I chatted with Jennifer Howlett from Oddfish Games about a whole bunch of immersive, fun, and engaging TTRPGs and TTRPG elements that were made for enjoying with their family.  She shares how they got into candle-making and self-publishing through family game time inspirations and how combining other life interests (like cats and cooking) with her TTRPGs have created some unique experiences.

ALSO: Check out my review of Oddfish Games’ Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test!

What’s your backstory?

My background is in education, and about 15 years ago, my husband and I were trying to run a tabletop RPG for our kids.  We realized we had to compete with all the video games and a whole multi-sensory experience, and we wanted to create more of that for ourselves in our tabletop games. 

I started looking around for things like scented candles and realized I wasn’t going to be able to use that unless I had us venture into something like a field of strawberries, so I did some research and figured I’d just make some that fit our games!

I also figured that if I was looking for this, maybe someone else was too, and we went from there!

That’s kind of what kicked up the company as Adventure Scents, and we had a really successful Kickstarter.  

Can you tell me a bit more about Adventure Scents? 

With Adventure Scents, the biggest concern people have is how often they’re going to use it or how long it will last… we’ve been in business for almost 15 years, and our original backers are telling us the scents are still holding as long as they keep them closed between uses. 

I will say, as we’re chatting, I’m getting a whiff of them every once in a while, and they smell AMAZING.  

Yeah!!  Some smell really nice, like Enchanted Forest, and others are really unusual, like Ancient Library or New Spaceship.  

Then we have Putrid Sewers and Moldy Crypt because sometimes you need that for the story!

You make a bunch of games too, can you tell us a bit about them? 

From Adventure Scents, we moved on to Cooking With Dice.  I wanted to include the kids with cooking with me, we have to do it every night, and I like cooking, but it can get a bit boring after a while, so we wanted to make something that combined playing an RPG with cooking.  It created some formulas and randomization that let us do something a bit different. 

After that, we made RPG With Your Cat.  Sometimes, you have a hard time finding other people to play with, but we had plenty of pets in the house to play with.  We found a way to replace the dice in any role-playing game with a cat.  What the cat does has an influence on your success or failure or whatever happens in the game. 

My husband got super inspired, and he’s been working on writing tools for some time, so he created Shine, which is a card-based outlining and writing tool.  He decided, if he’s doing that for writing, why not do it for role-playing games?   So, he created Luminous, a tool for game masters. 

Then, he added Radiance, which allows you to play solo in a role-playing game. We have a whole giant shelf of role-playing games that we can’t get to because of scheduling, but now we can get to them!  You just grab the book, pull your cards, and play a game. 

I love combining interests with TTRPGs, and I love cooking.  Could you go into a bit more detail on how Cooking With Dice works? 

Like any role-playing game, you start by creating a character.  It’s a simple character creation process, but it’s got some flavor text in there to make it fun and allow for role-playing.

Your goal, as a character, is to move your way up through a traditional French kitchen hierarchy, becoming the master chef who is in charge of everything.  

You do that by creating formulas.  

The first book of the series is called The Acid Test.  It can all be done without a stove or oven, focusing on using acid to cook or change the food.

I thought it would be nice because you could then do it at school or with little kids. 

For each recipe, it’s a formula with blanks in it.  The first one is super easy; you’re making refrigerator pickles, but you don’t have to use cucumbers.  You can use something else.  You don’t have to use distilled white vinegar, you can use another acid.  And you don’t have to use dill seeds, you can use other seasonings. 

We have roll charts for all of the different options.

You could either choose something from the chart that sounds good to you, or you could roll and let fate decide.  

The amount of risk you take and what you make determines, in the story sheet, how many points you earn towards leveling up.  

There’s a whole story line that goes with the book where you’re an adventure chef, and you’re catering a party for a pair of acid dragons.  They’re typical upper class suburbia dragons, and they want everything cooked with acid to show up the fire breathing red dragons down the street. 

Whether you succeed or fail, you choose that yourself, and there’s a positive or negative resolution at the end depending on how you complete the game.

It’s more of a cooperative game than a competitive game, so it’s something that works well for families and friend groups having a game night.  

My kid is kind of obsessed with cats, and How to RPG With Your Cat sounds like a wonderful game for cat lovers.  Can you talk more about that?   Have you actually tried it out with the cats in your life? 

We have!  It allows you to use any tabletop role-playing game, and it has tables in the back to help translate and replace the chance factor of dice with your cat’s actions. 

It focuses on a series of cat prompts depending on if you’re attacking or talking or so on.  Fights might be throwing a toy at them then seeing what they do.  Another could be leaving a plate of food for them to see if they sniff it.  It could be putting an electronic device on the ground and seeing how long it takes for them to come lay on it.  If your cat’s not into it, that still words.  The cat can ignore it, and that factors in too. 

We’ve also tested this with our cats at home, which has been really fun, and we have played this with people on zoom, which is the fastest way to get a bunch of cats together.  Seeing everyone’s cats was wonderful.  

People have used it to replace the dice, to include their pet as an actual cat in the game, as a human in the game to mess with the party, and to determine what the monster does so they can play GM-less. 

Your material seems really accessible to a wide audience.  Do you have any advice for new players who want to try out your games?  How do you encourage other players to try a new system?

For something like RPG With Your Cat, just grab a friend and try to do it remotely.  For any game, keep it short.  20 minutes is an easier commitment than a 3 hour session.  

In Cooking With Dice, the incentive is food.  Come over and have a nice treat at the end!  With our kids, we would bring their friends over, and we’d be making ice cream bread, so everyone is choosing ice cream.  That gets them into it. 

And then, think about how to combine things.  I am really into combining different games with Radiance, in particular.  In addition to using it as a solo tool, you can use it as a base for a GM-less game, which is a good combo with RPG With Your Cat.  It makes entry so much easier.

Thank you Jennifer for taking time to chat!  It was great getting to meet in person, and I look forward to seeing you again at future conventions!

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