One of the classic gags in old school adventures were the very beefy stats for important NPCs. The tavern keeper was a 10th level fighter to keep players from deciding the game of exploration and battle had turned into a game of rolling over the friendly townsfolk and shaking down the quiet little hamlet for protection money. Stewpot: Tales From A Fantasy Tavern from designer Takuma Okada centers its play around an entire adventuring group that’s given up a life of danger in exchange for wiping down tables and offering rumors for a bit of extra coin. The book is cute, cosy and has chill vibes for days. Is it worth your free time? Let’s play to find out.
Games of Stewpot: Tales From A Fantasy Tavern begin by building some classic fantasy characters and the location where they decide to build their tavern. While the default seems to be one of those pastoral inns inconveniently located near a dragon’s lair or a haunted graveyard there are also opportunities to set the game in a bustling fantasy city. Players communally built the space and set the tavern ratings. Most of these elements are there as prompts for the upcoming scenes but the tavern ratings can have an influence on outcomes. If you play a scene where someone important decides to stay at your inn, higher ratings means they’ll have a better chance of enjoying their stay.
Characters are built from Adventurer Jobs and Experiences. The jobs act as classes and the experiences are three aspects of their old lives that they are still holding onto such as a signature spell or a magic weapon. There are eight jobs in the book plus a few more in a PDF-only expansion, but I think most groups will have no trouble building characters outside of the included options. These elements act as game timers and story prompts as the characters transition into Town Jobs and Experiences. The idea here is to show how the experiences they had in the dungeon transfer to the tavern. Does the barbarian lose their rage once they become a cook? Does the wizard use their fireball spell one last time during the big town festival to promote the inn?
Each round of the game is a scene/minigame chosen by one of the players. After every three rounds, the players play a specific round built to show the passing of time. Once all the players have transferred all their experiences from adventure to town, it’s time to wrap things up. The scenes themselves are light on mechanics if they have any at all. Some require a die roll or a card draw to flavor the outcome of the story but most are just questions to be asked and answered with storytelling. Each scene is meant to be between 15 to 30 minutes long so a group could probably get through a full game of this in a session or two even though that seems to be going against the spirit of the game.
One of the things I wanted more off in the book were additional scenes and games to be played. Both the core book and PDF supplement have room for other content in them like essays and recipes. While these are part of the overall cozy feeling the game strives for, the minigames are so light that I think I would have preferred more of them to choose from.
Stewpot: Tales From A Fantasy Tavern feels like it’s best used as a long goodbye for beloved characters. You can build a fresh batch of adventurers, of course, but this struck me as an amazing way to wind down a fantasy campaign. So many of these games don’t come to a proper end and even the ones that do often leave the players wanting more. This game seems tailor made for a Return Of The King style multiple ending as characters lay down their burdens and return to normal lives after their time in danger. I can also see this being used to revisit characters from a long ago game that never got a chance to finish properly because someone moved away or real life interfered. We as players go through different phases of life. It strikes me as fascinating to see our characters do the same thing.
Bottom Line: Stewpot: Tales From A Fantasy Tavern offers a chance for fantasy characters to figure out how they’ll manage the next phase of their life once they’ve taken an arrow to the knee.
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