Building a Tower (Part I)

I wanted to build a tower. Faced with the failure (or, in some ways, 'critical planning success') of my chapel model (as described in an earlier post), I rather lost heart in the project to make the buildings of the Keep for quite a while. 

Honestly the fact that the first thing I tried to build didn't work, in that I couldn't see a way to make all the details I had 'fit', left me wondering if the whole project was a goner. I thought I knew what I was doing with the Chapel, it seemed like it would be a relatively easy and useful start. But if the build I had identified as 'easy' (in design, not even building the finished thing from foamcore!) proved such a challenge, was I up for any of it?

But, Orc Minimus gave me an actual proper cutting-board for Christmas (not Christmas gone, the Christmas before, end of 2024). This was a couple of months after the chapel debacle, which took place in the second half of that year - I'd originally laid out the scheme in July 2024 (in this post) and around September-October, I did my experiments with the Chapel model.

Presumably, I'd spent so long swearing over bits of cardboard that the 'little one' (he's nearly 24) took pity on me and bought me the cutting-board. Cutting-mat. I dunno, whatever they're called. The green, slightly-floppy measurey ones with the grids and angles in a somewhat sci-fi way.

It's a marvellous thing. Much easier to see if things are square/the right size/the correct angle and all that. Light and easy to move and it doesn't hurt if I drop it on my foot, unlike the old wooden kitchen chopping-board I had been using to cut cardboard and whatnot on. A damned useful piece of kit.

If I have one criticism of it, and I do have one, it's that on one side, it's in metric, and on the other side... it's also in metric.

Now, I'm not crazy. I know, objectively, that measuring things in units of 100 is much easier than measuring them in 16ths of a dead Frenchman. Anyone from an Imperial country that disagrees, please explain why your currency does not use 4 farthings to the penny, 6 pennies to the shilling, 5 shillings to the crown, and 4 crowns to the pound. Metric, decimal, whatever, 100-of-these-make-1-of-those, is vastly simpler to use and much more flexible.

But... all of that time I spent messing about working out whether it's 6' to the inch or 5' to the inch... it doesn't matter. I can't really work in inches on the board anyway.

Of course, my steel rule has inches on it, inches on one edge, mm/cm on the other, but much of the utility of the cutting-mat disappears if you aren't using it for measuring. The old chopping-board I was using as a surface also 'didn't have inches on it' (nor centimetres neither), so if I wasn't using the mat for handy measuring, it would be hardly more useful than the chopping-board.

So; having agonised for far too long about it and eventually taken the decision that everything was going to be based on 1" = 5', I had to then convert that to metric.

Now, everything is going to be 25mm = 5'. Astute observers will know that 25mm does not in fact equal one inch, 25.4mm = one inch. But there's no way I'm working with that. It's going to be 25mm = 5', so 5mm = 1', and that's an end to it.

I don't even know what that makes my scale - not 1:60 (ie, 1"=60"/5'); not 1:72 (1"=72"/6' - at this scale, 5' would be about 22mm, I think) - it's just about 1:61, I reckon. My 'inch' (for this build, the whole Keep project, and I suspect forevermore, at least for terrain work, maybe not if I'm putting up new shelves) will be 25mm.

So, anyway, the mojo to build some buildings finally returned after the disappointment of the failure to successfully tackle the Chapel. 

I didn't attempt anything else as challenging for a while. What I did was print off a few downloadable cardboard kits and make them up. So it wasn't totally dead time. I still added a few bits to my 'village', if not to the project to build the structures in the Keep.

Then, my laptop decided to fry itself and I lost the files I had. I mean all the files. Everything relating to the project that wasn't already on the blog (that is, the 'mission statement' and a couple of draft posts about different aspects, with snippets of info - these were part of the post about the Chapel, and some musings about military organisation in the Keep (since turned into a proper post here) and the Caves, not even directly connected with terrain-building, that will appear as part of the project); also, along with much other stuff, I lost all the downloads of cardboard terrain I'd collected over the years, including a bunch of GW stuff that you can't get access to any more. 

That was a bit of pain I will admit. It did seem like the universe was conspiring against this project.

But, as I don't actually believe that, I eventually returned to it.

So, I decided to try and build a tower.

Now for some reason, I'd become confused (not helped by the fact I'd lost the pdf in the hard-drive disaster and didn't re-download it for a while, while simultaneously not bothering to check my tatty old paper copy of B2 - but the problem must have started earlier, I just took ages to correct it). I thought the tower I decided I would make - the Bailiff Tower - was this structure:

Structure 8 - a 30' square crenelated structure

I read the description of the Bailiff Tower - 30' square, four storeys, battlements; I looked at the map at structure 8 - 30' square, battlements, connected to defensive walls at east side, big doors in south wall. All good.

What I didn't realise was that I had applied description 6 (Bailiff's Tower) to structure 8 (the Smithy), and I was actually embarking on building this structure:

Structure 6 - the Bailiff's Tower

Same floorplan, same crenelations, just different connections to the walls and different doors (also the Smithy is only 2 storeys, but as I was building the structure from description 6 that lists 4 storeys, that wasn't a worry). Not a problem, once I realised my mistake, which came later in the planning process than it should have done. But it was at least before I got round to cutting anything, so no harm, no foul I suppose.

The parameters of the problem gradually revealed themselves to me when I started looking in detail at what the Tower was. There are two walls which connect to it; these, unlike in most of the towers on the circuit of walls, are not marked with doors. Conversely, the Bailiff Tower is not joined directly to the battlements the way some others are, so it isn't the same height as the walkway. This, quite frankly, must be a mistake; I can't see how it is not. The idea that the only entrance/exit to this tower is on the ground floor in the Outer Bailey, and that the tower itself is a massive block on moving troops around the walls, doesn't make any sense to me. There must be access from the walkways to the tower somehow. In defence of this thesis, the illustration from the back of the module bears this out, somewhat:

Original illustration by Erol Otus, (c) TSR/Wizards of the Coast

This illustration clearly shows the Bailiff's Tower protruding above the level of the walls to a considerable degree. But it makes no sense that it blocks access around the circuit of the curtain-walls (so, by my reckoning, there must be doors in the north and west faces of the tower leading to the walkways along the walls).

The question that arises first is 'where do the walls connect?'

The answer is - not surprisingly, perhaps - slightly complex. The information in the module is written for gaming purposes, it's not an architectural brief. The drawing is illustrative of the 'feel' of the Keep and is not necessarily strictly accurate (though honestly it's pretty good where I have checked details against the text). The height of the walls is not given anywhere in the description of the Keep that I've found, but I've extrapolated a height of 20' to the walkway, mostly from the description of the gate-towers at the Keep's entrance. These are listed as both "30' high with battlements" - by which I take it is meant "35' high including battlements" - and all also as having "three floors" - which I take to mean, apart from the ground floor, two more internal rooms, and then the fighting-platform on top (an easily-extrapolatable 10'=one storey rule seems to pertain here). These 'flanking towers' are described as being either side of a 'gatehouse' which is 20' tall. 

From the towers on the opposite sides to the gatehouse, curtain walls come out to further towers, and the Bailiff's Tower is one of these. My rationale for 20' walls is that they are likely shorter than the towers, and on the castle plan, doors from the 'flanking towers' to the walkways can be seen, suggesting that the towers occupy at least another storey above the level of the walkway. So if the 'flanking towers' are 30' (plus battlements) and 3 floors (plus fighting platform) then the walls are likely 20' (plus battlements). 

This means that the doors to connect the walkways with the Bailiff's Tower on the 2nd (for North America, read '3rd') floor of the tower: in British counting, 'ground' is 'floor 0' not floor 1 - the first floor is the 'first above ground', then 'second above ground' etc. So for a 20' high walkway (with another 5' of battlements) the door must also be 20' up (unless there are steps... no, I'm not putting random level-changes in, this will be done in as simple a way as I can). If the ground floor is 0-10', the next floor above that is 10-20', then it will be the floor above that, at 20-30', that has the door to the walkways on the walls.

There are four internal storeys to the Bailiff Tower - the ground floor (0-10') of offices for the Bailiff and Scribe; a floor above (10-20') is the personal quarters of those two; above that (20-30') is a storeroom; the uppermost (internal) floor (30-40') is a barracks-room for 12 soldiers; and on the roof is a fighting platform with 5' battlements. It's also described as a 40' high tower with a 5' battlement above it. I can't help but think that if I had started here, or with the Gatehouse, and not with the Chapel, I would have agonised far less about how high a 'storey' is.

The doors then likely lead to the floor that is the storeroom. I think that makes some sense from the point of view of organisation in the Keep, as that means that it could be used to easily resupply other parts of the defences if there was an attack (assuming there are doors, of course). Don't know if Gary thought of that when he was writing it, but it fits nicely anyway.

Bailiff's Tower, west elevation

The somewhat schematic diagram shows the lower door for entrance from the Outer Bailey, the hypothetical position of the southern wall of the Keep (the wall leading to the Bailiff's Tower in Erol Otus's illustration), with the proposed door as the entrance to the storeroom level, and the internal floors. On the north wall (which is on the left of this diagram), another door at the same height, and a similar wall-and-battlement structure, makes up the southern part of the east wall of the castle complex, leading to the 'flanking towers' of the Gatehouse. On my reckoning, the height of the Bailiff's Tower relative to the wall is slightly less than the illustration makes it, but I'm not taking the illustration as definitive.

This then became my basic plan for the Tower build.

At that point, I started to wonder if I could build the tower as a series of 'trays', one for each floor, and have fully-playable rooms. I did investigate this possibility: I built a card model of the ground floor (at least partly) and even drew some stonework on the side (I have some grey card I though would make a good stone surface), but have reluctantly put it aside, at least for the time being. I don't want to complicate things that much at the moment. Maybe, if I get a bit further with actual exteriors, I can start to worry about how I might model the interiors.

That all left me with a conceptual problem though. The point about these builds is supposed to be to try and get some playable terrain. What I am planning is a tower, which can be free-standing of course, something like a pele tower (also spelled peel tower... if you don't know about them, go and check them out, they're cool) from the Anglo-Scottish Border region.

However, a free-standing tower with a door in the corner at the bottom doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense if it also has two doors half-way up its walls on adjacent sides. 

It seemed to me there were three options. Maybe there are more, but these are the ones I came up with.

1 - model the tower as-is, with the upper doors, and add something to it to justify them. Perhaps there could be a gallery or some sort of porch-type structure to either cover them or utilise them;

2 - model the tower without them, but create some doors that could be attached somehow when used with the walls;

3 - model the tower without them, and attach the upper doors to the walls, rather than the tower, as the upper doors would only be necessary if the tower was used with the walls.

Of these, the second seemed like the system that would give me the greatest utility, without requiring a bunch of extra building. If I went for attaching the doors to the walls, I wouldn't be able to use the walls in a different configuration. If I attached some kind of ancillary structure, I would have to do a whole load of modelling on something that wouldn't work with the Keep. If I was going to do that, I might as well just build a pele tower, perhaps based on Smailholm Tower (link), one of my favourites, and not attempt to utilise the tower from the Keep at all. As the whole point of this build was to try to get some multi-use terrain with minimal building, the idea of building stuff that can't be used for the Keep makes no sense.

So I'll build a tower and worry about attaching doors to it later.

However, this post is now getting very long, perhaps I should leave it there and post Part II later.