It All Starts in a Tavern

For those who you haven’t read the previous post, go back and read it now. Then the rest of this will make sense.

There’s an old D&D notion about adventures always starting in taverns. The player characters are all sitting around, doing what they do, and the mysterious figure enters the bar, looking to hire adventurers to rescue a fair maiden or maybe just dropping hints about lost treasure. And the characters all jump at the opportunity because (a) they are heroes and (b) everything sounds better when you’ve been drinking.

Really, it’s just a handy shortcut to get the team assembled and off to the mission.

My D&D movie will not start that way.

But it has to start somewhere and the temptation to start in a tavern, just for the in-joke, is too great to resist. (Well, not really – if it turns out I need to establish more background before the tavern scene than I will drop the in-joke like a rock, but for the time being, it’s as good a jumping off point as any.)

My thought is this: Epic stories often start in small places, allowing the hero to venture out into a broader world. So my hero is in the tavern when trouble rides in to town and things go from there. But I don’t think I want the inexperienced farmboy hero. It’s a classic role and it works, but we’ve all seen it – Luke Sykwalker, Eragon,... I want my hero to be competent from the beginning. More Aragorn, less Frodo. So if the broader world is where adventure happens and the small village is a simpler, more innocent place, then it stands to reason that my hero must not be from the village.

So now I not only have a competent hero, I have one that needs a backstory. This is a man from Somewhere Else.

And whatever trouble comes to town has to engage him. This gives me two ideas. The first is that he’s the local lawman. He’s the guy with the sword that knows how to keep the farmers safe. I like it – it gives him a role, a job to do, a reason to get involved. And no one will be surprised that he knows how fight.

The second idea is that if trouble is coming to our innocent village, it could have something to do with our hero’s mysterious past. After weighing these two options back and forth, trying to decide which to use, I finally decide in my typical Libra fashion that there is no reason I can’t do both.

My lead character, who I’m currently calling Jon Warder, is the city guardian/local lawman for a small farming community. He’s a retired soldier with considerable experience in combat. And something dangerous from his past is coming to town...

That’s a lot of mileage from the simple notion that it would be funny to start in a tavern.