A PC walks into a bar...

[DiscipleofBob]

It's a typical cliche. Adventurers meet in a bar or inn to look for work or to start their adventure. Or maybe they just spend the night there looking for wenches, booze, and barfights while the bard makes a few extra coin performing.

You could just use the typical bar, but I find it fun to mix it up a bit. Give the taverns their own distinct flavor. Maybe one's a high-end irish pub sort of deal where honest folk go after a hard day's work, and maybe there's one for the bad part of town where thieves, assassins, and rogues hide out for the time being.

I'm asking people to post the more creative taverns and bars they've come up with.

Here's one of mine to start off...

The Crow's Nest - Made for a pirate campaign, the Crow's Nest has an interesting history when a halfling pirate ship was the victim of a huge tidal wave and winded up run aground... on the top of a mountain! The mountain was the lone feature on the otherwise small island which was convenient along local merchant trade routes and pirating grounds. Cashing in their chips so to speak, the halflings took the wreckage of their ship and fixed it up into an odd-styled inn with a chairlift and a makeshift staircase for visitors to arrive up. The waitresses are plenty attractive (as long as you fancy the small folk) and the bartender, the grizzled old ex-captain, has plenty of stories of treasure and naval adventure to tell. The inn itself consists of a two-story building with the design elements of a ship, the top story being actually the deck with a few extra cabins built on top. There's a storage basement behind the bar, but it's made for small-sized creatures only, as only halflings really work here. It's a good place to hear of rumors of treasure or hire new crewmen on a long voyage.

[DiscipleofBob]

Sassonne Leaf Cocktail - This one's for Eberron, and made for one of my characters who specialized in the Sassonne Leaf Residue poisons at earlier levels (Yay, ninja!) Anyway, the Sassonne Leaf Cocktail is a seedy little bar in the lower parts of Sharn. It doesn't get a lot of business, but occasionally a group of rogues and assassins will gather there. In reality, the tavern is the meeting grounds/safehouse for the group known as Spiderweb, whose goal is to assassinate high-end members of dragonmarked houses, specifically Merrix d'Cannith. Their leader is a mysterious man named Ryu who trains other assassins to follow in his footsteps and has made near-successful attempts on Merrix's life. He's something of an urban legend in Sharn due to his style, wearing a Cloak of Arachnida that was fashioned into a fullbody ninja gi (therefore occupying the body slot instead of the cloak spot) and a Cloak of the Bat. The second command is a traitor dwarf Silver Key formerly of House Kundarak who's in charge of scouting out talent, collecting information, and finding ways past magical barriers, wards, and traps.

[Corlis]

I'm guess that's the aforementioned ninja in your avatar?

[DiscipleofBob]

Oh, hells yes.

It's actually a kind of funny story. For some reason, the DM would always go extra hard on Ryu. His very first attack roll in the game he rolled a 1, and almost killed himself with his own nunchaku (I hadn't gotten hit yet and the DM rules that I hit myself AND took my own Sudden Strike damage) I never used nunchakus again. Then he tried to throw an Acidic Fire and ended up squeezing too hard and pouring it on himself. Finally towards the end, we were infiltrating Merrix's hidden forge to blow it up, and he grappled a caster to try and keep him from casting. Well, one concentration check and teleport later, he was somehow captured, stripped, flayed, and tortured by Merrix, and the only rolls I got were a few will saves to avoid breaking to torture (which the third one failed), and finally got to make a few Escape Artist checks when the other PC's arrived to free me, and then I proceeded to get only my Belt of Hidden Pockets which held ALL my weapons and flipped out Raiden style to kill everything in sight. Merrix got away because the DM "wouldn't let us kill a major NPC in Eberron," so I said that my character left the party to pursue an eternal vengeance against Merrix. He ended up being Ninja 8/Fighter 2/Master Thrower 5. This was when I was still pretty new mind you. We already had a rogue, so I was secondary skill monkey and secondary damage dealer. With an aberrant dragonmark that let me use Jump once per day I was flipping all over the walls and doing death-defying stunts with adamantine returning daggers. I never rolled very well, but I had so much fun with that character. Good times, good times.

[Mee]

... You think he would have ducked.


Sorry, couldn't help it.

There's also the Commons Room of a large space ship.

[kieza]

I haven't had campaigns that started in bars, but I have had players blow them up. One that I created was this nice tavern in Sharn called the Green Fern. It had a balcony, a nice view, live greenery, and everything else I could think of to make the point that it was classy.

The PCs, with no regard to my plot or the time I spent making this place , got in a barfight, which due to the presence of magic-using bodyguards escalated to the use of magic. The two wizards simultaneously decided to use fireball and some spell that was essentially fireball with force damage centered at the same spot. The resulting blast blew out one wall of the tower and sent flaming debris and bodies plummeting 31 floors to the ground. And I had to make a new bar, which they proceeded to destroy by emptying a bag of holding full of acid. My campaigns tend to have a high attrition rate for taverns.

[Dr Bwaa]

Early in my D&D career, one of my friends ran a short evil-aligned campaign for us briefly. We started at level 1, were given full leeway to do whatever we felt like as far as character creation goes.

Long story short, "you all are in a tavern." Everyone takes turns going upstairs and hurting something to prove they are CE, culminating in my character bashing his way into someone's room where some customer is messing around with a barmaid, and starting a fight with the naked guy, me being almost eight feet tall and wielding a scythe, him being naked with a tiny knife, and the girl screaming so many, many people charged up the stairs to see what was going on. The fight just got going between me and this half-orc when the whole tavern exploded. We all fell into the pit the tavern now sat in, and, ignoring the spellcaster off to the side, I kept fighting the half-orc (who was apparently level 3 or so), along with all my "party members" who were just shooting each other and whatnot. Basically, chaos*. I eventually got knocked out by the half-orc and woke up to see a guy in a robe standing over me. Will save (fail). I can't move, and I'm being dragged away to a life of slavery. Yay!

*The psion decided to utterly crush the wizard with some craziness and go over and steal his spellbook, adn then go to the edge of the hole and use her feminine wiles to get the townsfolk to lift her up to safety. The wizard wakes up when she's about twenty feet from the top, makes a spot check, sees his spellbook, and lets loose a magic missile at the rope, which snaps of course, sending the psion hurtling 75 feet or so to the ground below, where he walks over, confirms that it is, in fact, his spellbook, and performs the coup de grace.

[Kilroy]

You can't magic missle a rope. It won't target inannimate objects.