We Think Too Small

I had planned a great big giant post about my Rome trip around the theme of "We Think Too Small." But things got busy... So let me link a couple of galleries and then give the sum-up to the post I was going to make.

My Rome Photos from May 9 - 12.

My Turku Castle Photos from May 15 (not so spectacular, originally built in the 1200s but it's been "repurposed" and renovated so many times, and it looks just like Hämeen Linna inside).

Just look at those Rome pictures though (the ones of the monuments, not the ones where I start obsessing over why some statues' penises are broken and others are not). Look how big those buildings are.

When I see RPG maps and cities and settings, I see a lot of things built on 5' and 10' squares. Sure, the past couple of years has seen the megadungeon come into fashion again, and the scale of one of those is immense, but the individual elements and rooms don't seem to be.

If I'm not mistaken, D&D is supposed to be "middle-agish" in feel, and the default method of play is exploring dungeons and ruins from some ancient civilization.

... Rome, right?

Not literally, of course, but the idea is that there's all this ancient treasure and magic underground that isn't overground. The ancients were Richer and More Advanced.

... Rome, right?

Even if not, the scale of the architecture of ruins can, and perhaps should, represent the splendor of a civilization that produced and possessed all that ancient treasure. Break it out. Make it HUGE. Go wild. It'll make everything seem even more fantastic, yet be more real at the same time.

And exploration strategies will have to change with all those great big distances to cover as opposed to being stuck in claustrophobic conditions.

But there are other ideas to be ripped out of Rome. I've got a few pictures in that pile of Egyptian obelisks that had been looted and carted back by the Romans. We shouldn't let our ancient ruins be monocultures! Rome spread its influence, but also took in a great deal of influence from those it conquered.

Visiting the Pantheon made me realize something too. Rome wasn't built in a day, and it didn't fall overnight either, and it certainly didn't just crumble into dust when it did. The fall of a civilization that built the ruins that are now this week's dungeon probably didn't fall into ruin overnight. After whatever caused it to not be the paragon of splendor, people probably stuck around trying to rebuild, or pretend as if their new society was the same as the fallen one just for living in the same space. They'll rip out the guts of the current architecture (to use elsewhere), temples, and other great places while keeping the magnificent facade, and replace the innards with their own cultural artifacts.

So that great ancient city that's being explored can be a mishmash of cultures and times, and can end up being as gonzo as anything D&D has to offer, without even ever breaking verisimilitude. Not a bad deal.

And one thing that our tour guide at the Colosseum said struck a nerve (the guy was really good, for charisma and the ability to make the tour enjoyable at least, can't speak for his factual value so much as I'm not up on my Roman history, but we got lucky because we just randomly picked out someone advertising English tour groups)... when the Romans brought animals from all over to the Colosseum, they weren't bringing "animals" as the citizens understood them to be. The lions, hippos, giraffes, etc, seemed like monsters to the crowd. Surely there are D&D adventure seeds in that realization...

So that's that. It was a fun trip, Italian drivers are crazy, Maria was surprised to find out something that I already knew - metalheads are the same everywhere you go (she seemed shocked that the crowd for Doomraiser looked identical to the Finnish metalheads), and the food... oh my goodness... the food. :D

I'll leave you with one photo I took which I decided to call Armor Class 9:

Hämeen linna April 7, 2009

This one was built in the late 13th century, and was in continuous use for nearly 700 years as it served as a prison as late as 1953. These days it's a museum (and other parts of the larger complex now serve as a prison museum and artillery museum, neither of which I visited). This makes it a bit crappy as a 'cool medieval castle' because it's got signs, lights, and all that modern junk. They're actually renovating it to try to make it look like an old castle again, but it's so hopelessly not. But in some ways, Häme Castle was more inspiring as far as some game ideas than Raseborg Castle.

First, a shot of the water in Hämeenlinna (the town) outside the castle.


Here is a scale model of the castle, displayed within the museum:


The outside of the place:








Inside the courtyard:


Now to the inside... I couldn't resist taking a photo of this:


This is the shitter. It's basically a hole that empties out into the moat.


The big problem with taking pictures (and there are many I considered too boring to transfer from the camera) is deciding whether or not to use the flash. These rooms all had electric lights (as you can see on the right), but not using the flash made things dark. In this case, the effect was cool:


At other points it was just too dark. But using the flash often made things too bright. This next room was originally accessible only through this hatch in the ceiling (we'd entered through a later-installed door). The idea was that theft was more difficult if someone couldn't just walk in and out of the room.


All of the castle stairs (not counting the modern additions) were very steep and very narrow. Even with the flash you see how dark it is below.



The next two pictures show the effects of 700 years of remodeling. I got ideas to enrich the background of a few dungeons I have in mind, which will either confuse or help the players better understand some clues.



A trap door! Couldn't resist.


I bet you thought for all these years that the number keys on maps were for referee reference. No! The rooms really have numbered labels!


My lovely assistant Maria shows us how tiny the passages are. She's maybe 5'7" and her head is touching the ceiling. That passage isn't 3' wide. Maybe this 1 square = 10' standard is BS. :P


This passage had no light of its own, but there was a lamp next to me where I took the photo. This looked like one of the many dead ends in the castle. It wasn't until actually walking down to the end that you could see that it turns to the left. The flash on this one betrays that a bit, but I'm telling you, in person, you couldn't just look down the passage and see the turn. The fact that the passages were so narrow probably helped that effect, but I'm rethinking allowing my players to look down passages at intersections and see turns even if they are within the range of torchlight.


That's Maria helping out again. The 50 cent piece is roughly the size of a US quarter, and those 17th century coins are significantly larger. I'd guess earlier coins were larger. 10 per pound looks slightly less ludicrous.


There were many more rooms, but they were either too full of modern stuff, or uniformly just empty rocky rooms with no really cool angles (and the ones that did had too many modern railings and such that just killed the effect). Even the chapel and other come-and-sit-down rooms had modern chairs. They have some work to do to make this a real medieval castle museum.

We did pick up a book about castles around the Baltic Sea... so there might be more of these little photojournals to come in the months ahead. We'll be hitting Turku and the castle there in May, as soon as we come back from Rome (which may allow for some relevant photography of its own!).

No Crusades, Though

Yesterday, the girlfriend and I went to Raseborg Castle. The fun started when I discovered that it is in a village called... Snappertuna. I love this country.


The first record of the castle being mentioned was in 1378. It used to be situated directly on the shore, and the castle was used as an outpost against pirates! Finland is rising from the sea, and so what used to be on the coast is now inland. This used to be the sea:


I'll shut up now and just get on with the castle pictures.