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beccaelizabethI bought the Book of Many Things and as with many rpg books I haven't so much read it as flicked through and got distracted by specific sections repeatedly.
Harrowhall, the castle setting you get if you draw the Throne card, actually really annoys me.
For one, they say Keep to mean a whole castle with an outer wall and a courtyard. The Keep is the bit in the middle, not the whole thing. That's what the word means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep
For another, the art work, the map, and the description, are not a good match for each other.
The floors of the Keep are said to be ten feet tall, there are two floors with a glass dome above, and the curtain wall is 30 feet tall with a tower rising to a room on the battlements.
But the art work shows you a keep you can see from outside the walls, and a tower at least twice the height of the battlements.
It should by the description be ten feet shorter than its own curtain walls, which would not be the typical height relationship between keep and curtain wall as far as I can see, but they can do it that way if they want. But if they don't want, just make the ceilings 20 feet tall. The side view picture still doesn't really support the inner keep being only ten feet taller than the walls but it's better than nowt.
Or there has to be a hill inside the curtain wall. Common way to construct castles, perfectly respectable, not mentioned in the description or compatible with the maps.
The tower is only a ground floor and one with the mechanisms at battlements level on the map, so why make it a tower at all? If it functions as a gate house put it on the gate with some murderholes like a respectable barbican. If it's a tower then give some way up to the roof and a look out post.
They keep referring to a drawbridge, but neither map not illustration shows a bridge with a mechanism or even one connected to the gate or walls. If there's a mechanism to draw it up then it is not evident in any other part of the description. There isn't really room for it to exist. I'll grant the portcullis can just slide up into the wall and there's a nice thick wall all around but if any of that wall held a mechanism they'd have to tell us which five foot square it was in.
It's sloppy, is all, just a lack of joined up thinking, and I don't know if it is keywording correctly for a DnD 5e product but in Pathfinder it is implying game mechanical features the map does not provide.
The map annoys me too. The shape of the castle is not one that you would design for a defensive structure.
There are five double door ten foot wide entrances on the ground floor. Five. Double. Doors. How in the heck are you going to defend those? And they all lead in to corridors so you have room for only two adventurers to stand side by side for three of the doors. You can actually surround the other two. From five feet away.
The traditional number of ground level doors is one, or possibly none, if you put a stairway in there.
It's nice to see a building with a concern for the fire code but it's hardly a *castle* at this point.
There's a balcony on the back whose sole view is another twenty feet vertical of stone wall, unless the illustration is meant to be more accurate than the map, in which case the balcony is plausibly thirty feet in the air and level with the top of the wall forty feet away. But if it is meant to be that high up it has major combat implications for the fight set next to the balcony, chief among them that the creature probably can't reach up and no normal medium sized melee weapon could reach down, which isn't what the text implies.
You can't get a view off the balcony that's any use for archers because the top level overhangs the bottom level by five to ten feet all around that section. You give attackers an overhang to hide under? What defensive use is that? It's not enclosed enough to protect defenders from flying monsters, it's just too deep to let the defenders shoot down on attackers while they try and break the doors in. Yes one of the doors is under the overhang. No there is no room on the map for imagining murder holes. They're just well sheltered while they have a go at the back door. Ridiculous.
The outer wall is a courtyard away in front, forty feet away in back, and a grand ten feet away on the chapel side up top. You can Enlarge and use a reach weapon and stab the upper windows from the curtain wall. Is that truly tour best design?
The are corners *everywhere*. The curtain wall has sort of chopped off corners on three corners, but the forth has a wiggle for no readily apparent reason. Three sets of stairs and a watchtower lead up the thirty feet to the top of the wall. The stairs are all the same length as the stairs inside the keep, which supports the interpretation the ground floor is supposed to be the same height as the curtain wall. Or the thirty feet in length stairs are to climb ten feet in height indoors and thirty feet outdoors. The stairs all have a corner to lurk in next to where they join the wall, rather than running into a corner, diagonal though they are. And one stair takes a diagonal in the middle, for reasons of irregular walls.
Why irregular? Could it be geological features? Well the ground is drawn with edges going off into the mist in the illustrations, but the map shows a dry moat as described, and then a good twenty feet of flat ground before you get to the walls, just to give seige weapons a nice steady platform I suppose.
This is a castle designed by someone who has no concept of the function of a castle, and then possibly illustrated and described by two other people with the same problem.
I could go on rightmove right now and find a more functional keep than this.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/149683289#
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/166657982#/
Yes Pathfinder's baseline assumption that you can only fit one person in a five foot square and a fighter probably needs ten foot cubes just to stand around in would enlarge the floor plan. But the basic 'this is a box for keeping people out of' theme should remain.
Also, if you put the armory in the courtyard, sure the guards on the walls and tower can use it if you hire them, but everyone from the keep has to run outside to get armed. Is that really the most efficient?
Not putting the crypt entrance in the main keep would minimise the Adventure attached. Putting it right next to the armoury has implications for the needs of the users that... probably do hold in a necromancer's castle.
The stables being five boxes all on one side of the courtyard is probably underestimating the storage needs of the average horse. Giving them a 10*10 foot room each might meet the bare minimums given that five foot squares are the only measure, but they'd be better off with another square each way. The equivalent Pathfinder component is Stalls 6 to 16 squares for one to two large domestic animals. Six for two horses would be smaller each so I guess it matches. Come to think the map doesn't say how many each room is for. Nor the description.
I do like the size of the library. Even using Stronghold Builder Guide units there's room for 12 stronghold spaces in there, at least. That's room for 24 to 36 book lots, which is at least 8 comprehensive book lots for +4s in those rules, maybe 12. Which is all the knowledges covered. Only six master lots at 6 book lots space for +6 each in SBG terms. But the description says it covers all sorts, so a +4 may be implied by space constraints. Though you can also argue 15 stronghold spaces for even more Knowledges covered.
1, 3, 6 book lots for +2 +4 +6.
The description does mention speculative fiction though. Personal experience says you can fill a lot of shelves with spec fic.
In Pathfinder terms though a Book Repository is 4 to 12 squares, and there are... four times as many four square sections as there are stronghold spaces. Even 12 squares is smaller than the 16 squares in a Space. +3 to all Knowledges and a Magical Repository made of the previous owner's specialist collection is therefore supported by the text. With shelves a plenty to spare. Four squares does only mean shelves down the outside of a 10 foot corridor, the drawings only make it look like the shelves are five foot deep. All these ten foot gaps are so Large beings can browse without squeezing. Which is polite and accessible.
A +3 bonus is between the +2 one lot and +4 3 lots so I guess it has to be 2 book lots. Meaning you'd need 3 of it to be +6 sized. Meaning it would fit in the 12 squares not the 4.
... I am getting deja vu and probably wrote this down earlier.
All these bonuses are for one hour of study though. The number of books has to be pretty limited to get exactly the relevant stuff in one hour. And/Or theres an excellent card catalogue.
... or there's not much to know so it's easy to be brilliant...
Also Harrowhall states the whole group and bonus help together can find a specific book in 10 minutes.
I think maybe this is incompatible with the one hour knowledge, or maybe the book was mis shelved or deliberately concealed.
The Harrowhall also has an Observatory with three telescopes, which in Pathfinder terms is three Observatories, which gives you no extra bonuses. Could be possible to swap two of those out for other components of similar cost.
Or, if I was redesigning this castle, you'd put the balcony next to the observatory, make the whole thing the tallest point of the castle, and have optical instruments for the mundane purpose of seeing what's sneaking up on the Castle as well as pointing them at the stars.
If the balcony faces on to the courtyard, or there's anywhere at all for firing out of the castle, you can defend the courtyard with a crossfire from the walls and the keep. You could argue some of the windows in the drawing are arrow slits, they're smaller than five feet. But the whole side of the observatory is window. That room isn't defensible at all from aerial attack, and there's a heck of a lot of flyers in this game. You don't put it slap bang in the middle of the castle with only interior walls to defend.
Well you could if the interior walls were also stone, which actually the map can be read as supporting. Spendy.
Maybe 5e doesn't care what the walls are made of. 3.5 and Pathfinder certainly have some ideas re magic and other ways to make new bonus doors.
The balcony door as drawn in the map faces the back wall and is near the wall stairs but hidden from the watchtower. Anything could land there unless the walls are patrolled right. The possibility of smashing the glass dome gets you another two exits from the observatory and entrances to the keep. Which lead to a corridor, which has the same problems as defending down stairs.
I'd put the balcony on the observatory just to keep all the ways in in one place, then limit it to one entrance door.
Though of course that is less fun for adventurers when someone else is defending.
Also, there are big windows in the chapel and the throne room.
Or, bonus doors with bonus expensive vandalism.
Wait the Throne Room is on the ground floor and states its ceilings are 20 feet tall.
How? There's no gap above it, and the intro says rooms in Harrowhall have ten foot ceilings.
There's no steps down into the Throne Room, there's no steps up in the area above it.
This is a geometrically impossible feature that redesigns the whole ground floor of Harrowhall in contradiction to the written description.
I mean it helps for the illustration but it's explicitly said two contradictory things here.
I've been writing this for over an hour now and it's just me grouching about things no one else is reading.
But it is Sloppy. Three components of one physical description and the writing can't agree with the writing let alone the map and illustrations.
In a hardback fully illustrated in color Book I would hope for better.
Harrowhall, the castle setting you get if you draw the Throne card, actually really annoys me.
For one, they say Keep to mean a whole castle with an outer wall and a courtyard. The Keep is the bit in the middle, not the whole thing. That's what the word means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep
For another, the art work, the map, and the description, are not a good match for each other.
The floors of the Keep are said to be ten feet tall, there are two floors with a glass dome above, and the curtain wall is 30 feet tall with a tower rising to a room on the battlements.
But the art work shows you a keep you can see from outside the walls, and a tower at least twice the height of the battlements.
It should by the description be ten feet shorter than its own curtain walls, which would not be the typical height relationship between keep and curtain wall as far as I can see, but they can do it that way if they want. But if they don't want, just make the ceilings 20 feet tall. The side view picture still doesn't really support the inner keep being only ten feet taller than the walls but it's better than nowt.
Or there has to be a hill inside the curtain wall. Common way to construct castles, perfectly respectable, not mentioned in the description or compatible with the maps.
The tower is only a ground floor and one with the mechanisms at battlements level on the map, so why make it a tower at all? If it functions as a gate house put it on the gate with some murderholes like a respectable barbican. If it's a tower then give some way up to the roof and a look out post.
They keep referring to a drawbridge, but neither map not illustration shows a bridge with a mechanism or even one connected to the gate or walls. If there's a mechanism to draw it up then it is not evident in any other part of the description. There isn't really room for it to exist. I'll grant the portcullis can just slide up into the wall and there's a nice thick wall all around but if any of that wall held a mechanism they'd have to tell us which five foot square it was in.
It's sloppy, is all, just a lack of joined up thinking, and I don't know if it is keywording correctly for a DnD 5e product but in Pathfinder it is implying game mechanical features the map does not provide.
The map annoys me too. The shape of the castle is not one that you would design for a defensive structure.
There are five double door ten foot wide entrances on the ground floor. Five. Double. Doors. How in the heck are you going to defend those? And they all lead in to corridors so you have room for only two adventurers to stand side by side for three of the doors. You can actually surround the other two. From five feet away.
The traditional number of ground level doors is one, or possibly none, if you put a stairway in there.
It's nice to see a building with a concern for the fire code but it's hardly a *castle* at this point.
There's a balcony on the back whose sole view is another twenty feet vertical of stone wall, unless the illustration is meant to be more accurate than the map, in which case the balcony is plausibly thirty feet in the air and level with the top of the wall forty feet away. But if it is meant to be that high up it has major combat implications for the fight set next to the balcony, chief among them that the creature probably can't reach up and no normal medium sized melee weapon could reach down, which isn't what the text implies.
You can't get a view off the balcony that's any use for archers because the top level overhangs the bottom level by five to ten feet all around that section. You give attackers an overhang to hide under? What defensive use is that? It's not enclosed enough to protect defenders from flying monsters, it's just too deep to let the defenders shoot down on attackers while they try and break the doors in. Yes one of the doors is under the overhang. No there is no room on the map for imagining murder holes. They're just well sheltered while they have a go at the back door. Ridiculous.
The outer wall is a courtyard away in front, forty feet away in back, and a grand ten feet away on the chapel side up top. You can Enlarge and use a reach weapon and stab the upper windows from the curtain wall. Is that truly tour best design?
The are corners *everywhere*. The curtain wall has sort of chopped off corners on three corners, but the forth has a wiggle for no readily apparent reason. Three sets of stairs and a watchtower lead up the thirty feet to the top of the wall. The stairs are all the same length as the stairs inside the keep, which supports the interpretation the ground floor is supposed to be the same height as the curtain wall. Or the thirty feet in length stairs are to climb ten feet in height indoors and thirty feet outdoors. The stairs all have a corner to lurk in next to where they join the wall, rather than running into a corner, diagonal though they are. And one stair takes a diagonal in the middle, for reasons of irregular walls.
Why irregular? Could it be geological features? Well the ground is drawn with edges going off into the mist in the illustrations, but the map shows a dry moat as described, and then a good twenty feet of flat ground before you get to the walls, just to give seige weapons a nice steady platform I suppose.
This is a castle designed by someone who has no concept of the function of a castle, and then possibly illustrated and described by two other people with the same problem.
I could go on rightmove right now and find a more functional keep than this.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/149683289#
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/166657982#/
Yes Pathfinder's baseline assumption that you can only fit one person in a five foot square and a fighter probably needs ten foot cubes just to stand around in would enlarge the floor plan. But the basic 'this is a box for keeping people out of' theme should remain.
Also, if you put the armory in the courtyard, sure the guards on the walls and tower can use it if you hire them, but everyone from the keep has to run outside to get armed. Is that really the most efficient?
Not putting the crypt entrance in the main keep would minimise the Adventure attached. Putting it right next to the armoury has implications for the needs of the users that... probably do hold in a necromancer's castle.
The stables being five boxes all on one side of the courtyard is probably underestimating the storage needs of the average horse. Giving them a 10*10 foot room each might meet the bare minimums given that five foot squares are the only measure, but they'd be better off with another square each way. The equivalent Pathfinder component is Stalls 6 to 16 squares for one to two large domestic animals. Six for two horses would be smaller each so I guess it matches. Come to think the map doesn't say how many each room is for. Nor the description.
I do like the size of the library. Even using Stronghold Builder Guide units there's room for 12 stronghold spaces in there, at least. That's room for 24 to 36 book lots, which is at least 8 comprehensive book lots for +4s in those rules, maybe 12. Which is all the knowledges covered. Only six master lots at 6 book lots space for +6 each in SBG terms. But the description says it covers all sorts, so a +4 may be implied by space constraints. Though you can also argue 15 stronghold spaces for even more Knowledges covered.
1, 3, 6 book lots for +2 +4 +6.
The description does mention speculative fiction though. Personal experience says you can fill a lot of shelves with spec fic.
In Pathfinder terms though a Book Repository is 4 to 12 squares, and there are... four times as many four square sections as there are stronghold spaces. Even 12 squares is smaller than the 16 squares in a Space. +3 to all Knowledges and a Magical Repository made of the previous owner's specialist collection is therefore supported by the text. With shelves a plenty to spare. Four squares does only mean shelves down the outside of a 10 foot corridor, the drawings only make it look like the shelves are five foot deep. All these ten foot gaps are so Large beings can browse without squeezing. Which is polite and accessible.
A +3 bonus is between the +2 one lot and +4 3 lots so I guess it has to be 2 book lots. Meaning you'd need 3 of it to be +6 sized. Meaning it would fit in the 12 squares not the 4.
... I am getting deja vu and probably wrote this down earlier.
All these bonuses are for one hour of study though. The number of books has to be pretty limited to get exactly the relevant stuff in one hour. And/Or theres an excellent card catalogue.
... or there's not much to know so it's easy to be brilliant...
Also Harrowhall states the whole group and bonus help together can find a specific book in 10 minutes.
I think maybe this is incompatible with the one hour knowledge, or maybe the book was mis shelved or deliberately concealed.
The Harrowhall also has an Observatory with three telescopes, which in Pathfinder terms is three Observatories, which gives you no extra bonuses. Could be possible to swap two of those out for other components of similar cost.
Or, if I was redesigning this castle, you'd put the balcony next to the observatory, make the whole thing the tallest point of the castle, and have optical instruments for the mundane purpose of seeing what's sneaking up on the Castle as well as pointing them at the stars.
If the balcony faces on to the courtyard, or there's anywhere at all for firing out of the castle, you can defend the courtyard with a crossfire from the walls and the keep. You could argue some of the windows in the drawing are arrow slits, they're smaller than five feet. But the whole side of the observatory is window. That room isn't defensible at all from aerial attack, and there's a heck of a lot of flyers in this game. You don't put it slap bang in the middle of the castle with only interior walls to defend.
Well you could if the interior walls were also stone, which actually the map can be read as supporting. Spendy.
Maybe 5e doesn't care what the walls are made of. 3.5 and Pathfinder certainly have some ideas re magic and other ways to make new bonus doors.
The balcony door as drawn in the map faces the back wall and is near the wall stairs but hidden from the watchtower. Anything could land there unless the walls are patrolled right. The possibility of smashing the glass dome gets you another two exits from the observatory and entrances to the keep. Which lead to a corridor, which has the same problems as defending down stairs.
I'd put the balcony on the observatory just to keep all the ways in in one place, then limit it to one entrance door.
Though of course that is less fun for adventurers when someone else is defending.
Also, there are big windows in the chapel and the throne room.
Or, bonus doors with bonus expensive vandalism.
Wait the Throne Room is on the ground floor and states its ceilings are 20 feet tall.
How? There's no gap above it, and the intro says rooms in Harrowhall have ten foot ceilings.
There's no steps down into the Throne Room, there's no steps up in the area above it.
This is a geometrically impossible feature that redesigns the whole ground floor of Harrowhall in contradiction to the written description.
I mean it helps for the illustration but it's explicitly said two contradictory things here.
I've been writing this for over an hour now and it's just me grouching about things no one else is reading.
But it is Sloppy. Three components of one physical description and the writing can't agree with the writing let alone the map and illustrations.
In a hardback fully illustrated in color Book I would hope for better.