Possible spoilers included.

Why aren't there more products like this on my d20 shelf? Let's face it, we've got a lot of books now with feats, spells, prestige classes, and monsters (I've certainly written my share). I'm not saying I don't want any more of those. But what I wish there were more books of stuff that I could drop into my campaign -- stuff that isn't just something I could come up with on the fly, but really special, imaginative stuff.

That's what Chris Jones' 112-page supplement The Book of Taverns is.

If you're like me, when you first pick up this supplement, you think, "Great... taverns. What more can be said about them? Do we really need a whole book of just taverns?*" And then, if you're like me, you opened up the book, read a bit and said, "Oh."

Thankfully, this isn't a sourcebook on taverns. It's 10 sample taverns. Really well-designed taverns. None of them is the standard fat-former-adventurer-now-working-behind-the-bar-who-knows-an-important-secret-about-a-dungeon style taverns, but none of them are so weird that you can't ever actually use them, either. In general, there's just a nice variety of establishments that you can actually imagine using in your game with really interesting and imaginative backstories, well-developed NPCs, and fleshed-out details about the tavern itself.

As we all know, the D&D tavern is just shy of the D&D mad wizard's deadly dungeon as being the biggest cliché in the whole game. But it's a cliché for a reason. Taverns offer a good place where PCs can have some down time yet still interact with NPCs and get news of the campaign world. They are a place where you're not on an adventure but things can still happen. They are an important campaign location.

For example, there's my favorite, The Lion Rampant, where the establishment might very well have connections to organized crime and one of the patrons might really be a monarch from the far future imprisoned from the past (and there's actually a lot more to it than that). The Quintain's Tower lies in the wilderness, amid the ruins of an old castle, and caters as much to local (nonmarauding) goblins and ogres as it does to rangers and other folk far from the city (and there's much more to it than that). There's Malachai's Public House, run by a halfling bard, which also doubles as a front for buying and selling stolen goods, including magical goods. The Dagger & Rose, run by an elvish noblewoman, is an interesting roadside stop in an area beset by highwaymen. Vain Robert's Gibbet is a dockside pub with some interesting history. The Four Winds is an interplanar waystation connected to many places in the multiverse at once. And there's four more.

Each tavern comes with a really nice map, some well-developed NPCs, a general description of how things look and work there, a price list of drinks, menu items, and other services, and a bunch of adventure seeds.

The NPCs and locations offered in this supplement are the kind of things that will become important in your campaign without you even realizing it. The Horse Lord or The Tireme might become a place where your PCs hang out all the time, and really get to know the NPCs within. There also many new magic items and other rules bits scattered throughout as well.

That said, the book's not perfect. It could really use a nice summary of each place in an introduction or annotated table of contents. It's not as user friendly as it should be when you first sit down with it and begin paging through to find a place suitable for your game.

Also, don't think that in the middle of a game, when the PCs walk into a tavern, you can pull this off the shelf, open it up and start using one of these locations. There are long, detailed backgrounds and descriptions you need to read before using these properly. (This isn't really a criticism of the book -- it's a strength -- but you should be aware of it.)

If you liked the old Citybooks published by Flying Buffalo long ago, you'll find this book is as good as any of them -- and all the NPC stats are already converted to be used in your favorite game.

* In the last year, I've found myself looking at a lot of d20 products and saying, "Do we really need a whole book about X?"

(My first inclination, by the way, was to actually put a funny, absurd example in instead of saying "X." But then I got scared that no matter how absurd an example I chose, someone somewhere might be getting ready to produce -- or might have already produced -- a supplement all about that absurd thing. So I chickened out and played it safe.)

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