Timing is a fascinating thing. You never know what will suddenly become relevant again, or how something from the past will reemerge with new context and impact later.
Now, Feast of Legends made a big splash in 2019, but it’s fair to say that six years later, it’s not as relevant in RPG circles as it once was.
However, it’s funny that I wrote about it just a few weeks ago, and now it seems like Burger King is suddenly getting in on the roleplaying game scene!
Yes, Burger King’s Quest is a playable supplement for Dungeons & Dragons, featuring the Burger King Kingdom as its setting, and resurrecting several characters from Burger King’s promotional efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to counter McDonalds’ McDonaldland and its characters.
You definitely know the Burger King, but do you remember Sir Shake-A-Lot, the Duke of Doubt, or The Wizard of Fries? I sure don’t! (Who knew that The Home of the Whopper was a real place, not just a slogan?!)
Well they’re getting new life in this RPG supplement, which was unveiled at Lucca Comics & Games as part of Milan Games Week.
Right now, the game is only in Italian, so we’re not sure if English-speaking roleplayers will get their own version in the future. But thankfully the hardworking crew at the Burger King WIKI have some details on the game for non-Italian readers.
I don’t speak Italian, but I did download the game’s PDF, naturally. The art is beautiful, and clearly a lot of work went into this promotional stunt.
But you can already see a rivalry brewing with the Feast of Legends loyalists in the RPG community. (After all, I only found out about Burger King’s Quest BECAUSE of the Feast of Legends subreddit!)
I reached out to the Burger King Public Relations team to try to learn more about the promotion and any plans for it to expand beyond Italy, but I haven’t heard back yet.
So, for now at least, this remains a roleplaying curiosity. But who knows what the future holds. Wendy’s, Arby’s, and now Burger King. The fast food/roleplaying crossover space is certainly heating up!
Some of my all-time favorite puzzling experiences have been part of roleplaying games, so it warms my heart to see more and more people discovering Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop RPGs. Not only are they a wonderful way to connect with friends and tell stories, but they inspire me to create new and innovative puzzles.
Both the Netflix series Stranger Things and the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory have helped bring roleplaying games to greater mainstream attention (as shows like Community and Freaks and Geeks did in the past), and now, even fast food chains are getting in on the pencil, paper, and dice-loaded pastime.
Yes, Wendy’s has created its own roleplaying game.
Feast of Legends is a self-contained roleplaying adventure that is both staggeringly detailed and shamelessly self-promotional. This NINETY-SEVEN page downloadable PDF contains the rules for building your character, equipment, rules, setting details, and different character classes (like the Order of the Frosty or the Order of the Spicy Chicken Sandwich), each with their own bonus abilities.
It’s actually a terrific introduction to roleplaying games as a whole, discussing concepts like how many actions you can take on a given turn, how combat works, and which dice to use.
They even created an online dice roller for you to use if you don’t own roleplaying dice!
(For RPG aficionados, the system is reminiscent of both D&D’s fourth and fifth edition rulesets, though not nearly as involved, obviously.)
Once you’ve created your character — an easy task, given the streamlined (but effective) character creation instructions in the first half of the handbook — there’s an entire campaign included to play through!
Yes, a five-part adventure awaits players willing to explore Freshtovia, battle the evildoers who seek to force frozen beef on people across the land, from Costa del Spicy to Roast Beach, from The Box to Biggie Vale.
Oh, you were curious about the shameless self-promotion? Trust me, we’re getting to that.
It starts with the setting — the mythical land of Freshtovia, in the realm of Beef’s Keep, where Queen Wendy requires your help to battle the monstrous threat of frozen beef. You can arm yourself with various implements (the spork caught my eye) as you prepare to do battle with the Ice Jester (a thinly veiled take on Ronald McDonald) and his minions, including violent versions of the Hamburglar (aka the Beef Bandit) and the Fry Guys.
Not only that, but there are rules regarding the bonuses you get for eating Wendy’s food while you play (as well as minuses for any characters eating from a different fast food chain during the game).
It’s seeded throughout the game, and on the website as well. On the page explaining how RPGs work, readers will find this text:
Beef’s Keep is a wide open world waiting for you to explore it. Make the world your own, expand your adventure, and most importantly, buy Wendy’s. Wait, we meant to say have fun. Also, buy Wendy’s.
As a writer and a content creator, I was a little disappointed to see that this voluminous and impressive PDF was lacking in one crucial detail: credits for all the hard work that must’ve gone into it.
Yes, there is a brief credit near the end — illustrations by Alex Lopez, maps by Collin Fogel — and a few signatures and identifying marks hidden in some of the art, but what about the writing? What about the well-crafted adventure? What of all the puns?!
Designed to launch in time for New York Comic-Con — coinciding with a play-through on the popular webseries/podcast Critical Role — Feast of Legends seems like a rousing viral success.
Yes, there is naturally some pushback on the Internet — some for campaign donations made by the CEO of Wendy’s, some for how Wendy’s employees are treated — and some directed at the RPG itself, viewing it as a thinly-veiled propaganda tool (or an anti-union screed designed to brainwash the puny minds of roleplayers).
Politics and social issues aside, I’m calling this project a win. People that have never played a roleplaying game before have asked me about it, and roleplaying games in general are in the news because of this. If this brings more people into one of my favorite activities and opens up a new world of puzzles and games for them, then I thank Wendy’s for making that possible.
And yes, we’re probably going to end up playing this at the office at some point.
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I mentioned last month that I’ve been doing a bit of late-Spring cleaning, and the process continues. This weekend, I was poring through some McDonald’s toys my mother had saved over the years (and when you’re one of six kids, those toys add up quickly).
(One section of the counter absolutely covered with toys.)
And as I was organizing and sorting an egg box full of these silly little gems, I couldn’t help but find the puzzliest among them to share with my fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers.
It seems appropriate to start with toys that resemble the brand’s signature food items.
When it comes to puzzle toys, you really can’t go wrong with something that transforms. Figuring out the proper steps to reveal the hidden character or form inside can be simple or complex, depending on the toy. Obviously McDonald’s kept it simple with these Happy Meal handouts, but it didn’t make them any less weird or delightful.
These faux foods are from two different series of McDonald’s toys — the fries and hot cakes & sausage from 1986/1987, the burger and hotcakes from 1990 — and each transforms to reveal something unexpected.
As you can see, the late ’80s toys become robots (keeping in line with the whole Transformers mentality) while the 1990 toys become curious food/dinosaur hybrids.
1992 brought us these stackable circus characters, testing the balance and dexterity of younger minds to see what diabolical human towers they can cook up. In my house, this quickly became a Jenga-like game of each person selecting a piece and taking turns to stack them, often with disastrous results.
(My tower…just before it collapsed.)
But by far the puzzliest of the toys I uncovered was also one I’d completely forgotten about.
Back in 1991, McDonald’s partnered up with NASA to spark interest in space exploration with a run of Happy Meal toys all about astronauts, space technology, and more.
One of the best and most challenging sets was this small space module, complete with two astronauts, logos, and flames.
If memory serves, there were also a lunar rover and a satellite, all built with these wonderful double-sided cardboard pieces.
It was a blast to rediscover these puzzle-fueled delights amidst a plethora of TV and movie tie-in toys, animated characters, and other nuggets of fast-food childhood fun.
Did this post remind you of any puzzly toys you found in cereal boxes, fast food orders, or the like? Let me know in the comments section below!
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