Approved Moat Cailin Redo appeal

[Sapper]

Okay so Moat Cailin is one of the most important strongholds in the North, as it acts as the gate to the North. The original Moat Cailin was built many years ago, and is very out of date with the current server standards. As I'm sure everyone is well aware, our wonderful Moderator Carci has recently re-done the terrain of the Neck. Because the Neck’s terrain has been updated to match server standards, its castles should be as well. My plan, if approved, would be to use my several tests for Moat Cailin and give it the update it needs. Im going to divide this into two main reasons why a update is needed.

Out of Date-
First and foremost, the old Moat Cailin is VERY old and out of date with server standards. Normally this wouldn't be a major issue, because we have outdated projects on the server, but due to Carcis recent update of the Necks terra re pasting the old Moat Cailin into the new Neck terra would not be a smart move. As first off the terrain of the old Moat Cailin is much different than the updated terrain presented by Carci. The general style of the new Neck does not match the style of the old Moat Cailin. An update will make it look more up to date and make it fit better with the new surroundings made by Carci. Everything from Moat Cailins exteriors to interiors to terra, is outdated and therefore requires a update. I could go on about every little detail surrounding how it s outdated, but its fairly obvious.

Canon Issues-
Secondly there are various canon issues with the old Moat Cailin. Below are some of these issues-

- There is no tree in the Gatehouse Tower

“The Gatehouse Tower looked sound enough, and even boasted a few feet of standing wall to either side of it. The Drunkard's Tower, off in the bog where the south and west walls had once met, leaned like a man about to spew a bellyful of wine into the gutter. And the tall, slender Children's Tower, where legend said the children of the forest had once called upon their nameless gods to send the hammer of the waters, had lost half its crown. It looked as if some great beast had taken a bite out of the crenellations along the tower top, and spit the rubble across the bog. All three towers were green with moss. A tree was growing out between the stones on the north side of the Gatehouse Tower, its gnarled limbs festooned with ropy white blankets of ghostskin.” [Catelyn VIII, AGOT]

- There is no Ghostskin whatsoever, which is a very important plant for Moat Cailin

“The only dry road through the Neck was the causeway, and the towers of Moat Cailin plugged its northern end like a cork in a bottle. The road was narrow, the ruins so positioned that any enemy coming up from the south must pass beneath and between them. To assault any of the three towers, an attacker must expose his back to arrows from the other two, whilst climbing damp stone walls festooned with streamers of slimy white ghostskin. The swampy ground beyond the causeway was impassable, an endless morass of suckholes, quicksands, and glistening green swards that looked solid to the unwary eye but turned to water the instant you trod upon them, the whole of it infested with venomous serpents and poisonous flowers and monstrous lizard lions with teeth like daggers. Just as dangerous were its people, seldom seen but always lurking, the swamp-dwellers, the frog-eaters, the mud-men. Fenn and Reed, Peat and Boggs, Cray and Quagg, Greengood and Blackmyre, those were the sorts of names they gave themselves. The ironborn called them all bog devils.” [Reek II, ADWD]

- The terrian in the old Moat Cailin isnt exactly up to canon standards
"the next morning Lord Ramsay dispatched three riders down the causeway to take word to his lord father that the way was clear. The flayed man of House Bolton was hoisted above the Gatehouse Tower, where Reek had hauled down the golden kraken of Pyke. Along the rotting-plank road, wooden stakes were driven deep into the boggy ground; there the corpses festered, red and dripping. Sixty-three, he knew, there are sixty-three of them. One was short half an arm. Another had a parchment shoved between its teeth, its wax seal still unbroken."


Here are some of my tests, the rest can be found at /warp sapper

 

[Sapper]

i hope i did this process right

 

[Bovine]

Hey, Sapper
Cool tests, I was wondering if this is the general size you are going for? I imagined the towers and complex of Moat Calin being quite massive, Considering that it can at least temporarily house the entire northern army, and at least two hundred comfortably. Your test seems a little smaller for those purposes although I do concede that translations in Minecraft will have to be downsized and individuals may interpret sizes differently. This is more of a suggestion than a critique, considering that you would have done more research you likely know more than I do!

Anyways it is exciting to see such an important location in the North getting some love, I'm sure you'll do it justice! good luck with the appeal!

 

[Elduwin]

Thanks Sap for going through the process. Mods will come back to you with an answer regarding the appeal, then applications can be put forward.
Until then, let's keep this thread only for the matter of the redo appeal (and not personal tests or plans).

 

[Sapper]

bump

 

[Emoticone11]

Hey Sapp, we've decided to approve the appeal - anyone is free to go ahead and apply for the project. Thanks for bearing with the process, it gave us the chance to discuss the extent of the redo in more detail with all the relevant canon.

We believe that there's some more subtle missing canon in the current version which could bear on the redo as well. I'm just going to quote EStoop 's comment from the (now deleted) application thread, since he did a great job summarizing the issues.

Hey Sapper,

I figured to go ahead and give some feedback while the redo request is being considered.
I'll start with two excerpts describing the Moat in the books:

A Game of Thrones - Catelyn VIII
The ground under their horses' hooves was soft and wet. It fell away slowly beneath them as they rode past smoky peat fires, lines of horses, and wagons heavy-laden with hardbread and salt beef. On a stony outcrop of land higher than the surrounding country, they passed a lord's pavilion with walls of heavy sailcloth. Catelyn recognized the banner, the bull moose of the Hornwoods, brown on its dark orange field.

Just beyond, through the mists, she glimpsed the walls and towers of Moat Cailin … or what remained of them. Immense blocks of black basalt, each as large as a crofter's cottage, lay scattered and tumbled like a child's wooden blocks, half-sunk in the soft boggy soil. Nothing else remained of a curtain wall that had once stood as high as Winterfell's. The wooden keep was gone entirely, rotted away a thousand years past, with not so much as a timber to mark where it had stood. All that was left of the great stronghold of the First Men were three towers … three where there had once been twenty, if the taletellers could be believed.

The Gatehouse Tower looked sound enough, and even boasted a few feet of standing wall to either side of it. The Drunkard's Tower, off in the bog where the south and west walls had once met, leaned like a man about to spew a bellyful of wine into the gutter. And the tall, slender Children's Tower, where legend said the children of the forest had once called upon their nameless gods to send the hammer of the waters, had lost half its crown. It looked as if some great beast had taken a bite out of the crenellations along the tower top, and spit the rubble across the bog. All three towers were green with moss. A tree was growing out between the stones on the north side of the Gatehouse Tower, its gnarled limbs festooned with ropy white blankets of ghostskin.

"Gods have mercy," Ser Brynden exclaimed when he saw what lay before them. "This is Moat Cailin? It's no more than a—"

"—death trap," Catelyn finished. "I know how it looks, Uncle. I thought the same the first time I saw it, but Ned assured me that this ruin is more formidable than it seems. The three surviving towers command the causeway from all sides, and any enemy must pass between them. The bogs here are impenetrable, full of quicksands and suckholes and teeming with snakes. To assault any of the towers, an army would need to wade through waist-deep black muck, cross a moat full of lizard-lions, and scale walls slimy with moss, all the while exposing themselves to fire from archers in the other towers." She gave her uncle a grim smile. "And when night falls, there are said to be ghosts, cold vengeful spirits of the north who hunger for southron blood."

Ser Brynden chuckled. "Remind me not to linger here. Last I looked, I was southron myself."

A Dance with Dragons - Reek II
The Drunkard's Tower leaned as if it were about to collapse, just as it had for half a thousand years. The Children's Tower thrust into the sky as straight as a spear, but its shattered top was open to the wind and rain. The Gatehouse Tower, squat and wide, was the largest of the three, slimy with moss, a gnarled tree growing sideways from the stones of its north side, fragments of broken wall still standing to the east and west. The Karstarks took the Drunkard's Tower and the Umbers the Children's Tower, he recalled. Robb claimed the Gatehouse Tower for his own.

If he closed his eyes, he could see the banners in his mind's eye, snapping bravely in a brisk north wind. All gone now, all fallen. The wind on his cheeks was blowing from the south, and the only banners flying above the remains of Moat Cailin displayed a golden kraken on a field of black.

He was being watched. He could feel the eyes. When he looked up, he caught a glimpse of pale faces peering from behind the battlements of the Gatehouse Tower and through the broken masonry that crowned the Children's Tower, where legend said the children of the forest had once called down the hammer of the waters to break the lands of Westeros in two.

The only dry road through the Neck was the causeway, and the towers of Moat Cailin plugged its northern end like a cork in a bottle. The road was narrow, the ruins so positioned that any enemy coming up from the south must pass beneath and between them. To assault any of the three towers, an attacker must expose his back to arrows from the other two, whilst climbing damp stone walls festooned with streamers of slimy white ghostskin. The swampy ground beyond the causeway was impassable, an endless morass of suckholes, quicksands, and glistening green swards that looked solid to the unwary eye but turned to water the instant you trod upon them, the whole of it infested with venomous serpents and poisonous flowers and monstrous lizard lions with teeth like daggers. Just as dangerous were its people, seldom seen but always lurking, the swamp-dwellers, the frog-eaters, the mud-men. Fenn and Reed, Peat and Boggs, Cray and Quagg, Greengood and Blackmyre, those were the sorts of names they gave themselves. The ironborn called them all bog devils.

Catelyn describes the Moat as once having been a great stronghold, with walls as high as Winterfells build with massive basalt blocks, with 20 towers and a wooden keep. Much of it has fallen to ruin, with 3 out of 20 towers remaining and the rest being ruined or completely sunken into the swamp. The tests in the application do not, in my opinion, represent this description for the following reasons:

• Massive basalt blocks | The curtain walls were made from massive basalt blocks, but are now scattered around the site. While we are limited in our ways to depict stones as large as that, the tests mostly feature small stone blocks that fail to depict the desription given.
• The layout | Three out of twenty towers still remain; the Drunkards tower, the Children's Tower and the Gatehouse tower. The tests in the app represent a square floorplan with a total of 12 towers, which is almost half of what is described to have once been. Granted, parts of the castle would have likely sunken and overgrown beyond recognition, but the floorplan clearly marks the outline of a small square castle. This layout neither adheres to the 20 towers described nor to the description of a great stronghold. Cat also describes a moat filled with lizard lions.
• The towers | The Gatehouse tower likely has a gate going through it, rather than beside it. Theon/Reek says that in order to assault any of the three towers you'd have to pass beneath and between the towers. Beneath could both mean literally under a tower (going through it) or below a tower (going around it). I think the name of the tower implies it's a tower gate in this instance though, since if it would have been one of two towers flanking a gate there would have been more than one gate towers and thus it wouldn't be named the Gatehouse tower. It's also an easy solution of applying the canon in both the literal and the figurative sense. The Drunkard's tower is described to be where the south and the west wall meet, but it's not located there in the test.

I advise to reconsider the layout of the castle and try and figure out how it would have functioned when it was still in it's heyday. It's unlikely the Moat has been raised in order to keep people out of the North, as it was there long before there was a unified North to speak of. Was the area around Moat Cailin always swampy or did it become that way during it's lifetime? Was it always a bottleneck to get north/south or did it only become so when the causeway was made? Was it a castle or a fortified settlement? Try to apply a layout consistent with early medieval fortifications, such as ringworks or oppida. The Moat is one of the oldest structures in Westeros, it would be a missed opportunity if the ruin would not represent that in the layout.

For reference for the stone blocks, check out the cyclopean walls of Mycenae.

Kind regards,

Stoop

All this said, we've concluded that whoever applies for the new version of the project shouldn't necessarily restrict themselves to the same square layout as the current version, but should play around with other layouts that better reflect this canon. In other words, feel free to redo the project a bit more liberally.

 

[Sapper]

thanks i’ll have a application posted soon

 

[Kor_Bro]

“The remaining three towers, which are covered with green moss and white ghostskin”. In order to do justice to this description, and to greatly improve the visual appearance, I think this warrents a mossy basalt block. I think the currrent moss blocks looks out of place when placed with the current basalt blocks. This could also come much handy in the future for the Harrenhal Redo.
Additionally, the way terrainset blocks interact with other blocks work very well with the current moss block. It could be cool if we could play with those properties and find a way to transfer them to other blocks, like the basalt blocks. Emoticone11