TABERNA COMMUNIS

The Common Tavern  ·  Inn and Tavern  ·  Common Quarter, Lacusum

"A city that processes every significant trade route on the primary continent requires, at its residential centre, an establishment that serves the full range of the people who live here rather than the selective range who can afford the Harbour Front’s prices. The Taberna Communis is this establishment. Excellent food at honest prices, rooms that are what they claim to be, and a common room in which the city’s cosmopolitan character is more completely visible than anywhere else in Lacusum. I ate here on my fourth visit and found the table next to mine occupied by a halfling actuary, a tabaxi sea captain, a dwarf trading agent, and a Roman grain clerk, all having the same argument about futures pricing. I found it clarifying."

— G.C.P.S.A., Descriptio Aethermarchae, 1197 A.P.

The Taberna Communis is the Common Quarter’s primary inn and tavern: the establishment that has been serving the residential working population since the fourth century, expanded in the ninth century to its current four-storey form, and run for the past eighteen years by Lucia Tabernaria, forty-nine, who inherited the role from her mother and has maintained the establishment’s defining characteristic: it is a place that everyone in the city can afford and that no one in the city is too important to use. The counting house clerks and the dwarf commercial agents and the tabaxi merchants and the halfling actuaries all eat here, and the resulting common room atmosphere is the most complete expression of what Lacusum actually is — a city organised around the single purpose of commerce, in which every species that conducts commerce is present and conducting it simultaneously.

Design

Forty rooms across the upper three floors: the city’s most affordable inn accommodation at prices that reflect the Common Quarter’s practical function rather than the Harbour Front’s commercial premium. The rooms are clean, adequately sized, and arranged around central corridors whose design Lucia’s mother modified in the ninth century to accommodate the range of species that use the establishment: ceiling heights calibrated for the tabaxi and halfling guests without being uncomfortable for human occupants, door widths that accommodate the dwarf community’s equipment, the specific ventilation arrangement in the third floor’s eastern wing that the establishment’s regular tabaxi guests have found comfortable since the seventh century.

The common room is the city’s most cosmopolitan social space: sixty tables, a bar that serves the full range of the city’s commercial population, and the specific quality of social atmosphere that a room in which every species is equally welcome for commercial reasons produces when the commercial reason has been operating for long enough that the welcome has become genuine. The food is the city’s version of honest — not the Taberna Aurea’s performance, but the cuisine that a city of Lacusum’s cosmopolitan character produces when two hundred years of different culinary traditions have been feeding each other’s workers.

Founding Date

4th century A.P.; expanded 9th century to current form

Type

Inn

Parent Location

PORTUS LACUS

Owner

Lucia Tabernaria

Rooms Available
40 rooms across floors 2–4: singles, doubles, and the third-floor eastern wing’s tabaxi-adapted rooms (6) with the ventilation modification.
Species-appropriate configurations available on request.
Currently at 60% occupancy outside exchange session season; full during session peak.

Species Accommodation
Human, halfling, tabaxi, and dwarf configurations available.
The ninth-century modification programme addressed ceiling heights, door widths, and ventilation specifically.
The most accommodating inn in the interior provinces for non-human travellers.