A Rough Guide to Castle Design

Part 3 – The Floorplan

by Jon Roberts

To collect and transform the room list into a sensible layout I make a flowchart, finding this to be a simple way to list the areas and work out how they are connected or, indeed, isolated. You’re unlikely to get it right first time (the chart below is my third attempt) but that just goes to show that it’s time well spent. It’s much easier to fix a flowchart than a floorplan and lines added to a floorplan become an increasing deterrent to fixing mistakes.

Notice that there are already clear hubs. The great hall, the kitchen and a group connecting the Lord’s quarters, cavalry quarters and the chapel are all clear groups.

At this point we have the rough layout of our castle. Before we go any further, sit back and have a look at it. Think about anything else you’d like to add. In my case I want this to have a bit a twist. What if the castle is in a region that is beset by wyverns? To combat this, the castle needs covered walkways on the roof and battlements, and some means of combating the flying menace. I’ll add ballistas with alchemists fire from our wizard. I’m going to give our lord a gryphon too. This adds in an eyrie and solves the issue of how our lord might escape.

With these final twists laid in, I’ll do one final flowchart of the layout (below), now adding floors. This allows us to locate the stairs. If you’re feeling really keen you can always decide to place the fireplaces and chimneys here too. However, unless your players like turning into gaseous form and coming down the chimneys (mine do) you probably don’t need to worry too much about that level of detail.

Note that many of these groupings can be re-used in any castle. You can take the kitchen and stores and place them in a grand citadel, a hill giant’s lair or a mind flayer hive. I can re-use this castle structure for many situations with little chance of anyone noticing. Save yourself the hard work and re-use this work when you need to. If it makes sense in this castle, it’ll make sense in others too. Continue reading »

Campaign Cartographer, the Writer / Designer’s Friend

Part 2 – Moving stuff around

by Robin D Laws

CC3 offers the primary benefit of a CAD-based illustration tool in a gamer-friendly form. Whether creating a map or using it for any of the purposes I’ll discuss below, that benefit is ease of editing. It lets you think visually, by allowing you to easily and continually manipulate its various elements. Changing either an element or its position relative to others proves blissfully easy.

When sketching out an encounter map for publication, you’re always going to realize midway through that you need to make an adjustment—you’ve left a tactical bottleneck at the entrance, placed a trap where it won’t get tripped, or given a confusing position marker to a creature. You can move stuff around in Photoshop or one of its equivalents, but it’s a pain. On paper, forget about it. Moving stuff around is what CC is all about—for me at least. Continue reading »

By Ralf Schemmann

We’ve been working on the new version of the Cosmographer add-on for a while, mostly because we didn’t want it to be “just” an art upgrade.  We’ve now added some very cool new features and are getting close to announcing a release date. Here are some collected previews of the different styles and features available in Cosmographer 3. Some of the images have already appeared on our blogs, others are new.

Deckplans

We’ve had some talented German artists (the BananaMonks) create a stunning set of  bitmap symbols for starship deckplans. Continue reading »