#RPGaDay2025 – Tavern

Skipping Day#2 for the moment as it triggered a little longer than planned. Meanwhile, some thoughts on – TAVERN (Where, Adventure, Excited).

Those random prompts remind me of Cheers, where everybody knows your name and isn’t that the sort of thing an Adventurer should be excited about?

Taverns are a staple of the genre (even if they aren’t really historical, but that’s a rant for another time) and a straight forward hub of information, quests, social roleplay, and the occasional colourful NPC staggering in with a bag full of coin and a blade in their back. So taking a cue from the excellent content creators at Raging Swan Press (the amount of free content, random tables, and pages upon pages of neat details is well worth checking out as well as frequent sales on the paid content), I’m brainstorming on additional ways to get players excited about taverns.

1. Local bards have taken to singing songs describing the deeds of the party (if they don’t have a party name, they might be about to get one). It’s a great place to prompt players to offer suggestions about what tales they want told about their PCs rather than the usual slander often heaped upon them. These are the heroes and gosh darn it, folks should hear about it and as DMs, we can even create a random table of “Deeds the NPC heard about” the next time they try to impress the tavern keep or local guards.
2. A grateful tavern keep who always insists that the PCs get the first round for free in gratitude for something they did for the locals. Maybe the tavern has even put up a trophy of painting to comemorate it.
3. Someone from the PCs background has taken up a regular stool at the tavern, perhaps as hired muscle or an entertainer or whatever else might be appropriate. Sometimes they have information, sometimes they have some trouble that needs fixing, and maybe sometimes they have inspiring story to share that can be a narrative reason for a PC to have a reroll when they are in a jam.
4. The tavern has named a drink or drinking game after one of the PCs as tribute. I’d say we all have had a PC that decided to get in on a drinking contest (and there are many home brew mechanics out there for it).
5. There’s a tavern that has set up in some very exotic location that gives it something beyond the usual tap house. Maybe it’s haunted with spectral servers or it’s an opportunity to speak with dead for the cost of a few shots of an ectoplasmic beverage. What about a tavern grown out the living wood if a tree (Dragonlance beat me to this one, but I’d like to think there is still much that could be done with it, particularly if there’s a primal power PC like a druid or ranger who communes with the tree or it’s dryad). There’s the classic den of the roughest toughest scum but what if it only had the hardest of adventurers because the tavern was located on the wrong side of some deadly barrier or roaming danger, so much so that patrons wear tokens proclaiming how many times they ran the gauntlet to get to the Siege Perilous Tavern.
6. The tavern runs contests regularly where the PCs can demonstrate their mettle against other Adventurers or even some mythical beasts, competing for a prize worthy of the challenge. Feats of strength like arm wrestling are pretty common but what about a skill challenge for Triva Night where the prize is a bag of healing potions (resolved through skill rolls rather than actual player knowledge) or games of nimble challenge? The tavern does it semi often so it still has some shine when it comes up on the calendar. Maybe one of the PCs wants to create one of the challenges?
7. An adventurer dead pool is posted behind the tavern keep. Are the PCs placing bets on others coming back alive or are they more interested in staying a couple of quests ahead of their rivals, the nefarious Fiddleback Crew? I admit to throwing one of these in for an Eberron game, the party using it as much for betting on the survival of others as a way to keep tabs on other groups.

Now comes the hard part – trying to drop one of these in during my next couple of game sessions …