Bars Aplenty Cut Content

The blurbs from the Barkeep in the Borderlands Jam are up now! I made a big supplement for this called Bars Aplenty!

Earlier this year, after finishing Hall of the Five Moons, I realized that there was a Barkeep Jam going on thanks to Bluesky and went into a fugue state to jam out 21 bars and some other stuff in three days for it before the deadline! 

I had a lot of fun making all the locations and trying to fit it thematically into the extant materials and I may have gotten a bit carried away with the number of locations in the end. But! That wasn't all I had planned. My original design document had 27 bars in total. I cut a few due to the deadline coming up and my own available time coming up short. Here's the basics:

Nightshade

A invite only bar for the ne'er dowells, vampires, and everyone just a bit too edgy and illegal to hang out overtly with the Cult of Chaos. These guys were going to have a swanky jazz bar with a bunch of available errands to run for the various esoteric villains of the city. 

Garden of Necessary Evils

If there's a bar for creeps and ghouls then there's surely got to be a Lawful Paladin speakeasy. I scattered a few Lawful type events around Bars Aplenty and if anyone in the party took them up then they got an invite to the Garden of Necessary Evils where the insurgent Lawful types of the city mingle and try to hold things together. This one would also have errands but they'd be more focused on countering the activities of the Cult of Chaos.

Starship

In my ongoing Mothership drop-in game, a spider-cyborg ally by the name of Tenpiece fled a station the crew was accidentally responsible for deleting from reality. This bar was to be a direct insert of Tenpiece and crew's ship crashing in the Keep and setting up a bar as well as offering reaper/cybernetics goods and putting out Pikmin style bounties for needed ship parts and reagents. Ultimately scrapped because it was just too tonally distant for me.

Slumbermaw

This was to be a sleeping dragon in the keep that partygoers could enter and experience the dragon's dreams and the bar that colonized them without waking the dragon- very similar to how the Gatorbarge works. Some of the ideas got reworked into my dream-selling-buying bar location.

Slapsticks

Barkeep had a few secret factions and Bars Aplenty certainly has secret recurring characters and factions- one of which is Clowns. They're all over the tables to be found throughout the city and the party would inevitably hear about the clown-only speakeasy they would need to dress up as clowns to enter. I was waffling between it being incredibly sad, unspeakably horrific, or just an actor green room and couldn't make the concept work to a way I liked. There's just One Clown anyways.

Labyrinthia

I am pretty bummed I didn't have time to finish this one. It was to be a giant maze set up in the Citywood with harpies that deliver drinks to those trying to solve it and commentators in a central tower heckling maze goers. There would be all sorts of traps and tricks found throughout- including an accidental drop into a real dungeon active beneath the city.

Bars Aplenty was a lot of fun to make- if anyone uses any of them please let me know! I'm considering taking Wicked Whispers and spinning it off into its own separate product and expand its depthcrawl- so maybe there'll be more news on that later...