Hey folks! Fireside this week! Last week\u2019s post was a monster (over 10,000 words compared to our more typically ~6,000) which left me with some non-blog catching up to do. Next week, we\u2019ll be starting our next Teaching Paradox<\/em> series, this time looking at Hearts of Iron IV<\/em>, which has been requested for quite some time. <\/p>\n But for this week\u2019s musing<\/strong>, I wanted to riff a bit off of a bluesky conversation <\/a>I had concerning the fantasy staple: the tavern where the party comes together and gets quests<\/strong>. It was prompted by seeing the trailer for the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons: Long Rest Tavern<\/a><\/em>. Indeed, the fantasy tavern as the hub of questing has become such a staple that it has an entire genre<\/em> of games built around it. But I thought it would be interesting to think about the sort of role such a place could take.<\/p>\n What immediately struck me is how the role of the tavern has kind of metastasized, from the place where Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin happen to meet Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings<\/em> to a sort of standard \u2018you all meet in a tavern\u2019 start to many Dungeons and Dragons campaigns to what we get in many of these \u2018tavern management\u2019 games, where tavern-keeping is an explicit, institutional part of the \u2018adventuring economy.\u2019 In Long Rest Tavern<\/em>, to judge by the trailer, the tavern owner is even responsible for assigning adventuring parties to specific quests, acting as a kind of \u2018violence-specialist temp agency\u2019 from the look of it.<\/p>\n Now I don\u2019t want to say this vision of the fantasy tavern is entirely<\/em> crazy, but I think it is missing some elements, in part because my sense is that it evolved not as a sociological story-telling device saying something about the nature of fictional worlds, but rather as a kind of gameplay convenience: every DM must, for almost every campaign, come up initially with a reason why the player-characters \u2013 a group of exceptional strangers \u2013 meet up and decide to work together. \u201cYou all meet in a tavern\u201d is simply such wonderfully effective shorthand that it become broadly common without needing to be very tethered to the actual fictional worlds. Here, after all, is a place that a regular person can think of and visualize, where strangers might meet. It works.<\/p>\n But I want to overthink it.<\/p>\n We first need to begin not with the tavern but with the question of \u201cwho employs adventurers here?\u201d It sure isn\u2019t likely to be a tavern keeper \u2013 no one could can shell out the payment for a party of level 8 adventurers is washing dishes. Instead, we should probably expect the biggest employer of adventurers to be the same as the largest employers of mercenaries more generally. Adventurers, in the D&D sense, are largely just small groups of mercenaries who specialize in particular kinds of problems \u2013 we might broadly define the \u2018occupation\u2019 as something like \u2018monster slayers.\u2019 And in a magical fantasy world, it actually makes sense that fighting magical or monstrous things might be a distinct, if overlapping, occupation from warriors, soldiers and such hired to engage in normal intercommunal violence (that is, warfare).<\/p>\n Which is to say, we\u2019d probably expect the most common figures employing adventurers would probably be the state or local Big Men in non-state societies. They\u2019re not going to do this personally, of course, they\u2019ll use a cutout to do it for them. That may well be the tavern keeper, although I suspect that some junior aristocrat or official is more likely: someone whose job is \u2018coordinate the recruitment and assignment of adventurer-mercenaries.\u2019 Essentially a military contractor of the sort we were just discussing<\/a>! Of course other individuals in a non-state polity where violence is fragmented might well also seek adventurers: a village with a problem, a smaller Big Man and so on. But the obvious place for them to go when hiring is where the Big Man <\/em>(or the state) hires, because that\u2019s where the adventurers will actually be.<\/p>\n The next question is where<\/strong><\/em> to find these fellows. And the answer is in large towns<\/strong><\/em>. Which is striking because a quick glance at the genre of \u2018fantasy tavern keeping games\u2019 and most of the taverns seem to be set in small towns, villages and forests (presumably for the \u2018cozy\u2019 vibe). There are exceptions, of course (the Yawning Portal in Waterdeep comes to mind), but often the \u2018fantasy tavern\u2019 is quite location-independent, which it wouldn\u2019t be.<\/p>\n The issue here is that \u2018adventurers\u2019 are, for the most part, specialists, in societies where the vast majority (upwards of 80%) of the population are non-specialist farmers and herders. If your goal is to find a specific specialist in a society that has very few of any<\/em> kind of specialized labor, you are going to want to seek them in the largest, densest population centers you can find. If \u2018wizard\u2019 is a job held by one in every thousand, you\u2019ve got a much better chance of finding one looking for work in a town of 50,000, than in a village of 500. A large town provides both a concentration of specialists (of all kinds), but also a concentration of wealthy people who can afford to hire those specialists.<\/p>\n And this isn\u2019t all entirely theory, we have a good guideline for how the private recruitment of violence specialists might work in a pre-modern or early modern context because of course there were quite a lot of mercenaries getting recruited in pre-modern or early modern contexts! And what is striking is that even in cultures where the aim was to recruit farm boys (because they were assumed to make better soldiers than city-dwellers; this was the dominant assumption in early modern Europe, for instance), you recruit them in a town<\/strong>. Or in many cases, you recruit them outside<\/em> of a town. A lot of towns, quite understandably, are touchy about letting armed bands of violence-doers inside the city walls and if they have the political and security position necessary to forbid such groups entry, they usually will.<\/p>\n So for a society which has need for a second kind of \u2018violence specialist\u2019 (beyond regular soldiers or knights or what have you), who specialized in what we might term \u2018monster removal,\u2019 you might expect the local political authority (who would be the largest employer of such), to set up a standard place for recruiting them, perhaps just outside<\/em> the town\/castle\/city walls. It\u2019s not hard to imagine a combined inn\/tavern springing up next to that, to cater to the traffic, and thus get roughly to the \u2018fantasy tavern.\u2019 That said, I find myself wondering: if a locality has so many \u2018monster\u2019 related problems, why is the king\/lord\/state contracting adventurers on a one-off basis? Why doesn\u2019t he have them on permanent retainer?<\/p>\n The easy answer, from a world-building perspective, is to make \u2018monster\u2019-type problems rare enough<\/em> that there isn\u2019t any cause to keep adventurers on permanent employment, but that is the death of the fantasy tavern, since it would lack the kind of continuous clientele necessary (instead, we might imagine adventurers functioning something more like itinerant craftsmen and other specialists in such a world).<\/p>\n The other option I can think of would be some kind of guild, with a legal monopoly on offering \u2018monster removal\u2019 services. Often \u2018adventurer\u2019s guilds\u2019 in fantasy worlds are vast, continent sprawling institutions, but we ought to expect this to work like other guilds: extremely local, perhaps with each large town having its own guild of adventurers which controlled membership, extracted fees, regulated the trade and provided for widows and such \u2013 the sort of things historical guilds did. In that case, the place you would go to hire an adventurer wouldn\u2019t be a tavern, but a guild hall. It might well have some of the same facilities (a kitchen, dining spaces, lodging), but they would be for the members, rather than public. Such a guild would then have a fair bit of price-setting and bargaining power, even potentially against the state or local lord. Of course, they\u2019d also have a role in preventing non-members from offering services \u2013 one might expect rather violently.<\/p>\n Alas, neither of these options \u2013 itinerant companies of monster-hunters or local established guilds of them \u2013 offers much space for the freewheeling fantasy tavern. Crucially, they also don\u2019t offer much space for the fantasy cliche of a group of unrelated adventurers meeting for the first time. That, in turn, I think, speaks to the degree to which pre-modern societies simply don\u2019t throw strangers together like that very much, as human mobility is much lower. \u201cHere\u2019s a room full of people you don\u2019t know, make friends\u201d is a very common modern life challenge, but an infrequent (not unknown<\/em>, but infrequent) pre-modern one. Tolkien seems to understand this: both Thorin and Company and the Fellowship of the Ring are unusual<\/em> groups in that they include members who are more or less strangers to each other. As a result, it takes quite exceptional circumstances for them to form.<\/p>\n That said, because Dungeons and Dragons campaigns \u2013 and similar other rulesets and settings \u2013 demand as a part of the structure of the game<\/em> (as distinct from the story) that player-characters generally be strangers to each other, I think the \u2018fantasy tavern\u2019 will continue and I would expect to see its steady drift from a convenient storytelling assumption to an established part of the lore, to becoming a customary institution<\/em> of sorts, to continue.<\/p>\n On to Recommendations:<\/strong><\/p>\n First again for my own stuff. I am back at Foreign Policy<\/em> with \u201cThe U.S. Is Learning the Wrong Lessons in Iran<\/a>,\u201d arguing that the focus on smaller-picture, often narrowly military issues (magazine depth, drone defenses, minesweeping, etc) runs the risk of obscuring the much more foundational strategic failures in the war. In particular, that the mission the military was asked to accomplish \u2013 regime change entirely from the air or, failing that, neutralizing Iran\u2019s long-range strike capability entirely from the air \u2013 was probably always impossible. At the very least, no one has ever managed to achieve these tasks before and many have tried.<\/p>\n I also made an appearance on The Rest Is History<\/em> discussing the Marian reforms<\/a>, though I think the episode is a \u2018bonus episode\u2019 that requires being a subscriber. Of course if you want my take on the Marian reforms in written form (in a bit more detail than one can fit in a podcast), you can find that here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, also at Foreign Policy and worth your time is Lucian Staiano-Daniels (author of The War People<\/em>, recommended here), writing \u201cThe Straits Are Not OK<\/a>,\u201d on the historical impact of maritime choke points and in particular on how the Sound Toll deformed Danish policy. In short, because tolls from the \u00d8resund went directly to the Danish crown, it enabled Danish kings to engage in a lot of warfare (like involvement in the Thirty Years War) without consulting their parliament. The result was disaster for Denmark and one wonders, should the IRGC likewise end up with its own revenue source in the form of tolls on the Strait of Hormuz, if those funds will likely fuel foreign adventurerism that may prove disastrous to Iran and the wider region.<\/p>\n In somewhat old but still interesting museum news: I remarked quite some time ago on social media that there were a pair of iron kopides<\/em> (singular kopis; <\/em>forward-curving Greek swords) in the Met which, given their thin provenance and the general rarity of such weapons (it is very hard<\/em> to find a well-preserved kopis<\/em>) I figured they were unlikely to have been obtained fully legally. I had waited until after I had the information on them I needed for my research to ask the Met the forbidden question (\u201ccould you please confirm if there is any additional provenance information for the items\u2026\u201d \u2013 sent back in 2021) after which the Met has never returned any of my emails ever again. So you may imagine my amusement to find that both <\/a>swords <\/a>had been restituted out of the Met\u2019s collection in 2025, repatriated to Greece <\/a>as part of a Justice Department fraud investigation. Let us all hope that, now that they are home, they are soon put back on display for the public and made available to scholars, as these really are unusually fine examples of the type.<\/p>\n Will the Met ever answer my emails again? The world may never know.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, over at Pasts Imperfect<\/em><\/a>, a bunch of neat stuff as always, including an interview with Stephanie McCarter, who works on Ovid, Horace and Catullus about the art of translation and the role of the translator\u2019s choices.<\/p>\n An unusual recommendation, but I have commented a few times in the past that academic book reviews are often written in such a style that it is sometimes hard for regular readers to parse if the work is being endorsed or repudiated. For an example of what an absolutely savage<\/em> academic review (that still fits within the bounds of etiquette for the form) looks like, check out Stefan Rebenich\u2019s quite harsh review<\/a> of M. Arnheim\u2019s Five Thousand Years of Monarchy<\/em> (2025). I have not read the book, so I cannot comment on the correctness of the review, though if its sins are as Rebenich describes, the review\u2019s tone seems well-warranted. The \u201cquae mutatio rerum!\u201d<\/em> (\u201coh how things change!\u201d) is an especially biting bit of academic knife-turning.<\/p>\n And for this week\u2019s book Recommendation<\/strong>, it\u2019s time for one I have been holding in my pocket since October of last year, N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy<\/a><\/em> (1986). For those unfamiliar with the periodization of British history, the \u2018Georgian\u2019 period runs from 1714 to 1830, so this is a study of the Royal Navy in the 1700s and early 1800s. Much like Lynn\u2019s Giant of the Grand Si\u00e8cle<\/a><\/em><\/em> (1997) which focuses on the French army of a century earlier, The Wooden World<\/em> is not a campaign or battle history, but an institutional study. Rodger is thus focused not on individual events, but on how the Royal Navy was organized, how its officers were selected and prepared, how its sailors were recruited, what the experience of life on ship was like, how discipline was conducted and so on. Such an approach has perils, of course, particularly the tendency towards historical compression, to treat the institution as an unchanging constant when of course all institutions change, but Rodger, like Lynn is alive to the way that parts of this institution are changing over time as well, though equally the approach benefits from the fact that in this period the Royal Navy was a fairly famously conservative institution and so changed surprisingly little.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/PXL_20260822_180618507.jpg?resize=1024%2C696&ssl=1\")
We had a water issue over the summer \u2013 fortunately, no damage to any of our things, but the basement where my office is has to be refloored. Which has delayed me setting up the new bookshelves I ordered and instead forced me to go through the long process of boxing up my books with the family library taking up about thirty of these \u2018medium duty\u2019 banker\u2019s boxes.
Percy\u2019s sour expression at the situation, as you may imagine, matches my own.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n