Tavern – RPGaDAY 2025 Day 3

RPGaDAY 2025 day 3 has the prompt “tavern”. I think I can manage without Collins today…

See all my RPGaDAY posts here.

You are quietly enjoying your drinks in the corner of the Feisty Mule, when a tall, hunched character in a hooded robe briefly talks to the bartender then heads in your direction. “I have a problem,” he says in a gruff voice, “and you look like people who can help me.”

How cliched!

And, you know what, so what?

Cliches and Tropes

I have to confess I feel a bit guilty when I resort to a cliché or introduce a common trope. But I am getting better at reminding myself it’s a means to an end.

Let’s be honest here. We’re not trying to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. We’re just having an evening playing a game of, as The Angry GM puts it, “pretend elf”.

We need a way to get things going, but that’s not the primary focus of the evening. The stranger in the tavern is familiar and it works. The players know what’s going on. It could even be argued it works because it’s familiar. Or conversely, it’s familiar because it works and so gets used a lot.

It’s very tempting to try to prepare a storyline with twists and turns and originality everywhere, thinking in some way that falling back on familiar tropes is cheating. But that misses the point of the exercise.

In another life, I write Scottish dances. I used to have a similar feeling about the dances I wrote, thinking that every 8-bar phrase had to be significant. But that way lies indigestion and overload. The dances which have been most popular are mostly made up of standard building blocks, with one special figure or twist which makes the dance interesting, different, worth the effort.

And so it is with a role-playing campaign.

The overall campaign needs a theme, a reason, which the players can work with (even if it’s a sandbox campaign, the theme is “here is the location, and you will get various options”). But the players won’t care if that theme is new, as long as the adventures it offers are interesting. (And anyway, don’t they say there are only 7 basic plots?)

That applies even more to the start of the adventure. The players are there to work through the adventure, explore the world, resolve the issue, have a good fight, negotiate, solve puzzles, or whatever other reason they may have for playing. The introduction is so much boilerplate to get the show on the road, and really isn’t worth spending too much effort on.

The other benefit of cliches and tropes is that they already have a lot of information packed inside them. Using them well means that the players can pick up a lot about the situation or adventure without having to be told.

Of course, this also means that, if you take a classic trope and then subvert it, you need to communicate that extra well to your players to overcome their assumptions. In this case, remember Justin Alexander’s Three Clue Rule:

For any conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues.

Why three? Because the PCs will probably miss the first; ignore the second; and misinterpret the third before making some incredible leap of logic that gets them where you wanted them to go all along.

You need at least three indications that the trope is being subverted. In this case, maybe more to overcome their assumptions…

What a tavern can say

Having said all that about the introduction just being way of getting going, don’t underestimate how much you can communicate about the world or the adventure with a tavern. Consider the following:

You push open the sturdy oak door of the Preening Mermaid and wander up to the bar, admiring the selection of beers, wines and spirits on display behind. Dorian Winkletoes, the halfling proprietor, smiles at you through his half-moon glasses from his step behind the bar and puts down his polishing cloth. “Friends,” he says, “welcome! What can I get you? We have a new barrel of mead just opened.”

Contrast that with:

You shoulder open the battered door of the Crouching Goblin. The room goes quiet, and through the gloom you can see you are the centre of attention of a roomful of rough characters. As you make your way to the bar, feeling the sticky residue of spilled beer pulling at your feet, the silence continues, and every eye tracks you. The hunched figure behind the bar, a scar livid across his bald head, takes his time looking up from polishing a tankard with a dirty rag. “Yes?” he says.

With a couple of sentences, these two scenes introduce very different adventures.

What will your tavern say about your world?

Conclusion

Starting in a tavern may be a cliché, but it works. Don’t be afraid of using, and even leaning on, common tropes in the aid of quicker understanding of the situation.

And remember how much your tavern description can communicate.

See all my RPGaDAY posts here.