Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Inns and Outs


I’ve been playing D&D (in one iteration or another) for nearly 25 years and one of my favorite things is designing inns. “Inns, you say?” Yes, as cliché as it may sound, inns almost always end up being the hub of my PCs illustrious adventures. Of course, the inns in my games run the gamut from being just a place for the PCs to hang their hats in between dungeon crawls to being the center of my city-based campaigns, and everything in between.

Recently, I’ve undertaken a project that’s been bouncing around inside my head for a loooong time. I’m putting together a collection of tables to create some colorful randomly generated inns. The tables will provide randomly generated names (from the silly to the sublime), to prominent NPCs (like that innkeeper who is really a wererat running a thieves guild), to unique features (like a series of subterranean prison cells beneath the cellar where unsuspecting drunks are waylayed and sold into slavery), to...well, a ton of other things.

I hope to post some things in the near future for your perusal and would greatly appreciate your feedback as to if you think such a project would be at all useful in your campaigns, things you’d like to see included (or excluded), etc.

2 comments:

  1. That sounds like a lot of fun. I used to have a chart for inns that would generate the house specials: a beverage, a meal and the local entertainment. The players seemed to dig on that. Lost the darn thing, though.

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  2. Jeff,

    Thanks for taking the time to post! yes, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm planning on doing. In fact, specialties of the house are an entire table I'm putting together (inspired by Otik's Spiced Fried Potatoes from the Inn of the Last Home on Krynn). Beverages and entertainment will also have their own tables as well. It's a doozy of a project but it's been fun. I don't know if anyone else will find it useful, or even remotely helpful,but it's been fun creating nonetheless!

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