Barkeep on the Borderlands Preview: The Birdcage
Get you a game that can do both. I, like many, am often drawn to adventures as roleplaying products. They promise such an elegant play experience—just read the book and do what it says, and you’ll have material for a nice couple of sessions with your gaming group. However, I personally struggle with adventures in practice (just see, for instance, my failed attempt to bring You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge to the table). Accordingly, what I find most useful in practice are gaming products that can be described as toolkits, more modular, smaller bits to plug into whatever existing mess my players get themselves into. It is, therefore, only natural that in making my own adventures I aim for something that can be run either in toto as an adventure, or broken down into its constituent parts and plugged into an existing campaign.
Every game needs bars. Or at least, every game that is based on typical fantasy tropes (taverns), or western tropes (saloons), or space westerns (cantinas), or cyberpunk tropes (nightclubs), or… actually, I will just say that probably every game could use a bar or two! While the “you meet in a tavern” trope is played out (to understate it*), there is a reason that so much fiction involves these liminal social spaces. It allows for a mingling of people that can be fruitful for storytelling. Perhaps you go to the bar to meet a seedy space pirate who will transport your outlaw party members, or to confront the black hat gunslinger that’s been threatening the local ranchers, or just to swap stories of your exploits with other adventurers and get leads on new adventure hooks. When I enter a town as a player, one of the first places I go is always the tavern. That’s where you go to learn what’s happening; a library is where you go to learn what’s happened.
*Footnote 1: In a recent interview of Anne of DIY & Dragons (who, full disclosure, is slated to be a guest writer on my upcoming Kickstarter, Barkeep on the Borderlands) over at the Weird & Wonderful Worlds blog, Anne had this to say about the meet-in-a-tavern trope:
“I don't even know how I learned it, but even as a kid I somehow knew that awful ‘you all meet at a bar, suddenly an old man in the corner starts telling a story’ setup. Which is like, maybe the worst way I can think of to try to start a game, because it gives you nothing to work with. You'd be better off just being told ‘This is the adventure, go do it.’ The one variation on that I'd like to try sometime would be like ‘You're in a bar and the band is singing about an adventure site, the site is within walking distance of the bar, you're all drunk, go adventure!’ I would use the White Stripes song ‘Broken Bricks,’ which is about poking around an abandoned construction site after hours.”
Barkeep on the Borderlands is written as a full adventure but is designed to be easily converted into a toolkit for referees. The adventure premise is that the Keep (the eponymous one from that classic Keep on the Borderlands module, albeit a few hundred years thereafter) is celebrating (via drunken revelry, the only way to celebrate anything) its annual celebration of raids of the Caves of Chaos when the Keep’s monarch is poisoned and the antidote lost somewhere among the shipments to the Keep’s various drinking establishments. The players can either partake in the pubcrawl with the rest of the populace or compete with the various factions of the Keep in finding and returning (or ransoming, or destroying) the antidote. A party of meddling kids dedicated to solving mysteries may also try to determine who poisoned the monarch in the first place. All this is inspired by my own ventures in barcrawling when I lived for 7 years in a city with 80 bars in a square mile and the most bars per capita of any city in the United States (and nostalgia for a time when such frivolity was a safe way to spend one’s Thursday night).
But Barkeep on the Borderlands can be useful even if you eschew the adventure framework. Because there will be twenty bars on the pubcrawl (with hopefully many written by different guest writers, such as the aforementioned Anne Hunter), what I envision is that a referee who needs a tavern can roll a d20 and open to the spread with the corresponding bar and use that. Each bar will be fully contained on a single spread for ease of use at the table. While that would be the easiest way to port manageable chunks into your game, a willing referee could go even further, stealing just NPCs, drinks, magic items, or anything else for their games. But that’s the typical mode of excavating adventurers, and I want there to be an easy way to steal. What’s easier than opening to a single spread and not having to reference any other part of the book?
Okay, enough blathering, here is what you were promised at the top: a preview of one of these bars! This one is called The Birdcage (an earlier version appeared in this blog post), a rooftop karaoke with an avian theme.
And back to blathering: two aspects of the above spread need a bit of comment in the context of using this bar outside the larger context of the adventure. The first is that the “Sidetracks” and “Situations” tables are designed first and foremost to fit with my pubcrawl procedure I use in the adventure but are easily stripped from that context for a standalone use. Essentially, whenever the referee wants to determine what is going on outside the tavern (in case the player-characters are walking to or from it or just loitering near the stoop), they can roll on the Sidetracks table. The Situations table works similarly for what is going on inside the bar. I would probably roll on either when the players first enter (Situations) or exit (Sidetracks) the bar and then again if I sense that the players need prodding or the scene needs a bit of refreshing. The second aspect is the choice to avoid proper names for NPCs. This is not only an homage to the Keep on the Borderlands (where NPCs were not named other than their titles and professions*) but also an attempt to ease adding this to any setting. A character named John or Johan may not fit, linguistically, with any given milieu, so instead I focus on titles, professions and relationships in denoting the NPCs.
*Footnote 2: As a final aside, I can’t find where I originally saw it, but one person suggested that the refusal to use proper names in Keep on the Borderlands is an act of worldbuilding. Perhaps in the Keep, one is only referred to by name in very familiar or intimate settings, and outside of such settings, they are called only by their title. Thus to call the Bailiff by their name would be a major social faux pas. Because the player-characters are assumed to be wandering adventurers, familiar and intimate with no one in the Keep, the adventure thus has no reason to provide names for the NPCs—the player-characters won’t learn them, and if they do they best not use them, lest they initiate a bar brawl.
If you have read (or even skimmed) this far, you have certainly shown enough interest that it is my duty as a hawker of games (a sorry station in life) to cajole you into following the pre-launch Kickstarter page. There is a lot more left to show you once the campaign launches in early February!
