Tavern of Taverns: A Session One Encounter

Like many adventures, this one starts in a tavern. The Proprietor of this tavern, however, has made a sport of stealing from their fellow tavernkeepers, and the walls are packed with all of the prized possessions of the city’s publicans. The players’ task is to make off with as many of these objects as they can without getting beaten to a pulp by the bouncer or hauled into the city dungeons by the guards. Each item they take and return to its owner brings the new crew a variety of rewards, and offers the Game Manager a new setting and cast of characters in which to set plot hooks.

This short encounter is designed to give players a chance to use their character’s skills and actions for the first time, do some significant world building, and seed future encounters. It also sets the scene for a campaign which is sensitive to themes of repatriation and decolonization. This encounter was designed with an urban fantasy setting in mind, but is *system-agnostic* and could be reworked to a variety of other settings and geographic scales--the taverns could easily be located on different planes or planets rather than simply in different neighborhoods. And the idea of a tavern should not be a limiting factor--the examples here interpret it broadly to mean social club, but you could expand that definition further.

Free to use under Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 -- please don't pay me for this but do tell me if you use it and what you think!

Edit: Since initially uploading this document, I went back and revised it to include some artwork and tone down the previous bright purple color scheme.