I’d rather pretend to be an adventurer.Ĭonsequently, it’s somewhat surprising I enjoy author/illustrator David Macaulay’s Castle as much as I do.Īn entry under the “Non-Fiction: Young Adult” heading of the “Inspirational Source Material” section in Tom Moldvay’s Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rulebook, Macaulay’s Castle uses the construction of an imaginary fortress to explain how real castles were actually designed and built in the thirteenth century. In part, I’ve never built a castle in D&D because I don’t want to spend my limited playing time pretending to be an architect. “It's this business of nickels and dimes and spending all your life trying to figure out how to save three cents on a length of pipe. I understand how cool it would be to construct your character’s dream castle, complete with secret passages and traps, all ready for the day when your nemesis comes at you at last! Like George Bailey tells his father, however, in It’s a Wonderful Life: To the contrary, I wonder if anyone has ever used these rules as intended, and if they have, did they consider this to be time well-spent? Or did they do what I would do-hire a bunch of specialists to build my castle for me, in an attempt to push all the “busy-work” back on the DM? I find this section intimidating because, while I’m technically-minded and detail oriented, the idea of spending hours figuring out the dimensions and cost of a fantasy castle has never fired my imagination. In my imagination, it had expanded to multiple pages of details about how to construct a castle-perhaps because in Chris Gonnerman’s Basic Fantasy, the analogous section does take up three pages.
When I went back to review it for this article, I was surprised to discover the entire section takes up only three-quarters of a page.
0 kommentar(er)
