Food Mechanics for a Survival Based Campaign

Homebrew

Basically I'm planning a survival based campaign and I've put together a rough food and hunger system for it. I haven't tested any of this and there's probably necessary tweaks that more experienced players will notice, since I've only had about 7 sessions of daggerheart so far.

I know that Beast Feast has a cooking system but I just don't feel it fits what I'm going for. I'm going more for resource management than the cooking itself.

The base idea of my system is that without eating a meal you can only heal 1d4 stress and hp per long rest and you lose one hope slot, like with that death move, for every missed meal, which you regain when you eat a meal.

Gaining meals will be done through looting adversaries and two new long rest downtime moves​ I'll be using in this campaign. I think "Hunt"/"Forage" and "Cook"/"Prepare Meal" would be good names for it.

With the "Hunt" downtime move a player makes an Instinct roll. I'm thinking of dividing this roll into multiple different degrees of success:

<10 is a fail; 10=< is a very small success, meaning the player only comes back with something small, like a single raw meal or a couple herbs to improve a meal or something; 14=< is a success, meaning the player returns with ~1d4 raw meals and 18=< is a great success, basically the same as a normal success but with 2d4 raw meals instead

With the "Prepare Meal" downtime move a player just turns up to ~4 raw meals into "prepared meals" and may enhance them with other ingredients. A prepared meal restores ~4 Stress and ~4 HP.

With this rough system I'm hoping to make the wilderness feel dangerous. I don't want my players to be able to just live in the wilderness forever, but a well suited character should be able to help the party survive for a little bit when they're running from someone or something.

Please voice your thoughts about my rough idea of a system in the comments of this post, I really don't want a broken system to ruin the start of this campaign

Posted Apr 4, 2026, 1:10 PM UTC

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