Basic Information
Despite the name a biker bar could actually play host to any reasonably insular and clannish subculture. The page name is simply due to the image being a Hollywood staple. Broadly, the place is a pub or bar which is frequented almost exclusively by one specific urban tribe - it could be (a specific chapter of) bikers, football casuals for a given team, punks, skinheads, goths, crusties, leathermen or pretty much any other similar group.
This sort of place is often depicted as a fighting pub and/or bad guy bar, but this is often an undeserved cliche - the biker bar is likely to be very hospitable to members of the appropriate subculture and at worst unfriendly to others … unless they manage to offend the values of the culture in question, at which point they will have offended pretty much everyone present, many of whom are drunk, and are likely to be in grave danger.
Sources
Game and Story Use
- In an urban campaign, quite a lot of PCs are likely to belong to some urban tribe, and in many places will have a place like this as their hangout. How the rest of the party goes down is another question.
- PCs may escape pursuers by fleeing into a biker bar that will be hostile to those who are chasing them.
- And turnabout is fair turn.
- Probably a good place to look for fellow thinkers in a strange city.
- …and a bad place to be looking for information if you don't belong.
- Ripe for subversion when the rough looking bikers are having a wine tasting evening or poetry recital.
- The demon bars in various Joss Whedon series are usually set up as these … with varying levels of villainy.
- The Blue Oyster Bar in the Police Academy series plays this for laughs with a leatherman hangout… unfortunate implications and double standard dissonance are laid on thick.
- Possible "fun" to be had if a character asks directions to one of these places from someone who gets the tribe right, but misreads internal factions - such as being sent to a bike bar for a rival chapter, or a neo-Nazi skinhead walking into a pub full of SHARPs.
- A common subversion is to have one character who plainly doesn't belong and hasn't noticed, there because a) it's the closest place serving drinks, b) they're there with friends, or c) they were coming to this place before it became the biker bar. The usual case is that they're tolerated as long as they keep drinking, but added humor if they manage to pass themselves off as a member or even a leader.