Classic Dungeons and Dragons and Old School Gaming

D&D etc.


"Heir to a crumbling summit: to a sea of nettles: to an empire of rust: to rituals' footprints ankle-deep in stone."

-Mervyn Peake

"...and that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped."

-Sir Bedevere in Monty Python and the Holy Grail



Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Huge Castle

I haven't been posting much, but I have been gaming, and I'll likely be doing some more over the holidays.  I'm gathering resources to do a by-the-seat-of-the-pants Megadungeon.  I'm thinking about giving the Players a giant version of this map.  (can you spot the modern architecture?)

I'd say that the Castle has been ruined and shrouded in terminal mist for generations.  Perhaps the map is from one of the masons who worked on the castle before it fell to ruin. 

We'll run it in LotFP with as few house rules as I can manage to limit myself to, Likely these:
aaaand I think that's about it.
Here's a Castle Name Generator:


















So now you too can find out what the Mad Lords of Castle Gorgonmaw have been up to!

5 comments:

  1. Impressive!

    Were did you find all those castle maps? Especially two I am interested in:

    Upper right corner: In early White Dwarf (between #25 and #50, I reckon) there was a module that looked very similar. But your map doesn't seem to be taken from that source. So I assume that the WD author was inspired by a real castle - the same one you used.

    Lower right corner: This looks like a Harn castle, but then, it doesn't.

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  2. Those are all the bounty of copious google image searches. I think most of them are real castles, though a few seem real gamey to me. The Alhambra is in there. A bunch of British castles, and one that seems to have been used by germans during WWII. I don't know details because most of the time I didn't read the original site, and now I just have the jpgs. I shied away from most of the obviously game related plan because they tend to look like somebody drew them on graph paper. I was looking for real buildings and I consiously chose buildings from different eras to simulate that the castle was gradually added onto by generations of Mad Lords! The modern buildings are the Denver art museum by D. Libeskind, there's a Carlo Scarpa and I think there's a plan for some helatious mcmansion in there.

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  3. That map is insane. Can't wait to print it out and really study it. I immediately thought of use for it in my campaign - thanks!

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  4. that map is fucking outstanding. Once you collected all the different castle blueprints you wanted, how did you conglomerate them all together?
    (which is i guess is two questions:
    1. what was the thought process behind the layout/relative orientation of the various pieces
    2. what was the physical process to assemble them? photoshop, printing them out and pasting them together and scanning it, etc?)
    thank you so much for this awesome resource, I may steal it or will more likely make my own!

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    Replies
    1. Thanks! Photoshop. Starting with a white background, color selected all the white bits on the individual plans so they can overlap easily. Then arranged until each piece felt right and deleting certain bits so they fit together better. The idea is that this thing was gradually added to over generations and generations. If I did it again I'd be more careful to get rid of the text, it isn't too visible on the 11x17 but on the full size 24x36 it would be. It was pretty easy but now I want to draw my own version of the same thing...

      I'd love to see how anybody stocks this!

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