Castle Peles in Romania photo by FreeImages.com / Ivana S

Castle Peles in Romania photo by FreeImages.com / Ivana S
Built as a summer palace during the years 1873-1914.

This article started as an example and additional content for last week’s discussion of Visualization, but that article evolved in a different direction, and this material no longer seemed to fit. So I pulled it to give both the room they needed.

Six Questions To Create A Building

Everything happens somewhere.

In order for any event to occur in an RPG, we need to specify somewhere for it to happen. That means that we have to create a LOT of locations in the course of a campaign, or even a moderately-large adventure.

Most of those locations will be buildings of some sort, simply because that’s where you find people, and that’s where you find objects of interest, and therefore, that’s where things happen. I have a set checklist that I mentally follow whenever creating a building, and that’s – at least nominally – the subject of today’s article.

  • What’s it for?
  • How big is it?
  • Who built it?
  • Where is it?
  • What’s it made of? And lastly,
  • What does it look like?

Seems fairly straightforward, doesn’t it? And notice that the last step is to visualize it – so that I’m ready to describe what I’m seeing, mentally, using the techniques described in the Visualization article and the series on Stylish Narrative.

But this series of questions is even more useful than meets the eye…

What’s It For?

Everything has a purpose.

But that’s a very loaded proposition – the creator may have had a quite different purpose in mind to the current inhabitants, who may have a very different purpose to that of the DM.

Each of these purposes will shape, or reshape, the structure of the building in question. The purpose of the creator will dictate the fundamental “bones” of the architecture. The purpose of the current owners/occupants will change the way that the spaces in between those fundamental bones will be filled, and the fascia that is applied. And guiding the decisions of both, from behind the curtain, will be the plot needs of the GM pulling the strings.

My personal experiences include working in an office space designed early in the 1970s which had been adapted to house clusters of cubicles – from almost everywhere inside the building there was no direction in which you could see an unbroken view of the outside, and when you were working in one of those cubicles, you were cocooned like a monk in his cell. And I saw what happened when they redesigned the space to take down the barriers between the workstations that comprised each cluster, orienting them so that everyone could see the outside in some direction – it felt like the building had grown 50% larger, there was suddenly so much space around each person.

I’ve also worked in a 19th-century wool-store that had been refitted as a data processing center – desks side by side and facing each other, each with a computer screen and a book-stand – and noticed how the original purpose of the building defined where the supporting columns were located, and how large they were, and how these became the hubs around which modern utilities like phones and power supplies could be run, and so dictated the way that the building functioned in its new role.

I’m not a big watcher of renovation/home decoration programs or magazines, but it only takes a passing acquaintance with such sources to recognize how large a transformation can be achieved with relatively minor changes – and yet, if you look closely at most such transformations, you can still perceive the lingering echoes of what was there before, even if they now have to be assessed in a new context that obscures that original design.

Purpose is one of the most important defining characteristics. At the same time, it’s often the easiest to put your mental finger on; it’s then “simply” a matter of interpreting those purposes into design, layout, and decorative elements. It’s hard to get that right – but it’s fairly easy to spot when it isn’t done correctly, because the space will make no sense once you look at it with a little perspective. The biggest mistake that most people make is waiting until they are about to use the space in a game before doing so.

How Big Is It?

Size matters (just ask any Dr Who fan about the TARDIS).

Size has two major effects, plus a third superficial one, that need to be noted and accommodated.

The first effect is that size dictates what can happen conveniently and efficiently in a given space. If the space is too large, then people will either be overwhelmed by it, or so separated that communication becomes a problem. Either way, efficiency and convenience suffer.

The second effect is a corollary to the first. If an operation is in a space of any particular size, it’s because they think or thought that they would need that space. If an insurance company occupies a 16-story skyscraper, they will need every single one of those floors for something. If a Hardware store occupies one-and-a-half acres (and at least one in Sydney does – I know because I helped set up the shelves and stock for it at one point) its because they have that much hardware that the space will be full. If they didn’t need as much space, they would relocate to cheaper premises, or never have moved into this location in the first place. If there wasn’t enough space, again it’s unlikely that this location would have been acceptable.

Let’s go back to that Insurance Company for a minute, which I know about because I worked for them for a number of years. The ground floor is all about customer service. There’s a floor for each branch of insurance, and a floor for senior management, and a floor for IT, and one for the computers themselves, and a floor for computer security, and a floor for the staff cafeteria, and a floor for training, and a floor for the printers that produce the renewal notices, and a floor for building maintenance, and a floor for the air-conditioning plant and elevator power. I count that as being 10 floors, so there have to be four major branches to the insurance operation (in fact, there were more until some were moved into a neighboring building). And one of those remaining floors is shared with the call center and switchboard, and another is shared with an internal library. And that’s with a number of key functions outsourced, like graphic design. Each floor has meeting rooms, and secretarial stations, and middle-management, and bathrooms for staff use, and security stations. At 14 floors, it was bulging at the seams. All that exists to service one floor of customer service, and a number of branches.

I see this go wrong all the time in home-brewed locations because in any operation, 9/10ths of it don’t show to the outside world (well, maybe it’s more like 1/2, but you get the point). People place something in an immense castle, with no thought of what will fill it. It happened with Assassin’s Amulet, too – the original map, though beautiful, gave few suggestions as to the purposes of the individual rooms. It was more-or-less assumed that the GM would fill things in himself – back before Johnn and I became involved. It took a lot of creative effort to allocate functions to all the internal spaces.

Gothic Ceiling by FreeImages.com / Andrew Smith

Gothic Ceiling by FreeImages.com / Andrew Smith

The final aspect of size is that it is equated to grandeur – but only if you can successfully convey a sense of immensity, and that’s more easily said than done. Even photographs often fail to capture it – as someone who has both seen the real thing and gone looking for photographs that adequately express the incredible size of the California Redwoods, I can assure you of that! Either the immense height is not adequately captured, or the physical size of these trees is shrunken; it takes a camera with the ability to pan up to begin to put scales into perspective.

To some extent, the same thing takes place with buildings; rows of windows can provide a useful tool for estimating height, but they come in so many shapes and horizontal sizes that they are an unreliable guide in that dimension. And even then, ceiling heights can throw you curve balls by increasing the size of windows/glass panels more than you realize.

Visually, the easiest way to convey immensity is with richness of detail. That simply doesn’t work in a communications mode that is serial in nature – the spoken/written word, for example. And yet, anyone who knows anything about Hollywood trickery knows that this, too, can be deceptive; it works because the mind makes certain assumptions about the size of small details, and so enlarges its comprehension of the space containing those objects.

And, in fact, it’s those relative sizes being incorrect that tends to give the game away when we look at miniatures; there is a mental discontinuity between the scales that makes the image an obvious miniature (the other photographic flaw is the rate of blur with distance, which our minds interpret into how far away the camera was). Still more cues include the detail of rocks and the sharpness of shadows.

Size is one of those tricky things to get right, and getting it wrong can totally blow the credibility of what you are describing. So I place thinking about it early in the creative process.

Who Built It?

You can’t really think about an original purpose without thinking about the original creator – the designer/architect/builder/decorator combination that caused the building to exist the way it is. Each will leave his own distinctive stamp on the structure in many ways.

That’s a level of detail that most GMs don’t go into – myself included, under normal circumstances. But even beyond that, there are different periods and styles in architecture, and those are also quite distinctive – and those I definitely pay attention to, because they tell me what a lot of the details will look like.

One page that I have bookmarked and refer to often is Wikipedia’s Graphic Timeline Of Architectural Styles. Each of the architectural styles is linked to the appropriate Wikipedia page, making it a great way of quickly connecting to an appropriate style – and if you use “open in new tab” or its equivalent in other browsers, you can skim and go back immediately if the results aren’t what you want.

Of course, there is absolutely no rule that says that architectural styles in a Fantasy world should look like those with which we are familiar, and defining a common architectural style can be a great way of unifying players’ perceptions of a culture in a fantasy game. Maybe the major buildings all have minaret-style domes made of glass, while the smaller ones reflect that design element in the shape of their doors (very Arabian) with stained glass inset above the lintel and rectangular stained glass panels along the sides of the main entrance of the building. This may be part of their religious iconography, a representation of the halo around their deity (or one of their deities). Throw in outer walls with sides canted inwards at a 10-degree angle or so, and you get a formalized representation of a tent, which starts to hint at the history of the culture.

In other words, if our cultural history doesn’t apply, I strongly recommend that you invent one for your campaign – even if you crib from real sources and apply a blender.

This, of course, is even more important and essential (and even harder) when you’re dealing with a future-based setting. The best futuristic sci-fi movies have a consistent architectural theme or two that makes it possible to identify a set photograph of even a movie that you haven’t seen before as belonging to the show/movie. Star Wars certainly has it. Tron had it. The City Of the Daleks in the 70s Dr Who serial had it. Blade Runner has it. Star Trek started to get it in The Next Generation and certainly had it by the time Deep Space Nine and Voyager rolled around.

One of the keys to future architectural style is not changing things too much. The doors on the original starship Enterprise were immediately recognizable as doors; that was necessary because it was a 1960s audience who was viewing it. Compare the cutting edge architecture of today with what people of 100 years ago thought the future would look like and, while there are some similarities, there are also a great many differences; the forecasts are less bound by function and far more simplistic in style, far more compromised to be recognizable by their audience.

Making sure that the building that I am mentally creating either fits the architectural style of the period in which it was created or one of the older ones, or is famous for not observing the fashion (notorious might be a better term) is an important step in creating the building because it connects the building with the culture and history of those that created it.

Where Is It?

Every somewhere sits in an environment (I was going to write, ‘every somewhere is somewhere’ but that’s starting to get too Baroque!)

The location can be either more important than “who made it” or less, or sometimes both at the same time. Which is to say that function will almost always trump form, and function in this case means adapting the style to suit the environment. What happens is that in the essentials, the purity of a style is compromised where necessary; but if it is not essential, the style will dominate the design.

Major impacts that may need to be accommodated include rainfall intensity, flooding, snow, high temperatures, earthquakes, wildfires (also known as bushfires), surface erosion, and strong winds. The more frequently these occur, the more strongly they will influence or even dominate other considerations when designing/constructing structures.

Which brings me to a side-issue that needs to be made at this point. I won’t go into it too deeply – I’ll do another article at some point digging into things more substantially – but this will serve as a primer for that article.

The impact of severe climate is the product of two different facts: the severity and the frequency with which that severity (not more nor less) can be expected to occur. Multiply these together, and add up all the results, and the total is the risk of complete failure that the building faces. If any of those risks exceeds a threshold level based on the expected lifetime of the structure, the design will need to mitigate or otherwise allow for it.

For example, let’s look at flooding. We’ll take 100 years as a typical expected lifetime. Once every ten years, low levels of flooding can be expected, so the likelihood is that it will need to withstand that flooding ten times in its lifetime – this obviously has to be taken into account in the design of the structure. Once every 25 years, moderate flooding will be experienced – so that’s 4 times in the expected lifetime. The major structure would probably take this into account, but that’s about the threshold. Once every 50 years, the building may experience severe flooding, but you probably wouldn’t factor that into your design.

Why? Because one-in-fifty-years events don’t come along like clockwork. What this really means is that the risk is greater than 50-50 that such an event will occur within 50 years of the last such event. Each subsequent half-way step toward 100% risk also multiplies the timescale by the number of steps, so the likelihood is 50% at 50 years, 75% at 100 years, 87.5% at 150 years, 93.75% at 200 years, and so on. There is a reasonably high chance that the building will never experience this problem within its 100-year projected lifespan, so unless there is some reason to expect the risk to go up, you wouldn’t expect to allow for it.

Standards have greatly changed in this respect over the years. These days, the risk to the building is secondary to the risk that the building may pose to others should catastrophe strike. Liability rules over Existence, in other words, and liability risks tend to be much higher with larger modern structures because it’s risk-per-person. The risk to an individual might be low, but multiply it by thousands and it quickly overtakes the risk to the structure as a design consideration.

The other change that has occurred is that absolutism has been replaced with an estimated repair value, and that is compared with a more flexible threshold, the estimated total value of the building. Putting everything in terms of dollars has only happened in the latter half of the 20th century, though it existed as an emerging trend for a century or so prior, but it has the virtue of being a more black-and-white real-world outcome. But we’re wandering off the point of relevance to this article.

If only it was as simple as adding structural or design elements to meet environmental survivability requirements. Quite often, solving one problem compromises capacity to deal with another. You don’t need to be a professional architect, but you do need to be aware of these potential compromises when imagining your structures – and, once again, the risk of the building becoming unusable dictates relative impact on design.

What’s It Made Of?

A secondary impact of location is in availability of construction materials.

Some constructions deliberately utilize non-local material simply because they are hard to obtain and hence evidence of commitment and importance, so what is not available is just as important as what is common.

Furthermore, different construction materials have different requirements in actual usage. Certain types of roofing materials require different levels of support from the structure because of their weight, for example; and in some places, snow loading can potentially exceed the weight of the roof if the design doesn’t take into account the need to shift that weight. (That’s why roofs are pitched at steeper angles in snow country. But these are bad for cooling – so flat roofs are preferred in higher temperature environments. Neither of these are the horizontally strongest designs, those tend to be at about 45 degrees of pitch – so those are what prevail in areas of strong wind. Flat roofs, on the other hand, have much greater potential vertical strength – so these are more prevalent in tornado-prone areas).

Whoops, I seem to have wandered back into the previous point – but that’s okay, because they are very strongly associated. Getting back on point, then, the stronger a frame has to be, the heavier it is, and the more strongly it needs to be held up/held together by the vertical parts of the frame. That’s a truism that becomes less relevant with advances in steel in the early 20th century, so this is a stronger factor in older buildings.

The local church in the town where I grew up that I attended as a child doesn’t need columns to support the roof – but it does have tremendous wooden beams spanning the entire structure, about a foot square in cross-section. They must weigh close to a ton for every 2-3 feet of length – and they are quite long, at least 60′, so each beam must weigh 20-30 tons, maybe more. There are at least 12 of those beams – so the foundations have to support more than 400 tons even without figuring the foot-thick stone walls into account. For comparison, there are complete multistory Japanese castles that are estimated to weigh that much. That’s about the weight of a fully-loaded 747 Jumbo, and the weight of the largest industrial excavator ever built in Germany, and the weight of the Locomotive that powers the Orient Express. The walls need to be made of such heavy stone in order to support both themselves and that load.

What’s It Look Like?

Once all the practicalities and historical contexts have been taken into account, all that’s left are the surface superficialities.

Yet, these are often the most visible elements of the design. Designers and decorators never seem to like being forced into anything by practical realities and go out of their way to hide the compromises that they are forced to make, simply because they are compromises with reality. In another structure where they are not necessary, the same decorator would quite happily incorporate the look of the very design features that they have just hidden, simply because they aren’t necessary.

How do you hide necessary design features? You make columns look like statues, you sheath walls in some entirely different construction material, and sculpt nooks and crannies and shapes into the walls. In short, you turn them into decorative features and build the rest of the appearance around them.

A number of structures are also over-engineered to provide scope for design features. For example, castle walls are designed to withstand siege equipment and cannon-fire; that necessitates walls of a certain thickness, but would you ever be comfortable in a structure designed to be only just strong enough to protect you? There’s always the chance that someone would get in a lucky shot, or build a better siege weapon – so you would engineer your outer walls to be at least three times as strong as they needed to be, if you could; four or five times would be better. And then it occurs to you that if the walls are going to be that thick and strong, you could build a secret escape passage into them and they would still be more than three times as strong as they need to be…

The Derivation Of Answers

The mental design process runs a lot faster than this article may have conveyed. Ultimately, it comes down to making six decisions – so somewhere between 3 and 12 seconds is enough time for me to envisage a structure, even without allowing for “typical” structures short-circuiting the process. With such shortcuts – and they only come with experience – I can imagine and describe a tavern, or a cottage, or a skyscraper, about as quickly as I can bring the word to mind.

What’s more, because they occur more frequently, the more common a structure in a game, the more readily such shortcuts come to mind – with experience.

What I have learned over the years is that spending those few seconds – or even, for a less experienced GM, maybe ten or twenty seconds each – thinking about each of the six questions gives me a strong foundation for making snap decisions about anything else that may come up.

You can improv only as fast as you can think, and this process lets me improv about as fast as the words can come out of my mouth. On a more complicated structure, I might need to spend a little more time thinking about it to achieve this – but a pause of 5 or 6 seconds is barely noticeable, and is easily covered by rolling a few dice and pretending to count them up. And if you can make the results of that dice roll relevant in some way to your subsequent description/narrative, so much the better, and you will never be caught out by your players!

A Building Without Walls

What may surprise people who haven’t thought about it enough is that the same process can be applied to other sorts of locations. A clearing in the forest or jungle, for example. A swampy hollow. The entrance to a giant anthill. Any location can be treated as “a building without walls” and the same process applied – though some of the questions might need tweaking, or a more metaphoric interpretation.

For example, let’s think about a forest clearing. What’s it for? A potential danger or trap, a passage for forest animals. How big is it? About 3 meters (10′) across, surrounded by brush and heavy trees. Who built it? There are three possible reasons for a clearing: first, there used to be a tree there, but it was destroyed by lightning/fire; second, there may be particularly dense stands of trees to east and west, reducing the light reaching this spot, and inhibiting growth there; or third, the soil may be especially poor there by chance. Deliberate construction doesn’t appear on the list, but might be a fourth – trappers did do that, I believe, to make their traps more accessible. Where is it? A thick forest in a cooler climate. What’s it made of? The brush to either side includes nettles and thorn-bushes, so the clearing is relatively confined. What does it look like? A span of mossy earth and plants a few inches tall surrounded by thicker undergrowth and dense stands of tall trees that keep the area in shade. Clearing done!

If you eliminate the need for walls, anywhere becomes a building, and the same tools, the same six questions, can make answers flow as needed.

The Building Of A Metaphor

The utility of those six basic questions doesn’t stop there. A more liberally-metaphoric interpretation of those questions enables the same technique to be used for just about anything you can think of.

For example, let’s build an off-the-cuff encounter for our clearing, in a D&D/Pathfinder setting.

What’s it for? A local noble feels threatened by recent events and has placed a guard here to try and drive the adventurers off. How big is it? Enough to trouble the party, but not realistically to defeat them. Who built it? Baron Mars Aeppin, who was forewarned by a seer of the party’s coming. Where is it? A clearing in the forests to the southwest of the Baron’s castle. What’s it made of? One knight and his two harpy allies who are perched in the trees that overgrow the clearing. And finally, What does it look like? A knight in polished ring-mail stands ready in the center of the clearing, a shield on one arm and his sword drawn and pointed at his feet, signifying his readiness for battle but an initially non-belligerent stance; the heraldic device on the shield is an inverted red “V” against a yellow background and a black eagle in flight above it (note that I am deliberately using a visual description and not technical heraldic language). The knight is Sir Reginald, the Baron’s brother, a nobleman himself who hopes to inherit the childless Baron’s estates one day. The encounter clearly invites a parley with the party, but one that could turn hostile immediately if the party do not accede to the Baron’s demands that they withdraw from his lands.

From this beginning, an entire plotline could easily be improvised – all the ingredients are there. The seer’s prophecy is self-fulfilling; by acting to bar the party, the Baron invites their attention (they would probably have ignored him otherwise). The seer therefore has an agenda of his or her own – she has Sir Reginald enthralled and if she can engineer the Baron’s downfall, she can claim the estates through him, using them as a stepping stone. The only question is where the Harpies fit in – they are unlikely allies, there is a story there.

A basic and simple plot, but one fully capable of diverting a party for a day’s play – and one that took about as long as typing “from this beginning, an entire plotline could easily be improvised”. A couple of seconds more thought might enable the seer to be linked into existing plot threads within the campaign, and the characters to become a bit more rounded than their current one-dimensional state – but you’ve got lots of time to do those things as play progresses.

So learn the six questions, understand why they get asked in the order they occur, and the apply general principle of practicalities to superficialities/personalities to your GMing day-in and day-out, and, and not only will your repertoire expand enormously, but you’ll have more time to create those memorable oddballs that don’t fit the usual patterns and focus on running a good game in which everyone has fun. That’s a lot of reward for a small effort!


Discover more from Campaign Mastery

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.