The Plot Hook Tavern - everybody's invited!

[ravells]

I hope you are all game for a laugh

Consider the hard-working DM who has taken weeks to craft his adventure which starts...predictably in a Tavern. Being the type of DM who doesn't want to railroad his players too much he has a number of locations which he would like the players to visit (whether voluntarily or not) immediately after they finish in the tavern. These locations are:

• A graveyard
• A spooky wood
• A dragon's lair
• A magician's tower

The adventure is a disaster. The players spend the night gambling at dice, and losing everything: their money, their weapons, their armour and finally their clothes. The evening's gaming ends when the players start a fight and end the night in the local lock-up. The frustrated DM stops the adventure and tells his players that he will be re-running it again. He comes to us for help. He needs a tavern where every person, object and location is a plot hook to get his wayward players to one of the 4 locations listed above.

Here is where I need your help. I'll start with a simple blank floor plan of the tavern and its immediate surroundings. Please pitch in with as many ideas about objects / locations / people - anything! That should go into the tavern map which can act as a plot hook to get the errant players where they should be going (the more humorous the better!). Just so you know, the way (I think - but please suggest) we can best present this is the map on one page with the objects / locations etc numbered, and another page with a legend describing how each location / object / person hooks the party so they HAVE to go to one of the four locations.

Fire away with your ideas and I'll put as many of them in as I can. For the first stage, can I have ideas about:

• Rooms the tavern should have
• Anything outside the tavern (e.g. well, stables, outdoor loo)
• A good name for the Tavern. (The Plot Hook Tavern is just a temp name).

When you give your idea about the object / person / location etc, it would be really helpful if you could do it in the following format:

Object: Beer Keg 'Old Zombie'
Description: Drinking a pint of Old Zombie: If player rolls a 6 on a 1D6, he immediately rises from the table and heads to the graveyard, chanting the word 'brains'. Roll again for each pint drunk with a +1 modifier.

Please try to keep your description as brief as possible (I may edit for brevity / consistency).
If you want to post a .png of the object / person etc that would be fab as I can just drop it into the map (grayscale / .png format please).

I reckon at the end of this we'll end up with two maps, one without annotations as a player handout and one with for the DM.

Given the number of people (whom I hope) will contribute to the project, it would be unfair if this misbegotten child of a hundred parents should be put up for the vote, so this one is just for fun.

Looking forward to seeing your ideas! I'll give it a couple of days and once I have your ideas for rooms etc, will post a blank plan of the tavern and then we can start populating it with people and objects (although by all means start posting your ideas on people / objects etc as soon as you like).

best

Ravs