I won't bore you with the a play-by-play of the first three sessions of the Castle Xyntillan campaign, but there's still a lot to discuss. First, Castle Xyntillan is everything I hoped it would be and more. Its easy to run, thematic, flexible, and highly entertaining for GM and players alike. The first treasure found: The telepathic brain in a jar. Three level 1 characters (a fighter, a cleric and a magic-user) have survived all three sessions with only minor injuries, explored around 20 rooms, found some interesting if minor wealth, and are now on the verge of their first big score. They have located the Wine Cellar.
The Wine Cellar is described as follows: "Rows of stacked old casks containing ancient vintages. Smell of earth and mould(sic.)"
As you can see there's not much to go on there. The map shows it as a large "L" shaped room, 20' wide, with length of 90' and 60'. Four 30' sections of walls are labelled on the map as "barrels". The rest of the room description details what monsters/NPCs may be encountered here, and what is in each cask, which is accomplished by random a d12 roll. What is not noted is the size, weight, and number of barrels. The value of the contents of some barrels is noted, but the ones containing common wine are not given a value. The PCs, upon finding this area, have determined that wine is valuable and so they should loot the place. And so for the first time as the GM, I am having to doing some serious thinking about how to run this part of the adventure.
I started by trying to envision the wine cellar based on the description given and what I know about the storage of alcoholic beverages in barrels. The description clearly states "rows of stacked old casks" so I know that there aren't just barrels sitting on the floor here. For every barrel on the floor, there could be one or more barrels in the space above it. This immediately brought to mind a whiskey aging warehouse. I've visited several of these as my parents lived in Kentucky for many years and touring distilleries is nice way to pass time while visiting them. But bourbon distilleries generally use standard sized barrels, which are 53 gallons/200 liters, and I wasn't sure what would have been used for wine during the time period that Xyntillan is set in. Which raises the question, what time period is Xyntillan set in? I guess that is kind of fluid, but I'm equating it to mid 15th Century France. At that time, bottles were not used to store wine; it was all stored in barrels which varied in size from a few gallons up to over 250 gallons, which is known as a Tun. My quick armature research revealed that all sorts of sizes were used, so the question was what was I going to put in Xyntillan?
Since some of the barrels had sizable GP value associated with them, it was clear that it was intended that the PCs should be able to remove them from the castle, but I didn't want it to be too easy. Secondly, the smaller the barrels, the more there would be I figured. More barrels means more barrels of value and more treasure assuming that I followed the random table provided. The description and table gives no limit to the number of valuable casks, so if there are hundreds of casks in the cellar, there could be dozens of barrels worth several thousand GP, and fairly easily transportable. If I used the standard barrel (known as a hogshead my medieval standards) each would weigh about 500 lbs. Fairly cumbersome, but not something the party couldn't take care of by themselves with some effort. Instead I settled on the Butt. Beyond the obvious reasons for, I picked the butt because at half a tun, it is large, hard but not impossible to more, reduces the number of overall casks in the cellar, and forces the party to engage some sort of hirelings to get them out of the castle.
I ended up settling on these figures: The wine is all in Butts weighing 1000lbs each. They are stacked on racks, 3 high. Each 10' section holds three columns of three casks, so nine in total. With twelve 10' sections in the cellar, that makes for 108 casks, about 27 of which are valuable. I also determined that while the normal wine could have some value, it would be obvious to the PCs that it would not be worth the time to move these. While looking at the value for wines in various D&D sources, I found the "Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog" to be a good resource, and it gave a value of 20-30 GP a tun for common wine. After transport costs, those end up being nearly worthless.
So then how are the barrels moved? That's really up to the PCs, but I have some clear suggestions for them. Their characters could try to figure this out themselves, but its going to be clear to them that they will need to hire people to move these things, and experienced porters and teamsters will have a good plan. I determined that they will need a team of roughly 20 men with wooden poles/levers, ropes, and pulleys to get these casks off the racks and up the long stairwell to the main floor. Moving each cask should take 2-3 turns. Once outside, a wagon with a four horse team with a driver and assistant will be able to transport four butts of wine.
The next consideration is how the PCs will determine which wines to take and how to value them. I could be a nice and just let them know the values of each wine, but no, I'm not going to be nice. I've decided that they need to hire wine tasting experts/sommeliers to identify the valuable wine and its exact value. With out these, the PC risk misidentifying some average wine as valuable, and not correctly valuing then wine when selling it. It will take 1 turn to test three casks, so there is a time consideration with this step as well.
Finally, there are some related questions that the above topics have raised. Can you rent a wagon team? Apparently not, so the party needs to buy a wagon and team, including tack. If they are hiring 20 porters to come on an expedition that will take 5 days (2 days to the castle, a day of work and a day back) they will need to provide food and some sort of shelter, so serious camping supplies need to be purchased. With the size of the expedition now close to the 30 folks, they are an obvious target for bandits, so mercenary guards may be in order, which again is additional cost.
Despite these costs, complications, and risks, the party stands to make a sizeable sum of money if they can pull this off. A single wagon load of four butts will have an average value of 14kgp, and with around seven wagon loads in the cellar there is a veritable fortune to be made. So what's going to stop them? Lots of wandering monster rolls. The next few sessions should be interesting.
