Taverns & Inns
Taverns are the quintessential adventurer rest stop. Taverns not only serve alcohol and meals, but also act a place to socialise. Inns are much the same, but additionally provide lodging to travellers. Rooms are rented on a day-to-day basis with a single meal included.
See Food, Drink, and Lodging under Equipment in the SRD for more price listings.
A Booze Up
After a long day adventuring, nothing beats a drink at the local tavern or inn.
Drinks available by race
The kind of booze you'll find varies from race to race. Taverns in larger towns or on important trade routes are likely to have some (more expensive) foreign alcohol available.
- Dragonborn - Firewater (a potato spirit similar to vodka)
- Dwarf - Lots of variations of beers, including ales, bitters and lagers. Whisky.
- Elf - Fruit Brandies, Meads and Wines.
- Gnome - Meads, Nut Liqueurs, Bounce (a fruit-flavoured sugar water mixed with hooch,) Tea-hooch (a concentrated tea-infusion mixed with hooch)
- Halfling and Human - Various Beers, Liqueurs, Meads, Spirits and Wines.
- Kobold - Fungobeer (a particularly vile mushroom-based fermentation)
- Orc - Scrumpy (a near-cider made with apple-cores)
- Otterfolk - Beer and Absinthe (a spirit derived from wormwood)
Getting drunk
If a player gets in to combat or attempts a tricky skill after having one too many drinks, you might want to test if they are drunk. The player rolls a constitution save (example DCs below) if they fail they gain the poisoned condition for 3 hours.
| Subject's drunkness | Target DC |
|---|---|
| I should have stopped one drink ago | 12 |
| I'm really drunk | 13 |
| I'm not drunk, you're drunk | 14 |
| You're my best friend (sobs) | 15 |
| (Incoherent noises) | 16 |
Playing Games
Taverns are not just a place to drink, they also serve as a community gathering space. Somewhere to meet your friends and pass some time. Naturally part of that is playing games. In the evening the locals will gather and play a round of cards, or some darts, or whatever the local popular game is. (See Gaming Sets in the Player's Guide for a list of games played in Ataland.)
Betting
Where there's people playing games, there's people taking bets. Card games are a favourite for this, but people will bet on almost anything. Players shouldn't be able to win a life-changing amount of money. People normally only bet what they can afford to lose and in most taverns that isn't very much.
Serious Business
Looking For Information
If local information is what you are looking for, taverns are a great place to start an investigation. If someone doesn't know the information you seek, they probably know somebody who knows somebody that does. In most situations all this costs the characters is some persuasion checks and a few rounds of drinks.
One thing many players fail to consider is that if the patrons are willing to give this information to you, they'd give away information about you to the next person. Players may be unknowingly giving away their own plan while learning about somebody else's.
Criminal Contacts
Those that want to hire mercenaries with criminal intent can hardly go to the adventurer's guild. Some criminal groups will do business in a local tavern. Still most of these groups are rightly paranoid about being approached by outsiders and it may be difficult to gain their trust. A character with the outlaw background would be ideal.
Looking For Work
Avoid the stranger-giving-out-missions-in-the-tavern trope. Not just because it's overdone, but because it doesn't make much sense. Locals looking for the help of adventurers are going to use the Adventurer's Guild, a more reliable option than a bloke they met at the pub. That said, there is work to be found in taverns: Odd Jobs.
Many inns will exchange room and board (and maybe even drinks if you are lucky) in exchange for helping with odd jobs. Characters with the apprentice background can do this automatically with their Odd Jobs feature.
If the characters do not have the Odd Jobs feature, it should be not be trivial to complete the required job. Characters should be asked to make skill checks applicable to the task at hand. If they fail, then this inn will be unlikely to hire them again.