I was complaining, whining and grousing the other day (or, well, on 19/03/2025, which will make this funnier and funnier depending on when this post actually came out.)
I was complaining about all the adventurers just eating hardtack, because, you know, that’s fucking boring. Vayra’s very good post on food on the Mountain made me think more about food, specifically, then the above exchange occurred. And also I read Dungeon Meshi a while back. This is also a response to a Glåugust prompt, also by Vayra.
If “actual food” (which includes hardtack literally, if not spiritually) spoils in eight hours when brought inside the Dungeon Environment, and there’s enough adventuring for this to be a problem, what are those motherfuckers eating?
Here are some answers. By the way, any time there’s something ending with an exclamation mark, I want you to hear it in this tone of voice.
Hallucinated Rations - Better than nothing? In some particularly strange Underworld circumstances, hallucinations can satiate (even if their nutritional content leaves much to be desired). Nobody should plan around eating hallucinations, because it is never good to be out of one’s head in the Underworld.
Carrion-crawler Larvae - Ghost-translucent, butter-coloured heads, fat and wriggling with little wiggly legs. When eaten raw, numb the mouth, disguising the dreadful flavour. When roasted or boiled, numbing agent loses effectiveness, allowing the true astringency to be uncovered. Can also be used as a very crude local anaesthetic when mashed up.
Dungeon Chicken - Common nickname for the head-sized rove beetles found in many dungeon environments. Fast, but stupid and fairly docile, they’re easy to rustle up, and can be carried around in wicker cages for an emergency. Tastes (optimistically) like wet chicken.
Fruitroot - The swollen, deep-reaching taproot of a large surface shrub, commonly found in lands blessed with primal growth. Tastes a bit like a resinous cucumber. Very heavy in comparison to its nutrition (i.e., a ration of Fruitroot is a full slot). Produces a clear green juice that’s all the rage with healthful types back in the big city.
Cave Wheat - Not actually wheat, despite resembling it at a distance. Possibly not even a cereal plant, but it serves the purpose. Careful, the “grains” are quite sharp on the top, and hastily harvesting it without tools will leave you with lots of little black “grains” embedded in your hands. Some adventurers like it for its stalks. A bushel of Cave Wheat can be stretched to keep a party of four alive for a week, if the party of four is not afraid to be miserable and hangry.
Sulfur Brassica - Gigantic jaundice-yellow collards, grow near vents leading to Hells or chemical underworlds. Taste exactly like rotten duck’s eggs, pretty much no matter what you do to them, but they’re a rare source of “greens” in the underworld. Can be half-rescued by a hefty application of some kind of sauce. A sulfur-roll, where the “greens” are used as a wrapping for a more appetising filling, can also assist.
Tsurubebi - Large, luminescent bacterial colonies, lumped into the general category of “ooze”. Can be used as a very shitty torch if smeared on a stick. Grow hanging from doorframes, stalactites and branches, pretty much sessile. Can be reduced into an edible, hard-wearing “jam” with a strong umami flavour.
Mothmeat - Papery mouthfeel and papery flavour, too. Best caught with a lamp and a big net. Giant moths love light just as much as their tiny surface-dwelling cousins, but be careful your light-lure doesn’t draw attention from something else.
“Sunfruit” - Named such by creatures who had never seen the sun - bulbous, split-skinned, weakly radiant. it’s not really a “fruit”, so much as it is a swelling on a mollusc that dwells in the cracks of walls - cook thoroughly to kill the juveniles!
Bitternodes - Fibrous and many-branched roots punch down through stone roofs, apparently not in partnership with any detectable surface plant. That mystery for the wizards aside, the roots have huge, chewy, but ultimately edible nodes upon them. As you may have guessed, they’re distinctly bitter in flavour, but they can liven up a dish significantly.
Hotweed - Grows around the edges of volcanic vents or portals to Elemental Fire. Smells like spent chemical matches or the aftermath of a red dragon’s breath. If you’re expecting some spice from the fiery associations - do not. These fibrous yellow fronds taste faintly eggy, but mostly have a celery-like vegetable nothingness that only seems to grow less flavourful as you chew.
Slab Fungus - Grows in thick, greasy layers on chasm walls, and other airy, cold underground spaces. The thick layering is designed to protect the important parts of the fungal network clinging to the wall, the “slab” is just an insulating fruiting body. Thus, layers of the slab can be harvested harmlessly, making slab-fields well-trafficked parts of the underworld. Chewy, umami, greasy. Fries pretty well if you cut it into strips.
Chokehorns - Pointy, horn-shaped mushrooms. Thick with a fuzzy layer of spores atop the edible fungal flesh. Water must be poured over them to remove the spores, otherwise they plume out in a thick, choking cloud. Adventurers descending into dungeons with chokehorn patches sometimes carry saltwater pails for this purpose. Chokehorns taste a bit like button mushrooms, but with a strangely gamey, stewy undertone, and a robust texture.
Worm Sauce - Excreted by pallid worms. Don’t think about it. Best served mixed with strong alcohol to mask the flavour and soothe the nerves.
Marlflowers - Huge grey flowers dungeon flowers that grow out of solid stone floors and walls, usually in places where elemental earth influences the dungeon. Their stiff, triangular petals have a marly texture, and require stout shears or an axe to harvest. Absolutely inedible by anyone with human teeth unless boiled to death, upon which they are basically limp, flavourless and leathery. The water you boiled it in, however, will do alright for stocks and soups, despite a faintly chalky overtone to the vegetal flavours.
Cave Fish - Flat, ciliated, oval, thicker in the middle. Cold, grey. While they taste somewhat like a fish, they are absolutely not fish by even the most permissive definition. They’re a sure sign of aboleth presence, a byproduct(?) of their work, or perhaps a poorly understood mechanism of their biological magic. Eating them probably isn’t safe in the long term, but neither is dungeoneering.
Darkmantle Eggs - Bizarre clusters of limp tubules, like black, wet sausages filled with slime. (You ever seen what the fuck squid eggs look like? Forreal?) Amazingly disgusting, with an intolerable texture and boak-inducing flavour, but they’re relatively easy to gather and non-poisonous, which makes them the last resort for many.
Cockatrice Meat - King of white meats, if you can avoid the petrification. Fatty, rich and creamy - a diet consisting mostly of this leads hastily along the short tunnel to gout, as many an underworld chieftain has discovered to their disappointment. Not to be confused with pyrolisk meat, which is tough, gamey and tastes a little moldy.
Bread Ooze - Named because you can spread butter on it once it’s cooked solid. A sort of relative of the black pudding, the ooze referred to as the dun pudding is most common in very arid environments. Small dun puddings are in the running to be bread-oozes, captured and cooked until they dry out into a sort of bendy “cake”. Large dun puddings will make dinner of you, on the other hand, so judge carefully! Bread Ooze tastes a little like molasses, or old brown sugar.
Ethereal Marauder Jerky - These monsters aren’t exactly common, but the second thing an adventurer knows about them after their ability to appear out of nowhere and disembowel you with two-foot long fangs is the fact you can turn the little sons of bitches into jerky. Their meat’s inedible unless dried, suffused with a sort of ethereal “blood” (prime ingredient in potions of etherealisation, so don’t lose it! Wizards will pay for that shit).Eating undried Marauder meat has a decent chance of partially etherealising you, for an indefinite or even permanent duration.
Forrel Roots - Delicately flavoured, piquant, found in shallow dungeon layers. Gathering these to sell as delicacies isn’t a bad side game, if there’s no ancient coins or cursed goblets lying about! The only good part’s the interior - each root’s got a thick, woody, flavourless “rind” on it.
Black Pudding Pudding - It’s relatively simple alchemy to neutralise the digestive acids of the proteinous Black Pudding. Have that on your cauldron overnight, then add butter, sugar, milk, salt, and a little flour (cave or surface), and then prepare. Produces a sort of treacley, creme-brulee dessert with a vaguely aniseed flavour and an oily texture. A treat for parties in shallow dungeons, or the kind of thing you’d serve a visiting patron in your underground base-camp.
Froghemoth Offal - Acrid and strong-smelling, heavy with blood and fat, a black-red sort of a colour. You wouldn’t think these organs are edible on first sight - and, uh, they aren’t, really. Eat too much and you’ll have some absolutely monstrous indigestion. Make cured sausages, though, and get them into sunlight, and the worst of it will work off over a few days. Very good for the next delve, no use for this one.
Miner’s Beans - Grow in tall pods in underground groves, recognisable by their disc-shaped leaves. Vegetal, tough, but excellent in a stew. Elves can’t digest some of the components, so don’t bother feeding them any or you may end up with your graceful blade dancer or ancient wizard laid out with the worst stomach-ache of their life.
Fruitroot Jam - Tastes a bit like the resin you’d use on a violin bow smells, but any adventurer will tell you this stuff is hearty, and strongly-flavoured enough that you can slather it on any old nightmare ration. Derived, naturally, from fruitroots, many adventurers who know they are going to a structure populated with the above will come down the way with a bag of sugar.
Ankheg Steak - A giant, territorial, deadly burrowing insect is not exactly an optimal game animal, especially underground, but protein is protein, and it already tastes like mustard when you crack open the shell! Eating ankheg meat long-term in any form but “boiled grey” will cause gastrointestinal issues. These issues arise due to a chemical-elemental imbalance in the digestive humours, induced by the bug’s own diet, over half of which consists of elemental energy derived from processing soil.
Cultist’s Mold - A thick fungal layer that grows best on walls of crumbling, antique stone brick. Scraped off, can be fried into “dumplings”, or worked with difficulty into a jam or sauce. Originally called “Cultor’s” Mold, but an association with odd cults residing in deep places under cities and mountains stuck.
Cave Porridge - The natural continuation of cave wheat. A bit like congee the colour of wet cement. Incredibly flavourless, but serves as a good base. A lack of toppings renders it mind-numbingly banal.
Ceiling Grass - Grows down from cave roofs, right out of the stone. Looks a lot like grass, but we don’t exactly know what the fuck it is. Indicates the presence of fay in this cave system, and usually taken as a bad omen, but - you can boil it!
Plump Helmets - Large mushrooms, with a sort of storybook appearance, and a hefty, extremely edible cap. Underground delvers, be they natives or topsiders, know the value of the noble plump helmet and its delicious, fluffy cap. How high is the number of souls sent on to the gods over nothing so much as a knee high mushroom? Higher than you’d think, even.
Giant Centipede - While the giant centipede is noble in the same way a tiger is, few like getting massive mandibles scythed through their soft parts, so the creatures often end up on the losing side of territorial engagements with adventurers. But wait! Before you throw the body down that pit left behind by an ancient civilisation, did you know the slimy greenish flesh within is, by a permissive definition, edible?! Tastes very bad.
Gist Slime - A particular variety of ooze which serves the exact purpose of yeast, perhaps due to the amused intervention of a breadloving god. Useless and inedible on its own, but the true underworld gourmet savours the distinctive reek.
Basilisk Eggs - The adult basilisk is entirely inedible in all senses of the worst, being too tough for teeth and sickeningly mineralised if you somehow manage it. Their eggs however, if you are brave, make for a torso-width omelette when handled correctly. They’ve got a pungent, burnt, rather memorable taste, but you can get used to it.
Fried Brain Mole - Whole Brain Mole, fried in oil. Traditional. Bite the thick meat off the bone like a chicken wing. Tastes a bit like rabbit. Salt and sesame are favoured seasonings. Eating a Fried Brain Mole guarantees weird, screaming nightmares later that night, due to the principle of psychic resonance, but hell, you’re an adventurer. After six days of cave porridge and mold, the calculus of trading a good night’s sleep for the indulgence of relatively normal protein starts to balance out.
Tief-apfel - Grown by dwarves in cavern orchards, fiercely guarded. Share a relation to apples the same way hardtack shares a relation to bread. Makes for decent, if piquant, cider.
Hairy Ooze - This particular bacterial ooze is a powerful emetic and deliriant, unless hundreds of tiny, flavourful mushrooms are growing out of it, processing the toxic elements. The sheer density of mushrooms looks like a covering of fine brown hair, leading to the name. Actually, unironically, delicious, almost truffly. Much less mobile than other common dungeon oozes.
Giant Cave Cricket Legs - The rest of the giant cave cricket is not fit for much consumption - stringy, hard to cook, occasionally toxic, depending on the cricket’s diet. However, the spiny, thick legs contain a pallid flesh, compact muscle, which is chewy but not stringy and very rarely toxic. Boil in shell, crack with hammer. Use the rest of the cricket to bait snares.
Blind Cave Salamanders - Few desire to devour the humble olm, but if it's between you and me, wet boy, you're going in the damn stew pot. Tastes like frog’s legs if you’re an optimist.
Underground River Shrimp - Hand length, pallid white, covered in filamentous legs, but when you get at the meat? Hoo-ee, that there’s good eatin! No complaints (unless you hate shrimp). Alas, true underground rivers with shrimp populations are rare (only about one per hexcrawl).
Barrelsteak - A hefty chunk, cut free of a massive barrel fungus, the bulbous fruiting body of which can spare a few pale steaks. Filling and rubbery, but rather lacking in enjoyable flavour. For the first day after harvest, it seeps oily moisture. These “Barrel Drippings” are an ingredient in a type of healing potion, but are best collected from a whole ‘shroom with a tap, maple syrup style. Usually, when you get Barrelsteak, you are poaching from an underground alchemist, alfar or wizard.
Shrieker Fritters - The danger of shriekers is well-known to any seasoned adventurer, who regard the obstreperous fungi with a contempt so absolute it borders on the pathological. Naturally, as an outgrowth of this, the harvesting and production of shrieker-based is an extremely controversial activity - worth the risk? Worth the flavour? A good idea to keep shrieker populations down? A form of revenge on those fucking things? None can agree. Whatever the case, the purple fungus-flesh is sweet, quite meaty, and generally a popular dinner, especially when fried in batter.
Cave Bread - Soft, nutty and fluffy when fresh-baked from cave-wheat flour, with a fetching mauve colour. Within a day, it goes stale, shrinking down into a hard grey bricklike lump, with an extremely chewy interior and a stony exterior. Best served with a broth to loosen it up a bit.
Rust Monster Eggs - Laid in gigantic clutches of thousands by the unseen but much-feared rust-dragons, the extremely rare final imago of the rust-monster. Rust-dragons are not actually dragons, but they’re insects the size of a city bus that can talk, fly and breathe out death, so we give ‘em the title. Luckily for us, they don’t give a fuck about their unintelligent young, making no effort to raise them - pure r-selection. The eggs themselves are mostly just unremarkable, disgusting protein, except for the fact that if you cook them in a metal pot, you’re a fucking idiot.
Bulette Flank-steak - I can hear what you’re saying. Hunt a bulette? Underground? Well, here’s my response: if you’re desperate, and you’ve got some spare hirelings, trading them for a dead bulette is a lot more socially acceptable than hireling flank-steak. As for bulette meat, bring a saw instead of a knife, and be prepared to boil the fuck out of it, but, once you do, you’ll find it’s surprisingly delicious - richly flavoured, fatty, with a satisfying chew. We’d even half consider suggesting farming bulettes to some surface nobleman, as if that’s not gone horribly wrong a lot of times before.
Pepper Worms - Fat red ribbon worms, thick as a closed fist. Eaten raw, they’re chokingly spicy - I'm not talking “ahaha white boy can’t handle the pepper worms” I’m talking tear gas. Cooked and seasoned, they enter the realms of jalapenos (i.e., you’re making a spiciness gamble with every pepper worm). Cutting into a pepper worm incautiously may end up filling your campsite with a faint haze of eye-stinging liquid, so leave it to the professionals, or risk the ruin of a rest-site for the evening.
Dwarven Iron Rations - Produced by factory kitchens of the dwarven holds, for the working miner. Traded like currency by dwarfhold neighbours. Consist mostly of edible roots, cave-wheat and plump-helmets, and whatever surface crops the dwarves had, often oats. These are processed into hard, reliable bricks that can be boiled into a porridge, or chewed (difficultly) in a pinch.. No two rations are the same. The “joke” about them containing real iron doesn’t amuse dwarves, who don’t get it.
Alchemically Treated Bread - Damn expensive, but it survives into the underworld. Accompanies royally funded expeditions, or those sponsored by private banks. Tastes like brown bread but very subtly wrong, smells horrible if you try to toast it. Lather with rothé butter and ignore the discrepancies, if you can.
Onibaba’s Stew - Boiled up by Onibaba, who can be found cooking inside the dungeon. Extremely hearty meat stew fortified with wine and spices. Served piping hot with flatbread and rice balls. Onibaba gives you only one guarantee - the meat may be people-meat, but she won't serve you your own species. (Just ain't right).
Rothé Cheese - Produced from the milk of stunted underworld cattle. Like said milk, has a faint bioluminescence, a tangy taste and a pungent smell. Melts exceedingly well, and most topsiders agree it is best consumed in this way, as heating it causes a chemical reaction that softens the flavours significantly.
Red Rothis - As above, but aged and cultured with a tangy red-coloured mold. Unclear thaumic reactions from the mold cause the cheese to not just be faintly luminescent, but to actually glow. A wheel of red rothis sheds light as a torch and is startlingly valuable.
Devil’s Olives - Actual, normal olives, double the size and intensely flavourful, but the trees they grow on are pitch black and watered with blood, and they’re all grown in secluded orchards owned by nasty fiends and their underground cults. Still, after a month of worm sauce and marlflowers, perhaps it’s worth the risk…?
Dungsin Sauce - Analogous to Hoisin (sea-food) sauce, this is Dungsin (cave-food) sauce. Thick, dark, exceedingly fragrant sauce sold at underworld markets, produced from a broad collection of underworld fungi, subterranean insects, and spices from the gardens of alfar. Not food on its own, but a dose of the stuff can go a long way to making nearly anything tolerable with its salty, mushroomy richness. Spreading it on surfaces in a dungeon has a habit of attracting curious animals - dungeon chickens, especially, can’t resist the stuff.
Alfar Brioche - Not exactly literally brioche (rothé butter, gist slime and sugar of unclear derivation, just to start), but it’s near enough. Most-usually found arranged in radial tear-and-share flower shapes. Smell faintly of vanilla. Steam a little. You’ll only get these as rewards or loot from the deep-earth alfar, and if they’re giving you treats of tasty brioche, you’re already too involved with them.
Ancient Canned Food - Dark metal cans from a long time ago. Inexplicable, faded labels with weird little figures on them. 2-in-6 chance of ringpull, otherwise, requires opener. If you can get the can open, food of incomparable and unusual flavour, sometimes pungent or disgusting tastes of a long-gone world. No two meals are the same. Effectively a valuable currency among underworld dwellers.
Potatoes - Just good old fashioned, normal potatoes. They grow fine enough on the surface, but their true home is the chthonic realms, and down here, they can reach preposterous sizes. Valued by all dungeon denizens as food - even the smarter obligate carnivores, who know their value as bait.
