Alternatives to wood

[Ail]

Hi fellows,

currently, I'm toying with the idea of making a were-gorilla mage living in a castle (it is Prof. Arcanus several years later). Since he is susecptible to wooden weapons, I had the idea he'd like to remove to his best ability all wooden objects in the castle, so that no one could improvise a weapon from a table leg, for instance, or from a beam in the ceiling.
The problem is that I can't think of viable alternatives to wood to craft a table, a floor, support a ceiling and so forth. All I see is metal, but it would make the whole setting strange.

An alternative I found was that he could be susceptible to specific kinds of wood and have him replace all wood in his castle by an exotic wood (Souragnien, for instance) that he would not be susceptible to.

For reference, he will be susceptible to the wood that was used to craft the stake that is in Gundar's skeleton, and I assume this is some tree native to the southwestern Core.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

Ail

[Jasper]

Ceramics and porcelain. A good sculpter can easly make a table of glass and fine white porcelain in any artistic form the owner wishes.

Same for the supports. A few large Romanesque fired clay colums done up as statues would fit easly in a wealthy lords castle. And done correctly fired clay has equal to or better support strength then wood.

[Joël of the FoS]

Or the wood has to be natural and free to coating? Painted or lacquered wood doesn't work.

Joël

[eldritch]

soapstone or other soft carved stone can be used for furniture and other items, it can be readily carved with a knife or a plane like wood. such material is usually very inexpensive when a local quarry is nearby and he probably has some peasants who are skilled artisans who could carve it.

egg shell, bone, sea shell, horn, antler, woven plant fiber such as hemp, bamboo, light volcanic pumice, reeds, whicker, ivory, lapis lazuli, marble, malachite, jade, hides, furs, leather, sinew, rawhide, ice, mud daub, straw, adobe, clay, porcelain, china, amber, shale, limestone, mudstone, granite, metaquartzite, calcium carbonate stalagtite, whalebone (baleen), woven insect exoskeletons (seen a beetle carapace chair once), wood exteriorized by precious metal

well there are a few ideas to get you rolling.....

[Ail]

Or the wood has to be natural and free to coating? Painted or lacquered wood doesn't work.

Joël

Actually, I had had that idea too! But it was last night and today as I was writing items for the adventure it had slipped my mind.
Jester and Eldritch, your ideas are all very good too. I'll use some of them.

Thank you

Ail

[Jester of the FoS]

Jasper, not Jester. Not that I mind extra praise.

Tables can easily be made with metal framed topped with glass. Wrought ironworks can actually look quite nice and stylish. Likewise stone is also a useful material.
Objects could also have wood paneling, a thin outter shell of wood that is easily broken and useless as a weapon.

I wouldn't worry about floorboards or rafters. Most players are not about to collapse a roof to get a useable weapon, especially when they have to move a load-bearing support to do so. And thick carpets prevent the easy use of floorboards as weapons.

[DeepShadow of FoS]

Another thing to consider is the method of construction. Fabricate, for example, can build things that might be difficult or even impossible using traditional methods of shaping the same medium. It allows someone to make hollow rafter beams out of stone, that grow right from the walls themselves, in such positions that a normal craftman would never find space for himself, let alone to swing a mallet.

Keep stuff like this in mind when considering a particular media for a particular function.

[Ail]

Jasper, not Jester. Not that I mind extra praise.

Sorry, you're right. I confuse your names easily

Objects could also have wood paneling, a thin outter shell of wood that is easily broken and useless as a weapon.

Can this technique be considered available already?

Ail

[ScS of the Fraternity]

Probably not, but there are exceptons to the established norm.

Lamordian entries in RL 3rd made reference to numerous Automatons - which seemed to be references to machines. As well, nearly every alchemist has it within their ability to make many types of glues.

Surely then it is not impossible that someone might have designed a means of making wooden veneer. The profit incentive is still there - make tables and desks out of easy-to-carve pine, coat them in a veneer - then sell them as Redwood or solid oak for ten times their price to wealthy lords (and archmage gorillas).

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Just make sure not to go so far overboard that the absence of wood becomes too obvious, or else the fact there's none in the castle will be as blatant a giveaway as finding empty mirror-frames in a vampire's house. Items that are too flimsy to be potential weapons, such as teaspoons, could intentionally be constructed of wood, since the were-gorilla wouldn't consider these items a significant danger (who's dumb enough to attack a raging gorilla with a spoon? ).

[Hashmalum]

then sell them as Redwood or solid oak for ten times their price to wealthy lords (and archmage gorillas).

Now that's a marketing campaign that would be interesting to see. There can't be very many market research studies done on archmage gorillas, even in Ravenloft

[DeepShadow of FoS]

Another way to hide the absence of wood is to paint other things to look like it. Mormon pioneers in Utah had plenty of pine, but they wanted oak and marble and all the other things they had back west, so they painted pine to look like them. They did it so well that many visitors to the tabernacle in Salt Lake City have to tap on the "marble" pillars and closely inspect the "oak" pews to confirm that they are, in fact, pine.

[Ail]

Just make sure not to go so far overboard that the absence of wood becomes too obvious, or else the fact there's none in the castle will be as blatant a giveaway as finding empty mirror-frames in a vampire's house. Items that are too flimsy to be potential weapons, such as teaspoons, could intentionally be constructed of wood, since the were-gorilla wouldn't consider these items a significant danger (who's dumb enough to attack a raging gorilla with a spoon? ).

Actually, there will be no mirrors either. I may be going blatantly off canon here, but I want to make sure the characters are being hunted by a Vampire first. The weregorilla shuns sunlight because it makes its shadow show overlong arms and bowed legs; and he avoids mirrors because the reflection of his face is an ape face, not human. Thus, there will be no mirrors. And the absence of wood is intentional. The only piece of wood available will be the stake down below in Gundar's skeleton, and unaware of the danger, I'm hoping that the PCs do take the stake as a last resource and use it to kill "the evil vampire". Later they'll find he was a good weregorilla after all (I hope this to be a considerable shock for the players, not the PCs), and that now at last they have a very mad (and eminent) vampire at their back.

There are a few more things, but this is the gist of it. I just want them to be unable to use any other wood than the stake, but I needed a rationale for it. Luckily the vulnerability to wood is not my own invention, it is in the books for real

A minor point is how they will actually kill a weregorilla with just one stake. I'll have to add other means of injuring, but not killing, him.

Ail

[Nathan of the FoS]

You could use a lot of wicker furniture. One of the Oz books (well after the Wizard, but still in the L. Frank Baum era) has an evil sorcerer who lives in a Wicker Castle, which is still one of my favorite images from the books.

[Kessler]

Forgotten Realms solution:

he's a mage: craft everything from wood, then develop spell "transmute wood to stone" and that's it...