About Ruprecht Part 2

I grew up drawing and writing a lot. The drawing led me to a graphic designer degree in University. The sad economy of the early 90s led me to taking jobs outside my field and I used the writing talents to become a technical writer.

My training as a graphic designer has led me to love good design. Good design, in my eyes means  the design should be understated and simple. It should not draw attention to itself but should serve the text. Common fonts should be used because there is nothing worse than a PDF bloated with extra fonts except a PDF without rare fonts that have to be downloaded by the user for things to display correct. I hate watermarked art on every page, art should serve as a mental bookmarks and shouldn't use up all the ink in your printer. Also art should have something to do with the accompanying text and should never cross over the text. When I see bad design in game books it makes me a little sad.

I would have provided graphic design work for free when I graduated and needed a job. Anything for the portfolio. I'm pretty sure there are designers out there now that would do the same. Yet bad design is everywhere. At some point I'll make a post with examples, but not here.

My day job as a technical writer is to take complicated information and format it and rearrange it to make it easy to follow.  That is another issue that role playing games seem to be somewhat poor at. Not just within a book but in deciding how to divide information into multiple books. Many games are beautiful but not organized well, others are organized very well but are horribly ugly. Again, some folks should hire a designer, and others should judge design on readability, not on cool, as cool fades with use and actually becomes annoying if it gets between you and what you need to find in the book.

Hopefully my training as a Graphic Designer and a Technical Writer will enable my fantasy heart breaker to clean and easy to use.

About Ruprecht Part 1

If anyone finds this blog sooner or later they may wonder who the hell is putting up all this amazing content. In that light...

I started role playing back in the early 80s when I was in middle school. My friend, we'll call him Simon, put together a simple dungeon and I was hooked. Before long we shared dungeon master duties but it wasn't long before I was doing most of the DMing. I was hooked.

We started off like idiots with a horrible monty haul campaign, we treated Deities & Demigods like a high powered Monster Manual. It was dumb fun. Then a friend of my brothers, we'll call him the Colonel, saw us playing and told us the game was better at low level (he wasn't a Colonel at the time by the way).

The Colonel joined our little merry band and we started over with 1st level characters fighting to progress. Then I discovered the glories of Harn, and RuneQuest, and eventually in University I started using HarnMaster for awhile as our game continued and I looked for a bit more gritty realism (a level of realism I no longer care for).

Along the way we shifted from dungeons to political adventures (the detailed Harnic Kingdoms seemed to excel at that). I re-skinned everything I could think of to create new and interesting adventures, I used novels, movies, comic books, whatever. I don't know if the players ever realized the origins of some of the re-skinning but I doubt it. It was all great fun.

I remember while at University a friend had a bunch of 2nd Edition games. I read through them and they didn't sit well. The big improvement was ascending AC but beyond that it seemed, well, bland. We'd moved on to RuneQuest and Harnmaster by then which probably colored my opinions more than a little.

Sometime after graduation the gang all went their separate ways and we stopped role playing while we scrambled for work in the sketchy economy of the early 90s.

I was unaware of 3E until I wandered into a Hobby Shop out of curiosity and saw Pathfinder which was freaking beautiful and caused a number of internet searches as I caught up to the history of the game and learned about the OSR and the SRD and to DrivethruRPG and all that, which led me to researching what happened to RuneQuest while I was gone and my discovery of Legend and OpenQuest and a full return into the hobby again.

3-Bay Hall House

The 3-bay hall house can be thought of as the poor mans hall house. It is similar in almost all ways to the Open Hall house except it is more compact, having three bays instead of four. The result is the parlour is gone from the ground floor and the service is gone from the upper floor.

Open Hall House

The Open Hall House or Wealden Hall house began as a manor house during the Saxon era but gradually as things progressed yeoman started to build them, although somewhat smaller in scale.


Roof
The roof was commonly thatch but in wealthier areas and later times the thatch might be replaced by clay or slate tiles. Since the supporting structure were generally two feet apart it probably wasn't very safe to walk up on a thatch roof. Somewhere near the middle the roof would have a smoke hole or vents to allow the smoke from the hearth to exit. In later days this would be replaced by a chimney.

First Floor

The house had four equal-sized 'bays' created by the framing skeleton.  The First Floor (1) has two areas that did not connect to each other. On one side we have the service area where servants slept, and the other side we have the Solar where the master of the house and family slept. The Solar took up two bays, so it hung over part of the hall below. Between the two was an area open to the Hall below which created a grand room and allowed smoke from the hearth to rise instead of choking everyone while it worked its way out of the smoke hole. The First floor was accessed by a ladder or steep stairs until late in the medieval period.

Ground Floor

The bay beneath where the servant slept was the buttery (for storing food) and the pantry (for storing drink). These are intentionally unheated to help preserve things a bit. On the bay on the far side you had the Parlour (2), which was where the owners of the house worked and stored gear.

In the center the two bays are connected to form a large, "Open Hall" where the hearth was for cooking and general warmth. Half of the hall was open to the first floor above (3) to allow the smoke to rise out of everyone's way. The hall had two doors to allow a breeze to feed the fire as necessary. The master and family would generally sit on the parlour-side of the hall (away from the doors and high roof), where it would be warmest. The household would cook, eat, and drink in the hall and guests probably slept there.  Frequently there was a screen between the hearth and the buttery/pantry areas to reflect heat back into the main hall and to keep those too rooms as chill as possible.

Common design modifications to the basic Open Hall House:

• Wooden slatted windows, with glazed windows in later years
• Jettied first floor end bays and possibly jettied upstairs toilet
• Corridor linking the front and rear doors
• Brick chimney place and stack, usually positioned between the front and rear doors, usually combined with the corridor listed above
• Floor over the Open Hall to increase space on the First Floor, generally combined with the chimney as the hearth smoke needs to go somewhere
• Jettied central bay inline with the end bays, this could be to accommodate a walkway between the two separate ends of the first floor, or it could be associated with the floor over the Open Hall above
• Jettied first floor areas filled in from below to increase space on the ground floor
• Window extensions and bay windows
• Stairs instead of ladders, may serve the solar only
• Second story, often jettied further out than the first floor

These modifications could be made to an existing house or during the design phase of a new house. Certain modifications such as the second story will appear far more often in urban buildings than in open hall houses in a village

(1)  I'm using the British terminology of first floor being the floor above the ground floor, second floor is above the first floor, what Americans call the second story and third story. I decided to use the British term because I'm talking about British buildings and it seems appropriate.

(2) English spelling, why not.

(3) Presumably why it is named an Open Hall house.

Best of the Web: Medieval Demographics Made Easy

Rob Conley is one of many that are hosting Medieval Demographics Made Easy. A brilliant little bit of accessible research that everyone who plays in any kind of medieval environment should take a look at. I've linked to the landing page instead of the PDF itself so anyone looking for more info on the pdf can find it there.

Saxon Hovel

This image comes from A Handbook of Pictorial History by Henry W. Donald, available through Project Gutenberg. The image is actually from the "BERGER" Handwork cards advertised in the rear of the book. It's a nice little floorplan. I don't know how accurate but it's suitable as far as I care.

I've cleaned up some of the unnecessary clutter and added a door. The lines indicate 2x2 yard(?) squares. The dark bits at the corner and center appear to be support columns. I'm not sure what the small box on the right is, perhaps that represents the chimney hole.

On the drawing it's clear the thing is a waddle & daube construction although I've read the Saxons used regular wood plank walls as wood was plentiful at the time.

The roof is thatched and would be replaced yearly. In hilly areas the building might be built up next to a small cliff allowing one to walk right ontop of the house. I've seen images of scottish houses with live grass on there roof being trimmed by sheep. Also in hilly areas you might have a basement, or partial basement as it would probably be easier to make one half the house two stories high than to dig everything out to lay a flat foundation.

Saxon Farming

From A Handbook of Pictorial History by Henry W. Donald, available through Project Gutenberg. These two figures show Saxon farming but they may as well show any medieval farming as I don't think major gains were made during the period.


(Fig. 1): January. This month was called by the English, when heathen, “Wolf-monath,” because the wolves were most troublesome at this period of the year. When the English became Christians it was called “Aefter-Yule,” i.e., After-Christmas. Here there is a ploughing scene. Four oxen yoked together in couples are drawing a plough of a very solid-looking type. (In those days horses were not employed in farm work.) A farm-hand, bare-headed, bare-footed, and wearing only a single garment, is goading the oxen with a sharp-pointed ox-goad, similar to a long spear in appearance. A man in superior attire is guiding the plough, while another is scattering seed as the plough passes. A good representation of the plough of that period is shown here. 



(Fig. 2): August. This month was called by the English “Arn-moneth” or “Barn-moneth,” i.e., “harvest-month.” This drawing gives a representation of a farm wagon of good construction, and of the costumes of the workers, who appear to be of at least two grades—some bare-footed, wearing a single garment, while others have better-cut garments, and wear shoes and stockings in addition. At the head of a party is a man with a spear in his right hand, blowing a horn, who may be either superintending the work or may be the “advance guard” of a hunting party entering the field. The implements, sickles, and forks appear to be very similar to those in use at the present time.