Street Games

While traveling in search of entertainment and fun, the PCs may find it thrust upon them. Street entertainers are part of the general social life of Greyhawk. In the New City (especially in the Garden Quarter), bards and musicians and street artists jostle for the attention of the crowds. A comely half-elf may offer to paint a portrait of a PC for a few gold pieces. A bard may ask the PCs if they knows they're being followed, and if they don't, would they like to hear details ... for a small fee? (The fee may not be all that small, and the bard may or may not be telling the truth, at your option.) A member of the Guild of Barbers and Dentists may offer a PC a quick trim while his friend entertains with a hurdy-gurdy and a trained pet monkey; and so on.

Men may be seen posting advertisements for coming attractions at the Grand Theatre or the Royal Opera House; others may shout out details of the match of the day at The Pit; and puppet shows, poetry recitations, priests collecting for charity, and many other types of street scenes are liable to be found in Greyhawk. Even in the Old City there will be a lot of street activity, although beggars and street urchins will replace those advertising events at the theatre and opera! Use street encounters to convey the sounds and sights of this cosmopolitan city.

Such encounters may also be used to set up small-scale adventures, or to delay PCs when they are trying to cross the city. Open thievery, assassination, and the like are extreme examples, but consider a PC simply seeing one NPC hand a bag (obviously heavy-coins?) to another in a narrow alley, then the two separate, looking about quickJy, and start to melt into the crowd. What is happening? It could be entirely innocuous, or a chance to tail a nefarious NPC gang. Similarly, street entertainers may no longer be amusing sights when a group of them "accidentally" collide with PCs chasing a fleeing villain. Accidental, or were they paid to do it? If so, will they talk for money, or are they too scared to do so? Still further, maybe one of those entertainers or beggars is actually a polymorphed creature or NPC of considerable power in disguise. At the most extreme, it could even be a visiting Greyhawk dragon (see GREYHAWK Adventures, page 26), a gold dragon, or even an avatar. A seemingly "trivial" encounter can sometimes be anything but!