The Outer Luck Cafe

The Outer Luck Café is a tavern in the north-eastern quarter of Bajapur, owned by a trio of former adventurers; halfling couple Merric and Callie Summerstep and their business partner, the retired human fighter Garth Irugan. Popular with humans and halflings, it is always bustling, and particularly frequented by novice adventurers looking to learn a little about the profession - and gain a little good fortune.

The Building

Situated in a prime position on the corners of two bustling streets, wide leaded glass windows turn the main room into an airy expanse. The door was built to the Summersteps’ specifications, with the entrance made into a large, round doorway. It is split down the middle to form a double door, to allow unobstructed movement despite its size, and the building is oversized by halfling standards, although slightly low-ceilinged for humans. The furniture is an assortment of human- and halfling-sized pieces, and is scattered around the room mixed together.
The tavern is notable for its many decorations related to luck and good fortune, from paintings of gods and goddesses of luck, to carved and painted symbols and talismans of divination and fortune.
Large enough to easily hold fifty to a hundred people, the main room has floorboards polished and waxed to a high gloss, and pale wooden pillars holding up the roof. A half-flight of steps leads down to the kitchen on the right side of the room, while the half-flight leading up goes to private dining and meeting rooms. Trestle tables for communal dining line the centre of the room, while smaller tables and booths circle the outer edge.

Fine Dining

The Outer Luck has a well-deserved reputation for food of a quality far higher than its prices, with the menu changing seasonally and frequent special dishes when the Summersteps can source unusual ingredients. Their eldest son Tarren showed a special gift for cooking even at a young age, and was apprenticed with some of the best cooks in Bajapur before returning to run the family kitchen.
The entire staff sample Tarren’s creations before the new menu is premiered each season or special dishes are featured, ensuring that they are familiar with every item on the menu.
The café is particularly famed for the Moon Cakes they produce during the Golden Moon Festival each year, as they are widely considered to be among the best in the city. Tarren produces a variety, from the traditional steamed, baked, or fried rice flour and honey cakes, to experimental moon cakes which are always spectacularly flavoured and hugely popular. Queues often form out the door of Bajapur residents wanting to buy a moon cake on the way to work, and the entire Summerstep family is pressed to work on making Tarren’s creations during the festival, including his five younger siblings.
The cakes cover a variety of prices, from the few coppers labourers can spare, to ornate confections bought by servants to be savoured by nobles of the Great Houses which sell for multiple gil. Despite the care taken with their baking, and the moon cakes’ popularity, the Summersteps somehow always have enough ‘mis-baked’ moon cakes to give away to the eager beggar children who cluster around the kitchen door each night.
Patrons hurry to reach the Outer Luck Café before sundown, for when the bells of the nearest clock-tower ring out that it is six in the evening each day, the main door is temporarily closed. Each table has a number inlaid in metal, and after the doors are closed, a wheel mounted on the wall is ceremoniously spun. The diners seated at the table whose number comes up, eat free for that night.
The Café's liquid offerings are notable for their variety, including a number of chilled wines which are served fresh from the coolroom dug deep beneath the building, making them very popular during the warm and humid months of summer in Bajapur. The other reason for its fame is the home-brewed alcohol known as Garth and Callie's Lucky Liquor. Callie's experiments succeeded in creating a bush with berries somewhat similar to the goodberry spell, but stable and longer-lasting. The berries were still too fragile for transport by adventurers, however, so Garth experimented with distilling the juice until he came up with an alcohol which possessed all their best properties.
The Lucky Liquor is a deep tawny amber, with hints of purple when looked at in the right light, and smells like citrus and woodsmoke, with hints of cinnamon. A single small toughened-glass bottle will replace an entire day's meals, although more than one bottle will likely leave the imbiber staggering drunk. The wine is considered lucky because packing a couple of the sturdy, tightly-sealed bottles has saved more than one explorer from a grim fate after their ordinary rations were lost or destroyed by misadventure.

Tales of the Tavern

Above the bar is a long metal frame hanging on ropes, with apparently random items fixed to it. A pair of ragged and tattered human-sized boots sit next to a tarnished dagger, an aged scrap of parchment with indecipherable writing, a stuffed jackalope’s foot, and many other things. These are all ‘lucky’ items which once belonged to adventuring regulars at the tavern, who donated them to the tavern upon retirement in a long-standing tradition (the exception is underwear, which is invariably refused).
The other half of the tradition is that young adventurers who have an item they believe to be lucky, are allowed to ‘walk the bar’. They climb onto the top of the bar, and the frame is lowered within reach. After choosing an item on the frame which they feel calls to them, they touch their own personal item to the bar’s lucky item, symbolically sharing its luck with their own. The entire tavern rocks to the applause and cheers following the ritual.
In the centre of the tavern sits a large bronze statue of a frog, the size of a pony, called “the lucky frog”. Callie and Garth laboriously hauled it back from a long-forgotten tomb they had discovered, and it is believed to impart good luck on those who rub its nose. This is actually true, so long as the supplicant genuinely believes in the power of the statue; for the next twenty-four hours, they have minor good fortune, similar to the good luck halflings experience. As a result, the statue’s nose is polished to a bright gleam.
Games of skill are popular in the Café, with darts and some card games being particularly common. Games of chance, however, are forbidden; within moments of such a game starting, Merric will appear at the table demanding the players stop, insisting, “Are you mad? Don’t use up your luck here, save it for the dungeon!”
A notice-board on the wall holds listings of easy jobs available for novice adventurers, such as clearing out giant rat infestations in store basements or granaries, and adventurers who entertain the diners with particularly well-told tales of their exploits often receive drinks for free.

Staff of the The Outer Luck Café

Merric and Callie Summerstep have been married for many years, since long before Callie gave up adventuring. A druid of The Parents, she met Merric when she and Garth rescued his village from a rampaging monster early in their adventuring career. They proceeded to court, and a few years later Merric and Callie got married.
Merric joined Callie, Garth, and the rest of their party in adventuring for a while, but after Callie gave birth to Tarren, Merric gave up adventuring and resumed his career as a baker, then later an innkeeper, so that he could look after their children. Callie continued serving the Parents for many years, taking breaks whenever she fell pregnant, until eventually she retired and joined Merric in opening the Café.
Both Merric and Callie are cheerful and good-humoured, with the well-fed appearance of healthy halflings. While Callie appears as pacifistic as any other halfling matron, regular customers know not to test her patience, and that her grip is strong enough to make angry drunks whimper in pain and beg for mercy. If she reaches for the old mountain ash staff beneath the bar, regulars sit very still with their hands in sight, and if her eyes start to turn deep green, knowledgeable customers will duck under the tables or head for the door, as it is a warning sign her patience has run out and combat spells will soon make an appearance.
Merric is a grey-haired and steady halfling man, portly from a lifetime of testing his food. He is amazingly even-tempered as a result of running after six energetic halfling children while his wife was out serving her calling from her deity. His keen eyes miss little which occurs in his tavern, and he is always ready to welcome new customers.
Tarren Summerstep is seldom seen past the doorway of his kitchen, which he rules with an iron ladle. Every dish receives at least some personal attention from him, no matter how busy the kitchen is, and his raised eyebrow is a sign for his kitchen assistants to wince, as something does not meet his exacting standards. Despite his perfectionism, he is generous with praise when deserved, and is carefully teaching his assistants everything he knows, just as he learned from his mentors. Several of Tarren's assistants or apprentices have been hired away to senior positions in the kitchens of the Great Houses of Bajapur, although they never forget what they owe to the mentor who taught them.
Garth Irugan is a retired human fighter who adventured beside Callie Summerstep for most of their careers. He pooled his savings with the Summersteps to open the Outer Luck Café, and now serves as bouncer when required, periodic bartender, and breaks out his surprisingly melodic baritone singing voice and encyclopaedic knowledge of drinking songs when the tavern falls quiet and there is no bard on hand to provide entertainment. Although he likes to chuckle, “All I fight now is my alcohol tolerance,” his humour and rounded stomach - a symptom of too much exposure to Tarren's excellent food - conceal the fact that he is still easily capable of beating insolent young fools into submission if Callie doesn't get to them first.
The rest of the staff are a mix of adult and teen Summerstep children (the number depending on how busy the time of year is) and a few human and halfling servers and kitchen hands. All are cheerful and friendly even when busy, although should a customer become overly insistent with one of the more attractive young tavern lasses or lads, a mere look is enough to summon Garth or Callie for assistance.