At an isolated corner of the border of a fief, there is an inn. The inn-keeper there always have a tale or two ready, if it’s not about kobolds infesting a nearby mine then it’s regarding some centaurs causing troubles in the woodlands nearby. Of course, there’s a fine reward awaiting anyone who rid the area of those annoyances. Adventurers would note that the inn does not seem to be near a frequently travelled route, and it is never crowded. And where does the inn-keepers gets all his leads, anyway?
- The inn is actually a smuggler’s hideout and smugglers are using routes through isolated areas to get their goods across. Whenever monsters, or other unwelcomed visitors disrupt the route, they will get adventurers to clear it so that the goods may be transported over. Sometimes the inn-keeper may use the adventurers as scout for routes which have not been used for times or are new, using them as pawns to ensure the route is free. Also, the inn-keeper is not above sowing disinformation to get obstacles out of the way – more than a few innocent wizards have been killed this way.
- The inn-keeper always have adventurers running about collecting trophies from the slain monsters as bounties – such as ears, claws, eyes, scales or sometimes, the whole corpse, as proof of completing their jobs before parting with his reward. What happened to those items? If the adventurers wait in a stake-out, on the night of the full moon, a group of hooded travelers will arrive and the inn would be filled with activity. If the adventurers could get closer, they could see some sort of feast is being prepared…who are those travelers? And what are they eating, exactly?
- As a rest stop for wandering bards, weary merchants and the occasional party of adventurers, the inn-keeper has gathered a goody number of ‘leads’ for the area. He is just inquisitive and nosy in nature and through this is able to uncover strange facts about the isolated region. However, he is paying all rewards out from his own pockets and some of the investigations he have asked adventurers to undertake seem to be to satisfy his curiosity. What is his stake here? Why does he set up an inn at a god-forsaken location, prying into the region’s secret? And where does he get his money from? Perhaps the adventurers, after earning the inn-keeper’s trust, should ask him, or take a snoop around the inn, especially the rooms which are always locked…
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Singapore License.
