Red Fox Inn

For tonight's adventure, the PCs are starting out having lunch at a country inn outside of Paris. Bondy is a village seven miles northeast of Paris along the main road to Meux. The Red Fox Inn (l'Auberge du Renard Roux) is a pleasant roadside inn with whitewashed walls and airy buildings. The front gate is flanked by ivy-covered trellises. Behind the inn is a walled courtyard with a well, stables, and a chicken coop. The innkeeper is Lucas Figuier—a stout man with a jovial personality. His wife Marie is an amazing cook (Cook-3) and the inn is well known for its food.

For the look of the inn I searched through my file of inns and taverns and came up with the Broken Coin Inn PDF that I purchased from THE FORGE ®. The PDF includes both an exterior view of the inn as well as plans for the upper and lower floors.

One thing I notice about most inns created for Fantasy Roleplaying is that the inns are fricking huge with dozens of private rooms and tables in the common room. That is much larger than most taverns and pubs I recall seeing in Europe and for play, such a large location just lowers the odds that a PC will notice someone interesting or it ups the GM workload by requiring the GM to fill the inn with a hundred or so interesting NPCs. I have a lot of NPCs for Honor+Intrigue, but aside from a crowd watching a parade I see no reason to include one or two hundred of them at a single location. The Broken Coin Inn isn't too bad in this respect, but I wanted a smaller inn, so I cut out part of the left wing of the inn which reduced the dining area to a single table private dining room suitable for a conference of PCs and eliminated 2 bed rooms and 6 beds.

I also wanted the windows in the outside picture to match the windows on the floor plans. For some reason the artist and map maker got their signals crossed. The original exterior show 11 windows on the front upper story (5 left, 1 center, 5 right) and 12 windows on the front lower story (6 left, 6 right). The interior plan for the upper story only has 7 windows (3 left, 1 center, 3 right) while the lower story only has 11 windows (6 left, 5 right). Lots of windows are nice for the airy look I wanted and it was easier artistically to change the plan than the exterior view. So I added and moved windows on the floor plans.

While I was fixing that, I noticed that the stairs between the first and second floors were not too clear as far as direction so I added some arrows and the word UP to clarify.

Since I had decided to name this inn the Red Fox, I took the sign for the real Red Fox Inn & Tavern in Middleburg, Virginia. Here is the result.