One of the things I don’t like about the vanilla taverns is the fact that they’re so quiet. I wanted to make Robber’s Refuge more like a normal bar, and fill the halls with a chorus of words, songs, and laughter, without the player ever having to engage anyone.

While I want to experiment with a number of tools, the first thing I played around with was the concept of prolonged skits. Over the course of several scenes, these characters can be given the same dimensions and depth as the other NPCs and still be part of the background.

Of course to shoot this scene, I needed a bit of quiet, so I had to kill everyone else off save Ortheim. You may notice the corpse in the top right corner. This is just one of 7 scenes between these traveling adventurers, and just a small sample of the kind of goodies I want Robber’s Refuge to have.