Infinite Taverns (A Note on Craft)
On June 22nd, 1835, Nathaniel Hawthorne — future author of The Scarlet Letter — wrote the following in his American Notebooks:
Crossing the ferry into Boston, we went to the City Tavern, where the bar-room presented a Sabbath scene of repose,—stage-folk lounging in chairs half asleep, smoking cigars, generally with clean linen and other niceties of apparel, to mark the day. The doors and blinds of an oyster and refreshment shop across the street were closed, but I saw people enter it. There were two owls in a back court, visible through a window of the bar-room,—speckled gray, with dark-blue eyes,—the queerest-looking birds that exist,—so solemn and wise,—dozing away the day, much like the rest of the people, only that they looked wiser than any others. Their hooked beaks looked like hooked noses. A dull scene this. A stranger, here and there, poring over a newspaper. Many of the stage-folk sitting in chairs on the pavement, in front of the door.
A scene like this in a D&D campaign is a great reminder that nothing is in motion yet. Something could happen. And — for the game’s purposes, assuming we are looking on this as a game — that’s often enough. The curtain has lifted, and we are watching actors wander out onto the figurative stage. The players can explore the stage and figure out how to play/give voice to their characters, tuning up the figurative instrument and strumming a few practice chords without having to worry too much about what their choices might mean.
What do the particularities of a scene like this give you as the DM — that is, as the person summoning the story to life, inviting your friends in, and doing your best to shepherd it along until people have to pee? You could look at “stage-folk lounging in chairs half asleep, smoking cigars,” and decide that there is a famous actor with a lit cigar in his mouth sitting upright and asleep at a table, the cigar slowly falling from his mouth, and — when it drops, perhaps landing on his leg, perhaps landing in his food, maybe right smack in the yellow center of an egg — he will start awake and blame one of the players for causing such a thing to happen.
We could look at a line like, “The doors and blinds of an oyster and refreshment shop across the street were closed, but I saw people enter it,” and ask ourselves what is going on across the way. What sort of meeting might be taking place? Is it directly related to oysters, or is there a broader conspiracy at play? If it’s the latter, then we can ask ourselves: how large do we want to make this conspiracy? Is it something of a silly one, one that involves oysters? (“No one will think to look for Mrs. Shamblee’s pearl earrings in here, boys.”) Is it something larger, one that involves an as-yet-to-be-defined political situation in the city? Or is it an even larger conspiracy, something that reaches well beyond the city, and aren’t the players fortunate to be right across the street from something like this?
And who (sorry) are the “two owls in a back court, visible through a window of the bar-room?” Shall we allow them to simply be passing birds? Are they patrons of a brother and sister warlock duo who are having a meal and/or a drink in the bar? If that’s the case, the question then becomes: what does it mean for siblings to pledge themselves to/ask for (and receive) magic from a pair of owls? What happened in the night that led them to these birds?
We could use one of these lines to begin to build our scene in the tavern. We could take all of these lines to begin to build our scene in the tavern. We could play the sleeping actor as a kind-hearted man and the owl twins as villains. We could take another tack altogether.
A tavern simultaneously provides ‘easy depth’ and a chance for players to begin to exercise their agency in the context of an emerging story.
We should also say here that there is no guarantee that players would be interested in any of what was outlined above. Maybe they’re done with taverns. Maybe their interest is in leaving a tavern as quickly as possible.
That’s fine. Prepare what you need to prepare as a person running a game. Be ready to think on your feet.
How should one prepare themselves to think on their feet? You could practice your skills of ‘Yes, and’-ing your players — of meeting their world-building efforts where they are and going from there, which is a perfectly valid position to take, or you could consider the following excerpt from the beginning of Campaign 2 of Critical Role —
MATT MERCER: As Caleb finishes oversharing.
LIAM O’BRIEN: Vaxleth is over. It's so over!
MARISHA RAY: Those are old times, man. That was a different universe. Different life.
MATT MERCER: At this point, there is a bit of a commotion towards the entrance of the tavern. Two shadows step into the doorway of the nearish-noonday sun. The figures, one eclipsing the other from behind, begin to step in. You notice one of them begins to step from table to table, glancing about with a sort of grace to the movement, the other staying a few feet behind. Taliesin, if you'd like to describe your character, please. (Critical Role: Campaign 2, Episode 1, “Curious Beginnings.”)
One of my sins as a Dungeon Master/Game Master is that I can sometimes slide into the Joycean notion whereby “[t]he artist, like the god of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” If I’m not in the game as a DMPC — that is, a DM Player Character, a self-insert; in this case, as the literal captain of a pirate ship named Garrick — then I am not there. Instead, I am the WereBear on Garrick’s ship who doesn’t realize he’s a terrible cook. I am the garrulous, loquacious Penelope, the white-haired mother of a corrupt Victorian-era London police officer who rides the rushing river of her own conversation through life, sweeping up everyone and everything in her path. I am Little Widget, the unnervingly mischievous, soft-spoken houseless Victorian youth who helps run a small army of vagrant youth under the watchful eye of a changeling Fagan-like figure. I am the Tre-Ent named Blueberry who has fused himself to the deck of Garrick’s pirate ship and befriended a Loxodon right-hand man of a lesser-known deity. But I’m regularly not myself enough in these situations — life has mess! Why not give my players a corresponding poetic bramble? — that I have noticed.
That absence of self means that the players are free to do whatever they want, however they want, distractedly rummaging through the story and world like it’s a great big drawer filled with trinkets and curios that are only worth noting for their ability to launch their next flight of fancy. That can be fun — and it can work if your players are capable of self-directing the story — but not even the best of players are immune to game-breaking nonsense; of letting fireworks fizzle into dust, and what happens then?
I bring this up not to flag the way Matt Mercer sets up Taliesin Jaffee introducing the character of Mollymauk, but because there were vast stretches of my own second major home campaign where — in a self-conscious contrast to the first campaign I ran — I made a point of avoiding phrases like, ‘At this point.’ I wanted to step back and leave my players with the feeling that what was happening around them was really happening around them, and that they were supported by the reality of the situation — that is, my work — regardless of whether or not they were making smart decisions, chaotic decisions, or no decision at all.
But phrases like, ‘At this point’ are wonderfully subtle rhetorical markers of control. And it’s just as welcome an example of thinking on your feet as is overtly adapting to meet your players where they are.
And, of course, it’s worth flagging that this moment happens in a tavern, The Nestled Nook.
MATT MERCER: The air is already bustling with townsfolk and all manner of travelers preparing to take on the day’s responsibilities. Yorda, the 40-something barkeep with shoulder-length blonde hair and weathered skin who you had previously rented the room at the inn from, frantically darts behind the bar while the red-headed barmaid rushes from table to table. It seems that the clientele is a bit more than they were expecting this morning. Yorda yells from behind the bar to the barkeep, “Adelaine, two more brats and a bit of mush at the corner table.” She looks up, “I'm working on it!” And she runs over and heads back to the kitchen. There's a faint bit of music as two slovenly-looking musicians in the corner are trying to work for tips with a small hat on the floor that it looks like nobody's thrown any coin into it. The tables are fairly busy, except for maybe two that appear to be available between the two of you guys, if you'd like to find a seat.
Compare this sketch of the tavern with what Nathanial Hawthorne offered up. Note how comparatively broader the word choices are here — ‘all manner of travelers,’ ‘frantically darts,’ ‘It seems,’ ‘The air is already bustling’ (‘How can an air bustle,’ a grouchy pedant might say), and ‘The tables are fairly busy’ (‘What’ve these tables been up to then,’ the humorless pedant might continue.)
Note, too, the bifurcated audience of these remarks — the players at the table and the audience at home. The players are receiving a frame with one or two clear strokes of paint (“the 40-something barkeep,” “slovenly-looking musicians”), but they are also being invited to fill the frame in as well (“if you’d like to find a seat,” “It seems that the clientele …,” “ … nobody’s thrown any coin into it …”) The audience is given something relatively clear. Together, everyone is walked up to the edge of polyphony and asked how they would like to jump.