Participationism, and the Humble Tavern
I stumbled upon this article recently, and it kind of set me off. I've had a lot of thoughts stewing lately, as of the Kenku Structure post, and this seemed to trigger some of them into coalescing. The article does what I've seen a lot of things purport to do in the past, which is provide alternatives for the "You meet in a tavern..." campaign opening. As a culture, fantasy gaming has a strange relationship to this trope; some want to move past it as a particularly tired cliché, while some counter-revolutionaries want to reclaim or rehabilitate it. It's got to the point where it's become difficult even to play it straight, where you're basically running an affectionate parody if you do adopt the trope. The interesting point for me is that I think the argument that we need to spice up our campaign intros basically misses the point of the original trope. Say you meet in a tavern with your crew of adventurers, and some shadowy figure in a cloak comes to you...