RPG Blog Carnival: Feasts, Foods and Fancy Drinks, oh my!

Crap. It's been literal years since I've contributed to one of these. 

VDonnut Valley is hosting this month's soirée, themed Feasts, Foods and Fancy Drinks, oh my! Well, I can work with a prompt like that. Perhaps from a slightly different angle.

After all, part of being a good host is sometimes being flexible to your guests' dietary restrictions and perhaps preparing a special meal for an honored "foreign" guest...

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The tremoring acolyte stirred the vile concoction. His eyes darted to the poor sod he'd just replaced, still spasming on the floor. Clearly, sampling the offertory meal had not agreed with him.

“Add the next ingredient, worm!” commanded the hooded priest. Taking a shaking hand, the acolyte opened the stained crockery. His eyes watered even more as the acrid, metallic fumes emerged from the crockery as he poured the toxic mixture into the boiling pot.

“Taste the offering. Perhaps you are more worthy to serve His Glory than your predecessor!” A spear butt in his ribs encouraged the acolyte further.

The acolyte glanced at his fellow initiate, now still. With shaking hand and tears in his eyes, he took a spoon to taste the bubbling amalgamation.

Somewhere, in the shadows beyond the priest, a shape began to unfold from space. Slavering jaws emerged as the entity from beyond took in the first, deep, delicious scent of the offering meal...

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It is only hospitable to serve a meal suitable to your guest. Even those from dimensions or planes beyond your own. Especially if you seek their blessings or wisdom in your own campaign for knowledge and power. Anything but the best will not do.

Therefore, there are those cults that prepare dark ritual meals corrupted with arcane ingredients and envenomed ingredients perhaps deadly to the worshipers, but found intoxicating or rarified to its intended recipients. Those alien intelligences and biologies savor and find delicacy in both the toxic ingredients, as well as the sacrifice necessary to gather the ingredients and create the meal. An appropriately hospitable meal must demonstrate the effort expended to prepare it, and therefore be flavored and seasoned by fear and suffering, after all.

The recipes have been modified and amended over the generations to best suit those outer dwellers. Ingredients like mercury, arsenic, sulfuric compounds, toxic plants or mushrooms, and other noxious combinations. Perhaps arcane or accursed elements gathered at great hazard and expense, both in gold and blood.

The meal preparation is dangerous, and a required rite of passage for those who wish to be worthy of the wisdom from beyond the spheres. For the acolyte's fortitude, both mental and physical, must be sufficient to endure the gifts granted by these alien intelligences.

Anything less will just not do for our honored guest.

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... vomit-covered and nearly blind, the acolyte swayed and stumbled. Dipping the pewter bowl into the offertory meal, with shaking hand and trembling body, he staggered up the steps to kneel at the edge of the summoning glyphs. The priest sang the final greeting in an alien tongue. 

The ghastly, cadaverous head, shimmering and not quite aligned with the mortal planes, bent down, inhaling once again the lethal vapors and the illness and fear-sweat of the acolyte, prior to taking the proffered taste...