Tavern Thursday: The Rootway (Patreon)

Each Thursday (or, you know, sometimes the next Sunday) I do a quick sketch of a new fantasy tavern as a paying-members-exclusive post. Each post includes an illustration and just enough tavern details for a GM to drop it in their game wherever they need a place for adventures to gather and quest to start.

The Rootway

Appearance: The rootway is a towering, twisted length of dark plant matter spiraling off into Astral space, with branches that reach out to the Shadow, Ethereal, Elemental, and Paraelemental planes, as well as dimensions and pocket dimension such as time, history, and even the demiplane of Chess.

Strange energies flow just under the rocklike bark of the rootway, often shifting and flickering with various colors. Near the base is a doorway glowing with the bright, cheerful light of a lively gathering.

(Art by Asanee)

Origin: The Rootway is a cutting of Yggdrasil, the World Tree that passes through all dimensions. It was taken by a group of planar travelers wishing to create their own private path bridge to all realities. Their hubris angered many gods, who sent agents to destroy the travelers, whose very existence was erased from history. However the cutting itself, part of a divine multidimensional entity, was deemed too important to destroy... and too dangerous to damage. Centuries later, a shaman was cast into the Void, and was found by the desperately alone divine cutting. The shaman became the guardian of the Rootway, and to keep it from being lonely, he turned it into a planar tavern and inn.

Owner: Thought the rootway rarely gets involved in the day-to-day affairs of the travels, service, and hospitality offered within it, it is sapient and sentient, and owns itself. It selects it's own innkeeper, chef, and serving staff, often reaching through the veils and layers of reality to rescuing them from moment of total misery or suffering. None are forces to stay, but having a divine planar plant care for you is something nearly all its invited staff find too tempting to give up.

Food: The Rootway stretches through all realities, and deep into every time and place. It's offerings are varied and not limited by any one culture or technology level. It's most popular offerings are tacos, sushi, lasagna, and pizza.

Drink: Like its food offerings, the Rootways beverage options are vast and every-chanfing. Currently it's biggest sellers are Kho-Ka-Kho-La (sometimes mixed with a drop of milk or blood, as requested , and Mount Tandhu.

Lodging: As a divine plant stretching through corners and nooks of all reality, the rootway has unlimited lodgings available, always at extremely cheap prices for those who it likes, and at no price for anyone the Rootway itself mistrusts. While its furnishings are variable and varying, its interior rooms are always wooden (walls, floor and ceiling), well-appointed, and often have telescopes to allow views out glowing windows into the depths of various transitive planes.

Stabling: While the Rootway does not have separate stables, the staff think nothing of giving horses, griffons, gelatinous cubes with saddles or any other mount their own rooms with appropriate food and bedding.

Clientele: The most common clientele of the Rootway are planar travelers who lack the power to teleport direct to their end destination, or planar entites wishing to meet on neutral ground. While that is a tiny percentage of the entities in the cosmos, the fact that the Rootway reaches at least a slim tendril into every reality means it's a tiny sliver of a (at least potentially) infinite number.

Sometimes the main room has almost exclusively humanoid adventurers, preparing to strike out on multiversal journeys. Other times, there may be a devil and a demon on a date in one corner, a series of planar machines going over how to split up and fix the cogs of existence in anther,. a group of fire elementals selling primal fire to steamsmiths in the balcony, a line of a depressed angel, a drunk god, a enlightened entity, and a hyperintelligent shade of blue at the bar, and a loud green con man with a very worried-looking human wizard apprentice at a table.

Rumor: The Duchess of Agonies, goddess-mayor of Surbek-Kak-Delbaz the Bridge City of All Places, is coming for a visit. No one knows why but everyone, even the Rootway itself, is nervous about it.

Adventure Seed: There are termites in the Rootway. The staff is in a panic. The Rootway has begin sending tendrils not to where mighty champions or archmages are, but to the lands near simply, common folk who happen to know how to get rid of termites.