The Wandering Tavern – Jigsaw Fantasy by Amy Coffey and Ste Coffey is a free role playing game supplement published by Artemis Games. This is a system neutral supplement suitable for any fantasy game system.
This is a 15 page PDF which is available for free from RPGNow. One page is the front cover and one page is the Credits.
The supplement starts by detailing the tavern, known as The Fallen Leaf, which moves of its own accord to different locations every week. Some parts of the tavern are fixed, but other areas occasionally appear. Some of these areas are probably safe; others, rather less so.
Next covered are the two NPCs who run the place, a human/orc and a halfling/faerie, followed by the reason why the tavern wanders, a curse which is related to the owners.
Next covered are patrons. Most are not regulars, given the tavern’s wanderings, but two entertainers, a one man band and a magician, and a group of four children make the tavern their home and wander with it.
Some rules are given on how the tavern wanders, followed by various ways in which the curse could be broken.
Finally are various notable, and really quite unusual, drinks that the tavern has picked up in its wanderings. Given its habit of travelling around, the owners pick up exotic and unusual drinks from the various locations.
The last section is the jigsaw pieces. Throughout the text are various jigsaw pieces linked to footnotes which gives examples as to how the tavern could be used and suggests other relevant products.
The PDF lacks bookmarks but the various jigsaw links link to the relevant footnote and there is a link back from the footnote to the jigsaw piece in the text, which is very useful, making it easy to check a footnote and then return to the same point in the text. However, bookmarks would have been useful. Navigation is not as good as it could be.
The text maintains a single column format in Artemis Games’ not quite difficult to read standard font and no errors were noted. There are also a couple of colour images. Presentation is okay.
In the footnotes are references to several decks published by Artemis Games, Concept Cards – Urban Locations, Concept Cards – Characters and Concept Cards – Epic Treasures & Tomes. There are also references to Extreme Environments – The Inbetween, Extreme Environments – The Big City and Twisted Races: Bestials, but it’s not clear where these exist.
There are also several mentions different settings that the tavern could be used with, including Discworld (the Discworld’s Luggage was originally stated to have come from a wandering shop that in some ways has similarities to the tavern).
Wandering taverns, or those that can be accessed in multiple different locations, are not that unusual a concept, cropping up a few times. This one is well detailed, with multiple different potential adventure hooks, and it could perhaps be found pretty much anywhere. It could possibly be used to transport characters to a completely new setting.
The described NPCs are often interesting and unusual, although they lack stats. Such would need generating to use the tavern with any system.
The Wandering Tavern – Jigsaw Fantasy is, given that it’s free, a really good supplement and it can be downloaded by clicking here.
Leave a Reply