 | Bounty |
|---|---|
| 1 | Seezere Hawks. Communal birds with long, steely beaks. After laying eggs, the strongest in a group is held down and impaled by its fellows, seemingly willingly. |
| 2 | Bramblers. Spiny ratlike beings evolved from chemically treated pinecones. Drawn to the warmth of machines that are close to sentience. |
| 3 | Aldent Hogs. Fleshy, hairless rodent with limber, noodle-like spines, known to hide in ramen shops. The spines inject a drug cocktail when eaten - the hog can control the eater as long as the noodle remains in their mouth. |
| 4 | Ossets. Ancient reptiles that grow protective bone shells. The bone fuses with its surroundings if left alone. They're functionally immortal and often found at the core of huge bone superstructures. |
| 5 | A childhood pet at the end of a happy life. All species welcome. |
| 6 | The Fool. |
The Garage (in Myra's Memory)
The Garage has accepted the Weeping Alley Feast as a corpse accepts flies. Once a labyrinthine set of storage units squirreled away below street level, the owner leased the whole place out to hungry feasters on one condition: don't touch the statues. A deal was struck, a pact was signed, and this vow was kept. The Garage stands today as it always has, filled with thousands of statues of one woman: Myra.
Joyful Myras dance between units. They hang upside down from the roof, faces frozen, smiles wide. Little Myras dangle their legs from shelves and hide behind vines. Marble Myra eyes dot the walls with candles in their pupils; a hundred Myra hands form an arch around the entrance, reaching always to your heart. The ground is paved with her teeth and stained with her ashes. She is inescapable.
With so much space taken by Myras, the Garage gets way less traffic than the rest of Weeping Alleys. This has allowed it to become a hub for the Feast's consumer underground, and abandoned units blossom with ragged stalls. They'll trade in anything you like, but only take one payment: nutrients, extracted on the spot. Most sellers say it's to get one over on the yellowbellies, but oldheads are quieter, referring in hushed tones to the same old phrase: Myra's Portion.
What's on offer at the Garage today?
| d6 | Offering | Nutrient type (# doses) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Boris Pupil, adventuring chef for hire. Uses uncanny sense of smell to find treasure. | Regic Acid (2/day) |
| 2 | Shining chestplate of transparent glass. Nearby birds are drawn to run into it head first. | MUCHO (3) |
| 3 | Twisted, contorted mask of a lost healer. Made from dried skin. Viewing it induces a paralyzing sense of longing in any creature that has just eaten another living thing. | Jenganese (9) |
| 4 | Stake carved from a fallen star. Implant it in a corpse's sternum to reanimate it until the next new moon. | Vitamin Aleph (12) |
| 5 | Telefragger (1d10, bulky). Rifle imbued with quantum energy. When the trigger is pulled, the shooter is fired out instead of a bullet. | MUCHO (7) |
| 6 | The deed to the Chop Shop. | Samsaridium (1) |
Other Banquets
| d6 | Eatery |
|---|---|
| 1 | A red liver stretched on the rocks near the sea. Feasters in bird masks hide nearby with knives, waiting. |
| 2 | House party with guests spilling out on the street. Each attendant has a bite taken from their forehead. |
| 3 | Alleyway crammed with food trucks. Each sells the same food (artisinal pizza). Their hatred for each other often births violence. |
| 4 | Tired little speakeasy, Undertow. Bartender only makes you a drink if he pities you. |
| 5 | Modern art museum ("a feast for the senses!"). Closed, locked, banned, heavily guarded. |
| 6 | Fasting baths. Elaborate sauna full of lilies. There's only one person inside, wasting away, still dreaming. |
Notable Gluttons
Everyone's gotta eat. Some more than others.
Lockjaw And The Itis
Former gangsters, current philosophers, the only blood on their hands these days comes from the Chop Shop. Twin brothers joined at the navel by their umbilical cord, Lockjaw and the Itis wrung a hundred necks together before finding enlightenment. Lockjaw can't eat - his trap's soldered shut with a big metal dome - so the Itis gets the fun work, passing on nutrients, taste, and memories from one belly to another through the cord.
What do they want? Food. Any of it, all of it, in any condition, age, treatment, seasoning, spice, whatever. Years of bathing in the blood of their fellows have, in a way, opened their eyes to the world's true nature. They say: the universe gave us life so that we may percieve it, and we can't leave until all of it is perceived. So now they eat, bite by juicy bite, each dish bringing heaven one step closer to earth.
What do rumors say hides in Lockjaw's jaw?
| d6 | Rumor |
|---|---|
| 1 | Another, smaller brother, doing strange experiments between the teeth. |
| 2 | Bloody, festering wound from eating a hexed intestine. |
| 3 | Forest of bone splinters boring through his mouth. |
| 4 | Squirming microbiotic ecosystem growing in his saliva. He cares for them as family. |
| 5 | Yawning portal to the space where their true benefactor lives, waiting for its summons. |
| 6 | Cleft lip. Birth defect. He's really really really shy about it. |
Yellowbellies
HP 4 | STR 13 | DEX 8 | Unclean Syringe 1d8
Critical Damage: target is deprived as all nutrients are extracted from their body.
Named for the jaundice-like effect that comes with one too many extracted nutrients, Yellowbellies are the Feast's most experienced gluttons. They wander Weeping Alleys in white satin suits, drooling and stained with viscera. Nominally guards, they protect the Feast for one simple reason: street fights make for bad meat. Yellowbelly forces often rip through backroads, hunting the unruly, dragging their syringes on the cobbles.
Nobody knows how they came to be. They've been stalking these alleys since the very first feast, breeding rumor and mystery all the while. Some say Yellowbellies don't retire, they undergo ritual dismemberment so their colleagues may inherit their storied flesh. A common thread runs through these tall tales: they take a special interest in talented chefs. Produce enough beautiful foodstuff and you might find a letter wrapped in satin, offering tantalizing hidden rituals in return for a private pop-up dinner at their underground nest.
What rituals can the Yellowbellies teach you?
| d4 | Ritual | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hungry Eyes | Consume a creature's eyes to violently cough out a small friendly copy. |
| 2 | Sanguine Decanter | Your blood becomes an earthy red wine that is deeply addictive to humans. |
| 3 | Room for Seconds | You gain a small storage bladder above your stomach. Can eat items to store them and regurgitate at will. |
| 4 | Skinweave Yeast | Your body expands gradually when exposed to high heat. |
Halloumi, Mendicant Fryer
On warm afternoons when the feast's oldest gluttons step back from their meals, swapping war stories and spittle, they might dredge up memories of the legendary Chef Halloumi. Once a renowned fry cook and creator of wysh, she has now turned her knife inward, carving off her home, her career, and (some say) her dignity in the pursuit of universal truth. She emerged from this paring with a holy vow of poverty and a just-for-funsies vow of silence, and the restaurant industry has mourned her ever since. These days she lives on the streets cooking freely for anyone she can. Her body's a filthy saltcrust temple and the stomach is her god.
You'll know her from the common beggars by the massive oil tank strapped to her back - the Mother Vat. She's been feeding that thing for decades, never washing, only adding more, and the bacteria percolating inside are on some nightmare shit. She's not just bonding breadcrumbs to that meat, she's bonding an entire ecosystem. Results from eating her work vary wildly with a few consistencies: no memory of the previous day, a hangover like an electrical fire, and the taste of something indefinable at the back of the tongue, like faith, or rubber. The effects are hard to study because of Halloumi's single unspoken rule: she'll only feed you once. Come back for seconds and her eyes will pass right through, as if you've disappeared from her world altogether.
Where do you wake after eating Halloumi's food?
| d6 | Circumstance |
|---|---|
| 1 | Ashen brick room one mile underground. Record player's spinning tinny opera. The elevator is on its way down. |
| 2 | Your soul has been separated from your body. It floats above you in an empty operating theatre flooded with roses. |
| 3 | On stage before a screaming crowd. Your throat is raw and filled with blood. They're selling your album in the back. |
| 4 | An offshore raft. Little glowing jellyfish swim by your hands. A voice underwater sings your name. |
| 5 | Slumped in a freshly dug hole. A harpist above plays a twinkling dirge. Someone gives a eulogy for you, and it's shockingly true. |
| 6 | At the top of a skyscraper-sized statue, in the palm of its hand, stained with birdshit. You're holding a bag of treasure worth $5k. Sirens sound from below. |
Other Feasters
| d6 | Celebrant |
|---|---|
| 1 | Sir Anno. Small with a hot temper. Yearns to run his sword through living meat. |
| 2 | Hammond Rye. Desperate to be eaten. Gluttons avoid him like the plague. |
| 3 | Petty Shoo, capricious devil. She steals food right before you eat it with an elastic sticky hand. |
| 4 | Brassica Carinata, veterinary phasmologist. Studies the ghosts left by butchered animals. |
| 5 | Jimmy Churry, secretary. Last week he ate the Perfect Steak but it was knocked from his hands. Now he crawls on the ground, licking the floor, desperate for another hit. |
| 6 | Tart Pops. Angry, but lonely. Pretends to choke on food so people come talk to him. |
Food That Fights Back
Dead meals are less fun.
Skakes
HP 7 | STR 8 | DEX 15 | CHA 8 | Muscles-to-Cake 1d8 DEX
Critical Damage: your weapon turns into cake.
- Skittering, chitinous wysh escapees, living in the gutters.
- Their compound eyes reflect a haunted dimension, slowly turning anything they focus on into cake. The surface remains the same, but it's cake underneath.
- Mostly just playful. The angrier you get about stuff turning out to be cake, the more they harass you.
Omens: Angry shouts; quiet chittering; the soft hush of matter being replaced by cake
The Fool
HP 3 | STR 10 | DEX 18 | CHA 18 | Potent Luck 1d10 STR
Critical Damage: By pure accident, your wallet ends up in the Fool's mouth as it hops away.
- Jaunty bipedal amphibian with bulging eyes. Croaks a ragged song everywhere it goes. Contains the nutrient Samsaridium.
- Obscenely lucky. Any attacks or attempts to capture / stop it fail through sheer coincidence.
- Pacifist and completely oblivious. Attacking it causes bad luck in your immediate area, like tripping on a banana peel or standing under a falling anvil.
Omens: happy croaking; yowls of a hunter's pain; wet, squelching hops
Taxworms
HP 6 | Armor 1 | STR 6 | DEX 6 | CHA 10 | Gnawing Hunger 1d8 Blast
Critical Damage: your stomach explodes.
- Mouthless freaks slumbering in mucus-y underground nests.
- Eat by warping reality to teleport food from your belly to theirs. While within a mile of a taxworm, you are deprived.
- Happy to subsist on their own, only attack when directly threatened.
Omens: a sound from underground, like crying; sudden unexplainable hunger; a section of the feast mysteriously empty
Encounter Table
| d6 | Encounter |
|---|---|
| 1 | Three Skakes harassing gluttons from the shadows. |
| 2 | Two Yellowbellies laughing wildly as they brutally stop a street fight. |
| 3 | Completely empty stretch of alley. A hungry taxworm lies below. |
| 4 | A recent wysh escapee running amok through the crowd. |
| 5 | Six hungry gluttons holding down a seventh, convinced there's cake underneath their skin. |
| 6 | The Fool blithely causing chaos as hunters chase after it. |
Hooks
| d6 | Hook |
|---|---|
| 1 | The party ate Halloumi's cooking and ended up somewhere odd. |
| 2 | The law got on wysh's ass, and they're hiring folks to round up all their escapees. |
| 3 | Lockjaw and the Itis got wind of some exciting new food and are calling all hunters to bring some in. |
| 4 | Someone at the Garage stole a valuable jade Myra and escaped deeper into the labyrinthine units. |
| 5 | Yellowbellies are starting to go on the offensive, attacking people for their nutrients in the streets. What do they need it for? |
| 6 | The Feast has offended every animal rights group imaginable, and they're converging right now to burn down all of Weeping Alleys. |
Touchstones and Inspiration
This post was written for the March 2024 RPG Blog Carnival featuring the theme Feasts, Food, and Fancy Drinks, oh my!
Hitmen for Destiny by Øyvind Thorsby.
Anthology of the Killer by thecatamites.
Nutrient mechanic inspired by Ultros by Hadoque.
"Dark red liver stretched out on the rocks" taken from The Feminine Urge by The Last Dinner Party
Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville. In particular the Slake Mouth was adapted from the Slake Moths in that book.
The Garage inspired by one of my favorite joints, The Garage in Birmingham, AL.
This post expands on some ideas I presented in a module for Hieronymus by Laurie O'Connel called The Gobbling Gluttons.
AI art generated by the bing create tool through Microsoft.