A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Sir Reginald Lichlyter’s Trusty Tavern Tome by Rick Hershey

Sir Reginald Lichlyter’s Trusty Tavern Tome by Rick Hershey is a role playing game supplement for Paizo Publishing‘s Pathfinder game published by Fat Goblin Games that covers alcoholic drinks, the effects of them, and some details on buying and running inns and taverns.

This is only available as a watermarked PDF from RPGNow. It is a 62 page PDF with a normal price of $7, but this was purchased as part of a bundle, so the price is harder to calculate. Of the PDF, two pages are the colour front and back covers, one page the front matter, one page is an in character note from Sir Reginald Lichlyter, one page is the Contents and one page the Open Game License.

A Brief History of Alcohol is a one page description of the history of alcohol, but one for a fantasy world, rather than the real history.

How to Get Drunk expands on the standard rules on alcohol, giving different drink sizes, and how much alcohol (using a simplified method probably similar to the concept of a unit of alcohol) would be in a drink, the effects of drink, including hangovers, and how a creature’s size will affect them when it comes to consuming alcohol.

Alcoholic Beverages is separated into Standard Alcohol and the subcategory of Mixed Drinks. Standard Alcohol covers the various generic types of alcohol, and Mixed Drinks is effectively some renamed cocktails. Each drink has descriptions on cost, what it is made from, who drinks it, how it is served, a relevant skill for making it and a description.

Signature Brews is a section that is subdivided into Beer, Mead, Wines and Other Distilled Drinks. These contain names and descriptions of various different drinks.

Fantastic Drinks are drinks that have effects beyond the norm, but which are not magical in themselves. These may provide benefits, but can also have detrimental side effects. The benefits, cost, serving size, relevant skill, side effects and duration are covered, as well as a description of the drink and various different brands.

Magical Brews are drinks that have a magical effect, and need to be created, with some similarities to potions. They are otherwise rather similar to Fantastic Drinks.

Inns and Taverns is about purchasing and some simplified rules on running inns and taverns, should a player wish to do so, with descriptions of different types. There is a list of common items that would be purchased, and the costs of purchasing and outfitting inns and taverns of different sizes and qualities, and their running costs and daily income. Both inns and taverns are divided into four size categories, each of which has three types of quality.

Drinking Buddies has various different effects that players, or NPCs, could suffer whilst drunk, and how they need to resist them, and what happens if they fail to do so.

Sir Reginald Lichlyter’s Trusty Tavern Tome in Review

The PDF is reasonably well bookmarked, to the same level as the Contents page and it has colour illustrations throughout. The illustrations are primarily scenes related to drinking, with a few related to alcohol in general, and have the appearance of stock art. There are a number of noticeable errors, primarily grammatical, but also including spelling, throughout the book.

The section on Standard Alcohol covers, for the listed drinks, Source, Supporting Geography/Cultures, Cost, Description and Construction. The various sections of Signature Brews do not have this level of detail. Given that the drinks listed in Signature Brews could be fitted in the broad categories of Standard Alcohol, it could be assumed that the relevant information for Signature Brews could be taken from that, but in the descriptions of the latter, there are stated differences, including in price, from the standard alcohol types, which would be lost by using the broader descriptions. It seems odd that the, more interesting, signature brews would not also be covered to the same level of detail.

In the section on Inns and Taverns, there is quite a lot of duplicated content. A lot of the writing for a quality of inn or tavern is similar, no matter what the size, and each inn also refers back to taverns of a similar size and quality, saying that an inn would be largely identical in terms of food and drink, if not in the numbers of people who can be served, as the appropriate tavern. The feel of this section is that it has been padded out by duplicating content.

Although there is some interesting content in Sir Reginald Lichlyter’s Trusty Tavern Tome, the full price of (at the time of writing) $7 seems a bit on the high side, given the amount of content; some areas, such as Signature Brews, which lost out on the level of detail, could have been expanded, and had their depth increased, which would have made the supplement bigger and made it better value for money.