Gong Farm - Free map [27x31] (Patreon)

Oldgrim Gongfarm Laystall (OGL)

I don’t really know why we chose this name for such a decent company, but somehow it seems to fit. Anyways, the new Oldgrim Gongfarm Laystall (OGL) is basically a giant pile of shit.

Something we usually overlook in battlemaps are bathrooms, but at The Dungeon Archive we always try to add them when necessary.

Usually people use a shovel to dig a small hole in the ground and let nature do its work, but if it’s cold outside you may have a night bucket that you can use for liquid waste and a different bucket for solid waste (it doesn’t smell that bad if separated). At inns and taverns they clear the barrels at night. Sometimes it’s thrown straight into the street, but in more civilized cities those barrels and buckets are deposited in cesspits for gong farmers to remove it. These cesspits are not watertight so the solid material can easily be collected.

Gong farmers, also called nightmen, are the people in charge of digging outhouses and cesspits, collecting the waste and depositing it in laystalls outside the city.
Laystalls are where the cattle is held outside markets, then it became the name of the place where gong farmers stored the waste until its removal.

If you are wealthy enough then you may have your own privy so you can go to the bathroom and stay warm in the house, or an outhouse in the back garden so the gong farmers can access it from an alley and keep the unwanted waste from going into the house. In big castles there may be garderobes, which are small rooms sticking out of the walls of the castle with a hole that discharges the waste into a cesspit or the moat. In the last case it makes the moat less attractive to the enemy, adding an extra layer of protection to the fortress. The negative part of this system is the dark stain track all over the castle wall after some use.

Urine can be used to wash clothes, the ammonia in it can be used as a pretty effective detergent or even to brush your teeth. It is also used as a mordant in clothes dyes and as part of metallurgical and tanning processes. On the other hand solid waste can be used as a fertilizer so the gong farmers can sell everything to different companies. Funny enough, there is no waste.

It is a dangerous job that nobody wants to do, suffocating while inside the pit because of the fumes is somewhat common and illness and infections can easily kill you. Gong farmers can earn quite an amount of money, not only because of the nature of the job and the dangers of it, but also because they have almost all the monopoly of the potassium nitrate needed to make gunpowder.

This is a very key job because it prevents diseases from spreading, drinking water wells from getting contaminated, cesspits from overflow and it also keeps the streets clean and fresh. That’s why rules and regulations are very strict, if they don’t follow them correctly, they can be punished by being covered in human waste to the neck in the main plaza. They are only allowed to work at night, deposit the waste in suitable locations and can not even live near the city.

This map is inspired by the London gong farmers back in medieval Tudor times. Gong meant “to go” in old English.
Fun fact, some streets and alleys had names like Pissing Alley and Shiteburne, since it was the place for the neighbors to deposit the waste for further removal. Some of these streets later changed their names to less rude names.

The OGL drama

Any similarity with the map name is pure coincidence.
We made an announcement on our Discord about the new D&D OGL. We do not support the new changes and will always fight for the community that built this game.
That's why we made this map free for everyone including all variations and future updates like the Foundry VTT module. All links below will download the same files, we are just keeping tier posts organized.

Downloads

Free download 

Variations