Back in the 90's, I was part of the LARP organization known as The Camarilla. We were all fans of Vampire: The Masquerade. Before that, I was storytelling a TT game for Mage: The Ascension that was based in my hometown. In the TT game, I created a nightclub known as The Shady Lane. During my LARPING days, this setting was used for many of our games; which is why I mentioned it.
In the LARP, the club was owned by my first vampire character; but in the TT version, it was owned and operated by my female Hollow One mage name Rose Addams. She was designed to be a goth girl who was a fan of the Addams Family movies of the time (Addams Family & Addams Family Values). She was a huge fan of the Wednesday character that she took that as her nickname.
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| Picture of the TT character version |
The other morning, I woke-up to a hit of inspiration to develop The Shady Lane as a fantasy location for D&D. I began thinking of ways to make it more than just the simple nightclub from my TT and LARP games to help make it enticing as a setting other people might want to use in their games. I was thinking of iconic places like The Succubus Club from Vampire: The Masquerade or the Yawning Portal and The Shady Dragon Inn from Dungeons & Dragons.
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| AI generated sign |
I know that the finished product will be more than just your standard inn. It will include several different features that will not only insure it generates a certain level of revenue, but also would become a cornerstone for any location it was added to. A place where not only the locals would go to enjoy a pint and a meal, but travelers would stop and stay the night and adventurers would come to in search of new opportunities.
As much as I am inspired to create this location, I'm hindered by my lack of artistic skills and also the fact that I'm not certain that some of the more iconic aspects that I would like to include are even possible by the written rules of D&D. I know that as a DM and creator, those rules can be bent to a degree.
For instance, I want to be able to help protect the people that come inside with rune of protection or wards on the doors and windows. I'm not that experienced with the current 5th edition rules to know if that is even possible. Another aspect that I wanted to be able to include were areas of the location that weren't entirely on the material plane so that you could enter secreted areas without the need for a huge area of physical space in the town. In Mage: The Ascension, this is accomplished by using the Correspondence sphere in order to create doorways into kind of pocket dimensions.
I hope this idea doesn't go the same way so many of my ideas have gone in the past; my inspiration does not fuel my creativity to completion. I have a laundry list full of ideas I've come up with for a variety of different games and settings, but they have never found a measure of success beyond the initial inspiration. I have written about some of them here in the past, so some of those failures are documented for all time.
Ultimate goal is to be able to create this and put it up on Dungeon Masters Guild.
