Features Archive | 12/24/2012
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Inn Generator
By John Hasznosi

F rom Dragon Magazine #418:

You’ve spent hours on the perfect dungeon, your monsters are all particularly devious and cleverly placed, and your adventure plot is practically Shakespearean in its genius. You’ve thought of everything. Your players are eager to see what you’ve come up with.

The first order of the session is to have the characters meet, and nowhere in the D&D cosmos do chance meetings that lead to adventures occur more often than at the inn. Everything goes well, the characters have agreed to the task at hand, and then a player asks, “What’s good to eat here?”

A seemingly inconsequential detail causes the game to crash to a halt. Never mind your perfectly awesome plot and masterfully crafted monster stat blocks—you didn’t go to the trouble of coming up with any details about the place where the characters met to begin their adventure.

Can’t think of the inn’s name off the top of your head? How about the name of the barkeep, the menu, or the prices? Who’s currently present? What conversations can be overheard? What’s the general mood, and why?

John Hasznosi created the Inns in an Instant tables to provide quick answers to such questions, allowing the DM to focus on more important things, such as how to introduce the next plot hook or run the upcoming encounter. As a holiday bonus, we've gone ahead and incorporated these tables into a new Inn Generator.

Simple click "Roll" to generate a random inn. You can also determine the parameters in the dropdown settings, as well as lock the specific results you like. And there you have it—countless inns in an instant! Whether it's The Nervous Warlock or The Somber Rabbit Tap House, we hope to see you there!

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