Tavern Thur(Fri)day: The Vault Tavern (Patreon)

Each Thursday (or, you know, Friday...) 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 modern urban fantasy, with lots of urban legends and weird wonders thrown in to boot. I see it as a setting where knowledge of the supernatural is common, but not universal. I plan to alternate between "classic" fantasy and other settings-with-magic at least for the next several entries. (Like ShadowFinder.)

The Vault Tavern 

The Vault Tavern is a subterranean, off-the-grid, semi-mythical urban legend of a gathering place, neighborhood community, tavern, and motel. It exists at a tangent between the lower levels of the tunnels beneath the city, and the true Borough beneath, which most surface-worlders will never see and don't believe exists.

Accessing the Vault Tavern from the Borough beneath is fairly easy. Reaching it from the surface city requires dropping down a long, narrow utilities conduit from the bottom level of a specific parking garage, or hopping into an unlit and nearly-invisible side tunnel from the middle of an old subway line, or knowing just which unmarked tunnel to take from the storm drains, abandoned underground mall, or basement of buildings built in the 1890s.

Despite that, surface world folks DO sometimes find their way their accidentally, after getting badly lost somewhere below the streets. All the passages to the Vault Tavern appear to be unused, ancient, abandoned and crumbling tunnels. But one of the decrepit meals door, which looks just like dozens of others in this tunnel, actually leads to the Vault Tavern.

Appearance: The Vault Tavern has three primary areas. Upon passing through the Vault Tavern's door one enters the largest area, the Common Room. Also called the Vault Actual, this is a long hall-like arched room with no windows or doors, just open arches at either end and wrought iron candle fixtures that were updated to electricity sometimes in the 1970s. Twenty matching 5-foot wide wooden tables run the length of the Vault Actual, 10 on each side of the room, with stools and benches on either side. While more people sometimes crowd around a table, the room is designed for 4 people per table, for a maximum of 80 people in the Common Room at a time.

(The Vault Tavern, common room. Art by Zedspider)

At one end of the Common Room is the archway into the Cataphiles Club, a much more upper-end private dining and drinking space. Only the Vault Tavern's owner (see Owner below) can approve letting someone into the Cataphiles Club, though she does pass out membership cards to anyone she decides is a good match for the strange mix of expensive luxuries and hidden mysteries that are the bread and butter of the club... and takes them away if anyone she trusted makes trouble or turns on her.

Behind the Cataphiles Club is the Staff Hive, a set of tightly packed tunnels cut smoothly into the rock, which includes the kitchen, storage, offices, staff break room, staff armory, and the Auberge Rooms (see Lodging, below).

Origin: The Vault Tavern is located in the Borough Beneath, a series of tunnels and underground spaces that are a combination of natural caverns, drainage tunnels (unmapped since a flood destroyed the city's records and maps of them in the 1940s), a long-discarded system of underground passageways connecting the basements of once-important-but-now-decrepit buildings from the 1920s, warrens of loamlings (humanoid moles with a vast underground civilization, for which the Borough Beneath is a too-high-for-fashion slum),interdimensional tunnels to the lost civilization of K'n-yan, and an underground river that keeps moving through space and time and periodically dumps explorers in lost prehistoric land, or brings exploring reptile people from that land to the Borough Beneath.

The Vault Tavern's location was used as neutral territory for multiple factions of the Borough Beneath to gather and sign a peace treaty in the early 1900s. At the time, it was just a convenient spot no one claimed that was next to major subterranean trade routes. No one remembers who the factions were, or what the treaty's terms included. largely all anyone remembers is that Subsurface Sally was there at that meeting, and hosted refreshments for the peace conference.

And she has been there ever since, never changing, never explaining herself, constantly and slowly expanding the Vault Tavern and making friends and allies.

(Subsurface Sally in the Cataphiles Club. Art by kamnevpro)

Owner: The clubs only and unquestioned owner is Subsurface Sally, an apparently unaging women with a strong sense of her own fashion and an interest in knowing people and being owed favors. She doesn't seem to age, or sleep, or have a home. She comes and goes from the Vault Tavern unseen and not through any of the doors anyone else knows about. She enjoys having a glass of rich wine with her at all times, but never drinks it, and has never been seen eating or sleeping. She comes and goes at random times, and though she usually warns her staff if she is going to be unavailable she never explains where she goes or what she is doing.

What no one, not even her staff, knows is that Subsurface Sally is a ghost. She's corporeal... most of the time. But when she is 'unavailable," she's literally not anywhere. She fades in and out of existence in response to complex astrological occurrences that she as (mostly) charted out over the decades. Sally was killed during the ancient Boroughs Beneath peace conference she hosted over a century ago, and is bound to the location of the Vault Tavern. She first started running it as a simple rest-stop because otherwise no one had a reason to stay there and talk to her. As time passed, she's discovered if the area dedicated to food, drink, and hospitality expands, so too does the area she can exist in. As a result, making sure the Vault Tavern is successful and expanding is one of Sally's top 2 priorities.

Her other priority is to find out who killed her, and what factions were involved in the peace negotiations she served food and drink at. She has no memory of the event, or her life before it, and is sure that those gaps in her memory are tied to why she is a restless spirit. She acts as an information broker and minor political power in the Borough Beneath not because she enjoys those roles, but because she is seeking that lost lore.

She doesn't want to admit the exact lore she wants, because she doesn't want anyone to know she is a ghost. As long as her true nature is a secret, she seems immortal and invulnerable. If anyone becomes aware of her ghostly origin can bring anti-ghost measures to bear. But she's learned if she simply gathers ALL information, no one will question why she does it. She has found that if she simply acts like she knows what is going on, and refuse to explain herself, people assume she is a secret spymaster of some kind... which has helped her develop a kind of spy network in fact rather than theory.

Food: The Common Room generally serves bar food that can be bought in bulk off the back of a truck or from a restaurant supply store, including soft pretzels, tater tots, prepared pizza bites and sliders from frozen packages... and donuts. Subsurface Sally adores the smell of donuts (though she can't eat them... or any food), and has managed to have all the appliances needed for fresh donuts to be installed in the Vault Tavern's kitchen.

The Cataphile's Club serves much more upscale foods, but does so using Borough Beneath ingredients. They have numerous alligator preparations, very tangy white cheeses (made from rat milk, though that's a 'trade secret'), eel, snake, frog, and some lovely shellfish stuffings and meatballs (made from farmed, fruit-fed cockroaches... which is ALSO a trade secret).

Drink: The Vault Tavern has a VAST collection of wines from around the world, often including rare and expensive vintages. These are raided from secret and forgotten wine cellars hidden by mobsters and divorcing businessmen over the ages. Sally has chalkboard lists of what is available and the price set out each day. Like donuts, she loves the smell of wine, but can't consume it.

She makes it sound like she has special delivers brought in with specific pricing that represents her cost to acquire them, rather than their street value. In fact she just grabs bottles largely at random from one of the ancient wine cellars, and prices them based on how big the bottle is, and how much she likes the label. Sometimes wine connoisseurs ask her if she can acquire a specific rare wine, and she charges outrageously for the service... then checks to see if there happens to be a bottle of it in one of the cellars she raids.

The Vault Tavern has only tap beers, which they buy from the Abby of the Noseless Monks, who dwell further down in the Borough Beneath.

Lodging: Though staff doesn't widely advertise the fact, and there are no signs calling it out, the Vault Tavern does have 12 rooms available for overnight or longer stays, called the Auberge Rooms. Each is essentially a cube carved directly out of stone with a mismatched (but well-maintained) furniture and a fan at one end, battery-powered lighting, and access to one of two communal restrooms with showers at the end of the hall.

There are 2-3 rooms rented out long-term to wanders who only use them occasionally, but the rest are normally unoccupied. The staff is honest about their existence if anyone asks, but actually renting one requires approval of the shift manager, who only promises it'll be available for 1-2 days if they don't see any reason not to rent them to the inquirer. Renting a room longer than that requires Sally's personal approval, and if she doesn't know someone that only comes after she conducts a personal interview. 

(Vault Tavern "Auberge Room." Art by Ross)

Parking: There is a Storm River (what seems to be an apparently underground river running through a storm drain) near one of the tunnels leading to the Vault Tavern, and it has a dock made of refuse, and tavern staff keeping guard over it. One nearby passageway is even and wide enough for shopping carts and motorcycles, but it only leads down, not up. One of the utility shafts that drops down to nearby the tavern from the surface comes from an underground parking garage that's never full (it's much too far from the shopping district), but someone must be an expert climber of have ropes to safely make the descent.

Clientele: Most of the patrons at the Vault Tavern are humans who spend a lot of time under the city streets. The most common are utility workers, urban explorers, subway engineers, and unhoused people from few different communities of underground camps. These last most notably come from the Drain Dwellers (from the flood drains), Flesh Specters (members of a commune that has set up in an abandoned underground 'ghost mall'), Mudlarks (a loose collective of people who explore the upper levels of the Borough Beneath looking for potentially salable items), the Rail Runners (from both deep subway tunnels and some old bricked-up subway lines and stops), and the Rookery (a mob-run for-pay shelter for criminals who need to lay low... very, very low).

A smaller portion are folk of various species from the Borough beneath proper. These include loamlings, enkratics (a group of pale, gaunt, hairless psychic humans who feel mental pain if they are not surrounded on all sides by rock or stone), men of Leng, high ghouls, desmodiums (sapient, 70-100 lb. bats), and Kosekin (people from the hollow Earth who worship death, hate light, and often aid others if it will put themselves at a disadvantage). None of these are particularly common, and are most likely to be at the tavern between 5 and 10 am, hours when surface-worlders are much less likely to visit.

Rumors: Among regulars of the Vault, there are a few who whisper about secret goings-on when they get drunk (especially if plied with drink in return for such stories). They claim one of the 'wanderers' to have a room in reserve is a lizard man (or, sometimes, a 'Saurian') named Ḥănōk, who comes from levels below even the Borough Beneath and is exploring the surface world as if he's never heard of any modern idea before.

There are also claims the Rail Runners are actually a clan of were-Hare-Indian-dogs (and las of the Hare Indian dog species), that there are living piles of garbage in (and cleaning) the nearby sewers called Ottie-Uggs, that the Cameron Village Sewer Blob preys on lone drunks in the subway tunnels above, and that there's a colony of psychic rats (with enlarged, exposed brains a single hive mind).

(Even with lights, it's easy to get lost in the Borough Beneath. Art by escli.)

Adventure Seed: Poison gas begins coming down the subway tunnels and rock passageways leading to the Vault, while the PCs are there. The gas is thick, toxic, and kills quickly. No one is sure if this is an attack, a breach into industrial gas storage tanks of some kind, a side-effect of someone trying to rid the subways of rats, or something supernatural. Regardless, the only way out is a Descent, down into the tunnels that were blocked off before anyone currently working the Vault was here, into the unknown depths (sometimes called the Death Line). This path is known to go through the territory of giant bugs who Mimic people and humanoid cannibals that CREEP and dwell underground, and skirt the lair of a giant mutant Alligator which may have offspring that Crawl in a larger range.

But there's no other option, and both the Vault's staff who on on-shift at the time and the other patrons at the bar look to the PCs to help guide them through this dangerous path. Success not only makes the PCs favored 'regulars' of the Vault, it wins them numerous allies among the people they successfully lead out of the underground tavern. (And, of course, Subsurface Sally would love their help figuring out where the gas came from, and exploring areas around the Vault, so Sally can have multiple ventilation shafts built, all with shut-off valves.)

MY NEXT PROJECT

I could have announced this game earlier....But I was Biden my time.

www.tinyurl.com/cardgametrump