#RPGaDay2025 - Day 3 - Tavern

Day 3 of #RPGaDay2025 and the prompt is TAVERN.

The iconic session one line that's been said my almost every gamemaster,  "All of of you are in a tavern (inn/bar/cantina)."  It's a meeting place, a rumor mill, a restaurant, a home base of operation.  

For a lot of folks my age, the first fully fleshed out tavern/inn was the Inn of the Welcome Wench from T1: Village of Hommlet (T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil for me...)   

When I designed my own village for my own world, I didn't rip off  or get inspired by the Welcome Wench, I simply changed the name to the Blue Wizard Inn, and it served as the main watering hole for the vast majority of multiple campaigns. From the Blue Wizard to my group's "Keg Rule."

When my last AD&D campaign ended (and the burnt down Blue Wizard was rebuilt and sold as The Green Griffon to a child of a retired magic-user), it did not mean that inns/taverns weren't useful to the new 21st Century gaming mentality.  

As we transitioned the game world to Hackmaster, we discovered one of the greatest tools was the collected random results on the Hackmaster GameMaster's Shield.  (See this article on the Kenzer & Company site for a few more details).

Under the City/NPC flap was a Tavern Name Generator that I used religiously as my Burning Trogs visited a town after town. . 

That chart was simply three random rolls to generate a different name. (ex. Alcor's Fighting Lion Tavern)  The only problem was no matter what my first two rolls were, the third result was always "Keg."  It came to the point, that when the Burning Trogs formally established their charter as an adventuring company, they put in a clause that if they travelled by group, they must stay at an Inn/Tavern with the word Keg in it, no matter what.  

Lucky for them, most of the "Keg" establishments were in lower-middle-class neighborhoods, their kind of people.    However, there are a vast swath of these named establishment well across the continent.  Even our BECMI D&D Adventures in Gulluvia campaign has kept with the tradition, with Ye Olde Stomped White Keg being a fine establishment when the party visited Gulluvia City.

If we ever restart the Hackmaster game, there's a good chance one of the characters will set up their own Keg, or a variant of it.  Franchising perhaps?