LE Adventurer's Tavern (Follower Recruitment Hub)

[aozgolo]

A common trope in fantasy genres is the meeting of companions or the hiring of mercenaries from taverns. It's a very common starting point in many PnP campaigns, and even been implemented in a few video games as well such as Dragon Quest (3 & 9) and Icewind Dale.

My idea is to create a central hub tavern, a new location, probably well outside any major city (for maximum compatibility) but along some well traveled road. This tavern would actually be very large (on the interior at least), possibly across multiple cells. It would contain multiple rooms (way more than a traditional inn) as well as many open common areas. It would be designed as a central hub where you could go to recruit companions, mercenaries, and followers both from the vanilla game and from mods. There would be normal inn/tavern amenities like room rental and merchants, as well as rumors and radiant quests. Additionally there would be an NPC whom you could speak to about finding a companion. For vanilla followers this would act as a radiant quest that would tell you a rumor about a potential follower and give you a quest marker to go meet them (with another dialogue to cancel the quest). You could also choose a "hire mercenary" option, and for a small courier fee a message will be sent out to any of the hireable mercenaries in the game to come meet you at the Tavern, you will rent a room for the night and the next day the mercenary will appear in the tavern for you to hire. It will not relocate vanilla followers, except possibly as an optional patch.

 

The tavern itself would be a standalone mod that allows for modular implementation of followers into it. It's biggest purpose would be a single hub for placement of followers added by mods. Where often follower mods will just choose some random inn or castle to throw their NPC into making it a bit cumbersome to remember and track them all down, this mod would allow them to create an optional file or esp to place their NPC in the Tavern. This is where it becomes a bigger community effort as patches can be made for a wide variety of followers to allow them to be relocated to the Adventurer's Tavern. This of course would be covered by a tutorial for patching as well as information on the features of the Tavern.

 

Followers added by mods could then be placed in various rooms in the taverns, this is where the size and different areas come into play, as you will have a standard common room and normal bedrooms for the more basic style of followers, a library/sitting room for more mage oriented ones, a stable for beast companions, a cellar bar room for the more cutthroat and rogueish types, and even a hidden chamber beneath for the darker elements like vampires and monsters. The primary Tavern Master will be able to give you details on each follower registered with the mod, to cut down on voice acting this can be a simple handing over of a note that has basic information on the follower, similar to details from the mod description itself. If the patched follower just relocates the follower to the tavern but doesn't include one of these notes, the Tavern Master will simply say "Sorry I don't have much info on that guest"

 

Obviously anyone who wanted to undertake this could change or add their own flair I am just outlining a bit.

 

The primary end goal of this mod would be a community resource for both modders and mod makers to conveniently place followers in a central hub that allows them to be easily found and recruited without cluttering up vanilla locations where they may frankly look out of place.

[Niborino9409]

I really like this idea, hope it gets made! :D I need to tend to my own mods and life atm but I really like the idea. :smile: But I also don't know how it would be done. Perhaps through an .esm file? But must be a better way... :ermm: :huh: Following :laugh:

Edited December 12, 2017 by Niborino9409