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Monday Maps #13: A Quick Tutorial on Caves
Happy Monday! I hope you and yours are all staying safe.
I haven’t posted a Monday Map in a little while, but I came across this YouTube tutorial that is worth seeing. If you’re like me and the only things you can draw are a breath, a bath, and a conclusion, invest 1 minute and 14 seconds of your time and take a look.
Hammers and Dragons has a Facebook page here with links to a free downloadable maps, including this one. Of interest to Warhammer and WFRP fans will be the Skaven temple posted on May 7th. Here’s a small-scale preview:
One of the things I especially like about Hammers and Dragons is that artist Tomasz Ratajczak is teaching himself to draw, so he’s not presenting some lofty masterclass that makes the rest of us feel like idiots. And yet, his simple techniques produce results that would not look out of place in a professional publication. He’s only just getting started, but I’m looking forward to seeing more from him.
Links
Hammers and Dragons YouTube Channel
Hammers and Dragons Facebook page
Monday Maps #12: Castles
Castles are a huge and complex subject. The European castles that inspire those of the Old World developed over a thousand years or more. They vary widely in size and shape, according to the time and place when they were built. They have a dizzying array of parts and features with strange-sounding names (this article is an excellent introduction) – but don’t panic.
All castles, whenever and wherever they were built, share a number of key characteristics, and when you understand those, you can design a castle of any size, in any place.
Concentric defense is the watchword. All castles are built around a fortified tower called a keep, which houses the family. The keep is an island, able to hold out against attackers even if the rest of the castle falls. In early medieval castles of the motte and bailey type, the keep stood on an artificial mount called the motte (not to be confused with “moat”).
The keep of Rochester Castle in England.
The keep is surrounded by a curtain wall, which is fortified with several towers. The area within is called the bailey, or ward. In the center is an open courtyard that can act as a killing zone, with attackers exposed to fire from multiple towers as well as from the keep. Around the edge of the bailey are non-essential buildings like the chapel (there is normally a private family chapel in the keep), the kitchens (even in stone castles, these were separate to minimize the risk of accidental fires spreading), as well as stables, a smithy, kennels, and the like. There may also be a postern gate, a small and sometimes hidden rear exit.
The bailey was entered through the gatehouse, which was the most heavily fortified part of the castle. Town and city gates, which were covered in an earlier post, had a similar design and function. A heavily-fortified gatehouse, or barbican, could become a small castle in its own right.
Goodrich Castle, England. Borrowed from British History Online; click for link. The keep is against one side to take advantage of the cliff. The barbican was built to create a killing zone by the adjacent cliffs
Larger castles may have two or more sets of curtain walls, creating an outer bailey which acted as a first killing zone where enemies assaulting the inner curtain wall would come under fire.
This castle is large, but has a simple design. It would probably have at least one more ring of fortifications. Notice the steps leading to the keep entrance: as well as looking impressive, they make it harder to use a battering ram and they limit the number of attackers who can approach the door. Image borrowed from TurboSquid. Click for link.
High ground is a good place for a castle, as Schloss Neuschwanstein in Germany demonstrates.
Water also provides a useful defense, whether it is natural, as at Olavinlinna Castle in Finland. . .
. . .or artificial, as at Bodiam Castle in England. Note the lack of a keep: the wide moat takes the place of a bailey and curtain walls, so the whole castle is effectively a keep.
Moats around castles were less common than movies would have us believe, and comparatively few were routinely filled with water. Instead, they were broad, steep-sided ditches intended to hamper attackers’s attempts to bring up heavy equipment to attack the walls and trap them in yet another crossfire zone as they tried to approach.
The dry moat at the Château de Vincennes in France has been lined with a vertical stone wall, making it even more challenging.
Castles are large building complexes, and a GM may feel intimidated when setting out to design one for the first time – but there’s no need. Once you understand the basic principles of how they work, a castle of any size is easy to lay out.
If you’ve enjoyed this, click here to check out the other #MondayMaps.
Have a good week, and next Monday I’ll be back with another map, or possibly something else.
Oh, and if you’d like a re-usable castle plan for WFRP, the 4th edition adventure collection Rough Nights and Hard Days includes a chapter set in Castle Grauenberg, overlooking the mighty River Reik.
Monday Maps #11: A Forge
Today’s #MondayMap comes from the ArtStation page of the very talented Guillaume Tavernier. Unlike some of the building plans I’ve shared in recent weeks, his work is all fantasy, and ideal for gaming. Use the following links to check his work out and support him:
Copyright Guillaume Tavernier. Use the links above to support his work.
Guillaume’s map keys are in French, but we Anglophones can figure them out with a little help from Google Translate or a French-English dictionary. For example, the key above reads as follows:
- (Main) room
- Foyer (possibly a typo for fourneau, “furnace”)
- Storeroom
- Stables
- Smith’s bedroom
- Storeroom (although réserve can also mean “sanctuary,” so perhaps this private balcony is the smith’s relaxation area)
- Apprentices’ rooms
A forge or smithy is a common location in fantasy adventures, where Our Heroes might go to have equipment repaired or to have some custom piece made. The village smith was a respected member of the community, and can be a useful friend to make. He (or she – there were plenty of female smiths in history, and there should be even more in fantasy settings) will know plenty about what goes on locally, and can provide introductions to everyone important in the local area.
And of course, it’s not just player characters who engage a smith’s services. Here are a few ideas for adventure hooks, and I’m sure you can come up with more. If you do, why not share them with the other readers by dropping them in the Comments section at the bottom of the page?
- The villain’s evil plan requires an unusual piece of equipment, and the local smith has been engaged to make it. Designs, prototypes, and work in progress are clues that may help Our Heroes anticipate the plan and take steps to thwart it.
- The greatest smiths in most fantasy worlds are the dwarves, and they are very protective of their secrets. Stolen designs or techniques could make a human or halfling smith rich, and the local dwarven community very angry. Adventurers might be hired to find stolen manuals, materials, and designs or other evidence in advance of a court case or some more direct punitive action.
- Medieval guilds defended their members’ rights fiercely – or, to look at it another way, they established a closed monopoly of their particular craft or trade in a city, town, or county. The same could very well be true in a fantasy world, especially a low fantasy setting such as the Old World of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. A smith’s forge could become a battle zone if he had the support of the local community and either refused to join the guild or refused their orders to shut down. The guild might mount a campaign of harassment or hire rogues to sabotage the illicit forge. If matters come to a head, the PCs might find themselves involved in a Seven Samurai style defense against a mob of hired thugs.
Whatever the story may be, a forge is an interesting place to stage a combat, full of unusual hazards and weapons of opportunity such as shovels of hot coals. For inspiration, watch the forge fight scene in the 2003 movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.
I’ll be back next Monday with another map, or possibly something else. Until then, have a good week, and may you and yours stay healthy.
Detlef Sierck Presents: Mostellaria (The Haunted House), by Plautus
Borrowed from the Long Island Press. Uncredited.
You have probably never heard of Titus Maccius Plautus. He lived in Rome in the second century BCE, when it was still a republic, and he wrote farces. Shakespeare stole his play The Brothers Menaechmus and called it A Comedy of Errors, and Molière stole The Pot of Gold for his play L’Avare (“The Miser”). The musical (and movie) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum combined elements from several of Plautus’s plays, and the 1963 London production starred Frankie Howerd, whose TV comedy series Up Pompeii was almost certainly inspired by it.
I discovered Plautus in the mid-70s, reading his plays in translation as part of a side-project from my Latin class. It was a golden age for farce and low comedy in Britain, with the Carry On films on television every weekend, or so it seemed, and TV shows like Up Pompeii, Are You Being Served?, On the Buses, and others holding out against the more surreal comedy stylings of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Goodies. Discovering Plautus and his fellow Classical farceurs Terence and Menander was an eye-opening experience, proving that farce is eternal – and that there’s no such thing as a new story.
Mostellaria (“The Haunted House”) has a timeless setup. With his father out of town, young Philolaches is hosting an epic rager – and Dad returns early. There’s no time to stop the party and clear everyone out, so it carries on unabated while a resourceful servant named Tranio intercepts his master.
Tranio spins the best lie he can think of: the house is haunted. The merry din from inside is really the moans and screams of tortured souls, and the sounds of breaking crockery and furniture are violent poltergeist manifestations. An inconvenient money-lender has to be explained away, and other obstacles are overcome before the truth comes out.
Many English translations of Mostellaria are available, including this free one from Project Gutenberg. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is available on multiple streaming services, and among its many other attractions it features the immortal Buster Keaton in one of his last roles as the returning father, Erronius.
While A Funny Thing combined it with plots and characters from several of Plautus’s other plays, the basic idea of Mostellaria could make an entertaining one-shot adventure in an urban setting. The PCs are friends of a young noble, or they need to curry favor with him for some reason. As the party rages on, ever louder and more obvious, they must devise an explanation to save their patron from his father’s wrath, and maintain it in the face of all manner of problems from late-arriving guests to impatient creditors. In a fantasy setting, a real ghost might provide a plot twist, as the party literally wakes the dead and the outraged spirits of family ancestors must be pacified.
What other plots and incidents would you add to turn The Haunted House into a full-fledged “Rough Nights” adventure? Drop your ideas in the comments section below. Meanwhile, Monday Maps #8 has some plans and elevations of noble mansions that you might find useful.
Other Detlef Sierck Productions
About Detlef Sierck
Detlef Sierck, the greatest dramatist of his day, was created by Kim Newman (under the pesudonym Jack Yeovil) for the Warhammer novel Drachenfels. He made guest appearances in Jack Yeovil’s Genevieve Undead and William King’s Skavenslayer, and has appeared in two products for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: the Warhammer Companion for WFRP 1st edition and Rough Nights and Hard Days for WFRP 4th edition.
Although Sierck is a part of Warhammer’s Old World, the plays and other sources in this series can serve as inspiration for almost any roleplaying game, in almost any kind of setting.
Monday Maps #10: Bridge and Toll Houses
The Enemy in Shadows Companion for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay includes a chapter on the Road Wardens who protect the Empire’s highways and collect tolls. Road travel can be an entertaining and challenging part of adventuring in almost any fantasy world, and toll houses are an interesting class of location.
They are hybrid buildings, partly accommodation for the toll keeper and their family and partly a stronghold built to withstand attacks by bandits and others who want to get their hands on the cash inside. In heavily-frequented areas, they can be the size of small castles, able to house a garrison or to act as a waystation and supply base for local forces, perhaps including a cell or two for arrested miscreants on their way to the local town for trial and execution.
Toll houses are most often placed in strategic locations such as road junctions or river bridges. Here is one from 19th century Germany, on one end of a bridge. Click the image for a larger version.
From the Architekturmuseum der Technischen Universität Berlin, via Europeana.eu
Some toll houses may incorporate arches over the road like city gates, which I covered in an earlier post. Here is a more rustic-looking building:
By Park Hwanhee, via Artstation.
Some may form part of a city’s walls and gates, like the Monnow Bridge that protects one of the entrances into the Welsh town of Monmouth. This arrangement makes a perfect customs barrier, although it may lead to serious delays at busy times, such as a market day when nearby farmers bring their crops and livestock to market.
An encounter at a toll house can take many forms: here are a few ideas, but I’m sure you can think of many more.
- Heroic outlaws might try to liberate taxes wrung from the oppressed local peasants, or lawful adventurers might help the beleaguered officials fight off an attack by bandits or monsters.
- Perhaps bandits have already taken the place over, added some improvised upgrades to its fortification, and started imposing their own “unofficial” taxes on all who pass by.
- Someone might need to be rescued from the cells.
- If the toll keepers are corrupt, a second set of books would provide proof and help Our Heroes restore justice – if they can be found and brought to a sympathetic magistrate or local lord.
- Perhaps the toll keepers are prejudiced, overtaxing those of a particular race, nation, or other class, and the PCs have been sent to investigate after complains were made to the local lord.
- Cultists might have intercepted a vital treasure on the road and turned the toll house into a makeshift temple for an unspeakable ritual.
I’ll be back next Monday with another map – or something else. Have a good week!
Monday Maps #9: A Town Hall
Across most of medieval Europe, the towns and their guilds won a long fight for independence from the feudal nobility. As trade began to drive economies and the merchant class grew richer, some towns were able to buy royal charters from the king, exempting them from the feudal pyramid and placing them directly under royal jurisdiction. Instead of a feudal lord, these towns were ruled by a council made up of senior guild members, and instead of a ducal palace, the grandest building in town was usually the council house, also known as the town hall.
Just like a ducal palace, a town hall was designed to show off the wealth and power of its owners – in this case, the town council and the trade guilds that underpin it. Tall towers and lavish architectural decoration are the order of the day.
A medieval town hall by Francois Beauregard, from Built4Ever on DeviantArt.com. Click to link to the Deviant Art page.
Within a typical town hall one might find to expect two council chambers, one large and open to the public and one smaller and private. There would be offices for the council members, each with a couple of smaller adjoining offices for their clerks and other staff. The town’s archives would occupy a good-sized room, part library and part document store. A lobby and reception area would be staffed by one or more doorkeepers who act as a first line of defense, telling visitors that they need to make an appointment and directing those with appointments to the appropriate office. The town’s bureaucratic apparatus can be expanded as necessary, with more offices in proportion.
In most small to medium-sized towns, the town hall also accommodated the town’s courts and judiciary, with one or two courtrooms, judges’ chambers, offices for the clerks of court, an archive for the court records, and perhaps even a couple of cells. “A Day at The Trials,” the second chapter in the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay supplement Rough Nights and Hard Days, includes a map of a town courthouse.
Town halls and town councils can be important in urban adventures,presenting Our Heroes with a web of politics to negotiate as they seek the necessary authorization or information to pursue whatever adventure has brought them to town. Small-town politics can be every bit as vicious, corrupt, and self-serving as those of a nation, which is why I have always found it grimly satisfying that the German word for council house is “Rathaus.” True, “Rat” does mean “council” rather than “rodent” (deriving from the same ancient root as the Old English word “rede,” meaning advice or discussion) – but even so….
Tune in next week for another #MondayMap – or perhaps a Monday Something Else Entirely – and follow my blog so you are automatically notified when a new post goes up.
Have a good week!
Monday Maps #8: A Noble Mansion
Many games present players with a mix of challenges, and a noble’s mansion can be as rewarding – and as dangerous, in its own way – as a dungeon or wilderness.
A mansion usually falls into three parts.
The public rooms consist of a foyer, a ballroom, a formal dining room, and one or more lesser reception rooms. These are almost always on the ground floor.
The family’s apartments are upstairs, and the suites belonging to senior family members usually include a dressing room and closet as well as a bedroom and an anteroom or study in which visitors can be received privately.
The third part of the house belongs to the servants. Servants’ quarters are usually on the very top floor, whose roofline is often constructed so that there is no sign of a floor there. A separate set of stairs communicates with the basement level, where the kitchens and storerooms are located. Hidden doors, or very discreet ones, give access to the other floors.
This 19th-century drawing, from the Architecture Museum of Berlin Technical University, is labeled Jagdhaus, or hunting lodge, but it would do very well for the country seat of a minor noble family or the town house of a major one. Only the ground floor is shown in plan view, but this is sufficient to show the load-bearing walls. Other floors will use the same basic plan, with additional dividing walls to create smaller rooms: cosy and private on the family’s floor, and cramped in the servant’s quarters. The small spiral staircase in the north-west corner will do very well for a servants’ stair.
Many more drawings from the Architecture Museum’s collection, covering a wide range of buildings, may be found on the Europeana Collections web site. Some are more useful in a fantasy game than others, but browsing through is interesting and can inspire all kinds of ideas.
This 19th-century lithograph, and a small selection of others, can be found at the Normany Then and Now web site, and give some other examples of how a house like this can be laid out. Search terms like “historic mansion plan” and “fantasy mansion plan” will find you plenty of others. Good hunting!
Monday Maps #6: Peasant Cottage
Adventurers spend a lot of time traveling through remote places, so a peasant farmer’s cottage will be a familiar sight. It may be threatened by bandits or monsters, presenting an opportunity for a Seven Samurai defence action. It may be occupied by a family whose remoteness from the world hides secret mutants or other quirks, like the cannibalism of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Or it may simply be a place to get out of the weather, and perhaps bargain for a bowl of stew.
This design goes back into prehistory, and is still in use today in some areas. In a medieval setting, the windows would be smaller, with curtains of skin in place of glass. Copyright Marion McGarry: used without permission.
In some places, a cottage is little more than a barn, divided into two parts. The animals occupy one part, and the family the other. Sometimes the sleeping quarters are in a loft above the livestock stalls, benefiting from the animals’ warmth. More prosperous farmers added hearths and chimneys to their cottages, and moved the animals into a barn across the farmyard. Other features might be added, such as a granary and vegetable store, a well, and even a smithy.
A medieval farm, by Dante78. Borrowed from Renderosity: click image for more information.
Often, there would be a surrounding wall, both for defence and to stop animals wandering off.
Hudson & Allen Studio’s 25mm Fortified Medieval Farmhouse. Image from Wargame Scenics. Click image for more information.
A two-storey cottage from Germany. This is large enough to accommodate an extended family, and would probably belong to a fairly prosperous farm family.
Links
This page from British History Online has some useful plans of various cottage layouts, as well as a lot of information on various building types and how they were used. Scroll down to find all the plans, but if you have the patience to read the text you will find some of it useful.
Monday Maps #4: Town and City Gates
In medieval Europe, and in most fantasy worlds, towns and cities are surrounded by wall to protect them from attack. The gates are the weakest part of a town wall, so they tend to be the most heavily fortified.
In a small town or walled village, the gate fortifications may be very modest. In a great and wealthy city, each gate can be a small castle in its own right.
From The Pictorial History of England (W & R Chambers, 1858)
This 19th-century image of Monk Bar in medieval York shows the basic components of a fortified city gate. It has a barbican with a double gate and a portcullis between: when the outer gate is breached, attackers enter a killing zone and must endure fire from all sides as they assault the portcullis. Having broken down the portcullis they must pass under an archway to reach the inner gate, and the ceiling of the archway is pierced with “murder holes” through which defenders above can fire missiles or drop boiling water or oil.
A guardhouse stands beside the gate, and outside it stairs lead up to the wall top and the room above the murder holes. The winch for raising and lowering the portcullis would often be at this level as well.
Finally, there is a sally port beside the gate, through which defenders could break out and get behind an attacking force.
Smaller towns will have more modest arrangements, like this:
Borrowed from VK.com
This model would suit a medium-sized town in Warhammer’s Old World or a similar setting:
Borrowed from Turbosquid.com
…and here’s a floorplan from Jason Engle, whose web site is worth a look. Find it here.
See you next Monday for more maps!
Monday Maps #3: Water Mill
Nearly every village of any size will have a mill for grinding grain. Windmills are popular in the Wasteland and other flat, windy areas, but everywhere else, a water mill uses the power of a nearby river. The mill is a vital part of the village economy, and the miller is a respected member of the community, turning raw grain into saleable flour for a percentage of the yield.
A water mill is essentially a large machine set inside a building, and it can be a dangerous place for the unwary – especially in a fight. Even if the wheels are not turning, they present hard an unforgiving obstacles in unlooked-for places; if the mill is in operation, their gears can snag clothes and crush their wearers.
And of course, there is that big wheel outside, for those who want to recreate the iconic sequence from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.
This diagram is from 19th-century America, but the principles of siting a watermill and directing the flow of water are unchanged from the Middle Ages:
These two images give an idea of the interior layout:
Borrowed from the web site of David Darling (https://www.daviddarling.info/index.html). No challenge to copyright intended.
A side view. Notice how the central shaft drives not only the millstones but also the top floor winch, used for hauling sacks up grain up for milling. Drawing by Pippa Miller, borrowed from Norfolk Mills (http://www.norfolkmills.co.uk/watermill-machinery.html). No challenge to copyright intended.
…and this more complex map includes floorplans that can easily be adapted for use in a game. It is borrowed from the Mills Archive, which has plans and drawings of many other English water mills.
The mill at Barford St. Michael, Oxfordshire. Borrowed from the Mills Archive (https://catalogue.millsarchive.org/watermill-at-barford-st-michael). No challenge to copyright intended.
Graeme Davis 