Tavern Thursday: The Hole in the Ground (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.

I've recently varied a bit from standard feudal fantasy taverns, and produced at cyberpunk fantasy tavern and related complexes, a cross-dimensional train club car, and a weird west mobile saloon. You can find them, and every other tavern I've done on Patreon, at this Tavern Index, which I keep updated.

This week I am going back to typical feudal fantasy... though the idea can be easily updated to nearly any genre. I plan to alternate between "classic" fantasy and other settings-with-magic at least for the next several entries.

The Hole In The Ground 

Appearance: It's a hole. It's in the ground.

(All 'Hole in the Ground' art by Ralf Kraft)

The entrance of the hole is fifteen feet at it's widest, and roughly half that across it's narrower axis. It is surrounded by tall but fairly sparse grass, rocks large enough to be difficult to dig up or move without tools or multiple people, and thick root systems. The drop from the hole is between six and eight feet. Multiple strands of roots dangle into the hole.

The hole is the only known surface entrance of a substantial cavern. The first chamber is roughly forty feet in diameter, with the surface entrance near the northern side of it. On the southern end is an underground creek of fresh mineral water. There are signs of multiple campfires having been built there, apparently over years of use, and is often one burning close to the creek's edge. The creek is slow-moving, fresh, cold, 4-7 feet wide and roughly half as deep. It flows out of the wall with no air-gap, but there's 3 or so feet of headroom where the creek flows off deeper into the cavern. A typically-sized human could partially submerge themselves and follow the creek deeper in, but there's no way to follow it without getting cold and wet.

Origin: Geologically, the Hole in the Ground is the result of water dissolving limestone. The limestone is mixed with marble, which remains behind, forming the supporting structure of the cave beneath the hole.

Sociologically, the Hole in the Ground sits just far enough outside town that no one comes across it accidentally, but close enough to be easily and casually visited on a daily basis . The land around it is too rocky to farm, too uneven to conveniently grow things on, and too riddled with sinkholes to build on. It was originally used as a hideout for criminals, but is too well-known for that now. Instead it's often used by young people as a gathering place beyond their parent's gaze, a respite for the homeless and travelers, and a gray market out of sight of the taxed guilds and restrictive rules of the nearby town.

Owner: As the land around the Hole in the Ground is seen as of low value, and townsfolk consider the Hole in the Ground to be distastefully low-class at best and actively criminal at worst, legal ownership of the Hole in the Ground has never been settled. Every few years some other group informally takes a dominant position among those who visit or dwell in it, before either growing out of having time for such things, or moving on to other locales.

Currently, a clique of older teen scions of the important citizens of town oversee what goes on at the Hole in the Ground. They treat it as their tiny dominion, and a combination of them doing a good job of keeping it safe and clean and fear of retribution from their parents if they were harmed prevents anyone from challenging them.

Food: There is a small copse of trees near the surface of the Hole in the Ground, which has tiny, sur apples that fruit earlier than normal, and naturally dry and ferment if not plucked. Regulars to the Hole often dry strips of apple over campfires, and stockpile them around the cavern for fall and winter months.

Otherwise, there's usually a hodge-podge of hardtack, potatoes, dried wildberries, wild onions, and mushrooms foraged nearby available in the Hole, either free or for a minor coin. Small game is also not uncommon, though it's much less rarely shared.

Drink: The mineral water from the underground creek is the best-tasting, purest water within a few days ride. It's much colder than local well-water, which is both a source of great satisfaction in summer month, and a bit of a mystery. A local monastery uses only this water for their mead production, and often trade small casks of their less-successful brewing efforts for casks of the water (lowering the mead down with mule-drawn ropes and drawing up old casks filled with water -- it's much easier for the monks to have people already in the Hole to do the labor of filling casks than it is to climb down themselves).

The current unofficial Scions of the Hole make sure they are present when this exchange happens, and mark new mead casks with dates in chalk. In theory no one is to open a cask until it's date, and more than half the time people respect that guideline. The current stockpile of ale casks are orange blossom honey mead that did not come out right, and have come to be called 'bitters' by Hole regulars, and are generally drunk diluted with water and then heated with herbs that grow on the surface near the Hole for "Bitters Tea," which many regulars swear is good for indigestion (and, see Rumors).

Lodging: There's plenty of room in the Hole in the Ground for people to sleep, and many do at least a few nights a week. There's no formal system of determiming who sleeps where, but campfires are kept near the creek by social pressure, and there are plenty of threadbare blankets and torn quilts to use as crude bedding... though sometimes they have bedbugs.

Stabling: No one lowers horses into the Hole in the ground, but the same copse of trees that offers the sour apples has numerous simple picket lines strung from tree to tree.

Clientele: A few homeless locals and itinerant workers use the Hole in the Ground as a shelter, sometimes for a few days every week, but no one lives in it full-time. Drunks, monks sneaking off to escape the abbot's eye, poor residents with nowhere else they can afford to use as a recreational location, and most of the town's older teens have adopted the Hole in the Ground as their primary hangout, including the children of some of the towns richest and mot powerful officials and landowners. Those teens have come to be known as the Scions of the Hole, but are more like popular regulars than true owners or rulers.

The Hole is well enough known that travelers sometimes use it as a cheap alternative to an inn, and non-local fugitives occasionally lay low within it, pretending to be travelers.

Rumors: One of the travelers who stayed at the Hole in the ground rather than an inn arrived looking sickly and weak. They drank copious amounts of the creek water, and by morning were better. Whispers have begun to spread than the waters have healing powers (after all, MONKS use it, right?), and a few chronically ill townsfolk switched to carting creek water to their homes, and seem to have improved in health. Now, occasional visitors have begun to travel to the Hole in the Ground from farther afield to 'take the waters.'

Maybe the water can heal. Or maybe town water is tainted, and the original traveler was just dehydrated.

Adventure Seed: An earthquake hits, shocking everyone. The ground shifts, closing the entrance to the Hole in the Ground with a huge slab of marble. Many of the town's most important people have children trapped below. The PCs may be brought in to try to break or move the rock, or they might be trapped with the children, and have to try to escape by following the creek, when they realize water is rising within the now closed-off Hole.

Support

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