Castle room: The Trophy Room

A room near the festhall areas of the Keep's upper bailey castle containing a number of trophies, banners, mementos and other items of interest.

Entries

The trophy hall is accessed directly through the study and also connects to the smoking room through a fairly obvious secret door in the waist-high lower paneling, where there is a gap in the cabinets to allow for access through the door leading to the transverse hall and the operational rather than recreational areas of the castle.

Sensory & Appearance

The trophy room has a dusty and more than a little creepy feel, with glass badly in need of a good dusting from the inside and contents that range from the perplexingly dull to the completely unrecognizable. The wood parquet floor is polished to a sheen that reveals all the gouges and dents of the ages, and though the mounted heads have been dusted recently they still have a threadbare and worn feeling just from their obvious age.

Contents & Furnishings

The room consists of a number of inset wooden cabinets and glass-paned cases filled - overfilled, to be fair - with a mix of hunting trophies, memorabilia, oddities and animal mounts shriveled with age. The cases themselves are not air or spider-tight, so many of the displays are partially hidden by soft layers of cobwebs, and the glass is thin and a little loose in the flimsy wooden frames. Cracks are showing in a few of the panes. The cases are locked, and the key is exceedingly small, more like a jewelry box might have rather than a large display case.

Valuables

The majority of the contents are mundane, mostly sentimental items, banners from contests of the distant past and certificates and literal trophies awarded by the Countess or her predecessors for various acts of valor or, in more cases, notable administrative excellence. However several items do stand out as having a trade or treasure value:

• An entire Owlbear shoulder and head mount, quite large and created with more skill than some of the more threadbare and tattered smaller mounts of whole creatures.
• A wildcat mounted in an awkward and unnatural pose shares a large glass case with several enormous river fish, an oversized snail shell and a bowl made of a smoky black crystal.
• A series of canopic jars and a wooden mummy case once brightly painted, but now faded; the door is open far enough to reveal a withered brown body wrapped in rags and possibly oiled paper within. The shape of the head and its tiny size compared to the shoulders seems to preclude its being human; possibly a gnoll or goblinoid.
• A stack of 6 yellowed bone or ivory stars a little smaller than drink coasters, inscribed with magical symbols, labeled as 'artifacts found in the ruins of the Wizard Tower' with a date of 3253, which was 80 years ago.
• A brass pocketwatch, the glass too clouded to make out the time indicated by the hands. The label identifies it as 'suspicious watch found in the chapel fire' and a date of 3312, 21 years ago. It shows no carbon damage or other sign of having been in a fire.
• A set of dice donated by the party of adventurers, used in augury and divination.

Many other items of interest may be mixed in with the strange and sometimes unrecognizable displays, which commonly contain too many things for all of them to be easily visible. Despite being so crowded the overall sense is that there's very little on display here that is categorically worthy of being on display.

Architecture