Be of Goodly Order

Long ago, I wrote about a fantasy art book that fascinated my childhood friends and I. Called Down in the Dungeon, the book featured color illustrations of a locale called Zarakan's Dungeon. Because there's very little text in the book, there's almost no context for anything depicted in it, beyond this overview of the subterranean complex.

It's a very cool illustration, especially because all of the artwork included in Down in the Dungeon can be placed within it. In fact, if you look carefully at the overview, you can even make out smaller versions of some of the scenes found elsewhere in the book. For example, in the upper right hand portion of the overview, you can see a bunch of pillars. Those pillars – and what's around them – can be seen more clearly in a pair of other illustrations.

In the book, these two illustrations are side by side, as you can see from the creature passed out from intoxication in the first piece, whose hand can be seen in the second one. In the book, a captain accompanies them, reading "Neutral Ground. Be of Goodly Order." Clearly, this is meant to be a bar or tavern located within the dungeon, where all its various inhabitants, monstrous or otherwise, can rub shoulders not only with one another but also with adventurers – so long as they all are "of goodly order."

It's a pretty strange concept, a bar within a dungeon and yet I can recall at least one dungeon I played in as a young man that included such a thing. The bar was explicitly a "safe area" where characters could rest and even re-supply, though to a limited extent. I don't know where the referee, whom I met at a "games day" at a local library, got the idea for such a thing. I'd never seen anything like it before (since I hadn't yet encountered Down in the Dungeon) and I recall finding it odd. However, my fellow players and I went along with it, since there were all sorts of weird NPCs in the place with whom we enjoyed interacting. Plus, as I said, the bar was a place where our characters could rest up, heal, and get more food/water, arrows, and other similar things. I suppose the referee intended it as a mercy of sorts, since the rest of the dungeon was pretty brutal.

Has anyone else ever encountered something like this in a dungeon? Are there any examples of it in fantasy literature or perhaps in a fantasy RPG? I can't shake the feeling that I'm failing to remember something obvious.