It's the perennial bugbear. The cliche to end all RPG cliches. The adventuring party has to meet somewhere. Why not an inn?
What would make it more interesting?
It's your local. Nameless tavern number 368 in a life full of nameless taverns is not a good start. What if you and your mates have been coming here all your lives? What if you have history with this place?
- The telly’s constantly on the go, showing football at all hours of the day and night. There’s usually half a dozen faces paying it attention. Sometimes the same half a dozen, day in, day out.
- The upper level ballroom used to be a second bar but that’s been closed for donkey’s years, used for storage and the like. The Ex-IRA’s pals sometimes meet up here.
- There’s a back way out not many people know about. It leads into a smelly little alley that runs along the cemetery wall; someone athletic could scale over the wall and get into the cemetery.
- FOURTH THING
- Some say the old black and white photos framed on the wall have peculiar properties. You think it's all a load of crap, but there's no denying some of those photies are creepy as hell. Why does it always feel like the people in those pictures are looking right at you?
- The building was a funeral parlor in the 1900s-1930s and still has a large yard with what would have been a carriage stable back in the day and is now a tumbledown garage.
- Stanley Ho lives in rooms above the academy but his lifestyle is very Spartan; he seems to think that owning things is bad.
- Gym Rats know it as a prime place for finding students out on the prowl, wandering out of their comfort zone.
- FOURTH THING: Some say the carriage stable is haunted by a black carriage that wanders the streets at the dead of night. If you see it, pray it doesn't stop; it might be stopping to collect you.
- There’s a persistent story that the statue or the immediate area of the statue is haunted by the ghosts of the children who died.
- The Feral Child Vampire (p191 main book) likes to hang out here and can often be found nearby.
- The street immediately in front of the statue is an accident black spot; rare is the month when someone isn’t sprawled bloodily in front of it. Bike accidents are particularly common.
- FOURTH THING: never, ever touch the black bike. If you see it chained up to the Memorial Statue railing, run.
- The Feral Child Vampire lives here and hunts here; the police know that assault victims turn up in the cemetery from time to time but haven’t made the connection.
- Victims of the Bethnal Green wartime disaster (173 dead) are buried here and the Feral Child Vampire sometimes uses their graves as a resting place.
- Scrapyard Meadow used to be housing until it was bombed flat and some say the house returns every so often; there’s a ghost hunting society spreading that rumor and investigating the site.
- FOURTH THING: The Man In Uniform is sometimes seen near Scrapyard Meadow. He looks official but a little old-fashioned, and whenever he's seen there's the persistent smell of burning, and scorched flesh.
- Public telephones. Bust, yes. But most places still have the spots where they've been. They just haven't bothered to remove them. The UK famously had its red box, and of course there is the Tardis box.
- Blind Alleys. Or narrow alleys, or closed-off-by-construction alleys, or any variant inbetween.
- Peculiar public monuments. That's how I got to Townshend but really, every city or town of size has some odd little statue or stone up remembering [insert peculiar historical fact here].
- Places that were used for something else once but have since been converted to new uses or left to rot. London's best example of this is probably Canary Wharf, which used to be shipping and docks and is now money and banks. You can still find bits of the old Canary Wharf, if you look hard enough.
- Parks. Not just the big or famous ones, but lots of little parks with iron bars and sturdy gates. Perhaps this one is owned by the city. Perhaps it's owned by the neighbors. Perhaps nobody knows who owns it ... or who plays there after dark.
- Markets. London has more markets than you think. New York has markets. Washington DC has markets. Paris, Lille, Brussels, Berlin - markets, markets, markets.