Cookbook App
After the noticeboard project, I caught the bug. Building tools that actually make their way to the table, that my players can touch and use, turned out to be just as rewarding as the worldbuilding itself. So when one of my players started leaning into the cooking side of his character, I figured: why not give him a real cookbook?
The character is a cook-mage gathering recipes across the world, and the original idea was simple. A reference he could pull up between sessions to remember what he had learned. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted it to feel like an actual prop, something he'd open, not just scroll through.
What the App Does
The Wandering Cook's Compendium is a shared cookbook hosted on the web that both of us can access and update. He logs ingredients he finds in the wild; I add recipes as he learns them. It looks like an old parchment book, and it actually keeps track of what's in his pantry.
Current Features - Parchment Aesthetic — Layered textures, IM Fell English typography, wax-seal chapter chips, and ornamental dividers. Looks like a book that has been carried in a saddlebag. - Glossary of Ingredients — Each entry has a category, rarity, unit of measure, description, and magical properties. Hover any ingredient in a list and a preview slides out so you do not have to click into the full entry. - Book of Recipes — Difficulty, servings, required ingredients with real quantities, instructions, and the effect on the diner. Recipe ingredients link straight to their glossary entries; ingredient pages list every recipe they appear in. Everything is cross-referenced. - Pantry & Pack — A real inventory tracker. Add ingredients with a search modal, increment and decrement with counters, and the pantry highlights "Recipes Within Thy Means" when you have everything a dish requires. - Cook This — A button on every recipe that, when you actually have the ingredients on hand, prepares the meal, removes the right amounts from the pantry, and pops up a toast announcing the dish and its effect. - CSV Import with Three Modes — For bulk-adding entries. Each import shows a preview of how many rows are new versus existing, then lets you choose Add New Only, Add and Update, or Replace Everything (with a confirmation for the destructive one). - Slide-In Toolbar — A contents drawer that opens from the left edge with chapter links to the Glossary, Recipes, and Pantry. - Shared Backend — Backed by a real database, so when he adds a Bog Onion he just foraged, it shows up on my end within seconds, and when I write a new recipe using it, it shows up on his.
What's Next
The app is live, deployed, and currently being used at the table. The character's note in the frontispiece hints at a future mechanic, that studying ingredients during quiet hours might unlock new recipes, and that learning and cooking cannot be done at once. I left that as flavor text for now, but it is sitting there as a potential next feature if I want to model that game loop directly in the app.
For now, I am letting it breathe and see how it gets used in actual play. It has been fully tested and successful for his engagement in the cooking skill, and searching for ingredients.