Abilities: Cooking and Brewing

The Cooking / Brewing talent focuses on a wide range of food preparation, preservation, and modification aptitudes. This talent also covers a plethora of microbial fermentation processes that lead to the creation of products like rubbing alcohol, beer, wine, and spirits. Life in the outer space colonies is rough and sparse, but competency in turning protein gruel into a pleasant dining occasion is a highly coveted skillset.

Ability Levels:

0	Abysmal: You really don’t understand food prep beyond heating something up in a microwave.
1	Novice: You know the basics, spices are your friend and fats and sugars equal flavor.
2	Practiced: You cook and brew for friends and family frequently. People ask for your recipes.
3	Competent: You are qualified to be a professional chef. You are constantly experimenting with different flavor combinations and profiles.
4	Expert: You are the master chef or brew master for your space station or colony. You can even make sub-standard ingredients taste like delicacies.
5	Your fame as a chef is legendary. People who travel the solar system go out of their way (wasting valuable fuel) to experience your culinary genius.

Cooking and Brewing Crafting System

Cooking and brewing are usually time intensive activities. True, a character could just put a hotdog in the microwave for a minute and produce something edible, but such a culinary delight rarely requires a dice roll. When your character desires to create a truly memorable food experience for themselves or others use the following system:

• Time. Cooking an elaborate meal with many items on the menu can take the better part of a day if a person is cooking alone. Begin by describing the size and scope of the meal that you wish to prepare to your Storyteller. The Storyteller will then decide how many hours (or days) it will take to prepare the experience. As a general rule, the Storyteller should give your character a single dice roll for every hour of prep time. This roll can be done back-to-back if the plan is to time skip to the dining festivities once the food is prepared, or it can be roleplayed out if your character is cooking while interacting with the other player characters or NPCs.


• Resources. The difficulty of your character’s dice rolls to prepare a meal are dependent on many factors: Do they have fresh ingredients? Are they following a recipe? Do they have access to the proper tools like ovens, blenders, and other kitchen utensils? Are they working with a kitchen staff or are they cooking alone? Your storyteller should start with a base difficulty of 9 for an elaborate meal and subtract -1 to the difficulty for each factor the chef has going for them in their favor. The difficulty for subsequent rolls can increase up or down depending on how these factors change. For example, you begin cooking and discover the lettuce is wilted. You send another character to the store to buy fresh vegetables. Once the hero returns with the new ingredients, the difficulty of the remaining dice rolls reduces by -1.


• Dice Rolls. For the first hour of food preparation, roll Intelligence + Cooking and Brewing to represent your character’s planning for the meal. After the first hour, all subsequent rolls are Wits + Cooking and Brewing since your character is responding to minute-by-minute changes as they keep pots from boiling over, and pans in the oven at just the right temperature. Treat each success as an increase in meal quality. For example, during the first hour you roll 3 total successes indicating that you are on track to produce a three-star meal. For the second hour, you only roll 1 success, so the average quality of the meal has dropped to two-stars. The storyteller should take your total number of successes and divide that number by the total number of hours spent cooking. The resulting average represents the actual quality of the meal once it is prepared.


• Complications. In the event that your character scores no successes on an hourly dice roll, the Storyteller may introduce a complication to the cooking process—the blades on the food processor break, The meat is discovered to be past expiration date. Such a failure usually results in higher difficulties as the chef must make do with less-than-optimal cooking conditions and ingredients. If the cook botches a roll (rolls more 1’s than successes) the meal is considered ruined, and the cook must start from scratch.


• Special Rules for Brewing Alcohol. The same rules listed above apply to brewing coffees and teas, but the production of alcohols like beer, wine, or spirits is a much more time intensive process. When brewing alcoholic drinks assume each roll equals at least a week of fermentation. Some spirits like Whisky need to age for years in oaken barrels so the Storyteller will need to decide on the official timeframes involved in these brewing processes.

Possessed by:

Arcanes, Gangstas, Liberal Artists, Chefs, Survivalists, Micro-Brewers, Foodies.

Sample Specialties:

Beer, Breads, Cuisine from a specific ethnicity, Grilled Meats, Spirits, Survivalist Fare, Vegetables, Wine.

Players may choose a specialty at level 4 and gain a second specialty at level 5.