Ritual Cooking
Anyone whose Facts/background indicates they learned cooking can make food out of a fresh spirited corpse. Such food is said to convey some of the blessings — & horrors — of a given creature.
Making a ritual meal takes 1 hour per corpse. This counts as Resting for everyone involved, including the chefs. When you make a ritual meal, split each corpse’s HD however is desired among any number of eating characters whose HD summed is no more than the corpse’s. Each character’s portion must be at least equal to their own HD.
Each qualifying character must roll 1d6 per HD they possess vs. 1d6 per HD they ate. If their roll is:
- Lower than their meal’s: They:
- Mutate to become more like the creature they ate. For sapient creatures, this includes the mental qualities of that entity; write down every meal as a Fact indicating what you ate & treat it as applicable to mental & psychological acts.
- May pick 1 Racial Feature (including natural weapons) off the corpse to copy that they don’t already have. Each Feature can only be copied by a single qualifying character. If there’s a dispute, each character rolls 1d6; highest gets it. Re-roll ties.
- Equal to or higher than their meal’s: They gain 1 HD if their HD is less than their HD share of this corpse.
You may only make 1 meal per corpse. The corpse’s soul is drained during the cooking process & sinks down towards the Underworld afterwards.
Making Rations
Creatures produce 1/4# in rations per 1# of weight when skinned, smoked, & salted. Salting consumes 1/4# of salt per 1# of rations.
Beastmen & Mass Ritual Sacrifices for Power
Power optimizes around & promulgates stable repeatable structures. Ritual Cooking is not generally optimal. It produces wild, dangerous soldiers of uncertain affiliation & unknown qualities — in the case of beast consumption, the result is often called beastmen.
Some realms on Aia optimize around the costs of this by using mass sacrifices (often obtained through ritualistic, systematized war) to produce bestial berserker-like soldiers, accepting the loss rate of mad & undisciplinable soldiers as an acceptable sacrifice in the pursuit of power. Others survive by not doing this, retaining discipline & sanity at the cost of raw power.
Many harpy flocks & some salamanders & coralers prey on humans for the specific reason that doing so grants them a large boost in power — going from 1 HD to 2 HD is a big deal for them. The cost is that eating a peasant makes you more peasantlike — which includes an incapacity for war or violence. Furthermore, high-quality targets are rare & difficult to hunt specifically because they’re high-quality.
Adventurers, rulers & the exceptionally strong-willed have comparatively little to lose from a loss in ability to operate as disciplined soldiers & more readily engage in Ritual Cooking practices.
There have been rumored to be cases of resurrective possession wherein warriors have lost their minds to their victim through these rituals. It is said this occurs more commonly with powerful spirits.