Dive bars…always with the dive bars…

It’s my basic gaming staple. Bars. Usually divey ones.

Whether it’s D&D (ok, those are “inns” and “taverns”), my futuristic Champions setting, Star Wars, or Call of Cthulhu, I always play the dive bar card. I’m not sure I ever did it with post apocalypse stuff like Gamma World, but if you ever saw Book of Eli with Denzel Washington, then you know those are great places for encounters/fights as well. I know from firsthand experience, because in the 90’s, especially when I was into darts for extended periods, I spent a decent amount of time in them.

It’s my go-to setting, because I can always get characters to spend time there. Often an entire session if I want. Have an interesting guy behind the bar, some mixed-economy patrons (there are always “yuppie” types who like to go slumming at dive bars), some ladies of ill-repute, some informer types, low-level criminals, and you have a nice mix of NPC’s to play with. Have a table or two with some open gambling, and frost the cake with fist-fight betting (cage matches or otherwise) and you got yourself a good time.

Players can chat to a lady of choice, get in on the gambling, or if they are the rugged type get involved in some nice punch-up play for fun and profit. My current group really loves my bar settings, and what was maybe going to be a very brief encounter often turns into the better part of the night.

Case in point: In the last Call of Cthulhu game, the characters needed to go to a lowbrow Hudson Bay dockside bar to find a guy who could lead them to a Ghost Town in the New Jersey Pine Barrens they needed to investigate. So after dealing with an attack from multiple byakhees (they have been stalked by a Chinese Business man since NYE who can summon them with an ancient whistle), they went into the bar for the usual bar fun.

Of course there was some fist fighting going on. It didn’t seem like any characters were going to get involved in it this time, until the young Turkish antique dealer grabbed Wing Kong, the young Chinese cook/martial artist, by the arm and sort of forced him into it. She is a brash young Turk, that girl is. Anyway, in the ring against “Slippery Pete,” Wing, who’s English is not so good, just dodged around confused while the guy threw punches. Wing Kong is the best HTH fighter in the group, and it was refreshing to me that he didn’t want to fight unnecessarily. But Andy’s old business man/’semi-hobo Michael (sort of an aged Clint Eastwood type) got up on the small dais and pushed Wing out of the way to take on Pete himself. After a devastating head butt and a good right hook from Pete, poor Michael was laid flat on the ground (this seems to happen pretty much every game to the poor old guy). Wing did not like that, and he got up to give Pete a thrashing with his five fingers of death (our young female Turk even tried to get a punch in). By the end of the evening, a group of international sailors were buying Wing drinks, and even Slippery Pete, black eyed and bruised, joined the characters at the bar.

I didn’t intend for the group to spend the better part of the game there, but these dive bar encounters just seem to have a mind of their own.

We have almost an hour left of the game, so we did manage to get them to the Pine Barrens, and a little bit of investigation into the presence of some Tcho Tcho people there. More on that, and a Mythos deity, next game.

The elusive all-Tavern game

All DM’s rely heavily on the inns and taverns of their world. These are iconic places where, whether it is in-game time or in-between game time, characters ultimately spend more of their life in these places than anywhere else.

If I had to guess, I’d say that 3 out of 4 of my campaigns from around 1978-1990 began with a bunch of characters who didn’t know each other (actually, I had a habit of having at least a couple of PC’s meet on the road to the tavern, just so there is some role-play back n’ forth right off the bat) hanging out in the boozer when some wizard/cleric/nobleman tripped in with a hammer, nail, and poster advertising for a group of stalwarts to go crawling into the local dungeon jobber for one reason or another.

While these public houses are great places to get adventuring gigs, info, and entertainment, they rarely take up large amounts of actual play time. They are usually just places that keep characters from having to hang out in the street or market squares in between dungeon delves. If things are going slow in the game and the characters are listlessly mooning around the beer hall, you can always have a gang of rakish rogues or barbarians march in as fist-fodder to pass some time. Doesn’t matter if it is some fancy uptown establishment, or some half-orc shit hole, a nice dust-up always gets the juices flowing. I almost can never resist creating a bar fight (it doesn’t help that in my younger, more aggro days I got involved in more than a couple of fights at dive bars here in Venice Beach and other places).

I always wanted to run an entire game set in a tavern. Characters drinking, brawling, wenching, gambling, etc. Recently I played a video game called Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and in your first levels you are hanging out at an Inn that is haunted by an elvish girl’s ghost, who sings a melancholy tune as you drink your ale and chat to the locals. Eventually you get a job clearing out the rats from the basements, and then deeper below where undead stalk around in the catacombs beneath the establishment. It’s great fun and easy to pull off in a low level game, but it doesn’t really count as a “Tavern Game.”

What I always wanted to see was characters mostly taking it easy, having fun on their time off. Play some cards or dice, chat to the lassies, have a brawl or two. An entire game of just hanging out. But in the past it doesn’t seem to take long for players to get antsy about moving on to big fights and big treasure. I mean, you cannot just force them to play out their roles in a tavern for several hours. A lot of it just seems to depend on their mood. If they have been involved in a lot of violent, life or death combat, it seems to make it easier to get them to take it easy and do some character-developing role-play.

So finally in the last game it just sort of happened. The party is still in a large town on the souther frontier. Having just fought wererats and a gnomish automaton below the town, and an alleyway encounter with the drow party from the previous games, the players decided they wanted to hit the big dive bar for a bit of a rest from the mayhem. So we started the game with them traipsing off to Silvio’s.

I’ve used Silvio’s in games of years past. Formerly a violent den of scum and villainy where a party once attacked it to rescues a child held hostage by gangsters, the place was now run by Silvio’s son, who has made attempts to clean the place up a tad. No longer involved in rackets and gangs, Silvio Jr. just wants to make legit money. So the Tavern now had better booze and food, fair card and dice games (and rat roulette), a small stage for bards, and a cage fighting hall downstairs in the basement.

It was the time of the spring festival, and lots of things were happening in town, but the players seemed content to have their characters relax for a bit. I didn’t mind, I just want the players to have fun and sandbox their own evening. So they decided to spend it at Silvio’s (probably prompted and enticed by a flyer I printed out and had a street kid distributing in the game).

Helena the fighter-girl settled down with some rat roulette, while Ormac the gnome and Dell the elvish monk rattled some dice. After jamming with the house musicians a bit, Vaidno the bard picked up on a dark-haired, doe-eyed serving wench who was sending him smiles. But it wasn’t just quiet gambling: Krysantha the female drow fighter/druid with the double scimitars went down to watch the cage fights, and after seeing the mountain of a man “Creature” whipping ass on all takers, she decided to volunteer to take to the cage. All the other characters came down to watch, and hefty bets where laid on Krysantha. With wooden swords Krysantha and Creature wailed on one another, until finally the big man went down like a sack of bricks. Krysantha took on a couple of more fights before striding out of the cage to collect her winnings.

Other characters were waiting in the wings to assist, like the corner handlers in a boxing match . So even though only one character battled, the other PC’s got to be involved, and some went around making bets. Everyone made money. Betting on herself, Krysantha made a few hundred gold pieces.

Helena was the funniest: the young fighter sat herself down at the rat roulette table, and spent a good chunk of the evening making small, one gold piece bets on the rolls. She was so excited to finally get the right rat, and get 3 gold in winnings (after losing around 6). This is a character who had adventured a bit, and had previously earned hundreds. Ah well, maybe she was just happy to make a little cash without having to steal or kill for it.

OK, my Wednesday night games are only around three hours long. I never could have stretched this encounter out to one of my old 6 hour weekend games. Or could I have?

Anyway, that was fun, and the players all want to go back there for an evening before leaving town. I hope this really fun game where not much happened wasn’t a lucky fluke.