Well, thank you for dropping by the blog on Sunday. Here for day 3 of RPG a Day? Let’s get going.
Let’s try something different today. The prompt for today is Tavern, but I wanted to use the Question, Mood, and Subject options presented in the graphic, so I rolled some dice, and the additional prompts were:
- Question: Why?
- Mood: Excited
- Subject: Genre
I’m going to put my money where my mouth is after yesterday’s post, and integrate those three additional prompts into the topic at hand, putting my thinking cap on. Here is what I came up with.
Why are you excited about incorporating a tavern in other RPG genres other than fantasy?
The tavern, the gathering place for fantasy adventurers, has been a constant throughout the editions. Just search for “You all meet in a tavern” or a variation thereof online and see all you get. What was the meeting place for the heroes in the first Dragonlance book? The Inn of the Last Home, a tavern! If the Dragonlance book were self-referencing the trend back in 1984, you can see how ubiquitous the tavern is in fantasy games.
It is such a cliché! But, to reiterate the previous question, why be excited about incorporating the tavern into different RPG genres?
First, it’s not as common in other genres. Yes, there is the cantina in Star Wars (same thing as a tavern), and I included a cantina in the first session of my Stars Without Number campaign in 2019, but looking back, I don’t think I’ve used them as much in other genres.
But think about it, socially, the “tavern”, whether we call it a bar, pub, or cantina, is such a shared social gathering place in real life. Out with your friends on a Friday? Beer at the bar! Need a place to meet after a zombie apocalypse, to the pub!
The saloon in a western game is probably as common as a tavern in a fantasy one. But the tavern can be a meeting place for your heroes in your WWII superhero campaign. A pub can be the meeting place for your Victorian steampunk heroes. A seedy bar is the place where your creatures of the night gather to plot against their elders. It can easily be used across all genres. But what about if we go further?
How can we use the tavern as an adventure location for other genres? The Winchester in Shaun of the Dead is a great inspiration for a zombie game. Still, a tavern can also serve as a meeting place for survivors, a source of supplies during a raid, or even a base of operations where weary survivors can exchange stories of their exploits.
In a superhero game, it can be a place where the heroes meet in their civilian identities, a familiar place that is then threatened by villains, or neutral ground where heroes and villains intermingle—a version of The Continental from the John Wick movies.
There are numerous examples of multi-dimensional, multi-genre taverns that connect different fantasy settings of worlds. Imagine a time-travel campaign where you enter a tavern by the end of the game, and after a few drinks, you exit to another time. Finding the tavern might be integral to most adventures; the tavern may be a base of operations for the time-travelers. Make the tavern a fixture of the campaign! Perhaps it serves as the base of operation for the players. They own it, or it is their interdimensional base with doors that open wherever they need to go. Go bar hopping and go time hopping. Now I want to run a campaign called Hoppers!
See, we can be excited about a tavern, despite all the clichés; we just need to be creative about how we use them.
How do you use taverns in your games? Are you a fan or are you tired of them? I want to read your feedback.
Leave your thoughts in the comments, or tag me in your replies, wherever you make them. If you choose to participate, don’t forget to tag your participation with the #RPGaDay2025 hashtag so the community at large can find your entry.
