Low Fantasy Castle

[MrZJunior]

I'm putting together a short little game for some of my friends. It involves infiltrating and robbing a small castle. I've been having trouble coming up with some more fantastical elements to include in it.

I want the setting to be fairly low magic. I was thinking I would have a faucet in one of the bathing rooms that magically warms the water which flows through it. I will also include a sealed, haunted suite of apartments.

What other cool things do you think I could include?

[CharonsHelper]

Are you just looking for more interesting fluff things? Or are you looking for various challenges to confront your players with?

[MrZJunior]

Are you just looking for more interesting fluff things? Or are you looking for various challenges to confront your players with?

Both would be nice.

[Keltest]

Is this more of a fort castle or a luxury palace castle?

[Knaight]

I'm putting together a short little game for some of my friends. It involves infiltrating and robbing a small castle. I've been having trouble coming up with some more fantastical elements to include in it.

I want the setting to be fairly low magic. I was thinking I would have a faucet in one of the bathing rooms that magically warms the water which flows through it. I will also include a sealed, haunted suite of apartments.

What other cool things do you think I could include?

If you want it to be low magic you could just not have the fantastical elements at all - or at least leave them where they're rumored to be magic, and could be magic, but there could also be a mundane (if weird) explanation.

The upside to this is that you can dig into history and find these, and while magic is generally rejected as an explanation in the historical case for obvious reasons you can just not say anything one way or the other.

[MrZJunior]

Is this more of a fort castle or a luxury palace castle?

I'm basing at least part of it on the Castel Sant'angelo in Rome so a little bit of both.

[Keltest]

I'm basing at least part of it on the Castel Sant'angelo in Rome so a little bit of both.

What are they trying to rob?

[MrZJunior]

What are they trying to rob?

I was thinking the old imperial crown. The castle is owned by a family of bankers and someone deposited it with them as collateral.

However, the whole heist is part of a plot by their employers to reveal that the bank has actually run out of money. This will destabilize the city's political and economic system and give them room to improve their position.

[Keltest]

I was thinking the old imperial crown. The castle is owned by a family of bankers and someone deposited it with them as collateral.

However, the whole heist is part of a plot by their employers to reveal that the bank has actually run out of money. This will destabilize the city's political and economic system and give them room to improve their position.

Hmm. Perhaps the vault is beneath the tombs. The bankers have a ritual to get in that they want people to believe is magic and tied to their bloodline, but the ritual is actually cover for activating the mechanisms that open the secret door. There may or may not be a curse on the tombs to prevent unwanted intrusion and observation.

[RazorChain]

I'm basing at least part of it on the Castel Sant'angelo in Rome so a little bit of both.

The Mausoleum of Hadrian is not your typical castle though, it was built as a tomb not as a fortification. That being said there is plenty of stuff about castles online and I agree with Knaight if you are using low fantasy there shouldn't be much of a fantastical element about it, a magical faucet isn't going to do much unless the PC's decide to take a bath during the robbery.

Wealthy bankers would rather use magic to protect their wealth as in magical alarm, wards or even traps. Magical traps aren't practical in an inhabited castle though.

Ars Magica does this well with coventants, the place were magi live. They tend to ward the whole covenant so supernatural creatures can't enter and it's harder to cast spells into the coventant. Then they tend to ward their sanctum (their room) as well so people can't teleport/scry or cast magic into the room or have magical alarms.

Imagine this, when the PC's enter the treasury a loud male chicken's crow (damn filters) can be heard thrice all over the castle.

Remember a robbery isn't really a dungeon crawl, it's more of an in and out operation so I as a player would try to find the shortest or the most discreet way into the treasury and only disable the guards that are in my path, I'd not explore the haunted suite nor turn on the faucet and take a bath.

If you are planning a dungeon crawl through the castle where the PC's murder their way room to room with it's soundproof walls until they come to the final treasure room where there is some guardian (boss monster) watching the jewels.....then that's totally cool and the PC's have more time to explore the castle.

[The Fury]

There's this Shadiversity video that goes over some basic castle design. I'd recommend some of his other videos on castles as well.

[Mystral]

I'm putting together a short little game for some of my friends. It involves infiltrating and robbing a small castle. I've been having trouble coming up with some more fantastical elements to include in it.

I want the setting to be fairly low magic. I was thinking I would have a faucet in one of the bathing rooms that magically warms the water which flows through it. I will also include a sealed, haunted suite of apartments.

What other cool things do you think I could include?

In a fairly low magic setting, you'd propably not have magical faucets, though some hauntings sound reasonable. You should watch the youtube channel Shadiversity, he has a lot on castles.

[Incorrect]

A hallway is protected by two (haunted?) paintings. Their eyes scan the hallway in predictable patterns, and they sound the alarm if they spot anyone that does not give the correct password.
The players can either do an elaborate dance through the lazers vision fields, or convince a guard to give up the password.

[Icecaster]

I think one of the most important parts of really conveying the low magic/fantasy is to make the magic scary. If this is a rich family who owns a castle, then it doesn't necessarily have to be super rare, but the characters shouldn't all understand what is going on when magic happens. Make the magic ancient and dangerous, with curses and drawbacks and prices; maybe the vault door requires blood from the bankers' family to be smeared on before it slides away, revealing the crown. If zombies roam the tomb when intruders arrive, then make them truly difficult to kill, not filler monsters. Anything associated with magic should be unpredictable, dangerous, and make the characters wonder if they should really mess with it. I hope that helps with some inspiration!

As for specific ideas, I think it might be interesting if the family had something along the lines of a court wizard that serves them. He could be dark, mysterious, and possibly even a little crazy, and he could possibly be a boss at the end. This could be a way to justify magical traps in places. Another good way for magic to be unpredictable is for magical traps to have entirely separate effects from damage. This could apply curses such as making a character's hands shake (with possible mechanical drawbacks), aging a character, paralyzing a character, causing hallucinations later on, teleporting a character to a random location in the castle, etc. You could have a room in the castle that's perfectly square with a door on either side and ornate sculptures, golden figurines, and books on shelves on the walls. If anything is taken from the shelves, then supports holding the floor around the walls slide away and the doors lock, leaving the stone floor to be balanced on a relatively small support in the very center of the room. The characters will either move quickly to escape, realize what's happening and balance out before attempting to escape, or fall to their apparent doom (or perhaps another convoluted riddle/puzzle designed by the family wizard simply because he's an odd duck). Depending on your system, make sure they have some time to react and see what's happening before dropping them, maybe a turn or two of the floor becoming increasingly slanted, making it difficult to climb back the other way if they take too long. You should make sure to have regular guards posted in strategic places so that the characters won't be able to do the ol' knock the guard unconscious and put him in a closet trick every time. Give them situations that they have to really think about and plan. A heist should be combat as war. And at some point, make sure to force them to improvise and adapt their plan to unforeseen circumstances, such as more guards coming, the wizard coming, a family member waking up and ambling about, or other things. Other magical encounters in the castle could be large statues that animate to fight the characters, a necromancer sneaking around the tomb himself for pieces of bodies, ghosts haunting the tombs (although perhaps they're just guards in costumes meant to scare off intruders), or swarms of rats populating the underground area.

[MrZJunior]

The Mausoleum of Hadrian is not your typical castle though, it was built as a tomb not as a fortification.

It fits thematically. The city the heist is taking place in is strongly influenced by medieval Rome.

Wealthy bankers would rather use magic to protect their wealth as in magical alarm, wards or even traps. Magical traps aren't practical in an inhabited castle though.

I like the idea of magical alarms, thank you. I will try to incorporate those.

Remember a robbery isn't really a dungeon crawl, it's more of an in and out operation so I as a player would try to find the shortest or the most discreet way into the treasury and only disable the guards that are in my path, I'd not explore the haunted suite nor turn on the faucet and take a bath.

What makes that not a dungeon crawl?

[Keltest]

What makes that not a dungeon crawl?

With a dungeon crawl youre exploring every nook and cranny for valuables. Youre going to set up camp and spend a month and a half disabling the adamantine door to sell and/or forge into adamantine equipment.

[MrZJunior]

With a dungeon crawl youre exploring every nook and cranny for valuables. Youre going to set up camp and spend a month and a half disabling the adamantine door to sell and/or forge into adamantine equipment.

Fair enough, in a heist you are spending much less time in the dungeon.

[Keltest]

Fair enough, in a heist you are spending much less time in the dungeon.

Exactly. They don't call it a crawl because of how quickly you cleared the dungeon, after all.

[BBQ Pork]

I want the setting to be fairly low magic. I was thinking I would have a faucet in one of the bathing rooms that magically warms the water which flows through it. I will also include a sealed, haunted suite of apartments.

What other cool things do you think I could include?

Look up solar water heaters. No reason the castle couldn't have shallow water cisterns, painted black, on the roof, to provide hot water.

[farothel]

check the Pendragon setting. There magic is also rare, so it can be a good example of how to build a castle with some magic in it.

Maybe the castle is build on the site of a fairy court (best take a seelie and not an unseelie court) and they sometimes annoy people who get in (or they have a pact with the inhabitants of the castle to help them in exchange for something).

[The Jack]

There was this nice spell in VTM where, short of making a zombie, you set up a dead creature and give it a single action with a parameter, IE if it hears an intruder it should pull a lever. The creature otherwise does nothing, it's inert.

another idea could be something which just looks or feels creepy. A doorknob repulses or attracts people in a way they know is unnatural; the players will end up avoiding it like the plague, even if it's nothing.

Magic which diverts attention away from real, physical traps, or illusions, or swarms of bugs...

[Beleriphon]

There was this nice spell in VTM where, short of making a zombie, you set up a dead creature and give it a single action with a parameter, IE if it hears an intruder it should pull a lever. The creature otherwise does nothing, it's inert.

another idea could be something which just looks or feels creepy. A doorknob repulses or attracts people in a way they know is unnatural; the players will end up avoiding it like the plague, even if it's nothing.

It isn't nothing, its the closet where the butler stores the good silverware.