Tavern Keeper's Item Design Tool Is So Good One Player Made A...

The fantasy tavern keeping sim from Greenheart Games is lighting up its players' imaginations.

I've fallen hard for Tavern Keeper, a sim where you manage an inn in a fantasy realm filled with halflings, orcs, and elves, serving drinks, cooking meals, and dealing with occasional devastating fire or insect infestation. Despite only entering early access just last week (after more than a decade of development), it's already beloved among players who awarded it an 'Overwhelmingly Positive' review score average on Steam.

Something I didn't get too deeply into when I gushed about Tavern Keeper last week is its item design tool. There are all sorts of objects to build in your tavern, from useful furniture like tables, chairs, and beds to decorative items like bookcases, paintings, and rugs—but that's just the start.

Tavern Keeper also invites players to modify existing items or create their own with its in-game design tool and share them with other players. I've only done some basic modifications so far, like decorating countertops with items like gold coins, goblets, playing cards, and perhaps a dagger half-buried in the wood of a table. Typically fantasy set dressing.

But the item design tool in Tavern Keeper is so flexible that players have been creating some shockingly imaginative stuff. Case in point, this Dungeons & Dragons table created by Jolle that I spotted over on Reddit:

But that's not all. If you open the design tool to inspect Jolle's D&D table you can zoom in even closer and see there's actually a ton of character info on those character sheets. They have names, classes, stats, and even a little avatar of each character, as if the players doodled them. There's an assassin rogue called "Edge Lord" with 34 HP, and an orc named Glinda Scarlett with 19 charisma. You can even peep the dungeon master's monster manual, which is open to the entry on the Beholder.

That's an astounding level of detail for a tiny prop in a tavern management sim, and it really highlights the power of the design tool Greenheart Games made and the creativity (and I assume patience) of the players using it.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

These are just props, mind you: the table, despite its elaborate decorations, is still just a table, and tavern patrons will sit and drink their grog there, not actually look like they're playing D&D—though thanks to all the items Jolle added to the table, its "decor" sc

Source: PC Gamer