Baguette Vampires? Chocolate Fountain Golems? We hope someone brings snacks to your next roleplaying session, as these DnD books are guaranteed to make you hungry. Created by Turkish RPG publisher Dream Realm Storytellers, Silverplate is a campaign setting for D&D 5e in which the environment, players, and monsters are all based on food!
The idea for Silverplate was born in 2019, while the DRS team was eating a famous Turkish dessert called künefe. For a laugh, lead designer Alican Develioğlu came up with an NPC based on the dish, and this soon became a running joke as the team reimagined all sorts of food as DnD classes, from donut barbarians to coffee paladins. Company cofounder Umut Çomak says “As time went by, our jokes seemed more and more like legitimately good ideas.”
The team were cautious at first, since good ideas don’t always make for good games, but soon gave in to the excitement building among them, and the desire to turn their idea into something real. “The more we developed the concepts and the mechanics, the more it seemed that this would be a game others would also enjoy.” Now a fully fledged world, Silverplate arrives on Kickstarter on December 6, in the form of a setting guide and an adventure book, Blight of the Green Witch, containing four campaigns.
In the beginning, Dream Realm Storytellers focused on the fun, goofy content its idea allowed for. “But the more we wrote, the more we realised this world doesn’t have to be sugar and spice and everything nice.”
“For instance, it might be fun to play a corn ranger, sure. But what would happen if you get fire damage? Your kernels would pop, right? Imagining stuff like this helped us create a world that seems sweet on the outside, but that also has a darker side.”
“We really like juxtaposition as a tool of storytelling, and imagining all these cute, vibrantly coloured characters dealing with serious political issues, wars, and other very real problems makes us incredibly happy.”
In Silverplate, each character will have a unique combination of features, as the races of ‘foodfolk’ can be customised, using a mechanic called ‘Cook Yourself’. Instead of the usual 5e system of DnD races providing predetermined bonuses, you can build your own food-based character, picking and choosing from a menu of different features. That means even two characters of the same food-type will play quite differently, for as Çomak puts it: “You wouldn’t expect a pepperoni pizza to have the same qualities as a pineapple pizza.”
Dream Realm Storytelling says Silverplate is a passion project full of monsters, 5e magic items, and dungeons – and that it has a little something for everyone. It comes to Kickstarter on Tuesday, December 5.
“We used nothing but our jokes and our appetites for inspiration,” Çomak says. “Most of the team loves to cook and those that don’t love to eat, so there was never any shortage of dishes around us, and thus no shortage of new ideas.”