Alternatives to the Tavern Cold Open

Stop me if you have heard this one; a bounty hunter, warlock, holy knight and a cat burglar walk into a tavern… when you think about it, there is no way in the name of Gygax that this party would ever accumulate naturally, and that’s before you take into consideration their back stories.

For a game that places such a high value on imagination and creating epic stories, it’s surprising how many times I have heard the phrase: ‘You’re all in a tavern and it’s night…’ (to be fair, I have said it more than a few times as well).

Even skilled DMs fall into this trap—I’ve met parties in taverns, inns, casbahs, nightclubs, and even a restaurant at the end of the universe.

It doesn’t have to be this way; parties can come together in a myriad of ways.  Here are ten of my favourite alternatives to a bunch of strangers suddenly deciding to become besties for no other reason than ‘because roleplaying game.’

Meet in a prison

Bound by chains, united by fate.

The party are, rightly or wrongly, in jail.  This can be the springboard for a Suicide Squad-style campaign, or the game could start with a daring prison escape, or maybe even just their sentences all come to an end at the same time.

What I like to do when I use this one is give the players a week or two to come up with a reason why they have been arrested and to tell me if they are guilty or not, that way a warlock arrested after a drunken brawl can be sharing a cell with a Paladin wrongly accused of petty larceny.

Maybe the party are seconded by the town guard, who are stretched thin due to a tournament, to transfer a mysterious prisoner from one town to another where they are to stand trial, during the transfer the prisoner escapes and leaves the players holding the bag, or as I had in one case, the party decides that the prisoner is a great guy and conveniently ‘forget’ to hand him over.

The road is long, and danger waits.

This is a fantastic way of kickstarting a new campaign in a setting that is new to your players, in media res during the middle of a ‘routine’ caravan guard job can give you a unique way of introducing new locations to your players, and provide you with an opportunity to weave lore into the story line, something like: You picked up the job in the tiny border town of Moze and are traveling through the Wolf’s Bane Woods toward the fortified Citadel of Elspeth’s Holm. Along the way, you’ve encountered a band of elven gypsies who warned you about a sleuth of owlbears acting oddly ahead… This will give you many opportunities for things that your players might want to know more about. It’s also a great way of hitting the deck running and, if combat is your bag, throwing a few random encounters at them.

If your group is more story-focused, then you can have one of the NPC guards strike up a conversation with them: “So, what’s your story? You seem… different”

Knowledge binds, chaos calls.

Bust out the sorting hat because it’s time to go back to school.  This way of getting the party together comes in a variety of flavours; they could be students, they could be professors (which would explain why the fighter is there, wizards need self-defence as well) the cleric could be the chaplain, pretty much anything the player characters can teach would be useful here… the possibilities are endless.

This is a good way of getting a one-shot party together because the PCs all may know each other, but it is also just as likely that they didn’t mix with the faculty from other departments.

It’s a neat little set-up for mysteries and ‘bottle episodes’ as well. For example, perhaps Professor Blackwood has accidentally opened a portal to the dimension of screeching agony and let in some fiends that are running amok in the applied divination tower, or maybe an old historian finds evidence of a hidden cache of treasure and money.

Waves whisper secrets, storms forge bonds.

This is the lazy DMs friend; all you need is a ship and a heading. The party can be from literally the four corners of the game map, and you can spend as much time as you need to at sea.  The party could hear legends and tall tales from their fellow passengers, or a few of the old salts on board, this could also be useful if you want to start the adventure off with a nice sedate mystery (think ‘Murder on the Orient Express’) or if you want to weave backstory into your first few sessions; maybe they hear of a dread Orc Pirate who swoops in and plunders ships, leaving but one survivor to tell his story.

It gives your players a wide breadth of options as well. Are they running away from something? Towards it? Are they just a leaf on the wind? It will also encourage roleplay; if the party are stuck on a ship with each other and a handful of colourful NPCs, then they will start to strike up conversations and play off each other.

Hunt the prey, find your pack.

The party are already on a mission to find some miscreant who the players have been charged with tracking down.  Now, not every class lends itself to a mercenary job, but with a little lateral thinking you can make this fit anyone; The Monk needs to find their quarry because they stole some item from their temple, or the Warlock’s patron could just have a beef with them, or the Paladin could have been seconded by a town guard to bring back a perp.

You can add a twist as well. Let’s say that the group is professionals who have worked together before, but then they find that there is a bounty on their heads. Or, what if the party go up against someone they think isn’t much of a threat, but it turns out they are a powerful Necromancer who has been raiding graveyards and has a small army of the undead to fight for him?

Guard the guilty, choose your truth.

This is a good way of introducing a Big Bad Evil Guy, or at least one of his minions. The party are enlisted by a town guard to transport a prisoner from point A to point B, maybe its as martial support to a detachment of the town guard, for example a Paladin would be a natural fit for this as they would be in high standing with the local authorities, even a rouge would be a good fit, after all they say ‘set a thief to catch a thief’.

There are a number of outcomes from this simple mission; maybe there is a daring escape attempt, or their captive could bribe them.  I used this on one group, and the party ended up sympathising with their charge, and helped him escape. This gives a lot of scope for character development and roleplaying; after all, how they treat a prisoner could speak volumes about them

Silk hides steel, alliances spark.

There is a lot of scope for roleplaying here. The big formal function could be anything from a wedding to a funeral, maybe the king is marrying off his wayward son to an exotic and mysterious princess of a far-off land? Or perhaps it starts with the funeral of the mentor of one of the players, then at the wake they come to know the other players who are somehow linked to them.

If you have a hankering to run a game of political intrigue, then this could be a fantastic way of introducing all of the power brokers in the area, and you get to know more about their backgrounds and motivations. 

If you want to start the campaign with a bang, perhaps the function is attacked, and the players have a split second to decide whose side they are on.

Madness unites, sanity frays.

When viewed through a certain lens, any of the main classes could be regarded as being what doctors of the mind refer to as ‘Bat shit insane’. The perquisites for this opener are that the party should be in a large town, in a civilized land.  What can make for a nice juxtaposition is if science is in its infancy and mankind is starting to consider non-magical answers to their problems.

As well as there being lots of scope for roleplay and character development, you could also introduce some lore for the world you are creating and possibly introduce the Big Bad early on, either as a fellow inmate or even one of the sanatorium’s doctors. 

Members of a posse hunting down a bad guy

Justice rides, strangers align.

A good example of in media res opening; the players are already part of a posse hunting down a bad guy who has done something atrocious, the fine details can be left up to you and your deviant imagination, maybe the guy they are after tried to kill the mayor of the town, took out a number of guards and made a run for it.  That way, we start with a nice, clear call to adventure and establish the first mission. Also, be aware the bad guy might not be alone; they could be leading them into an ambush, or they could lead them straight to a lair. Your options are almost unlimited.

You could have it that the captain of the guard just turfed out patrons from a tavern who were sober enough to hold the right end of a sword. This is admittedly just a continuation of strangers meeting in a pub, but as any blind date guide will tell you, it’s good to start with an activity of some kind.

This is a good way of starting with minimal preparation and forethought. If you ever have to throw a game together with very little time, go for this option.

Who are you? Fate will tell.

I can’t stress enough that this is a tricky one to get right. There are several moving parts to this, and you need to have players who are fully on board with the idea.  The elevator pitch is that the players all wake up in, say, a warehouse with no memory of who they are and where they have come from.

The first quest, therefore, is to find out information about who they are and how they came to be in this situation.  Mechanically, you could pre-generate the characters and drip-feed information to the players as they discover it.  This is a bold move for sure, you must know your players quite well so you can make an educated guess as to what they would like to play.  That way, the player finds out as their character does who and what they are.

Another way is to start with the players knowing only minimal information, gender, race, maybe class, and as they play and learn, they get to know their stats; you could have it that as and when they roll, they fill out that skill on the character sheet.

So, there you have it, my friends, my quick and easy guide to getting your players corralled into a group.

What’s your favourite way to kick off a campaign? Have you ever ditched the tavern for something wilder? Drop your stories in the comments or try one of these ideas in your next session and let me know how it goes!