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Recovered: Cathedrals

Construction on York Minster Cathedral was finished in 1472, having begun c. 1220. For two-hundred and fifty years, the unfinished cathedral was a part of the city, an ongoing project longer than the life of any one person. In that time it brought in specialists and materials from far away and gave work and benefit to the locals.1

Medieval laborers make bricks and carry them up a tower under construction using ladders and a treadmill-powered crane.Treadmill Crane. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Toolbox

This toolbox is intended to quickly sketch a settlement defined by its largest ongoing project. The locals are building something massive, and this is hopefully a shortcut to intrigue and conflict.

What is it? (1d20)

  1. Amphitheater
  2. Bridge
  3. Canal
  4. Casino
  5. Cathedral
  6. Fortress
  7. Greenhouse
  8. Lighthouse (warning, beacon)
  9. Necropolis
  10. Observatory (telescope, supercollider, lookout)
  11. Palace
  12. Power Plant (wind, solar, nuclear, hydro)
  13. Pyramid
  14. Reservoir
  15. Roads
  16. Ship
  17. Stepwell
  18. Tower
  19. Tunnel
  20. Wall

A sepia-toned photograph of a cathedral with walls half-built and cranes above it. A man in a suit breaks the foreground. Captioned in blue pen: “15 Août 1926”.Tomodachidami, CC By-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How far along is it? (1d12)

Following the example of a cathedral, the barest functional parts may or may not be completed already.

  1. Design
  2. Surveying
  3. Permitting
  4. Site Clearance
  5. Excavation
  6. Foundations
  7. Rough Structure
  8. Exteriors
  9. Interiors
  10. Finishing
  11. Cleanup
  12. Warranty Period

A realistic painting of loosely-clothed work crews moving many wheelbarrows of earth and stone.Repair work on the railway. Konstantin Savitsky, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What’s the hold-up? (1d10)

  1. Beasts
  2. Bureaucrats
  3. Errors
  4. Funding
  5. Holidays
  6. Ill Omen
  7. Labor (shortage, strike)
  8. Materials (quality, supply)
  9. Plague
  10. Vandals

Painting. In a sparse field before a colonnaded structure, crews of workers and horses saw, chisel, roll, and hoist various structural and sculptural elements.The building of a palace. Piero di Cosimo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why build this? (1d8)

  1. Convenience
  2. Defense
  3. Memorial
  4. Religion
  5. Research
  6. Spite
  7. Tourism
  8. Vanity

Painting. A buttressed wooden tower rises from a half-built stone structure, dominating an otherwise grand public city square.The Alexander Column in Scaffolding. Grigory Gagarin, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Who’s building it? (1d6)

  1. Condemned Criminals
  2. Locals
  3. Military
  4. Refugees
  5. Slaves
  6. Sleepwalkers

Photograph. “Raising last stone to top of Canada Life Building in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The image background shows the older lower-rise shops and businesses along Queen Street West, demonstrating the transition of Toronto’s downtown in the early 20th century from a low-rise commercial district to a high-rise office centre.”William James, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Secret (1d4)

  1. Corruption in sourcing or labor
  2. Design is of occult significance
  3. Roll a second, hidden purpose (1d8)
  4. None

Thanks to David Macaulay.

Watercolor (?). Scaffolding and cranes fill a large semi-circular arch in the mist, workers in hi-vis picked out.Repairing the viaduct. William Blamire Young, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This post was first shared on February 9, 2021. In the comments, some people shared their results.

Anne:

Okay, so this town is very nearly finished building its cathedral. The construction work is being performed by convicted criminals, and the final stages are going slowly because vandals keep sabotaging it at night, sometimes wiping out several days of progress at a time. The cathedral is officially being built for research purposes, but is secretly being built for religious purposes. Hmm… Okay, so this is village is in an avowedly atheistic principality. The people worship Reason and other abstract intellectual virtues. Two professors teamed up to get the grant funding from the state to build this thing. One claims it as an exercise in architectural history, a reconstruction of older building techniques for purely illustrative purposes. (Secretly, this professor hopes to use the finished cathedral to restart the Old Religion, possibly under the guise of reenactments.) The other professor is ALSO conducting research, in this case, on the moral effects of beneficial labor on the behavior of prisoners. (This professor also figured out what the other one is up to, and so has hired recently released ex-convicts to help prevent the building from being finished until the secret religious plans can be exposed to the public.)

Myself:

This town is divided by a wide river, with crisscrossing wooden bridges built on some small rocky islands. It’s General Aiken’s home town, so they’re building a massive stone bridge across it to commemorate his military victories. Currently they’ve got the piers laid down and rough scaffolding between them, but more stone for the bridge itself has to be imported from the conquered territories. The workers themselves are slaves bright back from the conquered territories, and are secretly working curses into the foundations of the bridge.

Nick LS Whelan:

Inland outpost of a civilization with deep ancestral and religious ties to the sea. They’re constructing a lighthouse far from sight of any body of water because to them these structures are not simply beacons for ships, but also beacons that guide protector spirits to where the faithful need them. Construction is paused tonight. It is the Feast of All Souls, and everyone must stay awake all night long to ward away malicious spirits, and give guidance to those who are lost. Because the sacred stones of the foundation can only be laid by sleepwalkers, there are thus no workers to continue construction tonight.

Painting. People throng across a messy wooden bridge, while boats pass underneath.The Last of Old Westminster. James McNeil Whistler, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

  1. I assume some of this, but it seems reasonable.↩︎

Tags
Recovered Adventures Cathedrals Places Religion RPG Tables
Date
June 20, 2025
Previously
Slush 2025-06 The earworm in my nostrils. The ringing in my fingertips. I ran into these game design experiences around the same time, and couldn’t shake the
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