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The Book of Taverns
The Book of Taverns is a 112 page softcover sourcebook from
Necromancer Games, priced at $19.95. (The price is a bit high for
my personal taste, and why I didn't pick it up until recently,
but as there are $25 96 page sourcebooks, I guess it's not too
bad.)
Rather than being about Taverns, it contains 10 detailed taverns
that you can easily drop into your campaign. So, something of a
location book. Some are taverns, some are more like inns-tavern
combinations.
This book to me fills a huge niche. Taverns (and Inns) are very
common in D&D games, but something that can be time consuming
to create. And tricky to come up with original ones. Much like
how I base my NPCs on people I know or from fiction, I tend to
base taverns on places I've been. In that case, it's mostly a
couple different pool halls and the occasional sports bar. The
latter is usually full of yuppies, so that's not a very good
basis for a fantasy tavern.
Each tavern is presented in a fairly standard format: Intro,
Background, Important People (generally the people who work
there), a room by room description of the place, a menu/listing
of services and goods/drinks available, and lastly some adventure
hooks.
The 10 Taverns are:
The Trireme - A Greek themed bar, with a history
out of a greek tragedy. (And a curse). Since it's very Greek,
this might be a bit tricky to use.
The Witch's Teat - Bar with gladiatorial fights
(with a twist - sort of has a reverse stargate in it). I found
this to have the most interesting staff of any bar in the book.
Quintain's Tower - This is a place operated by
ogres & goblins, in the ruins of an old castle. Neat idea,
but gets a bit weird, because there's also this ghost tree and
rangers that protect it.
The Horse Lord - This is essentially a cowboy
bar. You learn a little too much about the owner's love life.
(The "Horse's Mistress" would have been a better name
for the place. Ick). This is another one of those a bit hard to
use.
The Lion Rampant - A tavern catering to rich
people and aristocrats.
Vain Robert's Gibbet - This is a pub for sailors
and privateers/pirates. Very suitable for Freeport. Very very
suitable.
Death & Taxes - sort of a secret, members's
only place. This is hard to use I think because the players are
unlikely to be invited to join, or ever visit.
Malachai's Public House - Relatively generic
inn, run by a halfling bard. Probably the most obviously useful.
It is very high powered though, and is perhaps most suitable for
a setting like the Forgotten Realms
Dagger & Rose - Sort of a roadhouse, a
inn/tavern on a major highway between two cities.
The Four Winds - This is an interdimensional
tavern. It's probably more suited for somewhat nonsensical and
high powered settings like the Forgotten Realms (in fact, that
has something similar, the World Serpent Inn. And Blackmoor may
or may not have had something like it too. The 1986 D&D
module "Adventures in Blackmoor" did, but I don't know
if it was in the original. But I digress). I love the idea of
this, but it's a bit too high powered for my tastes (It's run by
a god, and an ex-god makes the beer). And not entirely serious,
it seems. It's also full of flying monkeys, which scare me.
(Seriously.)
The writing is excellent, full of tiny details and is a joy to
read. There are also a lot of puns and hidden references (at
least I hope so, maybe I'm reading too much into some things).
But nothing overly obnoxious or just plain silly, like found in
some products. There are some spelling problems. Including one of
my pet peeves, "loosing" instead of "losing".
Also at couple instances of a sentence missing a word. But pretty
minor (and something I'm sure I've done in this review).
The interior art is excellent. It's all by Brian LeBlanc. If
there's a better artist working in the d20 field today (or the
RPG industry, for that matter), I haven't see them (and I
probably have a 100 d20 books). Each tavern is fully mapped, and
the maps are very well done. Some parts of some maps are quite
blurry, though. That's a common problem of color maps being
converted to greyscale and printed, but this is very rare in this
product, happening on only 3 of the 25 or so maps (and thankfully, it's mostly on a couple of the smaller
ones). But it's another pet peeve of mine, and so worth
mentioning.
The first, is while the taverns all have very interesting and
detailed backgrounds, this detracts somewhat from their
genericness. In most cases, this is no big deal, but in a couple,
it's hard to get around. For instance, the "Horse Lord"
needs to be placed someplace where there are cowboys and herds of
horses. One has a time traveller from the distant future.
Malachai (of Public House fame) had a huge fight with the local
wizards guild and ended up enslaving the 4 leaders of it. A
couple of the Tavern Owners/Operators have deals with local
thieves guild. So, it's unlikely that most will be easily dropped
into your game as it, without ignoring the background. But as I
said, that's generally easy to do.
Another downside, is that while the taverns are described
completely when it comes to physical layout and staff, in most
cases, it's somewhat skimpy when it comes to customers. What
would Cheers have been without Norm, Cliff, Frasier, and the
occasional guest star, like Harry? ( Or Moe's without Lenny,
Carl, and Homer? In most cases, you do get some generic
customers, and in a couple cases, there are prominant people who
live in the in for some weird reason (like the time traveller
guy), but I would have liked to have seen more. And more normal
ones, not things like well, time travellers.
While it doesn't really matter to most people, also on the
downside, the names of the taverns and NPCs are all product
identity. Which is something of a shame, and something I don't
understand the point of. It would have been neat to see one of
these taverns inserted into an product from another company.
Especially as they seem to have borrowed a city from another
company in the name/background of an NPC in the Four Winds bar
("Jelka Swag of Freeport", an ex-pirate. Though
Freeport is a common name, even in d20, as there is a Freeport in
the Everquest.)
Still, to sum up, this is an excellent product for a DM. While
all the prominent NPCs do have stats, and there are some new
magic items, it's fairly stat-free, so can be useful for most
fantasy RPGs, not just D&D/d20
A-
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