The Curse of the Black Widow Stars is a popular belief or superstition that suggests a pattern of misfortune befalls the main actors who play the love interest of the titular villainous character in the Spider-Man film franchise. This concept gained traction after the deaths of several actors and the occurrence of other unfortunate incidents. The curse supposedly began with actress Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, and also portrayed Aunt May in a television adaptation of Spider-Man. Hamilton's alleged connection to the curse was due to her own experiences with setbacks and tragedies in her personal life. The first actor to allegedly fall victim to the Curse of the Black Widow Stars was Nicholas Hammond, who played Peter Parker in the 1970s television series Spider-Man. After his role, he faced numerous career struggles and failed to achieve the same level of success as some of his co-stars.
If you’re growing your own herbs to use in cooking, keep in mind that not every plant wants to be used for what the generic correspondence lists claim. While bay leaves may be listed as good for protection, your individual bay laurel plant might want to be used for psychic work. If you try to use it for protection, then it will probably not work well. Learning to listen to the spirits of your plants can help with this and when in doubt, trust your intuition. You’re probably far more capable of feeling the innate energy of that plant then you think you are.
While not necessary, growing your own herbs, becoming familiar with the seasonal foods in your area, and learning to work magic hand in hand with the spirits of your kitchen, home, and town can add depth to your kitchen magic. If you have a few trusty recipes that you love and use all the time, look at what seasonings are included and figure out what uses these spices might have.
After his role, he faced numerous career struggles and failed to achieve the same level of success as some of his co-stars. Since then, actors such as Topher Grace, who portrayed Venom in Spider-Man 3, and Andrew Garfield, who played Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man films, have faced a variety of challenges following their Spider-Man roles. One notable incident that is often cited as evidence of the curse is the death of Heath Ledger, who played the Joker in The Dark Knight.
Mystical Cuisine [Magical and Non-magical]
What rules currently exist to support the creation of foods, both non-magical and magical.
I am aware of Elves of Golarion but that seems to simply be potions in food form, preventing anyone without the prerequisite caster levels of using them. I nevertheless like the presentation used.
I'd nevertheless prefer a method which could provide small benefits, emulating certain spells but that could be created by non-casters and also providing a way to not require the wasting of potions outside of combat. Food would most of the time be consumed when adventurers would rest for example.
The only other alternative I've currently found is from the D&D Wiki for 3.5: link but I feel this lacks both flavor and content.
Are there any other alternatives or do you have any ideas?
Master Craftsman should be able to do this. I'm not sure how practical that would be though.
MagiMaster wrote:Master Craftsman should be able to do this. I'm not sure how practical that would be though.
I overlooked this feat completely. Yes, it would be acceptable I'd reason to allow them to craft the magical fare from Elves of Golarion with this.
I'd like to throw a few ideas right here, let me know what you think:
- I'd design a collection of pre-made "recipes" that the players can learn, find, etc.
- The requirements for making the recipe would include specific resources, Dragon Meat for example. This would allow me to use those as a flavor for the item creation costs and allow me to reduce certain monster treasure hordes. I mean, perhaps that displacer beast didn't have the obligatory pile of treasure, but his meat can either be used or sold.
- These recipes would create meals that can be eaten hors combat to heal health, remove ability score damage, and provide some spell effects. Example: Devilish Valejun Dragon Steak, provides the ability to use a fire breath attack once in the next hour.
I think this is a really really awesome idea, and I am going to have to immediately incorporate it into my own campaign.
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You should also check out a show called Three Delivery if you can. The central MacGuffin is a magic recipe book whose recipes have been scattered. Trouble crops up when some random person finds and cooks a recipe.
On a more crunchy note, Master Craftsman can replicate the effects of Craft Wondrous Item, which can make almost anything as a one-use item (though I image many GMs would rule out stuff that simply duplicated potions, which Master Craftsman can't duplicate, IIRC).
Personally, I think a recipe should allow you to recreate that specific item without the feat, since otherwise there wouldn't be much point otherwise. A Master Craftsman (Cook) should be able to write recipes, but I might charge something similar to writing a scroll.
Matt, Garnished Game Designer wrote:- The requirements for making the recipe would include specific resources
Yes, this isn't so much about feats as it is about your ability to cook the kinds of foods that have beneficial properties.
Profession (Cook) is key here, and access to recipes which bring out the beneficial qualities of the foods.
Snake Head Stew:
Snake Head Stew (Serves 4)
Components
Consumables: Head of a Venomous Snake, Bushel of Fayleaf (20gp)
Other: Cooking Utensils (Offer Masterwork for a +2), fire, 30 minutes
Effect: Recovers 1d4 con damage. This effect can only occur once every 24 hours.
Adventurer's Armory is your friend for herbs etc.
The recipes should be VERY regional, including resources that are attainable (difficulty shouldn't matter as that will change with level, it's just a question of whether or not they can go out and get the mats). Giving them a recipe for Shadow Dragon Jerky would be utterly useless. even if they fought and killed one, who would have such a recipe?
@Kybryn: How would you recommend assigning Profession (Cook) DC's and actual ingredient values though?
Example
Mobat Wing Ragoût (Serves 2)
Difficulty: 25 (Essentially a lv3 recipe and assuming a 3rd level character has 3 ranks and a +3 in Wisdom, that already gives him a nice +9 bonus. With masterwork cooking tools (55 gp), that's another +2 bonus, giving him 11. A 25 isn't an unreasonable DC)
Components: Mobat Wing (2), Fire, Cooking Kit
Effect: Once, within one hour after consuming this recipe, you may screech loudly, emulating the effects of a sonic burst spell. (Caster Level 3).
Value: 300 gp (Assuming that a single use, use activated item casting sonic burst would cost 150 gp to create, and that this serves two creatures. Therefore, each Mobat Wing would be worth 150 gp. As my campaign uses the slow experience table, a typical Mobat would have 550 gp worth of treasure. With this, I'd only need to fill 250 gp of treasure, its wings worth the rest. Of course, the players are free to sell the wings as well, so the loot is not wasted if no characters use the cooking system.)
As well, I believe I'd have to create my own herbs and other ingredients as the Adventurer's Armory only presents some black market items. It shouldn't be too complicated to make a list of items that can be found in the region that are worth money. In fact, they can also be used as rewards as they could technically also be sold, once again reducing the "Every monster has to have a treasure horde of random magic items from dead adventurers. I mean seriously, that dire wolf is NOT carrying a masterwork bastard sword. No, he has a nice lean cut of dire wolf meat you can have instead.
hhmmm, somewhere I have a few pages of material I put together on Golarion Herbs+Spices (partly as a way to make Herbalism interesting. I hate that most of the Profession skills do nothing but make a couple gold)
It would be a good place to start for some things.
I am thinking you can get meat/etc from creatures you kill, Profession: Herbalism or possibly Survival if you want to find herbs/spices/edible plants in the wild, and then Profession: cook to put things together.
Sort of related: Came up with some fun medicinal herbs and things too, one of my favourite concepts was a type of mushroom called Obelcap (anagram of Placebo) that could be used to create a special 'healing tonic' that only worked on people who didn't know anything about it.
When you drank it you had to make a Knowledge: Nature or Profession: Herbalism check, and if you passed it it had no effect, but if you failed it (i.e. didn't understamd) then it would remove Sickness/Fatigue.
Sort of related: Came up with some fun medicinal herbs and things too, one of my favourite concepts was a type of mushroom called Obelcap (anagram of Placebo) that could be used to create a special 'healing tonic' that only worked on people who didn't know anything about it.
When you drank it you had to make a Knowledge: Nature or Profession: Herbalism check, and if you passed it it had no effect, but if you failed it (i.e. didn't understamd) then it would remove Sickness/Fatigue.
That mushroom is hilarious, the naming included. And yes, I too hate how Profession does nothing but net gold pieces.
I'd probably allow the following:
Gathering Herbs/Plant type Resources: farmer, gardener, herbalist
Gathering Meat type Resources: fisherman, trapper
Preparing Food: baker, brewer, butcher, cook
Certain ingredients can be grown by the use of farmer and gardener while others need to be found in the wild with herbalist. Fisherman and trapper could find certain simple fish and meats.
So, this would mean that using the Profession formula for making gold, we assume that a 1st level Professional can already make 10 gp/week (1 rank, +3 trained, +3 stat bonus, +2 tool with a roll of 10, averaging to a total of 20). Therefore, the player would instead have found 10 gp worth of ingredients, which the GM would choose from a table, which could range anywhere from simple ingredients worth cp to rare and valuable spices and fish worth up to 25 to 50 gp each.
Certain recipes (breads, alcohols and meats) would be easier for those using baker, brewer or butcher for example, while cook is a general use skill.
Anyone else have any ideas, opinions?
Some plant items:
Roots (and tubers and rhizomes)
Stems
Seeds
Leaves
Flowers
Stigma (see saffron, very little per plant)
Fruit (including the skin and juice)
Bark (young bark and old bark are different)
Smoke (wood is inedible, but smoke is great flavor)
Secretions (sap, etc.)
Mushrooms (not technically plants)
Some animal items:
Meat
Organs (very few aren't eaten)
Skin
Teeth (either ground or cooked with but not eaten)
Bones (can be boiled for gelatin or if small enough baked until crunchy and eaten)
Feet (and other appendages)
Eyes
Tongue
Glands (especially magical ones)
Secretions (tears for example)
Minerals:
Salt is the only commonly eaten mineral on Earth.
Gold is edible (typically applied as a foil for purely decorative purposes)
Many other metals are poisonous (silver does weird things to your skin)
Preparation methods (requiring various amounts of time and tools):
Dice
Slice
Mash
Grind
Juice
Bake
Boil
Steam
Stew
Roast
Distill
Ferment
Pickle
Other thoughts:
Though cliche, the law of sympathetic magic suggests that if the creature has a prominent feature, that feature should be used in the recipe. (You'd want the beholder's eye if you wanted something like its gaze attack.)
Some preparation methods (fermentation and pickling) need a lot of time and attention (several weeks or a couple months).
Some preparation methods need materials that may not be common in the area ("boil in a full cauldron" would be tough in the desert).
Some ingredients need to be handled carefully or they become poisonous (or usually fail to lose their poison). Acorns are poisonous unless you boil them three or four times, changing the water each time (IIRC, don't try this at home). It takes years of training to safely serve puffer fish.
Mixing up the required skills is a good idea, but you might want to include some chance of using other skills at a penalty. (A beer recipe can be done with Profession (Cook) at a -5.)
Recipe idea (BTW, I'm terrible with names):
Fiery Ginger Beer (makes 32 pints) - Drinking a pint of this bright red beer gives the consumer a one-use fire breath power as per the Fire Breath spell. If they don't use this within 5 rounds, they take 2d6 fire damage.
Made from Conflagrant Ginger, which only grows in hot desert oases, and Pale Horse Peppers, which grows in jungles. (There is a mountain range that has one on one side and one on the other, where this recipe originated.)
The recipe needs 2 lbs of ginger (at 3700 gp per pound), 12 peppers (at 50 gp per pepper), other common ingredients and one month to ferment.
Requires a DC 20 Profession (Brewer) check or a DC 25 Profession (Cook, Chef or Baker) check.
Trying to make a smaller batch throws off the fermentation, adding +5 to the DC for each halving.
(That really needs a spell-like template.)
Edit: BTW, the ginger would presumably be about 1 ounce per root (230 gp), and would probably require some questing to get.
Wow, MagiMaster, amazing post and I will definitely take this to heart. I agree with the cliche part. Certain things need to be linked between the food and the creature: The Mobat's screech is represented in the Mobat Wing Ragout for example.
I'll try and keep ingredient prices relatively in the low end, as I feel that 3K for a pound of plant is overkill. I'm guessing the high price comes from the 32 pints of the stuff so I'd instead make it require more of the ingredient, but costs much less each. I'd make it require 64 of the plant, with 115 gp per plant, just to avoid the massive cost so I can mix and match the resources when discovered.
I was also indeed going to use certain "dangerous foods" such as poisonous foods, undead flesh, etc.
My own campaign takes place in a jungle-esque region at the heart, with Caribbean islands around it, so there's plenty of different resources that can be found. (Much like the Mwangi Expanse, Shackles, Sodden Lands, Sargava type areas)
My final design will look like this for the moment:
- A selection of recipes separated by style. Recipes can be purchased. (Southsea Cooking, Colonial Cuisine, etc)
- Ingredients are separated by type and region (your list helps enormously MagiMaster) and listed in order of value.
- A simple three-level prestige class that focuses on making unique recipes and prolonging and enhancing food effects.
- I'll include a new small selection of feats related to cooking these new foods.
Any other possible ideas?
EDIT: How should we use time to prepare, quantity, rarity, etc to modify the cost of preparing the recipe and the effects?
Those lists are mostly off the top of my head. There's plenty of room for additions. And yeah, the price is for a level 2 (CL 5) potion times 32. It could probably be brought down a bit since the end result isn't quite as nice as the actual spell. And I agree that each ginger root should be in the 50-200 gp range. You just need a lot of them for this recipe (or take a DC hit and try making a smaller batch).
Assuming that having a recipe lets you bypass the need for Master Craftsman (and that having Master Craftsman lets you write new recipes), then a recipe basically lets you create a specific one-use item:
The material price should obviously be based on the one-use item price (caster level * spell level * 25 gp to make it yourself). Based on other portions of the magic item section, unlimited uses is worth between 5 and 50 times the limited use price, so a recipe should be worth about 5-50 servings of the food it makes. So that comes out to around caster level * spell level * 500 gp (between 125 and 1250).
If you need both the recipe and Master Craftsman to make the food (and research or something to make recipes) then each recipe should be worth quite a bit less, IMO.
Taking longer than usual to prepare should have some effect on the price, but I don't know where to start here. The existing item creation rules don't offer much help. I'd suggest reducing the recipe price, but leaving the material costs as is. So maybe something like -20% for each doubling over the magic item times (1000 gp per day). For recipes that make more than one serving, you'd have to average the time over each serving.
So at 30 days, 8000 gp and 32 servings, the Fiery Ginger Beer is about 1 day and 250 gp per serving. A 250 gp potion should be 2 hours, so this is about 4 times the usual time (I think), so it should be reduced by about 40%, which would give 2 * 5 * 500 * 0.6 = 3000 gp. I don't know whether or not that'd be worth it.
Actually, it probably wouldn't be since you still need to spend the 8000 gp on materials for the beer itself. So maybe reduce that *500 gp to *250 gp or so.
You could probably come up with similar reductions for other things. Be careful that the reductions don't get to -100%. :) Also, remember that bonuses should be more expensive than penalties. (So a -20% for a time increase should become a +50% for a time decrease, for example.)
Edit:
I forgot salting, smoking and drying (plus sun-drying) in the preparation methods. Preservation methods are historically important.
The book's foreword is written by Harry Potter actor/icon Evanna Lynch, best-known for her role as Luna Lovegood.
While not directly linked to the Spider-Man franchise, Ledger's role as a major villain in a superhero film has been associated with the curse due to its similarities to the character of the Black Widow. In addition to the deaths of certain actors, the Curse of the Black Widow Stars also encompasses various misfortunes that have befallen others associated with the Spider-Man films. These include accidents, legal issues, and career setbacks. While some dismiss the curse as mere coincidence, others believe it to be a genuine phenomenon that affects those involved with the Spider-Man franchise. Overall, the Curse of the Black Widow Stars is a superstition that suggests a pattern of misfortune befalls those who play the love interest of the Black Widow character in the Spider-Man films. While the validity of the curse is debated, the various incidents that have occurred over the years have led many to believe in its existence..
Reviews for "Unexplained Deaths: The Curse of the Black Widow Stars"
1. John - 2/5 stars - I was really excited to watch "Curse of the black widow stars" based on the trailer, but unfortunately, the film didn't live up to my expectations. The storyline was convoluted and hard to follow, with many subplots that didn't seem to connect. The acting was also subpar, with wooden performances and lack of chemistry between the characters. Overall, I found it to be a disappointing film that didn't hold my interest.
2. Sarah - 1/5 stars - "Curse of the black widow stars" was a complete waste of my time. The dialogue was poorly written, filled with cliches and predictable lines. The special effects were also lacking, and it was evident that they were done on a low budget. The pacing of the film was slow and dragged on, making it hard to stay engaged. I would not recommend this film to anyone looking for a thrilling and well-executed horror movie.
3. Michael - 2/5 stars - I found "Curse of the black widow stars" to be very underwhelming. The concept had potential, but the execution fell flat. The scares were predictable, and the jump scares felt forced and ineffective. The plot twists were also predictable, and I was able to guess the ending halfway through the film. The performances were decent but failed to elevate the weak script. Overall, it was a disappointing horror film that lacked originality and failed to deliver on its promises.
4. Emily - 2/5 stars - As a fan of horror movies, I had high hopes for "Curse of the black widow stars," but unfortunately, it failed to deliver. The scares were too reliant on cheap jump scares and lacked any genuine suspense or tension. The storyline was confusing, with unnecessary subplots that dragged the film down. The characters were also poorly developed, making it hard to care about their fates. Overall, it was a forgettable horror film that didn't live up to its potential.