Tavern Thursday: Neon Complex - Part Two (of Three) (Patreon)

Each Thursday 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 last Tavern Thursday, based on a member request, was a cyber-fantasy tavern rather than feudal fantasy. It's future cyberpunk, but also a world with technomancers, mystics, street samurai, deckers, and both semi-real planes accessed through a info-matrix and spirit realms that require spells or talismans to reach. Presenting the Neon Complex's base set up took so much space that it became a rare multi-part Thursday Tavern, with Part 1  two weeks, ago, Part 2 today (to make up for missing last Thursday), and Part 3 wrapping it up THIS Thursday.

I'll try not to tackle such oversized, complex subjects n the future... unless my paying customers prefer these longer entries, even if they have to be spread out over multiple weeks? Leave a comment and let me know!

has the general description of the Neon Complex, and the entries for it's appearance, origin, and owner.

Food 

Neon Club N: The different sections of Neon Club N have different food options. The Club and Cyber Cafe have only typical cheap bar snacks -- salty protein nuggets that look and taste vaguely like various nuts, Algae Chips, NuFood pretzels, PahpKorn (made with real corn mash, extruded into one of 12 shapes then dusted with various artificial flavors), and black pepper 'Jirky' (soy protein dried and molded and flavored to look like beef jerky, with REAL black pepper).

The Food Cafe is entirely automated, unmanned, and essentially offers all the snacks from the club and all the prepackaged food from the hotel, as well as a huge variety of prepacked pies and ice cream pints. If someone causes trouble, or sleeps in the cafe for too long, security from the club is notified and comes to handle the issue.

(The Neon Food Cafe, art by Valeriy)

The Hotel has a small restaurant, with a staff cook from noon to midnight, and automated waiters (that also deliver any room service) which can take orders and deliver a full menu when the cook is on-duty, or pre-packaged food and drinks after hours.

(An automated waiter, art by chesky)

N: The underground/background section of The Neon Club's complex offers the same prepackaged foods and the cafe, but it also has a active kitchen club who buy and sell and trade real food from unlicensed sources. Fish caught from toxic rivers but detoxed with magic or chemical baths, fruits and vegetables from home or rooftop gardens, and even meat from cloned, stolen, and back-market animals or 3-d printed from bootleg vat-grown proteins. N absolutely does not promise any of this is safe, but takes just a tiny cut for use of its kitchen-lab, and the regulars in the "N Food Club" see real food, free of government interference and corporate limitations, as worth the risk.

The Neon Diner: "Food" at the Neon Diner is actually a menu of useful minor updates, patches, drivers, and databases for virtual reality and alternate reality hardware and software that accesses or manipulates the info-matrix. It's all presented in the form of classic 1950s diner food (burgers, chili, hot dogs, fries, chips, pie, and so on), but the menu has a coded level of information that reveals the true content of each thing "eaten." Anyone in the VR or AR Diner can see, for example, that the Neon Cheeseburger is actually a updated database of cyber-countermeasure programs and what they look like. Anyone who orders that item and eats it is actually downloading the new database. Such items are bought with 'Neon Bux' which you can earn by creating or curated such lists (which are carefully vetted by trusted professionals), or can be bought using real-world currency (usually at a huge discount).

Crimson Emission: The Crimson Emission doesn't sell food, or even have food, but either as a weird side-effect of its creation or as an intentional feature added by it's now-dead designers, technomancers in the Crimson Emission can can expend magic energy to cause name-brand foods advertised on the info-Matrix to appear in a quasi-real state in the quasi-reality of this technomagical space. There are limitations to this power -- food can only be summoned in the exact format it is advertised (if you summon a Jester Burger, it comes with cheese, pickles, and its famous black-and-red sauce, no special requests), you can only summon food with active ad campaigns at the time you summon it, and the food isn't as nutritious as real food. It's fine for a meal or two, but it's missing enough vitamins and micronutrients that after a few days a consumer feels a bit hungover, and after a week they may get scurvy.

Noble Gasses: There is no food in Noble Gasses, nor any need for food. But sometimes, there's a warm feeling that reminds you of your favorite meal as a kid.

Drink

The drink situation for most of the Neon Complex is essentially the same as the food situation, with Blue Bison (tm) energy drink ("Take Life By The Horns"), Boltzz Cola ("One Kind of Sugar... Sugar! And Five Kinds of Caffeine!"), and Choco-Cola ("The world's most popular chocolate-flavor-infused cola drink!") the most popular choices. The two exceptions are at the Neon Club N club bar and the virtual Neon Diner.

Neon Club N: The club is famous for "Neon Shots," which are bioluminescent shots of soda and cheap high-proof alcohol. Shooting them makes the drinker's lips glow, and eventually can even make their throat glow enough for the color to be seen on the outside.

The Neon Diner: "Drinks" at the Neon Diner take the form of coffees, teas, soda, and milkshakes. They represent various takes anyone surfing the info-matrix ought to take time to do (defragging, checking for updates, running virus scanners, and so on) but that is boring and many people skip. The diner's VR drink program gives a user something to experience (virtual taste and sensation) while this kind of dull maintenance is performed. It's also a way to enjoy the sensations of things like soda and milkshakes without actually ingesting the calories or chemicals involved in them. There's no charge for coffee, soda, or tea, but milkshakes have a small cost in 'Neon Bux.'

The free drinks are extremely popular with poor and rogue info-matrix deckers, and it's a big draw that the Neon Diner allows such users to sit at a virtual table and sip virtual sodas forever, which helps create a lively social environment in virtual space.

Thursday we'll do Part Three, and cover the final entries -- Lodging, Clientele, Rumors, and the Adventure Seed.

Support 

Health bills still keep coming, even though I am in remission. Help is appreciated, but so is just spreading the word to folks you know that I don't.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-owen-kc-stephens-fight-cancer