Thread: My "small" project about designing inns

For the attic one, you might want to consider some type of hoist system also to be able to move large items (such as those crates) far more easily... its generally pretty hard for one person to walk up a ladder with a 100+ pounds of dead weight in his arms over his head.... Lot's old hay barns used to have a simple hand pulley winch type system over the door way on the upper levels for bringing up hay bails and other feed supplies.

Would consider it, but not sure how to get a good symbol for it

Originally Posted by Redstar

Some other things to keep in mind with Inn/Taverns:

• If the place severs food, you'll need a kitchen
• If the place severs ale/wine, you'll need storage
• Consider the Inn as meeting hall too, do you need banquet rooms
• Does the help live there too? Do they have better lodgings?
• Are these "rich" and "poor" quality rooms?

Just some thoughts. Good work though. Looking forward to seeing more!

As you see, right now we have floorplans for the residences of the staff, so we know where "The help" lives. If you have followed the series on the blog, you might remember the first post where we discuss what is server. For the main inn building, we have several levels, both underground and aboveground with dedicated purposes.

I started to map them from the top levels. You can see some progress in the blog post called: How to design an inn: Top levels of the tower. If you remember the maps of the outside you see that the building has some small tower and how it works was discussed before. Mostly because I decided against adding its supporting walls to lower levels.

As you see, the images for the top 2 levels aren't included here (only on the blog), since they aren't that good, mostly because the size of the tower and the size of the map made it hard to add too much good details, but with this area you can see one luxury suite for the rich, with short explanation about why it looks like this. Which can be a bit of "tutorial" for the newbies.

I have two excellent resources for designing inns. My cartography skills are exceptionally weak (my major projects were in my youth with graph paper and pencil, computer would have meant designing it in ascii )
The resources themselves will also give you an idea of that, BUT these are EXCELLENT.
1. The Compleat Tavern by Gamelords (used on amazon for $20) is 24 pages and is chalk full of things about different size fantasy taverns, games, drinking, wenching, etc. But it really gives a lively idea of a tavern and things that a good tavern should include at different levels.
2. Cities by Midkemia Press ($26 Amazon) had 2 pages on Taverns but it was also pretty good and did an excellent job of telling what was usually around different size inns and cities. I would recommend it for any fantasy community cartographer actually. I think Chaosium reissued this later, but I'm not sure it included the tavern table. (I can't find my copy).
3. Any of the Citybook series by Flying Buffalo.
I think if you picked up the Compleat Tavern you would really feel your taverns come more "alive", just like I did back in the day. The reason is that I would roll up a tavern with all the people, services, patrons, amenities, etc, then I would try to figure out how all these people would fit in, then 2-3 more times I would roll up different patrons and see if they still all fit 80% of the time. Inns might actually be bigger than you might think. The reason is that for a small one you might have to think of it like a small town restaurant. In the morning everyone is sitting at "the bar" but at night more people use tables, then slowly, back to the bar. If people play games, will there be room for them? Just things to think about.
I wish I had your cartographic talent, as you can tell I'm more analytic myself.