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I want to design a castle for a dungeon idea to do one on one with a friend of mine to get them into Pathfinder.
I have no clue how to start out, all I know so far is that it's gonna have a moat, four turrets at the corners, and is gonna be like a noble's castle with a ballroom/banquet hall, huge kitchen, servants quarters, living quarters on the second floor, and a large wine cellar.
Once I design all that, I'll work on filling it with monsters/traps.
Does any know any modules or adventure paths that feature castles like this to get some ideas from?
Start with the main building - usually that's a tower, the "donjon". Put the stuff there that would be in a manor house, with the exception of small windows and thick outer walls. Then start adding outer walls, parapets, moat and what-have-you-not.
A castle is a fortress and a home and a centre of government.
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Do a web search on castle plans in your favorite search engine and you will get dozens of examples.
DriveThruRPG has cheap floorplans for dozens of castles, palaces, manorhouses, inns, cathedrals, you name it. Many of them are designed to be printed on multiple sheets of paper to work as battle mats.
Do a web search on castle plans in your favorite search engine and you will get dozens of examples.
I would like to thank you for being inclusive towards non google users.
Hmm, so looking over all the advice I think what I'm going to do is say that the castle is inside of a town that sprung up around it and replaced the moat with just a curtain wall that attaches to part of the wall that surrounds the town, lets see if I can give an illustration
I--------------------I
IXXXICCCCCIXXXI
IXXXICCCCCIXXXI
IXXX(_____)XXXI
IXXXXXXXXXXXXI
IXXXXXXXXXXXXI
IXXXXXXXXXXXXI
IXXXXXXXXXXXXI
(____________)
So that'd be the outer wall that surrounds the town and then the curtain wall for the castle that attaches to the outer wall
Also for reference this is what I have so far. I'm doing this on gimp and I made an overlay for the roll20 grid so each square is 5 feet
The red T outline you see at the bottom is the entrance hall, with the smaller rectangles to the sides being stairs that lead to the upper floor
Put secret freaking doors EVERYWHERE. I'm a fan of confusion.
No actual walls... just long sequences of secret doors with different triggers... see how long it takes them to realize it.
Definitely put in tons of secret doors and secret passages.
It kind of sucks to roll a natural 20 on a secret door Perception check, and there's nothing there. When that happens, I tend to just place a random secret door there unless it would totally mess up the flow of the dungeon.
Also, secret peep holes so you can spy on the nobles and monsters.
Or have the monster run away, and apparently disappear, so your player has to search and find the secret passage the monster is hiding in.
And is the monster sneaking up from behind?
I recently had my PCs go through a haunted manor house, and there was central courtyard with at least half a dozen entrances into the manor house, and each room usually had 3 or more doors, so there was no railroading and lots of player choice. Also, none of the rooms were rectangular, so there were lots of neat corners and insane room shapes.
Cross posted from another thread in the hopes it will help spark some ideas.
I don't know about range, but for the orbital satellite itself, you can make a flying castle with the animated object spell pretty easily.
Just fly it far enough into space where your typical flying creature or character can't reach it due to radiation exposure, suffocation, and other space-related hazards; and spellcasters need interplanetary teleport to teleport into it (assuming you don't bother with anti-teleport defenses).
When a bombardment is ordered, they could fly their landing castle in for a meaningful close encounter of the undead kind.
Hell, make it an entire fleet, with each of your 8 liches having their own castle full of undead monsters and minions. They can come crashing down onto Golarion's surface like the Orbital Knights of Mars in the anime, Aldnoah Zero.
Just imagine a meek army thrown into chaos because a castle landed atop of them, killing hundreds (perhaps even thousands with a magical shockwave) and dividing the enemy forces before your undead forces poured out, ripping into them. I imagine the impact on morale would be magnified greatly if you landed atop of an enemy fortification, such as a keep, crushing it at the start of the attack.
Could be fun if the PCs made it into the castle only to have it take off. Heck, finding a way into the flying castle could be half the adventure, with the other half being them trying to stop it before it launches an assault on an unsuspecting third party (or simply before it makes it far enough into space to kill all of the living stowaways).
Here's a video that might help. It's part of a whole series examining the 'realism' of various fictional castles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPULMBtfrl8