Holiday Feasting with Rats-on-Sticks

This past Sunday was our holiday game session for my campaign which saw it’s fifth year come to a close. I wanted to do something special for the holidays, so after encouraging everyone to bring treats, I set about to finding a recipe to cook something I’ve wanted to make for a long time – Rat on a Stick.

I first read about this way back in the day, I want to say the day of BBS’s and text files. After some searching, I saw the module in a game store, read it and laughed, but never bought the module and never made the recipe. This year, I was going to correct that. Since the old Judges Guild website is long gone, I went over to the Internet Archive (because nothing ever truly leaves the Internet…) and found the old recipe here: https://web.archive.org/web/20090924125433/http://www.judgesguild.net/treasure/ratonastick.shtml

So, a quick trip to the grocery store, cutting up of cheese, crushing of Cheezits, mixing and molding meat balls into rat shapes, here you go: 20 Rats on Sticks ready to be baked!

This morning, after shoveling yet another snowfall in the Chicagoland area, I put the tails on the rats. This was the only part that didn’t go to plan, I couldn’t keep one end of the spaghetti out of the water, so I improvised and it all went well.

Folks started arriving … this is only a third of what people brought. We had a special table for the food!

And here’s the rats coming out of the oven! Sorry for the bad pic, the sun was shining directly on the stove.

I don’t have any after pictures because most of the rats are gone! My granddaughter ate three of them and I think she’s looking forward to telling her friends at school that she ate rat. I wonder if I’ll get a call from her teacher… hmm…

The game saw a new player (Hi Michael!) come play, the hard-working, not-so-patient Paladin of Tangadorin finally got his steed – an air elemental horse, which can fly temporarily (I’m working out the details) and one final proof… you put a big, red, shiny button that says DANGER on it, some player will press it.

Or in this case, it was a mysterious stone building with four doors, each with a relief of a hideous face, in metal, with an open mouth and metal, razor sharp teeth. The keyhole was in the mouth. The fighter failed his dex roll (as he’s not a thief), and he got zapped and was at -9 hit points! His “scar”? He no longer has any hair on his body. Forever. Nowhere. Yep, even there too.

Happy Holidays!