Forgotten Adventure Design: Bar Brawls

I probably don't need to wax poetical about the taxonomy of RPG adventures - people have been doing that far better than I ever could long before I began this blog. We all know the difference between a dungeon crawl, a hexcrawl, and a pointcrawl. One thing I rarely seen being brought up, however, is a type of adventure that used to be quite popular but has since all but disappeared - the bar brawl.

Art by velinov

The idea behind a bar brawl adventure is simple: a tavern setting, and a collection of NPCs (or pregenerated PCs) with distinct personalities and often quite differing views, possibly with some being previously acquainted with others. The implication is that sooner or later - possibly as a result of the PC's actions, or possibly independently of them - everything is going to erupt into violence.

In a way, bar brawls could be considered a sort of mini-sandbox. Although the scope is limited to a single establishment, there is almost never any indication for the DM as to how interactions between the characters are supposed to play out, and any conflict is generated by the interplay between their different traits. This has its ups and downs - they can be daunting for some DMs to run, given the vast array of potential incidents and outcomes and the need to keep track of so many different NPCs, their agendas, and their relationships to each other. But that open-endedness gives them replayability, ensuring no two runs will be the same. They can be fun to sit back and watch the chaos unfold, and the fact that the tension results from the interplay of the characters can help the world feel dynamic and remind players that things go on outside of the personal narratives of their PCs. And, because the action rarely leaves a single tavern room, they're easy to drop into an ongoing campaign whenever the party is at a tavern - or just to use as a self-contained one-shot for a night of inconsequential mayhem.

For whatever reason, these sorts of scenarios were especially popular in British publications during the era of old-school gaming. Despite being American, and despite being introduced to D&D with third edition, I find the British old-school tradition to inform my games more than anything else, and I've posited its existence as a unique phenomenon distinct from American old-school gaming in an old Reddit post, which led to some discussion - Uncaring Cosmos has discussed this subject in great detail, and it's a very good read. Right now, though, I'm looking specifically at the example of bar brawl adventures.

The most famous example would have to be A Rough Night at the Three Feathers from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - in fact, it's so iconic that it's been reprinted time and time again, to the point where modern GMs often don't know how to run it since the times have changed and the context in which it originally existed in has been forgotten. However, when it was first published, it was just one of a multitude of similar scenarios for all sorts of games. Many of these came from the pages of White Dwarf - it was doing this as early as the 11th issue, which featured a bar brawl scenario for D&D. Issue 96 contains another one for WFRP called Mayhem in the Mermaid. And while it was perhaps a bit past the classic era, Issue 223 featured a minigame about drunk, rowdy Orks entitled Brewhouse Bash. While it didn't make it into the final magazine, my spiritual liege Dave Morris was writing up a similar scenario for Dragon Warriors, which he was kind enough to post over on his blog.

What I'm getting at is, back in the 80s, a gamer - at least a British gamer - would have no problem understanding Rough Night because adventures just like it were a regular fixture. But for whatever reason, they seem to have fallen out of favor.

Perhaps the decline of gaming magazines plays a part in this - while these short, simple adventures are perfect for taking up a couple of pages in a periodical, most don't exactly have enough meat on them for a full retail book. But there still are a couple more recent adventures in this vein.

The example adventure included in Machinations of the Space Princess is easily recognizable as a classic bar brawl scenario - although it's rethemed to take place in a seedy space station cantina, it still follows the formula of throwing PCs into a chaotic situation, with plenty of interesting NPCs to spice up the mix. James Raggi's Zak Has Nothing To Do With This Book - while, yes, a puerile example of rage-baiting in reference to the ongoing community discourse at the time - is a servicable example of this kind of scenario if you can look past its deliberately inflammatory title. The Age of Dusk blog describes this as a "powder keg" adventure in its review and cites Rough Night in the comments, which depending on who you ask may be synonymous with or inclusive of bar brawls. And, while I don't know if any of this was deliberate, the (very good!) Labyrinth Lord adventure The Inn of Lost Heroes starts out with two colorful adventuring parties antagonizing each other at a tavern, with the PCs caught in the middle, before everything descends into survival horror. When running it as a Halloween one-shot last year, I couldn't help but notice that the first segment of the adventure could've easily been published in a 1986 issue of White Dwarf.

Perhaps I'll try my hand at writing my own bar brawl adventure. I'd be quite interested in seeing if anyone reading this has any experiences running, playing, or writing scenarios of this sort, or if they know of any other examples out there. But as a bit of gaming history, I feel it's one that bears a mention.