The Misty Beard

This clean, well-mannered tavern (in such mixed company all folk tend to be extra polite) is a solid-looking stone building with large arched windows, downspouts carved into the likenesses of beautiful winged maidens, and a steeply pitched slate roof. It rises four floors above the street. This was once a tavern known as the Cat and Songbird, but it's owners were members of the Thieves' Guild, and perished bloodily in an assassination attempt on the gathered Lords of Waterdeep.

The interior of the Misty Beard is a well-lit jumble of booths and cozy chairs salvaged from sales all over the city. The rooms all open into a central well, where various stairs curve and zigzag up and down, and winged waiters dart from bar to table with single glasses. The waiters are sprites, who are hired here for month-long shifts, by which time they’'re usually sick of the city and flit home.

Food in the Beard tends to be of the breadstick and cheese dip variety. The garlic butter is justly famous, and a wonderful gooseberry jam is made on the premises. The fruit is brought in from High Hill, the owners’ estates northeast of the city. There is also very good sausage and morkoth soup, which varies in ingredients. Morkoth soup is one of those simmer-all-day throw-in-whatever’s about concoctions. The food is filling, but bland. The varied clientele hold little seasoning in common high regard.

The half-elven mages who own the place are two wand-wielding sisters, Allet and Vindara Tzuntzin, who once ran the Black Gryphon inn in Elturel. Their monstrous friends and visitors were not welcomed in that city, so they sold out and came to cosmopolitan Waterdeep, where they soon tired of making beds, so they turned their inn into a tavern. The tavern's name refers to a private joke between them, involving a bet, a Waterdhavian sailor, and some magic.

The bartender at the Beard is Munzrim Marlpar, a dignified, fearless lizard man of unusual height and intellect. He was outcast from his kin in the Marsh of Chelimber because of those features. He’'s usually to be found deep in conversation with a beholder-like, deadly looking spectator floating behind the bar: Thoim Zalamm, who is something of a philosopher, and sometimes drifts out over the rooftops of the city on dark nights to spy on the endlessly entertaining doings of humans.

The Beard has a more varied and well-stocked cellar than anywhere in Waterdeep except perhaps Piergeiron’'s Palace itself. The many drinkables run from 3 tp/tankard for ale and 4 tp/jack for zzar (the bargains) up to 12 sp/tallglass for most wines and exotic drinks. Bottles are always six times the price of a glass. Meals are 1 sp/head for as much as you want to consume in one evening from what’s on the menu that night.

There are many tales of the parties—and occasional brawls— at the Beard. The two sisters are quick to use their wands to keep racial fears and hostilities from erupting into full-scale slaughter, and this promise of safety is enough to attract a steady stream of the curious. A rare few citizens are comfortable drinking at the Beard as regulars, but it is a very popular place for low-income merchants to use to impress out-of-town visitors and a common neutral ground meeting place for merchants and others engaged in difficult negotiations. A few private rooms can be rented for short periods at 10 sp/hour. Some nights things turn into raucous sing-alongs-—and as one Waterdhavian told me, “"Until you’ve seen a spectator and a faerie dragon dancing on air together and struggling to harmonize— well, you'’ve not seen Waterdeep!”"