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Most of the time, as DM I've already come up with the names of important NPCs and their relevance to the plot. Same thing goes with important locations, or places I expect the PCs to want to check out.
But what about the unimportant places? Big cities like Baldur's Gate and Flamekeep are huge with nearly a million people living within a day's journey. Naturally these cities are likely to have many Blacksmiths, Shoppes, and Taverns, and not all of them could possibly be readily fleshed out. So what do you do when a PC whines, "We -always- go to the Yawning Portal" or "Snurrin's Emporium never has what I'm looking for. Let's try somewhere else."
With that in mind, I present;
The Five Dice Random Tavern Name Generation Table
This table uses four randomly rolled components- Definite Article, Adjective, Beast, and Type.
Roll a d6, 2d8, d12, and d4 all at the same time.
1d6
1 The
2 Ye' Olde
3 Inn of the
4 The sign of the
5 House of the
6 Home to the
2d8
2 Smiling
3 Hungry
4 Happy
5 Drunken
6 Seasick
7 Crusty
8 Purple
9 Golden
10 Sleeping
11 Lost
12 Laughing
13 Hanging
14 Wandering
15 Lucky
16 Dead
1d12
1 Dragon
2 Harpy
3 Crab
4 Sturgeon
5 Dwarf
6 Goat
7 Wyvern
8 Unicorn
9 Griffin
10 Stallion
11 Lady
12 Knight
1d4
1 Pub
2 Tavern
3 Lodge
4 Den
So the way this plays out with my group usually goes something like this ...
DM: "Three hours and countless pints of ale later, you still haven't seen Big Jack or Colt."
PC 1 Dunleavy O'Righteousness: "This is the right tavern, isn't it? You said he told you to come to the Yawning Portal, right?"
PC 2 Grunkel Ironfist: "Whatdya mean? I never said I talked to Big Jack. I said someone said he spends a lot of time in that big tavern, and Kels said the Yawning Portal."
PC 3 Kels Crystalwand: "I was just naming a big tavern. Mouse said yeah that must be it."
PC 4 Jacob 'the mouse' : "Hey don't look at me. I only know the name of one tavern, and this is it."
PC 1: sighs "Great. Let's get out of here and look for another big tavern."
So at this point, I'm unprepared for a search of dozens of taverns. I've already described the location of The Yawning Portal as the south end of the Castle Ward, and I've planned Big Jack's hang out as The Wandering Wemic in the Sea Ward because I found a cool map of it online, and I traced out his escape route to the Catacombs of Yintros beneath the Heroes' Garden. So the way I see it, at this point I now have three obvious options:
1. I just have Jack show up at The Yawning Portal. In my opinion, this is lame! It's poor DM'ing to give the players things too easily. I always say, make them work for it.
2. I could slip the group a clue about Jack being in the Sea Ward. Of course this type of railroading them straight to him is also poor DM'ing. I don't want this to be that easy especially since they pay little attention to detail, like assuming they were in the right tavern, and I want them to have to work for this a little.
3. I allow them to check every tavern between the Yawning Portal in the Castle Ward and the Wandering Wemic in the Sea Ward.
Now, some DMs may want to delay the PCs from finding Big Jack, and others want to just get to the climax. I'm somewhere in between. I don't want to make the players waste six game nights trying to find an NPC, but I don't want them to finish the campaign tonight either, so I let them search a tavern and come up empty, move on to another where they pick up a clue that leads them to a third where they learn about Jack and the Wemic.
But since I haven't actually created these other three taverns, I need to do so in the moment. That's where these random tables help. I make my own DM screen with random tables as I need them. One screen has tavern names and NPC names and descriptions. I'll do a post about NPCs next week.
So in my game, it played out like this:
DM: "You make your way through the streets, heading away from The Yawning Portal in search of Big Jack or Colt. Hearing a feisty ballad being sung by a group of Dwarves coming out of a place at the end of the block, you move closer to check it out. It's a tavern called *rolls dice* 'The House of the Crusty Unicorn Lodge'. Do you enter?"
Personally, I think this is a stupid name for a Dwarven establishment, but hey, that's what the dice gave me. I could have adlibbed and just pulled a couple words from the list, like The Lost Harpy or The Smiling Goat, but I want to be surprised and challenged as much as my players, so now I have The House of the Crusty Unicorn Lodge.
This again gives me options. I can say the Dwarven owner won it in an arm wrestling contest so he doesn't know why it's named that, or the shingle is pieced together from whatever the dwarf could find in the rubbish lot, or I can come up with a reason for it being named The House of the Crusty Unicorn Lodge.
Being a Lodge, I'm going to say its Members Only, and membership requires a Side Quest. But since my players don't have time to complete a Side Quest, and knowing my party Rogue 'Mouse' fancies himself a con man, I expect him to try to bluff his way in. Turns out, when they heard it was Members Only, they decided it wasn't worth the effort and moved on to the next place.
Now here's where things got interesting. They go a couple more blocks and I roll again for a tavern name. This time I get 'Ye Olde Golden Unicorn Lodge', and I'm thinking what's with all the Unicorn Lodges? So once again, I could have adlibbed and changed it to the Golden Bear Lodge or whatever, but no, I let the dice decide. I say this one isn't Members Only, but it is Humans Only.
Sometimes I get lucky and my brain works quickly. I already knew at this point that the next stop was going to be called The Sign of the Sleeping Unicorn Lodge, and it's owned by an Elf. I'm not always this sharp, but tonight I was in rare form. I decided that the three were part of an adventuring company in their younger days called the Black Unicorns because their first quest was to bring back a hoof print from a black unicorn for the Elf to gain entry into the Wizards Guild.
Granted, none of this had anything to do with finding Big Jack, but it gave me Plot Seeds for later quests, which I'll post in a future blog.
Feel free to print this out and add it to your own personalized DM screen, or better yet, write up your own version using things common to your world. Obviously you could put Inn in the Type section, and Lady isn't a Beast.
If you don't like the idea of rolling spontaneously for tavern names, just roll whenever the players are discussing something or distracted. Do it behind the screen and write the names down to use later. It'll give you a chance to do some thinking before putting it into play, plus rolling and writing things down without announcing the results should freak out your players a little bit *evil grin*
Let me know what you think! Post a comment. I'd love to hear your ideas for names, or some unusual combinations that you've rolled.
And as always, Good Journeys!
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