You meet in a tavern, the game master says at the beginning of nearly every campaign. It’s a trope as old as the role-playing genre itself, and for good reason. As owner of Violet Daisy Games, AnnaMaria Phelps, admits, it offers a lot of flexibility. “A tavern [is] a blank canvas,” Phelps said in a recent interview with Polygon. “You can start with a fight, or you can start with a rousing song. But what if you started because you met at a May Day celebration? Or what if you started because a thief robbed everyone, and you’re all chasing him together through a marketplace?”
Clever meet-cutes can lead to clever storytelling, Phelps said. That’s why she created You Don’t Meet in a Tavern, a book of prompts currently being funded via Gamefound that is designed to give your party new jumping-off points for your epic TTRPG adventures.
“I think a lot of people have a session zero where they create a backstory,” Phelps said, referencing common comfort and safety practices encouraged by most modern TTRPG publishers when new players gather around the table for the first time. “But [with the prompts included in You Don’t Meet in a Tavern] you can really see people getting into their characters — what the background of those characters are, how they’re going to be acting throughout the adventure, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s an opportunity for the GM to see the characters, and experience the characters, and kind of breathe them in. Not just as a piece of paper — Here’s my backstory! — but as genuine people.”
One sample prompt shared to the campaign page, which currently has a little over a week to go, sets the stage on a long-distance voyage where a ship becomes wrecked. Characters who’ve only just met aboard the ship must now take stock of their situation as they gather their belongings along a rocky beach. Another, tamer starter mentioned during our interview takes place at a gnome-led “sculpt-and-sip” — the fantasy equivalent of a night out with friends at the local wine bar.
In addition to her interest in game development, of course, Phelps said the book project grew out of a her own real-life experiences moving all around the country. That’s how she discovered some of her own favorite gaming groups — including one that she could only find through the regional Renaissance fair. Those experiences got her thinking about what other kinds of everyday scenarios could be extrapolated out into fantasy or even science fiction settings.
“It started with a couple of prompts for personal use,” Phelps said. “And then I was like, Oh, you know, I’ll expand this, I’ll make a little zine or something. And once I got to about 50 prompts, I was like This is probably going to be longer than a zine.”
The crowdfunding campaign for You Don’t Meet in a Tavern has a little over a week left to raise a modest $7,700. Funds will go to production but also to paying more than a dozen artists and writers collaborating on the project. Delivery of the digital version is expected by October this year, with a physical version arriving in February 2025.
