Tags
Building, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, Maps, Shop, Store, Town, Urban, Warhammer, Warhammer Fantasy, Workshop
Here we have a floorplan for a typical fantasy city storefront – a store to do your shopping in front, a workshop behind it to produce the goods being sold (with a small strong room for storing finished goods and expensive components when the shop is closed) and residential space for the shop owner(s) upstairs. There’s also a basement (accessed through a trap door in the workshop) where generic stock, overstock, and extra materials are stored.
Workshop and Store
While this is the standard assumption for most fantasy storefronts – the majority of actual medieval and Roman era storefronts didn’t include the front room where shopping could be done. They would open their shuttered windows when they open and customers would shop through those windows, never entering the building proper. Workshops where this wouldn’t work well (blacksmiths for instance) would have the customers walk into the workshop directly to deal with the smith.
Normally I just make up store structures on the fly instead of mapping them out like this, but there’s been a lot of requests for these because of my monthly series of Inns & Taverns.
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I always forget that about storefronts and shopping.
Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook (3rd edition) used 20’x20′ Stronghold Spaces (400 sq ft), and just one SS space was enough to qualify for the PHB2’s business rules (with a peddler’s wagon being the absolute floor).
Your fantasy shop is about 6.25 stronghold spaces with a modern open floor design. The workshop is even larger. I think that the SBG has a more cluttered effect, more like a hoarder’s utopia because it does cost a lot of man hours to erect any building, even with just basic timber (the floor in SBG), so large buildings is more of a thing for nobles and well to do merchant houses.
As for how medieval shops operated, yes, you are correct, but fantasy worlds are a reflection of our modern world with an idealized medieval skin replacement. Keeping to medieval gender norms is not a way to grow the modern player’s base, so why should architecture? (This is an open ended question, I’m not settled on an answer)
In our group we do use the SBG’s rules in our campaign world for just about everything; dungeons, castles, cottages in the woods, etc. My players know that there is not a lot of room to maneuver in someone’s home, so they try to lure people out in the open, or just cede that a homeowner has an advantage. The SBG seems to reflect truer medieval architecture spaces where people spent most of their days outdoors instead of holed up in a cottage, tower, or other building. But in a world with roving dragons, rampaging gnoll packs, and name your local monster eating villagers… maybe multi-generational family homes that get additions and new stories could become a 100’x130′ footprint like you’ve offered (which is 13,000 sq feet, much bigger than most domiciles in suburban America). As another comparison, Walmarts in America average about 178,000 sq ft.
I’d definitely use your floor plan, but I’d have to redo the squares for our bi-weekly game group. Thanks for the effort! I hope you take this as the constructive criticism this is intended to be. Your map collections get used in a lot of our games, and I’ve found your blog to be an invaluable resource when my players frequently leave the beaten track of the prepared story.
Oh yeah, this is WAY bigger than a real-world medieval shop too. Most structures in modern fantasy games are.
The scale is 5 ft per square. The total floor space, not counting the basement, is 6,500 sq ft.
Yeah, I guestimated using 10 instead of 5. Color me embarrassed or something.
A 6500 sq ft footprint equals 19 stronghold spaces… or what the SBG defines as a Mansion (15) or Castle (20).
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