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Tavern Party

A fantasy roleplaying game in a browser tab

Roll a character.
Survive the night.

Build somebody in two minutes, take on 5 encounters with your friends, and find out which of you they were prepared to sacrifice. Exactly one of you walks out with the loot.

2 to 6 players, about 12 min. Free, in your browser, no download and no account.

Six characters, from whoever opened the table. It never contains O, I, L, zero or one.

Or look at the open tablesOr write a dungeonFree · nothing to install

KNIFE · FENBORN

RUE

Brawn12+1
Deft16+3
Grit10+0
Wits13+1
Nerve14+2
Charm8-1
Signature: one special move
Whose Idea It Was
Kit
Roll of Picks
Hook
Two Keys
Failing
Everything you do looks worse by lantern light, and they always want to see hands.

Everybody at the table is handed the same six numbers. This is what one player did with them.

Every day at midnight, the same for everyone

Four daily puzzles

See today's four

All four are pinned to the date, so everybody in the world gets the same puzzle, and three of them publish a par worked out by brute force. Par is the most the day can be made to pay, so two short of it says more about a night than a number out of sixty.

The third thing you can do here

Write a dungeon, and find out what you wrote

What you write

Three to eight floors, and something at the bottom of them. Every floor gets two doors that ask for different abilities and one that always works and always costs, so somebody who arrives with nothing is out of pocket rather than stuck. You decide which Callings are allowed, what is on the shelf, and how much Vigour they start with. Six rooms off the shared shelf is a real dungeon and takes about two minutes; writing every floor yourself takes an evening.

What the solver tells you

A solver plays every character your settings allow, all of them perfectly, and tells you the truth: what par is, how many of them get out alive, which floor stops the rest, and which door nobody would ever take. It refuses to publish a dungeon nobody can finish. So the difficulty word on the card was measured rather than claimed, and nobody can call a walkover brutal.

Why it reads as a place

A door can leave a word on you, and a door further down can want it or refuse it: take the lantern on the first floor and the crack on the third is a squeeze instead of a gamble, or wade the water and the rope on the bridge will not have a wet man on it. One rule, and a dungeon stops being a list.

Write a dungeonPlay ours first

Or read the ones people have written, ranked by how many of the players who actually finished them thought they were worth the evening.

Character creation is the product, not the preamble

What you actually build

A Calling, a Blood, a piece of Kit and a Hook. The Calling is the loud one: there are 8, one of each per table, and being denied the one you wanted is the point at which the draft becomes a game. All four lists are written out in full on the character pages, and you are welcome to take any of them to a table of your own.

  • WARDEN

    Get behind me and stop arguing about it.

    Brawn +2Grit +2

    Once a nightBehind Me

    No use againsttoo many bodies in too small a space

  • KNIFE

    I was never in the room, and you will not remember me leaving.

    Deft +2Nerve +2

    Once a nightWhose Idea It Was

    No use againstpeople with authority and a reason to ask questions

  • RECKONER

    Everything has a price. I have written most of them down.

    Wits +2Charm +2

    Once a nightPrice The Door

    No use againstthe unexplained, and it has noticed you

And a past that other people can use

A Hook is not a note in the margin. It guarantees a scene of its own kind turns up in the night's encounters, so your history is an edit to everybody else's night and they can see whose fault it was.

It also carries 2 tokens worth 5 each, and they only refill when your past is used against you. Your fuel is in other people's hands. At the top of every encounter the table sees whose Hook is live, which pays you for going through the door and docks you for standing still, so leaning into your worst trait is the play rather than the punishment.

  • Two KeysYou cut a second key for a client's strongroom and never asked who wanted it.
  • The Lamp Left LitYou were the apprentice who did not go back down to check, and eleven houses burned.
  • Left the ColumnYou walked away from a marching company at night, and nobody has posted it yet.
  • 17 more, written out in full, and no two of them put the same problem into the deck.

The shape of a night

How a run goes, in about 12 min

  1. 01

    Draft against each other

    The house rolls six numbers once and everybody gets the same six. Then you rank your Callings, all 8 of them exclusive, so two of you cannot both be the Knife. Whoever won that draft picks their gear last, which makes it a fork rather than a head start.

  2. 02

    Build the character

    Place the six numbers and pick a Hook out of 20 pasts. Your Blood is dealt to you, so the argument is over the numbers. You get 70 seconds and it is the biggest decision in the run, because your Hook also puts a scene into everybody else's night.

  3. 03

    Take on 5 encounters

    Three ways at every problem, from a pool of 30 scenes. One line pays most, keeps its target number hidden, and only one of you is allowed to take it. You may also put somebody else forward for the encounter, and it costs you if they do not come back.

  4. 04

    Find out who gets paid

    Renown, the scars you kept, and one secret vote each, a Laurel worth 8 Renown. The party got through the night together. One of you leaves with the Hoard, and the rest of you find out how quickly you were volunteered.

Every phase is simultaneous and runs on a clock, so nobody sits waiting for anybody and a table of six takes exactly as long as a table of two. Every failure leaves a scar, and you choose each time whether to wear it, which pays at the end and frightens the party, or hide it, which costs you now and nobody else anything. Let the party's Dread reach 3 and every cost doubles. Somebody has to go through the door.

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A free online roleplaying game you can start in a minute

Tavern Party is a fantasy character creator with a game attached, built as a one-shot: a whole story with an ending, in the time a lunch break allows, rather than a campaign that needs everybody free on the same evening for a month. If you have ever wanted to try a tabletop game with friends online but could not get four diaries to agree, this is the version that fits in the gap. Nothing to install, nothing to buy, and no dice to lose under the sofa. There is more on the shape of playing this sort of thing in a browser if you want it.

There is no rulebook to read. The server rolls the dice, prints every modifier by name so you can see exactly why a roll landed, and closes each phase on a timer, which means a player who wanders off is a problem the rest of you can see and work around rather than a stalled evening. Play against whoever is at an open table right now, or work through today's four puzzles on your own, including one that is nothing but building a character to beat a named encounter.

Read the lists first

The same prose the creation screen shows, given a page you can read before you ever open a table.

More from the same crowd

A few other small browser games by us. Nothing to install, no accounts, all free.

There is a chair, and a candle, and one of you is getting paid

Two of you is enough. One of you is enough, if you do not mind who else is at the table: the empty chairs fill with strangers who take the door the numbers point at and never freeze on a deadline. They draft at random and they never vote, so beating them is not the same as beating a table.

Find a tableToday's puzzles