I moved across provinces back in 2017. My spouse and I spent a little over a year apart, before deciding that we would both stay here in Saskatchewan long-term after my second degree. We made a few good friends when we moved here – Ben and Eric, but as they were my friends ‘first’, I wanted to give my spouse some time to get to know them without me around, so they wouldn’t just be “‘Beef’s friends’, but ‘our friends’. So, the Fast Food Aventures Trio was born! They don’t actually call themselves that, but basically the three of them would get together every few months and try weird fast-food menu items – the “Meat Mountain” secret menu addition at Arby’s, the limited edition “Double-Down” at KFC, etc. My spouse rarely eats that sort of stuff, so it was always kind of a fun event to do.
About a month ago, I discovered that Wendy’s (yes, the fast-food chain) put out a free tabletop roleplaying game a few years ago called Feast of Legends as part of a marketing scheme. I knew I had to run it, though I obviously doubted its quality -first – my name is Beef, so the fact that the world map of the game was called “Beef’s Keep” was a blatant irony I sought desperately to exploit. And second – this actually kind of lines up with my spouse’s activities and it would be a nice opportunity to bridge our interests: I figured that while my spouse wasn’t normally into tabletop, he would acquiesce in favour of combining it with ordering food from Wendy’s with Ben and Eric. So, a few weeks later we set a date, and a new legendary journey begins…
I’d like to split this review into two parts: first, the actual game mechanics, and second, the adventure campaign module that comes written along with the system. I should note that Wendy’s actually removed the game from their website a while back, but you can still find it from various internet archive sources. First, mechanics-wise, Feast of Legends is surprisingly functional. It’s a D20 system, probably a bit of a hack of D&D, and all the stats and etc. make sense. The writing is great – the ‘roll 4d4 for your stats, just like our 4 for $4 deal’ and ‘if you eat these Wendy’s items in real life, you get a bonus’ are quite clever little additions. On that note, though – the character sheets aren’t very well designed, or perhaps the food item bonuses aren’t clear, but it reads as if you add your temporary bonus to your base stat, not the modifiers, and there’s no spot to the character sheet to put these bonuses, which means you have to manually adjust your base stats and modifiers and then remember to put all the numbers back at the end of the session? Huh. A bit of an oversight that would have just been helped by an extra box. Chargen is fast at least (literally just pick your ‘class’ and roll stats), but it also weirdly doesn’t have good rules surrounding how to handle initial equipment (you may want to plan ahead what is OK and what isn’t OK for the game) – but I mean, you’re playing a TTRPG put out by a fast-food chain: Who cares if they get the ultimate fried chicken armour and wield the 1d10 damage whisk?
Spellcasting is also not really discussed – technically it’s just “you can use these skills and they function as spells”, but it feels weirdly phrased and almost like magic is ‘absent’ from the game – despite pretty much every “Order” being ability/magic-focused. A player asked me how he cast spells and I had to pause and say “I don’t know. You just… do them…?”. Welp. There’s also some terminology that got missed in editing – the actual stat is called ‘Grace’, and there are references in the Orders to not being able to use ‘graceful’ weapons, but then weapons are categorised as ‘finesse’ weapons on the actual tables – most likely they changed the name from finesse to grace and then forgot about it. But, hey – this is a free TTRPG, clearly made by like four people (there’s a bit of interjected genuine very author commentary throughout about their playtests, which I enjoy) and I forgive the company for making a few missteps here.
That said, the adventure module is objectively terrible. I was going to just run it with minimal prep (this is a ‘just for fun’ game, after all), but reading it I was immediately struck with wasted time, ‘let your players explore aimlessly until they see the fountain’, dead ends, and, worst of all, a lot of ‘they have to answer all four riddles correctly in a row or else the doors close for two hours and the party just kind of has to sit there until they reopen so they can try again even though the time punishment has no effect on the narrative’. That last one isn’t an exaggeration – it’s literally in the book:
I went ahead and went through every page and crossed out all unnecessary portions, and probably ended up with like a 2-3 session campaign that would have been significantly better than the multi-year-long adventure module in terms of actually having people play through it. The campaign itself, even, has a magical item at the end of the first area that instantly max-levels every character. So there’s no reason to keep playing for…. months after that. Just take them right to the boss for a final hoorah! Anyway. Maybe I’ll post my cut-up remix later if anybody actually wants to read it (I doubt it, but you never know). I would appreciate being able to showcase my edits in some fashion though, because, hilariously, the actual game barely happened: everyone ate their meals and then we played for 45 minutes, with one single combat, before the players had to leave. All my effort into learning and reading and running a Wendy’s TTRPG… wasted. The party literally ran into a mysterious guy, he told them to defeat the evils in the French Fry Forest, went over and fought two kobold-analogous enemies, and then went back, job done, saved the kingdom, hooray!
Overall I give it a solid 6/10 game system. Maybe 7/10 for the humour.
Slice of Beef 