The Thirsty Throat

This tavern is as ramshackle an establishment as its name implies. A merchant described it to me as “a pile of wood taking its own lazy time about falling into the street,” and he got it right. All the furniture is crowded together and bolted down.

"“Crowded, dark, and smells of stale beer,"” I wrote, years ago, on my first visit— - and it hasn'’t changed a bit. What it does have to offer is mediocre beer at low prices. A tankard as big as a man’s head costs 1 copper piece. Those who like to laugh and brawl tend to go elsewhere. This place is full of quiet men drinking themselves into slumber with a handful of coppers.

The washrooms are interesting. You climb down a ladder into a little antechamber opening right into a harbor-bound sewer channel. Men climb down one ladder, and ladies down another —and end up facing each other in the same room, about an arm’s stretch apart. It'’s an ideal place for exchanging items on the sly, dumping incriminating things into the sewer, or even for easily getting into Waterdeep’'s sewer network.