Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Typical Celtic Buildings



When we had our sit down the other day we didn't really talk too much about the civilization level of the "Barbarian" Celts that lived to the north of Garnia, except for the one brief mention that they had one "Real" city; the word I couldn't remember was Oppidum. Since most of the Celts in the original crossing were Gauls and Britons, they were familiar with building techniques and probably used them to their advantage even out on the semi-barren steppe where the found themselves. Their one city, the city holy to the barbarians and learned men from Garnia to Frodia to Tirnakaur is in this steppe, it is the place where all the people of Math were led to, and Druids, Priests and Bards still hold their traditional roles here. I always pictured it as an Oppida built on a hill next to the one "mother river" that flows to the north; from there they could protect their people and expand against the ill equipped hordes of poorly led and not terribly intelligent humanoids that already lived on the the steppe, and they would also come into contact with things from earth that hadn't been seen in tens of thousands of years, Neanderthals, Mastodons and Woolly Rhinoceroses to start with.

I did a Google image search today for some inspirational examples of real world Celtic structures and it was not easy coming up with anything solid. When you search for Celtic structures of any sort, from Oppida to Crannogs they inevitably lead to many images of ruins, which is probably unhelpful in the inspiration department, or conjectural drawings of what artists and/or archaeologists think they looked like, or models from miniature companies, or the proud owners of said models showing them off, or back and forth to each other type of Celtic building, and, of course the conjectural reconstructions of said buildings, sometimes entire villages.

So, without anymore explanations as to where I plundered this bounty of Celtic building Awesomeness, I'll just start posting  the pictures.

 This is a Broch and out buildings.




Both of these were the work of a guy on the Warlord Games forums.


This is an artists rendering of an Oppida.


An artists rendering of a Crannog.


An actual reconstructed Crannog.


The cut-away of the inside of a typical Celtic round house.


A reconstruction of a typical Celtic round house.


An artists rendering of a Celtic village near Glastonbury. 


A Celtic Hill Fort in the west of Ireland, there was an actual picture, but I thought this was prettier.

1 comment:

  1. I was looking through the stats and this post remains popular, probably because of Google searches for Celtic Building types I'd imagine; but now with the time distortion effect, all of these buildings would be perfectly valid structures throughout the bulk of the core campaign world. There is no need to update/evolve anything in any significant way.

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