Comedy RPG Coffee & Chaos lets your D&D characters run a cafe and uses cutlery instead of dice
Give your heroic adventurers a stressful day job in food management - what could go wrong?
Do your tabletop characters want to run a cosy but hectic cafe instead of delving into yet another monster and trap-filled dungeon? Rather wrangle a broken espresso machine instead of a ornery bugbear? Save your healing spells for the customer who ate five croissants in two minutes? Comedy tabletop RPG Coffee & Chaos allows you to do all this and more in short, fun sessions meant to slot inbetween grand adventures.
Created by Cobblepath Games and featured on Dicebreaker last year, Coffee & Chaos is not quite a full setting but more than a supplement printed on a cafe-style trifold menu. Inside are rules and resources that allow your group’s party of adventures to set aside the torches and rope for a bit and don their barista aprons as they attempt to keep a coffee shop afloat for a single shift.
Instead of creating new characters, Coffee & Chaos walks players through the process of translating their fantasy hero’s abilities, spell, stats and weapons into food service-apporpriate talents. The wizard can levitate ingredients from the top shelf, the bard can calm the rush of customers impatiently waiting for the fighter to subdue the mimic masquerading as a milk steamer.
Players use a cutlery-based system of knives, forks and spoons as resource tokens and tackle prompted obstacles as a team, such as handling a rush hour of impish demons or exhuming a ghost that's currently haunting the supply closet. Each character can approach the problem as they choose, using different cutlery tokens to represent a straightforward, brute force technique or perhaps a less conventional solution that leans into the catastrophe as an ‘unplanned opportunity’.
Coffee & Chaos claims to prioritise hilarious storytelling over more traditional RPG goals of winning or defeating a foe. It’s designed to typically last no longer than one or two sessions, meant to be more of a reprieve from dungeoneering and life-threatening dice rolls. Characters retain their iconic abilities, no matter what genre, setting or RPG system they come from - how those prove useful in serving lattes and muffins is up to each player.
“Coffee & Chaos was born from a couple of silly ideas. First ‘what if we made a cafe game and printed it on a menu?’ and second ‘Oh and what if we used cutlery instead of dice?’,” Milton said in a press release. “Those two starting points and a feverish weekend of wild designs and we had the first draft of this chaotic comedy game.”
Coffee & Chaos is the creation of CobblePath Games, which consists of designer Ferne Milton and writer Steph Williamson. The artwork was provided by Nimali, while Cat Elm contributed layout and Hilary Doda handled editing. The full game is available digitally on CobblePath’s Itch.io page, and a physical version is currently available via a leta pledge on its GameFound campaign. More physical copies will be sold through SoulMuppet Publishing at a later date.