It's that time of the year again, when something goes thump in the dead of night, and dire
halflings grab their gear and go to investigate.
That's right, its time for the traditional Halloween Homebrew monster, and this time
it really is something of a brew, well, a stew to be precise.
Oh the inspiration for this idea has been bubbling away in the back of my mind for a
very long time, actually, I can firmly point to the Scarecrow Worzel Gummidge, invented
by author Barbara Euphan Todd for the first paperback storybook published by Puffin Books
way back in 1936, later this charming and quirky scarecrow would come to my attention
as a child watching the TV show starring Jon Pertwee whom I already knew well enough as
Dr Who, although Pertwee is the Iconic Dr Who, Baker will always be the Dr I grew up
watching.
In researching for this video I also found out that a new worzel show is currently both
airing and new episodes are being filmed in the UK, but, its not the original book version
or the latest version based on those books that inspired me, no, it was specifically
Jon Pertwee's Worzel that inspired this video, and it is simply because the scarecrow in
his TV show used interchangeable turnip heads, which you will see influences the creature
I am going to be talking about in a rather interesting way.
Another fun fact, or couple of them, Worzel Gummidge eventually found a home in New Zealand,
to avoid trade union issues in Ireland and studio issues in England, production moved
to New Zealand in 1986 and you can find one of the earliest working credits for director
Peter Jackson, who did some special effects for the show, some of his earliest paid work.
Now, all that real-world stuff aside, lets get on with the subject shall we?
The culinary magic of the Halflings and that of the Hags is legendary in the lands of Luiren,
on the far southern coast of Faְerun, it's common enough in taverns and inns, most public
houses and travellers' rest stops for there to be a tapped wooden keg of ale, bottles
of wine, bread, cheese, dried fruit and conserves, preserved meats and perpetual stew.
Wikipedia has this to say on the history of the perpetual stew...
"Also known as forever soup, hunter's pot or hunter's stew, is a pot into which whatever
one can find is placed and cooked.
The pot is never or rarely emptied all the way, and ingredients and liquid are replenished
as necessary.
The concept is often a common element in descriptions of medieval inns.
Foods prepared in a perpetual stew have been described as being flavorful due to the manner
in which the ingredients blend together, in which the flavor may improve with age."
In human lands, people typically make a pottage, which is 'food cooked in a pot', a term for
a thick soup or stew made by boiling vegetables, grains, and, if available, meat or fish.
The result is a dish that was constantly changing so the cook will constantly balance it out
with fresh water, vegetables, salt, spices, meats and such.
"pot on the fire" is a common faerun dish of boiled beef and vegetables, usually served
as two courses: the broth and then the solid ingredients served with bread.
The meat is very tender and fresh , heavily buttered bread soaks up the rich broth nicely.
That and a hunk of cheese and half a skin of wine, some oat and rye porridge in the
morning with a scoop of jam in it and fresh milk, thats what I would call the standard
human daily rations, give or take.
Halflings and Dwarves eat differently to humans, its common for dwarves to have a much more
substantial meal in the morning, the halflings split this big meal load into two sittings,
one breakfast when they get up, get dressed and discuss quietly what the plan for the
day was, then another breakfast when they arrive at the site where work, hunting, fishing,
gardening or building are to take place, Dwarves may still be heading down lifts, ladders and
countless steps to get to their work sites, they then get stuck into it and by the time
they take a break for something to eat and drink, it will be just past 2pm, in farms
and factories, halflings and dwarves gather together for their lunch meal, otherwise,
they will have a packed lunch carried with them, halflings generally consider travelling
anywhere without some packed food to share to be the sort of thing reckless and rude
people do.
Work then continues for another couple of hours for the Halflings, unless they work
for the evening at inns, late markets, gaming taverns and that sort of thing, or crafts
folk making furniture and such can work long into the evening.
Dinner time is another large meal for the dwarves, the halfings have three courses,
something to quiet the hunger, then the main meal, and then at least two rounds of desert
plus a spot of something sweet and wicked to warm the head, while food warms belly,
and flames warm tired feet by the fire.
A fire that will almost always have a pot of perpetual stew going, bubbling away and
filling the home with good aromas.
But, this is Dungeons & Dragons, and as we know, weird stuff happens, even to stews.
I mean, it is not that shocking, all things considered, that over the course of years,
some of the ingredients the halflings throw into their stews can get a little reckless...
strange spices from distant lands, left over splashes of really nice tasting magic potions,
a bit of troll meat, unthinkingly stirring the cauldron with a magic wand instead of
the wooden spoon... or just some latent sorcerer who concentrates a little too hard on "What
this stew really needs".
And one day, the stew wakes up.
Yes, to put it extremely simply, this is essentially a culinary ooze with intelligence, but oh,
the possibilities and the clever halflings recognised the potential for this kind of
magic almost immediately; unfortunately, Hags have been doing just this sort of thing for
eons, they are actually famous for it when you think about it.
"Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble-
Eye of Newt, and toe of frog, Wool of Bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and Blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,
For a charm of Powerful Trouble, Like a hell-broth... boil and Bubble!"
In this case, the ingredients are actually code for more common herbs and such, the hags
just didn't want anyone overhearing the actual ingredients of their magic concoction, so,
Eye of Newt is actually a flower, for example.
Now consider that the hags were not talking to themselves or speaking the words of a spell,
no, they are talking to the stew, which is an Evil Hell broth, and they are adding ingredients
at the Hell Broth's instruction because it is in the process of replicating itself and
creating a second cauldron of Hell Broth for the hags.
But what use would the hags and halfings have for a self aware, sapient pot of stew?
Well, for one thing, all awakened perpetual stews are effectively immortal as long as
they stay warm, and there are plenty of places where it never gets cold, so they make excellent
guardians who can hide very well in plain sight.
The stews are very, very good cooks, they can also brew salves, tonics, elixirs, unguents,
pastes, powders, potions and poisons, and, enchant wooden spoons and cold iron cauldrons,
they can also neutralise poison and brew antidotes in some cases.
So, they are very, very handy to have around, but, they are fully sapient and typically
full of personality, so, they are fairly hard to control and tend to be a bit wild when
first awakened, becoming more stable and mature as time and ingredients are added.
In the case of a Hell Broth, they are also very temperamental and you should avoid giving
them anything extremely spicy, as they will use it to burn your house down, quite literally
throwing it into their mix and letting the spice transform them into flaming culinary
ooze demons for short, but very destructive, periods of time.
As going cold can kill a perpetual stew, they understandably fear cold and tend to love
fire, even though too much of it can burn them, which also has a transformative effect,
they become listless, depressed and morbid, but thankfully this can be fixed.
It's the variability and the effect that different ingredients have on them which makes the stews
so infinitely handy as a storytelling tool, as you can imagine, I could fill a book just
coming up with ideas for what different ingredients do to the stews, and the fact that they can
turn evil, or an evil stew be turned to a good stew, by forcing healthy and fresh, delicious
ingredients to it, and the idea that stews can exist for centuries, gaining knowledge,
experience and even more mastery over their weird mystical arts, so, hags and halflings
are constantly trying to steal perpetual stews from each other, and quite a few stews have
to deal with the trauma of having radical alignment changes forced on them, one way
or the other, a stew that starts off good or evil will tend to want to gravitate back
to that original state, even if they won't admit it... this makes for a Non-player character
with a lot more depth than the bottom of its cauldron, as you can imagine.
Now, despite all its benefits, powers and wonders, the stews do have some severe limitations..
first, they can't move about under their own power, they have no means to unless it is
provided for them, an awakened stew in an awakened cauldron is thus not uncommon, particularly
with evil hell broths that enjoy tormenting and bullying their cauldron, like it was their
slave..
when such a cauldron figures out it an up end itself and dump the stew on the ground
to cool down to it's probable death, well, now you know why there are so many awakened
metal cauldrons wandering around remote places, particularly near hags, and hags are well
known for their penchant for riding around in such things.
So, stews can't move, but they can manipulate things inside them, even to the point of squirting
or shooting objects out of themselves with use of their heat, steam and such, this is
about the only physical attack they make, other than generating clouds of poison similar
to the cloud kill spell, just not as powerful or as large.
Stews, therefore, need others to do most of their grunt work for them, which is not a
problem if the stew promises to brew a potion of longevity or some such, to bargain and
bribe it's way to whatever it needs to happen is the stew way of life.
Good stews, such as those made by the halflings and carefully guarded for centuries, can be
tremendous boon's to the halfling community, after all, the thing is a hot and delicious
apothecary that works for the halflings happily and demands nothing more than a well-tended
fire and lots of ingredients.
The good-aligned stews tend not to replicate more stews recklessly like the hell broth's
tend to do.
Rather they only do so when there is a need for it, such as times of war, where the halflings
need all the healing potions they can get, as quickly as possible, the stews are an excellent
way to achieve that.
Stews can be very large, they can also be little more than a cup full, but never less
than that, otherwise, there are not enough ingredients in them, and they get too cold,
too fast.
Stews of great age tend to be larger, but that is simply because they fear the cold,
their size changes all the time, particularly when they are doubling, adding ingredients
until they can awaken a new stew and carefully transfer it to its own cauldron, by carefully
in this case I mean violently vomiting the child stew out of its own cauldron and hopefully
getting most of it into another cauldron on the heat.
Stews can have a gender identity, but they are not biological, they are more akin to
wondrous items who tend to emulate the humanoids who they interact with the most often, you
are lucky if you happen to gain possession of a stew that was created in a hobbit home
where the family there tends to sing a lot, as a singing perpetual stew has an amazing
voice, they can use that deep brew, the metal cauldron itself, steam jets and vibrating
bits within itself to produce all manner of noises, a fantastic singing voice is something
they know makes most humanoids more happy and open to requests, so its a trait many
good-aligned stews work hard to develop.
Evil stews do the same, but they love to learn how to project sounds and scare people or
emulate the voices of others and cause all kinds of trouble that way.
Gnomes were the first ones to teach perpetual stews how to cast spells, I mean, of course
they did such a reckless and extremely interesting thing; how could they not?
Also, it turns out you don't have to enchant an entire shield golem to awaken one, you
only need to give it a full cauldron of stew within itself, a very reliable source of heat
and weld the cauldron firmly down so it becomes part of the golem.
This process is brand new, so they are far from perfecting the process and it can kill
a perpetual stew to try and do such a thing, but... those that succeed are now essentially
a new kind of Sapient Robot and a hell of a powerful weapon in the hands of the extremely
clever and devious gnomes.
More than one orc and hobgoblin camp has been gifted a hell-broth by a hag, though it almost
always turns out fairly badly for the tribe, a skilled and very strong-willed shaman can
get a lot of use out of a hell-broth before its sudden and inevitable betrayal.
Am I a little vague on the details and stats for these perpetual stews?
yes I am, because given what they are, no two stews are exactly the same, there may
even be some who figure out how to animate meat and move around in grotesque, steaming
constructions of cooked body parts, holding a bloated haggis full of the stew itself as
it moves from one hot spot to another as quickly as it can... of course, there is also nothing
stopping the stews from sharing such secret arts with each other (should they wish to
and have the opportunity), and teaching themselves such things, as well as teaching themselves
how to read, learn magic and start to investigate the power of polymorphing via magical means...
oh ho ho, I can almost feel your brain quiver with the potential in that idea!
Of course, the very idea of being dispelled is terrifying to a perpetual stew.
They are unlikely to risk polymorphing and going too far from a source of heat to keep
them alive in the event their spell ends before they intend it to.. the idea of a player character
seeing a person suddenly transform into a pile of what looks like puke on the floor
though, accompanied by the puke making terrified and pleading screams for rescue... oh, that
is just priceless.
Much like a perpetual stew, my channel can only survive with the steady adding of new
subscribers and the warm, nourishing heat of your contented views, so, thank you.
So with that, I wish you all a very happy Halloween and as always, I will be back with
more for you, homebrew ideas and otherwise, very soon.