QQ&A: Spicing up the tavern meeting
A question came in from my first-ever Dungeon Master:
How do you spice up the first “you meet in a tavern” encounter?
Now, there are plenty of guides out there for how to eliminate the tavern part of those encounters. They’ll tell you the taverns are boring, so have them meet as slaves in a galley, in a battlefront hospital or in the afterlife.
Since those exist and are plentiful, I won’t add my own list of ways to begin a campaign.
Instead, I’ll take the question literally and assume they are meeting in a tavern.
How do you make that more interesting?
Avoid the clichés
You know the clichés.
Things like each member of the party received a mysterious letter summoning them to the tavern.
Or there’s a known quest-delivery mechanism (a notice board, a wise old man with a mysterious past who drinks alone in the corner).
These work well. Each requires the PCs to have agency, plus it gives them a reason to work together. Both are essential for a great campaign. Passive and solitary PCs are no fun for anyone.
But we’re here to spice this up, so toss out the clichés.
While you’re tossing things, if you want to really spice it up, toss out the quest-giver. Have them be strangers in a tavern when something happens - something they have to react to. A barbarian horde is on its way. They can go fight it or go get help.
But even that’s not all that original. We’re talking about spice here, so let’s add some chili.
Avoid the icebreaker
Another fine feature of the first meeting is everyone going around the table, introducing their character to the others.
Like I say, it’s fine, but we’re after more.
One option: have each player create rumours about their character. The others start off having heard some of these.
Another option: you, as the GM, create the rumours. You’ll have their sheet and their backstory, so you can come up with all sorts of true, plausible and plausible-people-would-say-this-about-them rumours.
The problem with the rollcall is it’s boring. One character hogs the spotlight while everyone else regresses to high school. So rather than meeting all at once, give the players a reason to meet up in pairs. Let them get to know each other through conversation, while sharing the spotlight.
The other players can learn about these characters too, even if their characters aren’t there.
Spice up the tavern
Why not make the tavern interesting? If you’re clever about it, it can be part of why they all decided to go there.
Is the bartender an adult gold dragon who likes to chat with smallfolk? Is it suspended over a deep chasm? Do ghosts patrol its walls?
It could be the tavern is dangerous to reach, for whatever reason. What if you flip the script and have the characters meet, work together, and then reach the tavern?
Smart business owners play to their uniqueness. What’s different about this tavern from all the others? And why is that important?
Spice up the meeting
What’s a twist you can throw into the meeting?
Maybe the invites were a trap, sent by the royal guard to arrest troublemakers like the party.
Maybe the invites were a trap, sent by sentient mimics.
They could be a magical contract somehow, so now the adventure is about getting out of it.
Is it all actually a dream? The party meets in the tavern, then wake up, then have to meet in real life…
The key thing is to play around with it. What are the tropes of the tavern meeting? Which should you keep, like giving the PCs a reason to adventure together? Which can you remove or invert?
If you enjoy this sort of creativity, you’ll love Footprints. It’s a handy guide for any GM who likes to think about how their setting actually works.
It’s great if you have players who like to think their way through (or around) tough encounters.
You can find it here: