Rebuilding some Ruins

[Green-Pilgrim]

Ok, so I just love this guy's maps. What I really like doing is taking one of his free maps and seeing if I can rearrange the elements of it or, as in this case, 'repair' the ruins that he's given me. So, in the pictures below, I show the original picture posted (just doing a google search of 'ruined keep' brought up these pictures several times) and then my 'reconstruction' of the damaged sections of the keep. I kept the new maps fairly printer-friendly as the original images were so dark that I'd never dare print them off or risk using up all of my printer's toner.

Part of the fun, though this may be showing my uber-geek side, is to explore the concept of a ruined keep -after- the party has gone in and removed whatever threat the dungeon master has put within its walls. Whether they've removed some black slime, a horde of orc or maybe even some undead, what your left with is a bit of architecture that could, conceptually, be reused. Rather than wait until your character was high enough to build your own castle, I typically would keep an eye out in my DM's campaigns for any location that might serve as a possible base for our party - somewhere we could fall back to that was beyond the prying eyes of some baron or local lord. So, that usually meant some ruined tower or forgotten keep. Since we were always bouncing back and forth between there and whatever quests we were on, I could be fairly certain that nothing bad would try and move in while we were gone.

After a few missions, I would talk to the DM to see if I could get some repairs done through the craftsmen of the local settlement. It was usually the remainder of the treasure that we had recovered that couldn't easily be divided among the party that was used to pay the laborers to either clear out the ruins while we were away or help repair it. This did two things: it improved relations between our party and the local settlement because we were putting people to work and spending money in their village. It also gave us a home - some place to leave some of the things that we had gathered that we wanted to keep but didn't want to haul around with us.





Though it wasn't a "castle" (in the game-mechanic sense) we didn't have to hire a full staff and hang up our adventuring hats. We could keep doing our thing with maybe one or two NPCs to help look after the place. This also gave the DM a lot of potential one-off adventures as the townsfolk could come to us between campaigns and ask for our help in some matter or another. Someone spotted goblins in the woods to the west of town - could we clear them out, etc.



I'm still reconstructing the damaged section of the second floor and will post it and the original when I get a chance.

Now I just have to figure out what might be different (in terms of what #'s mean what room) for the reconstructed keep.

Comments and thoughts welcome.

-Green Pilgrim