The Alehouse Drake

Many of the inns of Akorros have their own resident Alehouse Drake. As Mike Welham summarises in Tome Unleashed: Alehouse Drake:

Alehouse drakes squat in busy bars, rowdy taverns, and bustling inns. They love gossip, and spend their days drinking, joking, and arguing with patrons. There are friendly alehouse drakes and more devious ones, but either way, they are usually helpful enough to proprietors to earn their keep. They are often “passed down” in innkeeping families through generations.

Alehouse Drakes are described as one to two feet long on average, weighing about 18 pounds (8kg). They are described as inveterate gossips, and their size makes them small enough to hide in corners or up on shelves unobserved, perfectly placed to overhear all sorts of discussions and secrets which they may be persuaded to exchange for the right enticement (which probably varies from drake to drake).
Some drakes like to be the centre of attention, flying down and perching on the tables or clinging to the backs of chairs, lapping up the admiration of the drinkers. Such drakes can get cantankerous if ignored.
Other drakes are less extroverted, and enjoy just lying along the back of a bench or on a window ledge, soaking up the ambience and tweaking the emotions of the crowd to calm over-excited drinkers, in return for the affectionate caresses of regulars and all the ale they can drink.
Alehouse Drakes have very tough constitutions (19/+4) and immunity to unconsciousness, so it takes a lot to make them drunk, and they are also high in charisma (16/+3). Their skills include Persuasion +5 and Insight +3 which makes them good at reading the crowds, and their Deception +5 helps them to have fun with the punters.
They can also innately cast various spells which again show the two sides of an alehouse drake. They can cast both friends and vicious mockery at will, and while they can cast calm emotions five times a day, they can also cast dissonant whispers, ray of sickness and hideous laughter, and they can cast confusion and invisibility three times per day, which all suggest much more of a prankster, and they can burp a cloud of intoxicating gas which causes drunkenness – poisoned for a minute and needing to make a DC14 CON save to avoid becoming stunned.
I had great fun with an Alehouse Drake when the party was making their way through the alternate world of Averoigne in X2 Castle Amber. They had finally broken free of the forests and come to a roadside inn, which I based on The Bluebell Inn from Tales of the Old Margreve. One of the Inn’s optional NPCs is:

Garryth, the resident alehouse drake, [who] absolutely loves playing matchmaker. Though he is chronically tipsy, he means well, even when advocating matches that seem unlikely at best.

I had Garryth try to match up the most unlikely pair of the party, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Notable Alehouse Drakes of Akorros to follow…