So Many Free Taverns for Your Games: Barkeep Jam Retrospective
Mission Accomplished: The Barkeep Jam had 31 entries, for a total of a whooping 200+ pages of extra content for your own pubcrawl adventures. I wanted to briefly hype up all the entries, all of which are worthy of your perusal and even stealing for your own games. I’ve already started to use a few in my pick-up games I run on the ol’ Prismatic Waystation discord server.
However, one thing I wanted to note for folks, especially those who were like “dang it, I missed the deadline!” is that the deadline isn’t real. The Barkeep License isn’t going anywhere (I am not Wizards on the Coast) and is always there if you want to make a pub or a full-blown pubcrawl adventure, for your home game, for hawking on DriveThruRPG or elsewhere, or for a secret third thing.
Without further ado, here is a speed-run (or maybe not so speedy, given how long I took in writing these up—life events intervened) through the various entries to the Barkeep Jam:
Bar in a Bottle (Pub)
By: xmasowl
The Bar in a Bottle, or The Glass Menagerie, is, as it says on the tin, a dive bar located in a glass bottle that will occasionally pop up in and around other bars. One has to apply a magical grease that shrinks you in order to enter, but once inside there is a djinn bartender that serves drinks when you make wishes to them, and a number of strange bar patrons. An especially unique aspect of this pub is that it is written as a frame narrative where the bar entry itself is described as a missing entry from a Gnomish translation of Barkeep on the Borderlands (no such translation exists, but if any Gnomes are reading this, I am open to business inquiries), which was misplaced, discovered by a mouse, examined by the Keep’s Jewelers’ Guild before ultimately falling in the hands of Reginald Aristides Tablewriter, the senior editor of Gnomes Gnow Games Workshop.
Bar in the Belfry (Pub)
By: Aaron Phelps
This gothic bar is nestled in one of the Keep’s bell towers and specializes in blood siphoned from stirges that drained blood from drunks. It is a very squicky bar but absolutely your best bet if you are in the Keep and hankering for a bloody Mary. However, the entry includes tables for the side effects that may come from drinking the stirge-produced drinks or from being one of the donors to produce it. Subject matter notwithstanding, the whole thing maintains a light and humorous tone. There are also numerous references to The Hunchback of Notre Dame (including a hunchback bartender, a dancer with a pet goat, and a priest who mumbles something about hell fire).
The Barely There Tap & Inn (Pub)
By: Tabletop Bookshelf (a fine purveyor of ttrpgs, including Barkeep actually)
This is a good “roadside” tavern that would be at home in pretty much any fantasy game–we all could use more plug-and-play roadside taverns. But this is no ordinary tavern, as it is run by a clan of halfling werebears. Bear motifs are frequent but a running gag in the pub is that it is frequented by lycanthrope hunters that are so incompetent that they have no clue that lycanthropes are right under their nose. One of the halfling werebears is also a dealer of magical curios, so the entry includes a small table of the goods she has to offer.
Bars Aplenty (Giant Barkeep Supplement [includes 21 Pubs])
By: Dungeon Crab (Crab Dungeon)
This entry is longer than Barkeep on the Borderlands itself! There are 21 new pubs for the Keep, with an expanded map of the Keep for using them all, a number of drinking games, and “New Rave Plus”, which expands the Raves of Chaos to a full 12 days instead of the original 6, as well as adding a new ingredient to the recipe for the antidote to compensate for the extra time. There is a lot of variety among the bars (obviously), but just to sell you on the few, there is a disco bar for werewolves, a rooftop bar run by a witch that requires you to get through a haunted house depthcrawl to make it to the roof, a casino in the Keep’s sewers, a “cottagecore board game cafe”, a fungal convenience store that keeps popping up all over the city, a court house turned dining theater experience with a full system for a cooking contest, and many more, way more than I can reasonably summarize in this blurb. One thing to highlight is that these bars flesh out on of the not-so-secret non-major factions in Barkeep on the Borderlands: the lizardfolk, who are just as unhappy with the Monarchy as many of the other anti-monarch factions.
Buried Base of the Boozed Barrel Burglars (Dungeon)
By: Teun Veekens (TiniTheMini)
This is a small (7-room) dungeon crawl that is quite modular and which you can insert into nearly any of the pubs in the base adventure. The gang of gnomes in this dungeon is led by a wererat leader (gnomes and lycanthropes are definitely common themes thus far). This is probably a good size dungeon for a short session or half a session if you are running Barkeep on the Borderlands and need a dungeony reprieve from a largely social adventure
CC’s Dive Bar (Pub)
By: Zak Hamer
This one is literally a dive bar–it is a sunken houseboat that is now a bar run by merfolk! There is an air-filled fishbowl for air-breathers, but this place caters to those with gills. There are a number of well-themed drinks (e.g., jellyfish jello shots, a blue lagoon fishbowl drink) served in watertight sealed containers. This one also introduces a fun, undersea faction: the Hell’s Angelfish, which are tattooed merfolk that frequent this pub. The eponymous “CC” is a water elemental that is bound to the bar by the diver who learned its true name.
Chaotic Cocktails (Drinks)
By: Peregrin Jones (Wandering Falcon)
Make your own damn drink! Now you can, with a bunch of fictional ingredients (8 spirits, 8 mixers, 8 garnishes, and 4 serving styles) that have mechanical effects from the good (flamebelly hooch gives you a dragon’s fire breath when you belch), to the bad (add nepenthe to your drink to forget everything, potentially even you own name) to the ugly (satyr milk gives you the legs and hindquarters of a goat for an hour). I think this would be most fun to not tell players what the ingredients do and let them figure it out through trial and error. The menu at the back page would work perfectly as a handout to your players that doesn’t spoil any of the drink effects. The concept of making your own drink in a bar is very funny to me–so much so that I almost brought two preeminent RPG bloggers to a dive bar with that gimmick where you make your own drinks using liquor in ketchup squirt bottles. We went to a higher class place instead where the floors aren’t as (reportedly) sticky.
The Circular Spine (Pub)
By: xaosseed (Seed of Worlds)
There were a lot of sea-themed pubs entered into the jam but this is the only one that is also a fighting pit among repurposed ship parts. I always love fishpeople (especially when they are above water for some reason–take note, Spongebob Fans). Something that is really fun about this entry is, based on the postscript, it is from a one-shot xaosseed ran, converted into the Barkeep pub format. As I said somewhere when shilling for the jam, I think most of us referees have a few pubs from our home games that sprang fully formed at the gaming table, so if the jam served as a motivator to etch any of those fleeting gameable pieces onto stone, then it was all well worth it.
The Cockatrice Tail (Pub)
By: Anne Hunter (DIY & Dragons)
Anne was the only contributor to the O.G. Barkeep on the Borderlands adventure who wrote a second pub, this time on her own time. But it was also, as she noted in her introduction, an opportunity to take advantage of the unlimited space of a blog post, versus the heavily edited entries in Barkeep itself (if you see a 2d4 table where you might otherwise expect 2d6, you can be assured that four excellent entries were cut for page-space concerns).
The Cockatrice Tail, aside from immediately feeling at home in Barkeep on the Borderlands due to its punny name, this pub has connections with many of the major (and minor) factions in the the Keep (it’s the only pub other than the one Ben L. wrote that features the white swine from the Dreamlands). It also furthers Barkeep’s unintentional motif of marriages with the married chickens who want to matchmake a jolly crewmate with another pub patron and another bachelorette party (an underused source of random encounter in non-Barkeep adventures). This one is another fun pub with a lot of wit and set up perfectly for a raucous adventure.
Dad Rock Cafe (Pub)
By: Teun Veekens (TiniTheMini)
This pub has so many dad jokes and dad-rock music puns. Like, I figure that I am probably only grokking 20% of the total puns and references going on in here. There are arctic monkeys, giant beetles (4) taking the stage, a pumpkin smashing contest, a bard named Mac from the Woods of Fleet, a Mary who is Proud, and all that is just from a few of the situation entries. A special treat is the d20 table of “What’s Playing on the Jukebox” that has lots of dad-rock+D&D based puns that would make Brad Kerr weep. There is even a spotify playlist for this one, which you should definitely play for your table while running this.
The Doom Shroom Saloon (Pub)
By: A.R. Brewer
This fungal-themed pub sprouts in the sewers beneath the alchemy wing of a university (potentially the Academy from Barkeep on the Borderlands, but it is left generic enough to put below any school your players happen to happen upon). I love any adventures that take place in sewers (my first session I ever ran was in a homebrewed sewer dungeon), so I am surprised that something with a similar slimy aesthetic didn’t make its way into the final cut!
The Escape (Pub)
By: Ian McDougall (Benign Brown Beast)
This pub combines the tiki bar aesthetic with the classic you-got-sci-fi-in-my-fantasy trappings by having the crew of a crashed flying saucer operate a bar to not raise any suspicions. This is truly Gygaxian, recalling elements from both his classic Expedition to Barrier Peaks with his love of Tiki (as both aesthetic and attitude, as described in this excellent post from my colleague at Richard’s Dystopian Pokeverse). There are lots of nice touches of crossing the genre streams where the reader understands the sci-fi happening that is being described in a fantasy-coded way from the acid-spitting lizardling to the elf-eared crew member named Strik who has a poor bedside manner. Another nice little nod to Barrier Peaks can be found in the drink menu, which features a Froghemoth-themed drink.
Extra NPCs for Barkeep on the Borderlands (NPCs)
By: Kathryn Lindsey
Like the Bar in the Bottle, this entry is written in-character, this time from the POV of a hereditary bartender who describes a sort of legendary non-player character type called Walkers, quasi-immortal but neutral beings. The entry is not only told by a narrator but specifically by an unreliable narrator who often crosses out certain sentences (or it may be that the sentences are being crossed out by a Walker since the narrator mentions, in a crossed out section, that their family’s history is being erased). What is presented within this framing device is 3 NPCs for use in any of the pubs (although they have pubs from Barkeep on the Borderlands that are noted as their favorites), along with their favorite food and drinks. This provides a good deal of flexibility to sprinkle an extra NPC or two in any pub your players happen upon, or even to include these Walkers as recurring NPCs.
The Flytrap (Pub)
By: xaosseed (Seed of Worlds)
Seed of Worlds is probably one of the most active blogs in the game these days so it should be unsurprising (although delightful) that they are on this list not once but twice. This pub is located in the repurposed stables of a potentially haunted castle and gets its name from the goblin-like fly-lings that frequent the pub, joined by rat-lings and raven-folk as well. Because the pub can be approached by two different routes (either from the front or via the tunnels beneath), the Sidetrack table is dynamic with some situations that are only ever encountered if the pub is approached via the tunnels. Doing so also gives the opportunity to eavesdrop on certain conversations going on in the tavern, also making use of the same random table, making the table a 3-for-1.
The Fungus Among Us (Pub)
By: Riley Adamson
This is very cool in that this uses the Barkeep pub format to create a cantina for the science fantasy setting of the Vaults of Vaarn! I would love to see similar pubs for the implied settings in other systems–pubs set in the city of Troika or in Dolmenwood come to mind. In the pub at hand, the proprietor is a mushroom person who is also the brewmaster and brewing vessel, accepting payments in water or slime for his spore-filled drinks. In addition to the Mos Eisley Cantina-esque patrons, there is separately a chance of various demonic biker gangs showing up at the pub and making a ruckus, using a separate d6 table to generate what they are up to (including a sub-table if they are negotiating with another biker gang).
Gatorbarge (Pub)
By: Franco A. Alvarado (Root Devil)
A casino boat run by birdfolk inside the mouth of a giant alligator. Surely you are already sold on that premise alone, right? But it lives up to all the antics you imagine with such a description with a rich array of staff, sidetracks and situations, firmly planted in the setting of Barkeep on the Borderlands (which really missed out by not having a sailing bar in the first place). There are even factions unique to the bar–both sentient gators and the aforementioned birdfolk (some are parrot-folk, others manatee-folk, etc.). There is even a chance for the giant gator to wake up and plunge into the water. Finally, there is a simple, abstracted gambling mechanic and monster stats for use with Cairn.
Getting Sloshed in the Swamp (2 Pubs)
By: Markus M
This presents a location in the Barkeep on the Borderlands setting but just to the east of the Keep itself. Instead, two pubs are located in a nearby swamp–one is Le Crapaud dans le Trou, a traditional Froegue (a debonair sort of frog-folk) bistro that offers fancy food and drinks and the other is a norse tiki bar run by vikings that ran their ship around and decided to turn the longship into a bar, the Skal and Bones. You may get drunk and get a tattoo at the Skal and Bones (there is a d8 table and all give some supernatural powers or play in a variety of viking sports. Le Crapaud is thoroughly Frenchified in theme, not only in its drinks and cuisine but also in its 1d8 table for revolutions that the Froegues are prone to start.
Hair of the Wyrm (Large Supplement [Includes 4 Pubs])
By: Tyler Nicolson
This supplement includes very charming and cohesive art throughout and features four pubs: a jazz club ran by Lizardfolk, an apothecary turned into a bodega (which hosta a farmer’s market on the weekend), an underground horse racing gambling den, and a moving pub run by a retired gargoyle that pedals down the Keep’s streets. Similar to other gambling entries (there were several, which just goes to show that one vice [drinkin’] asks for the company of another [gamblin’], the Ogre’s Ante tavern includes rules for a horse racing mini-game. This supplement also features 3 NPCs to insert into any or multiple taverns during a pub crawl. I LOVE the art for these NPCs and I like the simple, system-neutral stats that are included for each of them, stats which focus on how one might socially interact with them rather than how hard or easy they might be to murder. But that’s not all–this supplement includes a gnoll merchant who sells a number of alcohol-themed magic items, including the eponymous Hair of the Wyrm. Most of these items interact with Barkeep’s drinking and sobriety rules in fun ways and would be great to plug into any Barkeep campaign.
Hunt for the Swill-Stolen Ax of Illya the Pale Sinner (Stand-alone Adventure [includes 4 Pubs])
By: RegularEvent
This is a full pubcrawl adventure using the pubcrawl rules from Barkeep on the Borderlands as scaffolding but otherwise a completely separate scenario. In this one, you are a member of a band of mercenaries, and your leader has lost her prized battleax while on a bender in the lakeside town of Brayme. It is your job to find it before the band must depart for a new gig in the morning. Each tavern is as flavorful as you would expect in a pubcrawl adventure although on the whole more nautical in nature than what you saw in Barkeep. And yes, there is yet another gambling den here, this time at The Messy Mermaid. The adventure pairs two types of social adventures, mystery and pubcrawl, and provides a set of clues about where the battleax may be based on what pub they are visiting and who they ask. There are also multiple different locations the ax may be, which adds replayability.
I was very excited to see a full scale adventure using the pubcrawl format! I hope to see more like it in the future as it is a good framework for a social adventure, just like a hexcrawl is a good framework for an exploration focused adventure and a dungeon crawl is well-suited for a combat heavy adventure.
Mindy’s Mines (Pub)
By: Haughty Homonculus
I ran an entire session in this pub for some members of my discord server. We had a blast as they got into plenty of trouble without ever needing to go to a second bar (although they passed through a few others on their way back home after one of them got blackout drunk). This is a mining-themed bar but there is actually a secret pub within a pub. One of the Situations is the appearance of a galleon coming into the underground lake in the bar and setting anchor to operate as The Hole in the Hull pub. It was here that a lot of our action took place although they also rode in a mining cart full of punch, the most expensive drink at Mindy’s Mines (although frankly a great deal for just one gold!).
A Night at the Chunker (Pub)
By: Chase Wrenn
My colleague Chris of the Loot the Room blog recently wrote how different systems require different information to run adventures. Truthfully, I am not sure that Barkeep does a great job at providing all of the scaffolding that a typical 5e referee might be used to when running an adventure (actually, I am certain of it). This tavern, a music hall with a garden in the back, is written with both OSR and 5e referees in mind and also breaks the pub down in terms of its various zones. Many of the zones contain various obstacles to get pass, making this almost a small dungeon combined with the pubcrawl structure. I think using this bar for a combat location would lead for a very dynamic encounter. However, the pub has an additional rule for determining when a character needs to use the restroom, which is located in the back of the pub, so it presents that as a reason to move through the various zones.
One More Round (Large Supplement [Includes 4 Pubs])
By: Chris Sanford (Wayspell)
Another collection of pubs to supplement a campaign of Barkeep, which does a great job of matching the tone of the pubs in Barkeep on the Borderlands so you can seamlessly slot them in to replace existing pubs or add them in to spice up your pubcrawl. The pubs include a literal dump, a sewer-based pub (I’ve already gone on record in this post about how much I love pubs in sewers) run by a psychic ball of intertwined rats, a death-themed monster mash type establishment operating out of a graveyard (very seasonal but only because this took me so long to write up), and a dormitory that has been taken over by an anarchist movement, the “Terrace Hall Anarchist Collective” and turned into a bar called THAC0 (get it?). Lots of tiny jokes in this supplement, like Barkeep itself, such that it is worth just reading through for the giggles. A few examples are the four turtlefolk and their wererat father in the Rat King pub or the sidetrack outside of THAC0 where goblins are attempting a Weekend at Bernie’s situation with a dummy of the Heir they constructed.
The Outer Reaches (Pub)
By: giantrobotattacker (Elsewhere, Elsewhere)
This pub is an underground (deeply underground) dive bar that is also multiversally connected to a shitty bar in every known universe. Like many of the entries, there is a lot of humor in the situations but there is also a note of foreboding and many strange happenings, befitting the multiversal concept. In addition to the standard inclusions from the Barkeep format, there is a d6 table to determine what musical act is playing that night and a table for determining what neighboring world is bleeding into the bar at any given moment. Finally there is a recipe for an actual drink (rum-based punch). I did not make it and try it as part of writing these blurbs but mostly because I have neither tea (sorry, British people) nor guava juice.
Pie in the Sky (Pub)
By: Generations
Barkeep on the Borderlands, and many of its pubs, began their life as some type of wordplay and grew for there, and I suspect that this pub was born through a similar method. This pub is basically a gnomish flying saucer shaped like a pie that is a dessert bar. Naturally there is a list of signature desserts to pair with the pub’s signature drinks, and many foodie related situations in the bar. One secret (perhaps unintended) situation that you won’t find on the table is on the Staff & Regulars table–there is a 1-in-6 chance that the pilot of the pie-ship is not present at the pub when the players enter. Intended or not, I would absolutely lean into this with the jolly crew arriving while the pub is in crisis and the player characters will need to right the ship or risk disaster.
The Pike and Purl (Supplement [Includes a Pub])
By: Sam Worthington
First off, the use of public domain art throughout this supplement is exceptional. But beyond that, this entry has everything you could want in a pub and much more. While it is centered on the riverside club on a floating veranda, The Pike & Purl, it has a lot of extras that are tied in: it has a 1d6 list of additional starting backgrounds you can use to make your jolly crewmate a regular at the Pike & Purl. These are slightly more elaborate than the backgrounds in Barkeep but the two 1d6 tables for the pub’s staff and regulars are much more fleshed out, with an illustration and detailed description for each and a quote in their voice, which is always helpful for getting a referee in the headspace to run an NPC. There is a similar table for certain NPCs that make an appearance in the situations in the bar (a total of 18 NPCs). In addition, one of the NPCs sells treasures from the river and artifacts from the Keep’s museum, contingent on the goblin’s successful ransacking of the museum on day two of the Raves of Chaos. The whole thing ends with a list of 10 songs the bard in the bar might be playing. This is a lot more than your typical Barkeep bar, freed from the 2-page layout.
The Pub (Pub, duh)
By: Alexander Haworth
This pub, The Pub, is Br*tish. Specifically, it is “every British” pub and the name changes every time someone refers to The Pub’s actual name (there is a 1d20 table of potential pub names). There is a surly landlady, The Lads, double-decker red buses and classic British cuisine: jellied eels, eels and mash, etc. There is also always a ball game being projected on the wall with a mechanic for determining what goes on in the game every few turns in The Pub and, more importantly, how The Lads react to the changes in the game. The ideal use of this pub is either for non-British people to play it and laugh at how silly the people on that island are, or for British people to play it and probably laugh harder and with greater frequency.
The Rolling Bones (Pub)
By: Dr. Curious VII (Half Again as Much)
A recurring gimmick in Barkeep on the Borderlands pubs are shaped by the arcane and nonsensical laws made by the polity of the Keep. For instance the Off-Central Park is a failed conservation attempt while The Birdcage exists only because of the legal impossibility of shutting it down. There is a reason for this: obstreperous and incompetent laws increase the likelihood of player characters wanted to find some way to intervene in the Keep’s politics, either by the drama with the dying Monarch and their erstwhile Heir or through the ongoing parliamentary election that is going on during the Raves. This pub continues that theme by establishing a law that no land may be used for gambling. Thus necessitating the loophole filling paddleboat casino. A brilliant premise, and this pub executes on it well. Moreover, common advice when making something is to come up with a great premise then add one more tweak to spice it up. Another victory for this pub as it isn’t just a gambling barge, it is undead themed due to being run by an enterprising necromancer. Using a skeleton crew is a great way to skirt labor laws too. This pub also includes a d666 mechanic for playing a slot machine that I really like (and pairs well with other minigames from aforementioned entries–we basically have an entire Las Vegas going on with these entries!)
Sherrie’s Jubilee (Pub)
By: Kevin Nguyen (Nguyen Conditions)
The first thing to note here is that there is a full page illustration that is the background for the entire pub which helps to run the thing, based on the Picture Book Gameplay theory posited by my colleague, Dwiz of the Knight at the Opera blog. This pub is a 24-hour diner where you can also drink liquor. If I could’ve gotten bottomless mimosas at Waffle House in college, my GPA would’ve been a full point lower, not to mention if they had the rum flambe with chocolate ice cream that is the eponymous signature drink of this pub. There are a lot of fun situations in this pub but my favorites are the ones that lean into the 1950s vibe–the idea of pompadoured greasers fighting with knives in a medieval fantasy setting tickles me.
The Three Fine Gentlemen (Pub)
By: Benjamin Blattberg (Blackbird Games)
This pub is a former gentlemen’s club that has only gotten more debaucherous when infernal portals were opened, turning the establishment into the latest battle ground in the eternal war between devils and demons and all types of other extra planar monstrosities. This pub doesn’t have sidetracks, but you could use the sidetracks for the pub the jolly crew is coming from instead. I believe this is to make more room for its supercharged situations table, which uses a similar structure to Our Lady of the Sacred Speakeasy where you roll 2d6 and add the day of the Raves of Chaos, so some encounters only happen later during the Raves. In this instance, the final encounter, only possible on the final day, is that the law and chaos planes of evil come to claim the entire town. In addition, there is a 1d6 table to determine what the portal is spitting out at any given instant. My favorite result: a baby.
The Tilted Purse (Pub)
By: Christianserver
This is an unassuming fantasy tavern run by a family of dwarves. It is located in a market district of town and has a definite commercial motif with many of the NPCs and encounters attempting to engage characters in commerce or schemes. In fact, one of the more unusual NPCs in the tavern is a halfling sporting a top hat named Piccadilly Tim who has opened up a store of overpriced goods in the corner of the tavern. One of the drinks on the signature drinks table is named for and apparently sponsored by this halfling, perhaps in an attempt to get customers in the right state of mind to pay his exorbitant prices.
Ur-porter (Drinks)
By: PelleP (former champion of the Scandinavian homebrew beer competition!)
This is an actual recipe for a dark smoky ale that you can make in the real world (although some of the steps include instructions like cooling the drink “to blood temperature” and “SCREAM like hell into the vessel to scare away demons and evil spirits.” This drink is served in-universe at the Brutal Legion pub from Barkeep and it absolutely matches the extreme tone of that pub. In addition to the drink recipe, there is a d6 table for additional inebriating effects the ur-porter has when a character drinks it in-universe, which interacts with Barkeep’s drinking rules by having different effects depending on if the affected character is Tipsy or Drunk.
The Wood Stained Alley (Adventure [Includes 3 Pubs])
By: Austin Smith (Sage of the Bionic Castle)
While this can be used in conjunction with Barkeep on the Borderlands, it offers its own adventure scenario in the Keep where a sinister friar is attempting to open a portal to a demonic fungal realm but to do so has to get rid of a meddling mouse wizard. The location of the mouse wizard is a mystery to be solved, with several opportunities to get clues from the NPCs in the pubs. The pubs include a monastery filled with monks who worship their ale, a 6-floor bar with different drinks depending on which floor of the tower you are at, and mouse-sized bar that has a portal turning all who enter into mice temporarily. I really like the last premise and, if I were running this scenario, I would switch to using Mausritter characters while in that bar. I love the idea of reflecting fundamental shifts in reality by changing systems, and there is no better way to reflect being a little mouse adventurer than playing the premiere little mouse adventure game.
Thank you to everyone who entered the Jam! I hope writing your entries were as fun for you as reading them were for me.
