I wonder if you could recreate them with a waffle iron and strawberry pie filling…

Monster has a line of canned coffee-like products they call their Java series. One of them was Swiss Chocolate flavored. It is discontinued, always separated, left an awful sludge in the bottom of the can, but I loved those things.

There’s a lot of narrative potential there. Why would a group of rag-tag bandits attack a squad of seasoned fighters? Perhaps they were misled by their cruel leader who tortures those who fail to “motivate” the remaining bandits.

The leader could be secretly backed by a powerful noble who is funding the bandits as a way to remove competition. The leader doesn’t need the bandits, so their lives are expendable, but the bandits are the outcast, down trodden, and desperate who have no alternatives.

What seems to be a simple case of greedy bandits suddenly becomes a power struggle between noble houses with the backing of the crown. Killing the leader may solve the issue in the short term, but the nobles will just install a new chump to continue the plan. Killing the nobles will have greater consequences across the kingdom. Disposing the crown will throw the kingdom into chaos.

And it all starts with one, desperate highway man begging for his life in the mud while the party thinks “it’s just a bandit, they’re evil, so they deserve to die.”