Where: Vallaki, near the town square.
Status: 🏠 Home base. A six-bed room, 2 gp a night, ours as of the evening we arrived.
First entered: Session 7, at the end of the long day through the gate.
The house
Kept by Urwin Martikov and his wife Danika, with their boys Brom and Bray permanently underfoot and reportedly under tables. Warm light, real food, honest prices, and the first room in Barovia where nobody watched us eat. After the village, the windmill, and the road, walking in here felt like being handed something we’d forgotten we were owed.
The menu, priced for the road-weary: hot beet soup, potato pottage, potato bread — coppers. Wolf steak, properly done — silver. Six beds, two gold, a door that locks — mostly (see below). The wine is now, officially, a problem: rationing has started. Urwin watered our round. The Wizards of Wine matter is no longer someone else’s.
The regulars
- The Bard — the defiantly colorful musician, now properly met. Wax jar says “Riptarvo’s.” Says the devil’s name out loud like it’s weather. Watching us with great interest.
- The Wachter lads, Karl & Nikolai — the noble house’s rowdy sons, carted home nightly by a long-suffering manservant. Wine makes them honest about their sister.
- Two happy drunks, professionally happy.
- And at a corner table: Roger — last of the previous Mistwalkers. The tale is now told (Session 8, over the wine we bought), and his page holds all of it. One story per glass: “buy the wine again some other night.”
What the bar gave up (Session 8)
Danika’s family owns the winery in the south — the wine that “keeps this entire bubble afloat” — and the latest shipment is days late, which never happens. If our travels run west and south, we’ve been asked, quietly, to look in. She filled in Sirius’s map herself. And when the raven-man’s death came up, she winced — the Martikovs and the ravens keep ending up in the same sentences.
What the inn gave up (Session 9)
- Ireena sang from the stage — a full room gone completely quiet, a song she dreamed, and a refrain we haven’t stopped hearing. Her page has it.
- The twins hired us: their friend Bluto is missing at the haunted lake — 70–80 gold from Mama to bring him home (Quests & Threads).
- And in our locked room, windows secured, a letter lay in the middle of the floor. Danika saw no one enter. See The Ravens of Barovia.
What the inn turned out to be (Session 10)
A second impossible letter — through a warded window this time — and the pretense collapsed all at once: our barman is a wereraven, the inn is an information hub of The Ravens of Barovia, and the roof’s raven population is not a coincidence, it’s a staff rota. We have been sleeping in the safest room in Vallaki since the day we arrived and are choosing to be retroactively flattered rather than alarmed.
The morning the room changed shape (Session 11)
- Danika and the boys are gone — sent to the winery before dawn, “given the things we discussed.” The wine is now half water, and Urwin keeps glancing at the west road.
- Ireena is waiting tables. She’s got a job. She’s enjoying it. We are not examining our feelings.
- Muriel Vinshaw claimed a corner table, our acquaintance, and — shortly afterward — two vampires.
- Izek held the best table for the Baron’s status report; see his page for a masterclass in Vallaki arithmetic.
- The bard’s corner produced a heavy chest and five words: “Hunt well those who hunt.”
- Henrik slept here the night his coffins stopped being his problem and became everyone’s.
One meal a week (Session 13)
The taproom has become a ration station: one meal per week per soul, served without apology, because arithmetic doesn’t take apologies. The wine is dregs — ten percent wine, ninety percent history. Drew’s contribution to the crisis: Lady Wachter’s liberated beets, distributed Oprah-style (“You get a beet. You get a beet.”). Muriel resigned from our company at this bar at dawn; Urwin accepted the beets like sandbags in a flood and keeps not-looking at the west road, where a bird he was expecting has not come.
Open questions
What do the Martikovs know about the bad times — and about us?Rather a lot, on both counts. See Urwin Martikov.- Why is the wine late — and what happens when it runs dry? It has run dry. This is what happens. The winery is silent, Falkon never came back, Danika and the boys flew into that silence, and the whole town now eats once a week and drinks memory. The west road is no longer a question. It’s a destination.
Who delivers letters through locked doors?Wings.