Feast on this Manse Magnificent cornucopia

Our upcoming 5E supplement, Manse Magnificent, the product of two years of effort, lets you construct a luxurious personal base without breaking the campaign. That base includes food – boy, does it include food.

With America’s annual Feast Day approaching, let’s sample the cornucopia from Manse Magnificent. As your player characters rise in level, your dwelling, the hearth, grows grander. With each increase in luxury, the food improves from the purely practical to the dazzlingly delectable. You can eat anything allowed by the hearth’s current luxury level – and this is real, nutritious food, not astral phantasms. This magical sustenance is cruelty-free, so even vegan characters can enjoy its flavors with a clear conscience.

Real food? Really?

It’s conceptually risky that the Cornerstone, an arcane magical item, creates food and water. Early editions of D&D restricted food creation to divine and nature magic, a metaphysical distinction important to niche protection. The 2E mansion spell created only phantasmal food, and once you left the mansion, you got ravenously hungry. But the 3E designers skipped this finicky and troublesome distinction, making magnificent mansion the only wizard spell in the 3.x PHB that created real food.

In Fifth Edition create food and water remains mostly the purview of clerics, paladins, and druids – though a couple of divinely inspired wizard and sorcerer subclasses get it too, and a 2020 5E expansion gave the spell to (gasp!) warlocks. Still, Manse Magnificent exists as a response to the magnificent mansion spell, and it leans hard into that spell’s real-food exemption.

The Manse menus

For your low-level party, the hearth takes the form of a physical hut, shieling, or cabin. On its humble table you’ll find wooden bowls of nuts and berries, loaves of warm bread, flagons of pure water, and crunchy carrots equivalent to a goodberry or create food and water spell.

When your party reaches level 7, your Cornerstone opens up a private demiplane, where the hearth becomes a cozy astral cottage with yeoman-quality fare: dense bread, hard cheese, a slice of beef, an onion, a stodgy but filling rennet pudding, and thin beer. This is baseline stuff. But as the Cornerstone evolves with you beyond 7, your hearth – by turns a household, villa, and manor – gains a nuanced understanding of your gastronomical preferences. At each level, your meals grow more sophisticated.

In the level-8 household, you get a phantasmal Chef, an entity with refined taste. The Chef’s typical four-course dinner might consist of mutton with thick gravy or buttered trout with dill, accompanied by parboiled jewelfly, sweet potato casserole, and, for dessert, cupcakes with boiled icing. The kitchen wine rack is stocked with one or two good vintages, and there’s a cooled keg of malty stout. But the Chef is just getting started.

In the level-10 manor, your phantasmal dining room staff serve you favorites like beet tower salad with goat cheese, wild rice and pheasant soup, a fig-and-walnut amuse bouche, acorn-fed dry-cured boar ham, fried delicata squash rings, marinated spatchcocked quail, pickled marmot, apple mille-feuille, and a merlot or cabernet with silky tannins and a core of plum and chocolate.

At level 11, the estate staff serve elaborate delicacies like spoon-sized gold-leaf mascarpone torte, pteranodon confit in blackberry sauce, East Hamden lilac-infused chicken, cured duck with saffron-poached peach, spiced cider jellies, fleur de sel caramels, and a dry white with creme de cassis.

Even these gourmet meals seem mere appetizers beside the multiverse-class dishes, made from expensive and rare (not to say creepy) ingredients, you’ll savor in the level-13 manse: fae truffles, self-flambeed fire elemental steak, myconid sprouts and egg yolk in water mephit soup, and snifters of ethereal port. At your request, the chef’s staff offer up a full eight-course meal of hors d’oeuvres, soup, appetizer, salad, water monster (or simple fish if you’re a normie), main course, dessert, and a bite-sized mignardise dessert, plus palate cleansers.

We hope, wherever you are this holiday season, you’ll enjoy a cornucopia of delicious foods. If these morsels from Manse Magnificent tantalize you, ask your friends to sign up for our free (and spam-free) mailing list.

Speaking of cornucopias, check our sister site, the Bundle of Holding, for time-limited offers of the best and most interesting tabletop roleplaying games for an unbeatable bargain price.

Stay cozy, friends!