Greetings, fellow architecture mavens! It is I, Wolfgang Baur, eccentric game designer!
I’ve enjoyed the Castle of the Week contest on the Midgard Facebook Page so much that I’ve decided to take it to the big time here on the Kobold blog.
Your challenge: Identify the most castle pictures from the set of 23 images below between now and Sunday, March 3, with a winner to be declared on Monday the 4th, GM’s Day. A few will be laughably easy. Others will be mind-crushingly hard.
To the winner goes ETERNAL GLORY, as well as THESE PRIZES (all in PDF):
- Zobeck Gazetteer
- Dark Roads & Golden Hells planar sourcebook
- New Paths: Expanded Spell-Less Ranger
- New Paths 2: Expanded Shaman
- New Paths 3: Expanded Elven Archer
- Courts of the Shadow Fey (Pathfinder or 4E version)
- The Monsters of Sin Monster Bundle
The losers will be EXILED TO ANTARCTICA, so I can wrap up THAT CONTEST TOO.
(Not really. But the Antarctica Challenge IS STILL UNMET.)
Here are the castles. Email your guesses to [email protected] with the Subject line “Castle Contest.” Tally-ho!
The 8 Simple Castles
You can probably recognize a few by sight; these are famous castles, historical castles, fictional castles of note, or those with a distinctive character. I believe they are entirely solvable by the diligent scholar of military architecture.
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12 Harder Castles
This is a set of images that might be a little harder to crack. Some are famous castles, some fairly obscure. The images are all there for inspection, and some contain clues for the sharp-eyed, but don’t be surprised if some of these prove quite elusive.
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The 3 Impossible Castles
These… Well, we can say that they are certainly castles. And they are very hard to identify indeed. One’s a model of a castle (and we’d like the name of the castle that it models). One’s just a very small piece of a much larger castle. And one is — how shall we say this — largely invisible, as befits a fairy castle of its nature. We expect no one to figure these out, but there they are. Tiebreakers, possibly. Or sheer villainous villainy.
Have at it, and if anyone names two of these three, a Special Prize shall be awarded!
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The contest ends Sunday, March 3. Good luck!
I am not nearly worldly enough to make any worthwhile guesses. (Except about #3, of course. Everybody knows that one!)
However, is it too late to send in castle photos?
It is NOT too late to send in castle photos!
I used some of those for this contest, but I hope to run this contest again and would love to have as many options as possible.
Are the castle pictures hosted on Facebook in a layer that’s not accessible to those without a Facebook account? I can’t see any of them.
In fact, I’m not seeing the headline art (such as “The Accolade” for Sarastra’s shadow) on any of the other articles, either.
Hi Jem, the photos are hosted here on the site and there are no restrictions on them. Have you always had this problem on the site, or is it new?
Wow I don’t know my castles* – I think I know #1, and I’m pretty sure I pasted a section of #2 together out of cardboard back in the day. I’m also guessing #23 is in Wolfgang’s backyard as a cubbycastle.
Can we have an alternative prize for the best 23 made-up names for these?
*Probably a good thing too, while I’m particularly liking #7 for chutzpah and nos. #12 and #20 for faded grandeur, some of the others are burning out my retina with their gauche and horribly ugly architecture. Euuugh! I’d lay siege to them just to reduce them to rubble. It’s a good day when you can reduce national and hallowed treasures of “kulcha” to debris with a few keystrokes. ;P
every castle is a thing of beauty, a bold statement in architecture by the people who built it to STFUAGA. :D