The 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 to our maps to keep consistency and realism so all maps feel real and alive. Because, yeah, heroes also poo.

Bathrooms in medieval times

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 at night they clear big barrels that the patrons have been using during the day. 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 liquid can filtrate, and the solid material can be easily collected.

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.

Gong farmers

Also called nightmen, are the people in charge of digging these cesspits and outhouses, 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.

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 important job for society 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 gong farmers 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.

Uses of the waste

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.