Farmhouse floor plan

I decided to take a break from Hero Lab for tonight and do a bit of drawing instead. We're going to be fighting our way through occupied France and behind enemy lines all across Europe... we're going to need to hide in some farm houses at some point!



1. Outhouse/Bath house

2. Outside entrance to the basement area (10)

3. Kitchen area. A large stove, store cupboards full of crockery and some food gently bubbling away on the stove...

4. Dining area with a fireplace in the corner. The room contains a large window overlooking the lands to the rear of the house.

5. Entrance hall with stairs up to the first floor. Under the stairs there is also access to the basement area via a ladder.

6. Study. This room contains a desk, bookshelf and some manuscripts. Quite what these are, depends on what the house is being used for... If this is a typical farm, then they will probably be records of the crops, taxes and farming almanacs. If this is the home of some occultist, the paperwork could be more suspect... though the more dangerous tomes will probably be found in the cave hidden in the basement.

7. Upstairs landing with a small window looking out over the front of the house.

8. Master bedroom

9. Secondary bedroom

10 Basement area. This is used as a storage area for crops, dried meats, cheeses and wines. On the far wall is a large book case or wine rack that can be moved out of the way to revel a dark passageway to a cave (11)

11. Dark cave. The cave has a body of water that occupies over half of the area; the water is murky and probably not safe to drink. If this is just a normal farm house, then the cave was probably just blocked up and forgotten when the waters were discovered to be bad. If this is something more sinister, the cave will likely contain occult books and artifacts; possibly even a small shrine to some dark entity... If you want to get really mean, there could be something nasty living in the water; either in the cave, or through a tunnel in the lake.

More useful maps

Today uncovered a few more useful map packs for Achtung! Cthulhu games, this time from Piazo. They have created an ever expanding range of map packs, both as Gaming Mats and additional tiles for their Pathfinder system. While these packs are designed for a fantasy system, most of them will be useful in 20th century, real world situation as well, especially if you're sent behind enemy lines in Eastern Europe or North Africa... even things like mystical tombs and magical lands fit as we've already got extra-dimensional beings threatening the world! There's even a neat Rooftops one for all your rooftop chase needs ;)

The newer maps can be bought as a physical product, but they have their entire range available as PDFs.



God... I'm beginning to sound like an advert for other companies! We should be starting our campaign next week, so hopefully I can start posting some actual game related updates soon.

Castles in Germany

http://www.roadstoruins.com lists all of the castles, with their locations and some history, photographs and floorplans that could all be rather useful for anyone dropping in for a visit.

So where are we going again?

GMs always need maps and I will not be any different, so over time I'll going to start collecting links to useful mapping resources for the time period that we're playing in (1938-1950).

Obviously there are two types of maps that people may want to use... First up there are grid based tiles like those used in miniature games, then there are the more hand-out style maps that you'd get in a normal RPG book. From now on I'll be referring to the game-style tiles as Tiles and the handout ones as simply maps.

Tiles

Fantasy flight Games' Mansions of Madness has some great looking floor tiles for a 1930s mansion, with some of the expansions adding on some additional location boards. The building looks to be very American, so if you're picky about being accurate, possibly not the one for you if you're fighting evils outside of the US. On the plus side, you also get a nice selection of monsters and some civilian investigators

Handout maps

The Wizards of the Coast D&D 3.5 archive has some useful maps that, although fantasy based, are mostly of castles and caves, which works well in the European warzone as we've got our fair share of both kicking around. Some of them, such as the Sandstorm map pack would work well for any region as it includes ruins and a tomb. I am mildly amused that the Sandstorm Temple of Three map looks like a cartoon Cthulhu peeking over a wall.

The National Park Service in America has a nice little site designed to provide tours around world war 2 locations in the San Francisco Bay area. The maps are fairly high level, but give you a great idea of what was happening during the war and where military installations were. This could be very useful if we ever make it as far as San Francisco when defending the world

There's also a neat house planning site, http://www.eplans.com, in America that allows people to browse a vast number of different architectural styles. The site includes photos, illustrations and floorplans of all the different styles, which is perfect for American based adventuring; not so good for the rest of the world... but it's a start! The best section to look in is the Victorian House Plans section as these seem quite evocative of your typical haunted house, or run-down, cult filled wreck.

http://mansionfloorplans.blogspot.co.uk also has a neat selection of mansions from across the US and Europe. there are only 13 available, but it's useful none the less.

Hurstmonceux Castle in the UK is detailed on http://www.bigdaysout.com, including some history and the floorplan. I can certainly see this one being a base for a British paranormal investigation team as it has easy access to the south coast as it isn't that far from Hastings.

Other things

http://www.british-history.ac.uk has a wide selection of historical information about Britain throughout the ages, including floorplans of famous buildings, ordinance survey maps form different time periods etc. etc... more than enough fodder for the constructive GM.