Epic Encounters: Local Legends – Tavern Kit review

A good tavern is the staple of many a fantasy adventure story. It can be a focal point for an action scene, a meeting place for your heroes, the location for a shady deal, or simply just a place for a little downtime and regrouping. In D&D campaigns, they are often all of these things, but can be incredibly stressful for a DM to create and control. How many NPCs are there? How do they factor into the overall campaign? What are they carrying if your party decides to flip out and just murder everyone? Any instance where a lot of characters gather for any period of time and mingle with NPCs can cause all manner of unforeseen tangents. Which is where the Epic Encounters: Local Legends – Tavern Kit from Steamforged Games comes in.

Part of their superb Epic Encounters range, the Tavern Kit features 10 detailed maps of different inns and taverns (internal and external images) to help you plan your encounters, along with a whopping 60 fully-statted NPCs that come with ready-made backstories, character portraits and event cards highlighting the “first thing you notice” for each of them.

It’s hard to overstate just how useful even these character cards and profiles are, allowing any DM to easily kit out their entire tavern to the point that an adventuring party can spend literally hours there, interacting with NPCs and expanding the campaign. The variety of taverns on offer is also impressive, and the combination of maps and NPCs allows for an incredible amount of replayability.

The Tavern Kit also comes with three detailed booklets. The first is the “Inncounters Book”, which explains how to set up your tavern, and gives advice on exterior description, interior set-up, and what kind of encounters you could establish here. And the emphasis is on “could”, as you can use the Kit as a set of guidelines for your own entirely unique creations, too.

CHECK IT OUT: Epic Encounters | Enhance your next DnD campaign the easy way

Book number two is the “Tavern Book”, which describes the ten ready-made taverns in detail and offers rules and tips for the selection of minigames that come with the Tavern Kit. These “games within a game” give your adventurer’s some much-needed downtime – or perhaps the opportunity to make a fortune. Hell, maybe they’ll cheat at a game of Drop It! And create a whole new set of problems to deal with, or they’ll be cheated by an NPC and coerced into some foolhardy quest.

Each tavern has its own “Local Legend” too, many of which can be purchased as individual sets such as the Night Hag, who integrates with backstories of multiple NPCs. The art is stunning, too, with detailed portraits and an absolute ton of lore to draw inspiration from.

Finally is the “NPC Book”, a doorstep of a tome featuring detailed deep dives into each NPC, with modifiers, interaction outcomes, actions, loot tables, mannerisms and background information. The potential is kind of endless, and even if you’re the kind of DM who loves to make up their own stories and campaigns from scratch, there’s really no downside to using the Local Legends Tavern Kit as a point of reference if nothing else.

I’ve used several of the maps and NPCs in my own campaign, even building an entire mini-campaign for my son and I using Epic Encounters box sets and the Tavern Kit, and it’s just so useful. The fact that it allows for so much creativity on the players’ part just adds to the overall usefulness of the Kit.

The Epic Encounters range is a fantastic resource for one-shot encounters, full campaigns, boss fights, or just for inspiration if you’re struggling, and the Tavern Kit is no different. The amount of work Steamforged Games have put into it is genuinely impressive, and it’s really hard to find fault with any part of it. I can’t even knock the price, as it retails for just £40 direct from Steamforged Games. The sheer amount of options and features for that price is staggering, making it an absolute win for DMs of any experience level.