Escaped gaming meme

[mithriltabby]

One of my more successful memes; I was delighted when I found this idea was turning up in the campaigns of other game masters at UCSB after I introduced it.

Back when I first started as a game master at the UCSB Gaming Club, I gave some thought to the impact of adventurers on a medieval world, and worked on making the world internally consistent.

One of the things that players would encounter in my chunk of the world was a chain of inns named the Sword and Pentacle— not because there was an actual franchise, but because someone had found it was a good idea to have one like it in every city. They were all named the same thing because people deemed it a good idea to make it really, really easy for adventurers to find their way there.

The idea behind the Sword and Pentacle is that adventurers are trouble, but they’ve usually got a lot of gold to spend. No one wants adventurers in their tavern because there’s a strong tendency of the place to get busted up, flattened, attacked by monsters, and so on. So a very wise city councilman created a special, heavily fortified inn that catered to the paranoid, but charged the same prices as other inns in town. The other inns had to pay an initial tax to subsidize this, but it was considerably cheaper than hiring enough guardsmen to keep the peace when high level adventurers made trouble. As business picked up, the tax on the other local institutions dropped as the premium services provided to adventurers provided more profits.

The player’s-eye-view of this was that when the party came into town, the guard would take one look at them— any group that registered as “unusually diverse and/or exotic” would qualify— and inform them: “You’ll be wanting to stay at the Sword and Pentacle. They cater to your lot.”

The Sword and Pentacle is an inn with at least one wing of heavily fortified guest rooms suitable for providing comfort to the extremely paranoid: heavy metal-studded oak doors that could be locked and barred, similarly durable window shutters that would keep out night marauders but provide an escape route, nightingale floors and other such alarm mechanisms, and many rooms set up in suites so a party could sleep in shifts while keeping guard against whoever might attack them in an inn. (Cheaper guest rooms, with normal inn rates, were also available for beginning adventurers, but they didn’t have the premium security features.)

Next to the front door is a grisly display: several spears, weathered skulls impaled along their lengths, each one labeled with a profession like “thief” and “wizard”, and an overall label explaining: They made trouble. It becomes more clear when the adventurer enters and finds a host or hostess asking: “Do you want brawling or non-brawling?” I always made a point of describing the various employees as ready for trouble: “The barmaid looks like a sixteen year old girl, with a leather bandolier of throwing daggers draped across her shoulder like a sash. You think that bodice may be armored.”

The brawling room has furniture that’s either incredibly tough and heavy or incredibly light and cheap (wicker, rattan). The bar actually has a grid of iron bars in front of it to block thrown objects. A sign in numerous different languages informs anyone walking in that the customers are free to brawl and battle in there as long as they don’t endanger the employees, and that they’ll be billed for anything they break; the local constabulary will ignore anything that happens there among adventurers.

The non-brawling room is elegant, quiet, and tasteful. It also has a policy statement: if anyone starts a fight or attempts theft or assassination, a very generous reward will be divided with 50% to the person who deals the death blow and the other 50% apportioned equally amongst all those who scored at least one hit, and the town guard won’t care as long as no citizens took harm. This, it is clear, is where the skulls outside came from. The reward is in a transparent jar (probably tougher than normal glass) that accumulates a small fraction of the take in the non-brawling room each night, and is glittering with expensive coinage when I first describe it to the players.

None of my players ever did more than glance in the brawling section, and no one ever started a fight in the non-brawling section. I’ve heard that these things have happened in other gaming worlds that adopted the Sword and Pentacle, though...

Comments

[wicketbird.livejournal.com]

This is a very cool idea! If we ever find time to get back to gaming (like *after* I get my Vet Tech degree) I will definitely keep it in mind...
-Mary (hatching plots to save...)

[cmccurry.livejournal.com]

I can see this applying to the Shadowrun universe quite easily.

[mithriltabby]

The trick is finding a place where it’d be consistent with the local laws. In the Redmond Barrens, it’s anarchic enough to have a place like that, but there’s no background level of sensible businessmen who’d want such a place in order to concentrate shadowrunners away from their place of business. I should do a meme release on some of my better shadowrunning hangouts for contrast, like 32767 Flavors and Okeefenokee.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Wow! I like!

This is perfect for handling those restive PCs. And it reminds me a bit of the Traveller's Aide Society hostels from the Traveller RPG. It also has shades of a salooon in the old west- appropriate since most fantasy games resemble westerns more then anything else.
A few comments:

I can definitely see some PCs trying to game the "no brawl" system, either to steal the jar, or to fake a brawl and a death. That should result in all sorts of fun hijinks.

The heavily armored rooms can be for the safety of the other patrons as well as the people who have rason to fear- after all, when the assassins come for the Disguised Prince of Whateveria, people won't want to be caught in the crossfire.

The high security rooms are also likely to make PCs nervous. I like that. It also occurs to me this inn would probably be on the outskirts of town, or in a walled city, outside the walls. After all, who would want to live next to a Maximum Security Hotel?

On the other hand, depending on the size of the town there may also be some specialized shops that take the risk of being next to or part of the Inn- say, armorer, provisioner, and herbalist. As the local service industry expands, they may also get a laundry, hostler, etc. There may even be a job board for people who want to hire the sort of dangerous lunatics that would patronize the inn. From the town POV this is a good thing as it would reduce the amount of contact with dangerous outsiders.

The nightingale floors are also potential fun- especially since paranoid and touchy PCs tend to room together. I can see it now...
*squeek* *squeek* *squeek*
BOOOOOM!
"Damn it, I was just going to the bathroom!"

OK, never mind a game about standard adventurers, I want to do a game where the PCs RUN this inn. There could be all sorts of fun things get players involved with that are rarely seen in an RPG, and the income/expenses aspect would bring up entirely different issues- like, how much hazard pay do you pay a waitress anyway?

I SO want to see this as a D20 sourcebook.

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

Blues Bros. bandmember: "Chicken wire?"

Fun idea. Considering the rough and ready nature of the place, worlds with these inns would have "barmaid" as an actual character class. This also reminds me of the UCSB gaming joke about the inn with octagonal rooms, so that all the paranoid party members could sleep in the corner with their back to the wall.