Not, you may give people the wrong impression as my seal of approval was not without caveats.

I tossed together a quick mock-up of a Dres canton in the CS. It’s mostly just a facade. I’ve attached the file.

The proportions are not quite right; I think the second level of the canton should be taller and narrower and the council strucutre should probably be a bit smaller. Overall it’s a bit busy. I do think it conveys the rough impression, though, and serves its purpose as a proof of concept, which is what I was going for.

I’m so excited for our upcoming content of the Dres lands, it all looks so amazing already.

Especially those cantons are going to be such a sight ingame, really great design.

Or instead of a dome, going for the more organic structure of the seashell shaped Old Mournhold ruins set. Still viable as a cap-off, but more pointy and natural.

As it turns out I found some time to doodle today, and landed with some designs I’m pretty happy with, which lead to a new mock-up:

File attached as before. I forgot to mention that the cell is “Dres Clanstead”.

As can be seen in the sketch, I settled on three platform designs; one for the large platform and two for the smaller platforms. The large platform would be modular, the smaller platforms could be as well.

Dres clansteads would have either one or two levels depending on importance, and with about half a dozen clansteads + Tear I think we’ll be able to get suitable visual variety. The top smaller platform design would also be used for outlying structures like arenas (technically available for the settling of clan wars, but generally used to settle disputes within the clan, generally between low-ranking Chap-thil and the like; Dres prefer to deal with clan wars through employment of the Morag Tong, who have a strong presence in the Deshaan with a guild hall in every clanstead, though disorganized border-skirmishes, raids and counter-raids between Chap-thil of rival clans are also fairly common occurrences), the clanstead temple and possibly slave pits.

Refer to my never-finished top-down sketch of a Dres clanstead which I think was my first concept for House Dres:

At the center of the clanstead is the council house. I think basing the design off of the Daedric towers was the right way to go. It is capped by a sort of open courtyard at the top reached by steps which wind around the exterior of the structure. At the center of the courtyard is the ancestor pillar, or ancestor pillars. The bodies of recently deceased Clansmer are placed on bugbowls on top of the ancestor columns, which are weighed down with stones, and burned. The strong foehn winds that occasionally blow up from Lake Andaram and over the ridge of the Deshaan before encountering similar winds blowing up from the Argon Jungle carry the ashes eastward.

Access to the council house is generally restricted to the clan elders, and even they are prohibited from passing through the screen which divides the interior of the building in two. Instead, they hold council in the front chamber, where seats are arranged for them around the wall. Behind the screen are the quarters of the clan Matriarch and her ‘successor’. Their needs are seen to by a trusted servant between clan meetings; otherwise the screen is not to be disturbed, and the elders must content themselves with hearing the words of the Matriarch through the screen. Even this is seen as gracious, as the council house is effectively the wise woman’s yurt, and it is still as well understood among the Dres as it is among the Ashlanders that the yurt of the wise woman is not to be entered lightly. For the most part, the day-to-day affairs of the clan go on beneath the ever-watchful gaze of the council house without paying it much heed.

If you mean my mock-up those central pillars are just stand-ins for the ancestor pillar(s), which would probably need to be a new model. Generally the knobs are not supposed to stick out as in your image, but should be used with the building T(op) mesh.

Started on a list of Dres assets. The list should get proper concepts, and will probably be expanded as well, but should give a rough idea of how the set would look like.

Progress:

I have noticed a few irritating inconsistencies with scale that aren’t immediately apparant, so there’s still a bit of work to be done. The general shape should now be correct, though.

I’ve finally pretty much finished my large platform concept; I mainly intend to add a grid, colour, (I’m sort of hesitant here as to which colour scheme I should use), and possibly some captions and detail drawings:

Note that the sides look steeper than they are due to the shape of the buttresses.

Don’t know if this can be incoporated into the current models this late in, but I found this for a possible architecture idea for the cantons.

These are Fujian toulou out of China. All dwellings open inward into the courtyard and there’s no outside iwndows on the first floor for defensive puporses.

Sometimes they can be built several to a town, or just one big town:

I tried to sketch this out real quick for what it might look like in a Dres city. (operative term tried! Blur is due to bad cell phone pic) The outer canton walls would be a few stories high to accomodate dwellings along the inner couryard, and the center would be some sort of temple or city hall structure. The courtyard would be an open air market with stalls set up between the buttresses of the center tower. Since having an enemy army climb up the outer buttresses would be counter productive, these instead are steep battlement-like extensions off the main canton, where archers and mages can be posted to rain havoc down on anyone assaulting the walls.

Hm, there’s room for improvement, as the file didn’t quite export cleanly. I’m not sure what file format is most convenient for modellers, and how high the image resolution can go. The palette could probably use a bit more experimentation as well:

As far as Mwgek’s canton is concerned, it’s quite a departure from my design, so I think we’d need to choose between the one or the other. One aspect I do think needs improvement with Mwgek’s canton model is its angularity, but otherwise it’s a nice alternative take on Dres clansteads.

I am indeed planning a ‘donut-shaped’ platform piece for the clansteads pretty much as Kevaar described, which would be placed on top of the above large platform piece and would surround the ever-present central clan council hall. It would be an alternative to the standard ‘small’ central platform piece as shown in my other images.