Tangible Taverns: The Bull & The Bear

This installment of the Tangible Taverns-series clocks in at 18 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial,1 page foreword, 1 page SRD, 2 pages of advertisement, 1 page back cover, leaving us with 11 pages of content, so let’s take a look!

This review is based on the revised version of the tavern and was designated as a prioritized review by my patreons.

All right, so, the tavern does feature paraphernalia galore, representing the two eponymous animals, but just short of being cluttered. Patrons frequenting the establishment are scrutinized by two guards – Evie, a young human female, and Durgul, a similarly young half-orc – while flirtatious, they both are actually pretty devoted to one another. Food and beverages served are surprisingly healthy and delicious, though, unlike later installments of the series, we do not actually get a proper menu. The second story of the establishment does btw. contain a discreetly-run brothel.

Really nice would be the rather detailed 8 rumors and 8 sample events featured here for the tavern. The NPCs that make this place come alive feature btw. an elven, peg-legged, but pretty attractive and cool lady/pirate turned bartender (using unchained rogue as part of her built) and a fluff-only write-up for the head chef Louisa, the madam, as well as 4 further, nice NPCs. On the crunchier side, we do get statblocks for the kitsune geisha and the ifrit rogue that can be found here…

…and the two guards mentioned before actually not only come with one, but 3 statblocks, with the more advanced ones clocking in at CR 4 and 9, respectively.

It should be noted that the nice b/w-cartography for the place is player-friendly. Big plus there!

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good, I noticed no significant hiccups here. Layout adheres to Dire Rugrat Publishing’s printer-friendly 2-column b/w-standard and the pdf comes with solid b/w-artworks. The pdf comes fully bookmarked for your convenience and the cartography in b/w is nice for such an inexpensive file. While it does not sport a scale, the default can probably be assumed.

Kelly & Ken Pawlik’s Tangible Tavern series has come a long way since its humble inception; comparing this to the more recent additions to its canon does illustrate that fact rather well. “The Bull & The Bear” is not a bad tavern and it can be inserted rather easily into any given city, but at the same time, it is less special, less unique than later offerings. The dynamics of the NPCs are fun and so is the dressing – but as a whole, the place remained pretty pale to me, never really coming alive to the same extent that the other, mostly absolutely excellent installments in the series did. I also expected, to some extent, a fortune/dual-themed or finance-themed angle that never really surfaced here. Anyways, for the fair and low price, this is still worth getting, which is why my final verdict will round up from my final verdict of 3.5 stars.

You can get this nice tavern here on OBS!
Endzeitgeist out.

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