Tavern Thursday: The Quarter Cask (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 doing a tavern designed to be set in a classic feudal fantasy. I plan to alternate between "classic" fantasy and other settings-with-magic at least for the next several entries.

The Quarter Cask

The Quarter Cask is a low stone-framed building set among grass-covered rolling hills. It has a living sod roof, and sod-covered chimneys. All the doors and windows are round and vary from 3 to 4 feet in diameter. Next to the wood-fronted stone structure is a strong oak door in a stone frame built into one of the rolling hills. In fact the hills are honeycombed with interior chambers, many with hidden doors, airholes, and even windows concealed behind thin strips of sod growing on burlap flats, which look like just more rounded hilltops without a close, careful inspection.

(Art by เอกสิทธิ์ นูนทะธรรม)

The interior of the Quarter Cask's exterior building, referred to as the "Public House," is a cozy but comfortable hardwood building, with small private tables, a library of gnomish and halfling literature and history that patrons can read while on-site, a stone floor, and magic candles that illuminate much better than they should and (despite giving off illusory smoke) do not heat or choke the air.

(Art by IG Digital Arts)

The kitchen and staff areas are part of the "Green House," which has green painted wooden fixtures, and is much plainer and less appointed than the Public House area where customers are seated and served.

Origin: The gnomish adventuring wizard Evendra Wynflaed built the Green House a half day outside a major town so she would have a place to secure her ever-increasing library, and to rest and do research between adventures. For the first few decades of its existence it was just a slowly growing home base she protected with spells while she was gone. But, as her power and fame grew, she decided she needed full-time living caretakers. She hired staff to look after the Green House while she was gone, and taught them to trigger powerful summoning and defensive magics if needed.

After a few years, Evendra discovered her growing staff was bored, as they had little to do during her frequent (and often lengthy) absences. So, she had the Public House built as an extension of her Green House, and turned it into a tavern and inn that specifically catered to shorter patrons. Taller folk aren't turned away, but as the Quarter Cask is not scaled for their comfort, few bother to visit. Evendra's insistence on the highest quality of care, food, and drink, and the fact it has never made any effort to cater to taller folk, means the Quarter Cask is constantly losing money. Evendra doesn't care. The business exists to keep her staff entertained and fulfilled, not to make money. She funds the difference out of her adventuring loot.

(Evendra art by warpaintcobra)

Owner: Evendra remains the owner of the Quarter Cask... but few people realize that. Even those who know Evendra spends her down time at the Green House of the Quarter Cask think she simply has a long-term rental agreement with the inn. In general, most people think the halfling Innkeeper, Thurcy Atell, is the owner of the business. Thurcy is empowered by Evendra to make any decision needed to run the business-side of the building, and is the public face of the inn and tavern.

Thurcy was Evendra's first employee, has her complete trust, and is completely loyal to her. Not an adventurer or wizard himself, Thurcy has learned quite a bit about how magic and questing work. He has also read much of Evendra's library, including the private books she doesn't let anyone else have access to, making him an excellent source of lore. Thurcy has become a contact for numerous up-and-coming groups of heroes and ruin raiders, though he carefully doesn't ever bother Evendra with the troubles of the less powerful questors he has become a patron of.

(Thurcy at the entrance of the Green House art by IG Digital Arts)

Food: The Quarter Cask has two parallel selections of food on their menu. The first is hearty country fare, focused on breads, numerous and extensive lists of cheeses, and pies (including meat pies, vegetable pies, and pasties), and meat-and-mushroom stuffed breads similar to Beef Wellington (though with a braoder set of possible proteins).

The second set of foods are things Evendra has encountered in her adventures and liked enough to acquire recipies and ingredients and passed them on to Thurcy to make sure someone in the kitchen can make them for her. This includes sourdough, tacos, lasagna, sushi, and grits. Some of these items use local substitutions for ingredients and spices, but in other cases Thurcy as literally set u local farmers and herders to create the ingredients locally... though no mater what he does, he can't get local sourdough to taste like the samples Evendra has brought home.

Drink: Evendra brings home ingredients by the cask for dozens of forms of chai and coffee when she is adventuring, and has Thurcy cycle through it to both keep the staff expert on making it, and to force her to keep bringing in fresh ingredients if she wants to have it available for herself. It's often served with cream and honey at the tavern, regardless of how it is prepared in the lands it comes from. The business is also known for remarkably fresh, cool, clean, crisp water, which comes from ground wells in its hill complex. Beyond that, the Quarter Cask has a fair collection of ale, mead, and red wines. Evendra dislikes beer and white wine, and thus the Quarter Cask des not offer them.

Lodging & Stabling: The Green House has three opulent guest rooms that Evendra almost never needs, and she allows Thurcy to rent them out to friends and regulars of the business or himself. There are a dozen more rooms, still clean and cozy but not nearly as well appointed, in the first hill complex adjacent to the Public House's main entrance. There are actually 36 more such rooms in secret, deeper under-hill rooms which Evendra has built just in case she needs them, but wants to keep secret. Thurcy is empowered to rent them out at his discretion, but has never done so.

There is a single under-hill stable, just behind the hill with the publicly-known rooms for rent, designed to hold ponies, riding dogs, riding cats, wolves, giant cricket steeds, gnomish riding owls, goats, and sheep... but not horses or other mounts big enough to carry humans and other larger folk.

Clientele: The Quarter Cask is extremely popular with dwarves, gnomes, halflings, fairies, brownies, and goblins, both in the local population and among traveling members of those ancestries. Many merchants from those communities plan their routes around stays at the Quarter Cask, and some scholars and wealthy patrons take vacations to spend time at the inn.

Increasingly, there are also younger patrons who have, through intent or circumstance, becomes adventurers. Thurcy has a soft spot for such clients, and not only gives them reduced-rate services, he also allows them access to some of Evendra's private books (which Evendra leaves to his discretion) and advises them. While he doesn't ask Evendra to assist with any of his adopted young adventurers, he has scores of contacts of his own as a result of being her chief assistant for decades.

Rumors: Some humans in nearby settlements have begun claiming the Quarter Cask is a secret front for "anti-longshank cults," claiming that the businesses not catering to them is proof of bigotry and/or malicious anti-tall-folk plots.

Among customers of the Quarter Cask, it's more commonly whispered that the tavern is clearly a front for a dwarven mine, likely for mithral, with the Public House being a front to hide the valuable ore being dug up and shipped out.

Adventure Seed: Alithe Gail, a young human woman, has been coming to the Quarter Cask twice a week, every week, for months. She has to crouch to get inside and sits on the floor, but she is studying halfling literature, and finds many of the books freely available in the Public House to be invaluable to her scholarly work. Thurcy has no issue with taller folk being customers, though he doesn't inconvenience his regular clientele to accommodate them. In the case of Alithe, he's come to appreciate her scholarly mind, and begun to think of her as a regular. However, both some of his typical clients, and some humans who live near Alithe, have grumbled about her becoming a regular customer.

Which is why when Alithe fails to show up on her normal days for a week, and Thurcy's inquiries suggest she's gone missing, he looks to some of the adventurers he knows to find her, and make sure she is safe.

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