It's not set in Europe but this Japanese castle looks to fit the early modern period.

Here's a series of posts illustrating the creation process.

Hôtel de Sully

Figure 1: The Hôtel de Sully as it looks today.

In my most recent adventure write up one of the PCs had to enter the Paris mansion of the Duke de Sully in order to find and steal an old marriage contract. This is an actual location which still exists in Paris today. The floor plans, engravings, and modern photos provide a lot of detail for GMs to use. The ready availability and intrinsic suitability of these material is, I find, one of the advantageous of running a campaign in an historical fiction setting.

The Hôtel de Sully is a hôtel particulier, or private mansion, in the Louis XIII style. It is located in the Marais district at 62 rue Saint-Antoine. The Marais was a fashionable district where the rich and famous were building new residences. It was home to the Place Royale (now the Place de Vosges). This was a newly built set of luxury apartment buildings around a central park. Prior to his construction of the Palais Royale, Richelieu maintained an apartment in the Place Royale. The Duke chose to build his new Paris residence in this fashionable neighborhood to give access to the Place Royale and to L'Arsenal.

Figure 2: Hotel with entrance from the rue Saint Antoine. (North is towards the top.)

It looks to me like the building shown in Figure 1 is identical with the building depicted at the north end of the floor plan above. The coach gate on the south portion of the floor plan above faces the rue Saint Antoine which is south of the hôtel itself. The stables are in the lower right of Figure 2.

Figure 3 below shows a modern view of the coach gate.

Figure 3: Here's the view (looking north) from the rue Saint Antoine today.

Engraving of the elevation of the Garden side of the Hotel de Sully taken on line AB. (Line AB runs east to west.) The scale at the bottom is measured in toises. The old French toise was equal to six feet (toise means foot) and this measure is very close to the the old English or the American foot. 

As best that I can tell, this view is looking from the main garden towards the south and the building corresponds to the highlighted area below. (Note that I have rotated the plan so that left and right (or east and west) on the plan correspond to left and right on the engraving above. North is now at the bottom of this version of the floor plan.

Engraving of the view and profile of the Hotel de Sully, taken on line CD of the plan. (Line CD runs south to north.) Note the cutaway showing the staircase. Again the scale is measured in toises. 

My best estimate is that this is the west interior side of the courtyard corresponding to the highlighted area below. I believe the low wall on the left of the engraving corresponds to the west wall of the small, square garden shown in the floor plan.

Figure 4: A higher resolution scan of the floor plan and Garden as shown in Figure 2.

And here is the Wikipedia article on on the Hotel de Sully. Although in reality Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully didn't actually purchase the hotel until 1634, in my campaign I had him build the hotel and begin its construction prior to the historical construction period of 1625-1630. Just one more reason why my  campaign is historical fiction.

Floor Plan for Zaton's Eatery

The red building is where I located Zaton's Eatery

In my Friday Fiction post last week, I quoted a section from Stanley J. Weyman's novel, Under the Red Robe that begins in a place in Paris called Zaton's Eatery. As a follow up to that post and as a prequel to my session write up for the adventure inspired by Weyman's opening to Under the Red Robe, here is the floor plan I created for Zaton's.

Courtyard: Storm doors and ramp down to Zaton’s cellar, empty wine barrels, water trough, crates, wooden locker with brooms, rusty rake, and dirty aprons.

Ground Floor: Most of the ground floor rooms have large windows with wooden shutters.

1.    Entrance Hall—lower right with wardrobes, door with bar on the inside, stair to upper floor along top wall

2.    Privy—is a 3-holer leading to a cesspit in the cellar.

3.    Small Dining Room— 4 tables and fireplace; mirror on long interior wall.

4.    Lounge—3 tables plus seating at the bar.

5.    Bar—5 stools and pass-through to kitchen.

6.    Kitchen.

7.   Large Dining Room—8 tables and fireplace, stair to Upper Level Balcony and Private Rooms #9 and #10.

8.    Door with stair to basement.

Upper Floor: Private dining or gaming rooms.

9.     Private Room for dining and gaming room.

10.  Private Room with bar for dining and gaming.

Cellar: Ramp up to courtyard for delivery of wine barrels; stair up to door in Dining Room #7, barrel rack; various crates and boxes, cesspit from Privy #2.

Staff: Kazimir Zaton the Proprieter of Zaton’s Eatery (SR 4), (3) Bartenders, Lily and various other Tavern Maids, Hurtaly the Head Bouncer, and (4) other Bouncers.

EDIT: I think I chopped and edited an existing floor plan to create Zaton's, but I can't find an original in my Floor Plan folder nor did a Google Image search turn up the original. If you created the original, THANKS! And please comment so I can give you credit.

Zaton's PDF

Plan of the Hôtel d'Angoulême

So one of the PCs was captured by Henri de Valois, Comte de Lauraguay. Henri is the grandson of Charles IX of France. His father is the Duc de .Angoulême and the illegitimate son of Charles IX by his mistress Marie Touchet. Henri is mad. In the two usual senses of the word. He blames one of the PCs, the Seigneur de Chambre for the disappearance of Henri's witch. This made Henri angry. When Henri is angry his cruelty is uncontrolled. It's a flaw. (He's a villain; it's Honor+Intrigue, flaws are a thing.) And since Henri is crazy* mad, he devised a rather bizarre method of dealing with de Chambre. 

Not surprising, once the other PCs figured out that de Chambre was missing they set about finding and rescuing him. In the process, I had to figure out where family's house was in Paris. Since dad's a Duke, I assumed they would have a hôtel particulier, which is what the French call a Parisian mansion or grand private home in town. A quick search on Google and I found an entry for the Hôtel d'Angoulême-Lamoignon which is (it still exists) in the Marais district of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, number 24 rue Pavée which is at the corner of the rue Pavée and the rue des Francs-Bourgeois. 

However finding out exactly where that was on any of my usual period maps for Paris turned out to be more challenging than I thought. The address was helpful, but only if I could find which street on my map was the rue Pavée. Like many Parisian streets the name had changed a number of times and it also had a different name once it crossed the rue rue des Francs-Bourgeois. Sorting that out took some time. Fortunately, unlike some streets, the rue des Francs-Bourgeois still has the same name today. Even more fortunately, it begins at the Place des Vosges and runs west past the Hôtel d'Angoulême (the Lamoignon was added later after a change in ownership). In 1624, the Place des Vosges was called the Place Royale, and it was a fancy new area with townhouses for those who, while still rich, did not have an hôtel particulier to call home. 

I easily found some photos of the mansion, which was great. It even has a watchtower, which is a nice medieval touch. Apparently watchtowers were all the rage for medieval and renaissance mansions in Paris, but shortly before the 1620s a royal decree prohibited architectural features that, like this watchtower, overhung the street. So the fashion passed. But the presence and location of the watchtower will turn out to be important.

To locate the rue rue Pavée, I tried counting blocks from the Place de Vosges on Google Maps and matching those blocks to one of my Parisian maps. After maybe five minutes or so, I found what looked like a great site for some swashbuckling adventure.

The buildings with the yellow roof seemed to be in the right place and it had a big garden with towers. Also it looked like there was a big wrought iron garden gate, which would let the PCs scout out the gardens and the garden side of the house. I decided there was an alley between the Duke's hotel and the adjacent hotel. The players decided to use the alley to try to climb up a drain pipe.

There was only one problem. That's not the right house. It's not even the right block. By closely examining the modern Google Map and using street view to find the watchtower, I realized that the watchtower was on the southeast corner of the intersection of the rue Pavée and the rue des Francs-Bourgeois. This places the watchtower on the northwest corner of the hotel. But on the map above, the northwest corner of the hotel isn't on a main intersection and the only southeast corners are either the building towards the lower left of the map in the same block as the house with the yellow roof or in the block across the street from the top of the map. (You may be confused by my directions. If you are, it is probably because north is to the left on the map. It usually is in period maps of Paris. I don't know why, but by now I'm quite used to it.)

Now I had to find the actual location of the Hôtel d'Angoulême. I went to the French site for the rue Pavée and did some more reading. I learned that the Prison de la Petite-Force was more or less next to the mansion.With some more reading, I remembered that the Prison de la Petite-Force was once a
hôtel particulier--the Hôtel de la Force. I knew where that was on a couple of my Paris period maps. From some more reading about the rue Pavée I learned that another section of the same street was called the rue Payenne (Pagan Street). Going back to my period maps and using the new knowledge that the mansion was on the southeast corner of the intersection with the two mentioned streets, that it was adjacent to the Hôtel de la Force and that the rue Pavée turned into the  rue Payenne, I was able to find the house. Yeah!

Unfortunately the 3D perspective of my period maps kind of crapped out in this part of Paris. Here's what it looked like.

The Hôtel de la Force is the massive building towards the right with the blue roofs and the Hôtel d'Angoulême is in the same oddly shaped block. It is the building on the far left end of the block. Trust me when I say there is not much detail to be gleaned from this drawing and by comparison with other maps, both modern and ancien, the shape of the block is significantly distorted. The vertical dimensions are significantly compressed obscuring the buildings behind the Hôtel d'Angoulême as well as the fairly extensive gardens behind it and between it and the Hôtel de la Force.

I found a nice engraving of the mansion which, based on the age of the artist, can be placed near the middle of the 17th century. The view is of the garden side of the house, which, as we shall see, faces the east.

L'hostel d'Angoulesme du costé du Jardin by Israel Silvestre

You can also see that the garden behind the house looks to be at least the size of the main house and outbuildings. A fact that is not at all apparent on the map. I could have changed the location of the Hôtel d'Angoulême and used the map I first found. I did that with the Hôtel de Bellegarde so that I could use the nice set of floor plans from the Louis XIV era mansion that was used by the Bellegarde family. But one reason I'd done that with the Hôtel de Bellegarde was because I couldn't find the location or images of whatever Paris mansion they were using in the 1620s. And here I had just found the exact location and the mansion still exists today. 

So I decided to make my own floor plan. To do that I named the Google image of the hotel and ported that over to PowerPoint so I could draw rectangles for the buildings over the image to get approximately the right sizes and orientations. I made a few modifications to better align my floor plan with the engraving above and added a watchtower that my players and I could actually see on the plan. I found that drawing the rectangles was tricking since I kept grabbing the Google image instead. I could have used layers in GIMP, but I'm still not all that familiar with GIMP. So I cheated. I took the image and moved it to the Master Slide. That way is appears as the slide background and the damn thing doesn't move. Then I traced my buildings, added some rectangles of greenery for the garden, a tan pattern for the paths, and a gray pattern for the courtyard. 

One nice thing about using the Google Map is it comes with a scale. I first zoomed my map so I had a 50' interval. Using that I created my own scale in 10' increment. I used the 3D view in Google Maps to locate the doors off the interior courtyard, added a stair and an outbuilding like that in the engraving, drew in and labeled some streets and voila...

I'll do a follow up post where I show a map for my players that includes the garden sentry route and timings. 

EDIT: I updated the map after taking another look at the engraving and I also added a compass rose.

* There's not a lot of information about Henri. But I found this, 

Folie d'Henri d'Angoulême, Henri d'Angoulême, Comte de Lauraguais, est déshérité en 1609 et enfermé près de 50 ans pour cause de démence.

Which Google translated as: "Madness of Henri d'Angoulême, Henri d'Angoulême, Count of Lauraguais is disinherited in 1609 and imprisoned for nearly 50 years by reason of insanity."

I bent history a bit, by allowing Henri to still be running loose and the heir in 1624. But the chance to have a real mad villain who was the grandson of a King of France was just too good to pass up.

Block Map for the Old Inn Court

Last session the heroes disguised themselves by dressing up in the clothes of their servants and went to the Red Écu tavern. After a side detour to investigate a crypt in the Saint Nicolas cemetery, they were led to the Old Inn Court. Literally led, as their questions alerted a gang of mercenary cutthroats who were relaxing in the tavern while off duty, and the gang escorted them to the courtyard so they could be questioned. Here's the map of the block with the Old Inn and the Old Inn Courtyard.

Old Inn Court

Here is a player-friendly version of the map key.

A.   3-story building (includes attic garret).

B.   3-story building (includes attic garret).

C.   2 story building, formerly a stable that has been converted to apartments. The upper floor rooms are accessed by a stairs to the balcony facing the courtyard.

D.   2 story central inner building with a third floor attic garret. It has a balcony facing the courtyard. The building is accessed by a stairs to the balcony facing the courtyard and by either of the alleys from the R. des Deux Portes and the R. Tiere Boudin.

E.  Old Inn Court is a courtyard with a well. Once the coach yard of an inn, now it is used by the laundry in G. Three sides of the courtyard are overlooked by balconies. The inn side has two levels of balconies. Clotheslines stretch from one balcony to another. The upper group of clotheslines connect to a set of pulleys on the roofs of buildings C and D.

F.   The Old Inn is a tall 4-story medieval inn (includes attic garret) converted to shops on the ground floor and apartments above. The southeastern corner of the inn contains a cistern fed by roof drains.    

G.  Laundry: The burly laundresses have Might 1. In warm weather, vats and kettles are moved to the courtyard. The clotheslines hanging over the courtyard provide advertising for the laundry. The laundry building is one very tall story in height.

H.  Interior 2-story building, the main door is on a a small courtyard that connects by an alley to the R. Beaurepaire.

Players Map

Rue des Deux Portes
Rue Beaurepaire		Rue Tiere Boudin
Rue Comte d’Artois

Here's the map I gave the players. It includes the names of the streets that border the block. It also included a compass rosette to remind them that north is actually to the left on the map.

I.     4-story building (includes attic garret).

J.     Corner 4-story building (includes attic garret).

K.    Interior 2-story building with access via courtyard and alley to the R. Beaurepaire.

L.    3-story building.

M.   4-story building (includes attic garret).

N.    3-story windowless building. Storage?

O.    4-story building (includes attic garret).

P.     Corner 4-story building (includes attic garret).

Q.    3-story building (includes attic garret).

R.    3-story building (includes attic garret).

S.     4-story building (includes attic garret).

T.    Courtyard.

U.    3-story building (includes attic garret).

V.    2-story interior building.

 

The Map and the Method

The image is from the 1618 map of Paris by Claes Jansz. Visscher, which is very similar to the 1615 Merian map of Paris. Lately I've used the 1618 map as it has a higher resolution. Having both maps is helpful as sometimes a street is labeled on one map, but not the other. I used the Snipping Tool in Windows to grab the block I wanted. Opened the image in Paint and added the labels. (Had a wanted to create something fancier I'd have used GIMP instead of Paint since GIMP lets me do layers.)

I vertically counted doors and windows to get the number of stories. I assumed the peaked roofs contained attics. These could be garret apartments or just attic storage. Servants and artists often rented garret apartments in Paris as they were cheaper and for the artists the upper floor provided more daylight.The interior buildings in the block were harder to parse. So I just assumed those were lower story buildings. I assumed the existence of the two courtyards, which could possibly be flat roofs, sometimes it is hard to tell with the 3D perspective. And then looked for locations where there could be some alleys to break up the block and allow different access points to the interior of the block.

I'm not certain how much my players care about some of these details, but I enjoy knowing exactly which building is the setting for the action. I loved the old Judges Guild map for the City State of the Invincible Overlord for just that reason.