This event has started and will remain active until October 31!
The culmination of this part-writing, part-role-playing event will be the first Tavern Tales anthology, releasing on February 14, 2027—Nat 1 Publishing’s fifth anniversary!
Faewalk Tavern Tales is a new Nat 1 Publishing anthology event with a twist—instead of simply placing a collection of unrelated stories one after another, we’re putting the storytellers in the book, too.
Say what?
The anthology will be framed around a gathering at a tavern in Faewalk called the Bramble Cup, where travelers, adventurers, locals, and others have come together to share stories. Each submitted story (or poem, if poetry is more your style) will become one of the tales told, recounted, or inspired by someone in the tavern. Between the submitted works, which will be due by the end of the month (October 31), the House will write short scenes set inside the tavern, creating segues from one piece to the next and turning the anthology into a single, interconnected piece rather than a traditional collection of independent works.
The general vibe of the collection is a crowded tavern: someone at the next table finishes a strange tale about something they encountered on the road, and another patron overhears the ending and insists it reminds them of a story from their homeland. Both stories are told, and an argument breaks out over whether either tale could possibly be true. Someone in the corner has been listening quietly—and finally decides to break up the fight because they have a story worth telling. Then the next story begins. By the end of the anthology, people won’t have just read a collection of stories; they’ll have spent an evening at the Bramble Cup with the people who told them.
Your Tavern Character
In addition to submitting a story or poem, every participating author will create a character who is present in the tavern. These avatars can be the protagonist of your story, recounting something they experienced firsthand, or they might be a traveler telling a tale they heard somewhere along the road. They might know the people involved, have witnessed only part of what happened, or simply be passing along a story that has made its way across Faewalk… TaVs and theater tickets are expensive, so they need to get their entertainment from somewhere!
The character and the story don’t have to be directly connected, as long as there is a reasonable way for that character to be the one sharing the tale. At a minimum, your tavern character needs:
At a minimum, your tavern character needs:
- A physical description, including their lineage (Faewalk’s term for the fantasy races)
- A 2–3 sentence backstory
- A general personality
You’re welcome—and encouraged—to develop them beyond that.
Role-playing in the Tavern
There will be a channel on Discord where participants can role-play their tavern characters with one another. The interactions in the role-playing thread may be used as inspiration or source material for the scenes we write between stories. That means conversations, friendships, rivalries, jokes, arguments, running gags, and other moments that develop naturally between the characters may find their way into the finished anthology. This part is completely optional. You will not be penalized if you don’t want to role-play. Your character still needs to be created and submitted, but if you don’t participate in the role-playing thread, the House will write your character’s tavern interactions for you based on the description, backstory, and personality you provide.
Some Notes
- Information about Faewalk can be found here; specific questions can be asked on Discord.
- Having a character in the tavern does not mean your story has to be written in first person. If your tavern character is also your protagonist, you can write their story in first person, third person, or whatever perspective best serves the piece. Think of the tavern scenes as the framing device rather than a requirement that the submitted story be a literal transcript of the character speaking.
- There is one important distinction: if the protagonist of your story is not the character who is present in the tavern, don’t write the story in first person from the protagonist’s perspective since the tavern character is sharing a story about someone else, rather than recounting their own experience.
- The evening is taking place in the year 1488 of the 8.5th Age, meaning most existing published stories take place before this collection.
- The Bramble Cup is a tavern whose doors can appear almost anywhere across the Dagger Shores, always marked by an out-of-place tangle of flowering bramble and a wooden sign depicting a cup entwined in thorns. It is small, with mismatched furniture and a fireplace that the patrons never see tended. Also, despite the room’s size, whenever someone enters, there always seems to be a seat or table for them. When patrons leave, the door returns each of them to the same place from which they entered.
- Lyric, the tavern’s keeper, appears to be a woman in her early- to mid-thirties. She is short and slender, with warm brown skin, dark curls with hints of copper, and eyes that shift between green and amber. She is friendly, clever, and nearly impossible to fluster. Despite treating strangers like regulars, Lyric is evasive about herself and the peculiarities of the tavern. Before she ever has to answer pointed questions, a patron conveniently arrives or leaves the Bramble Cup, the door’s bell interrupting the conversation.