Playing castles again

Today I have been looking at listed buildings, wondering where to put my characters.

Usually the problem is some franchise has put characters there already. Hardwick Hall is awesome, and also Malfoy Manor. They changed it a bunch though so it could still work.

Other times the problem is names. The best ones are in use already. But there are several of Red Castle, and as far as I can tell they're all ruins already. So my character can totally have one of those and it won't be lie wandering around in someone's actual house.

Ruins are tricky because they're either too ruined or not ruined enough. You might want a nice bit of roofless religious architecture in the middle of nowhere, but mostly people nick the stone or build around such a nice thing in the first place. But this is what making things up is for.

Looking at all these places they're a history of the crown nicking things. Like, all the monasteries. Or to be more detailed, a nice big working estate with these fancy buildings at the centre gets nibbled away, until the lands don't support the buildings, or more likely dont support the next round of death taxes. Then the things get sold off or given to the nation by one or another path.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of aristocracy, but reading the same fail story over and over gets sad. And it's still more cheerful by far than the other one that kept coming up, where all the sons of a family went to War. Some families didnt need their property after that.

If I inherited a huge great house - with the taxes all paid for - I would want to make it useful to the community somehow. Put it at the heart of things again. A bunch of places are or have been schools of varying levels and sorts, so that could be a thing.

... wizard school, but everyone can go there...


Also just the existence of all these empty piles at the same time as all sorts of homelessness... would annoy me more if they weren't mostly rotting. The maintenance, it eats everything.

One place, can't remember which, was housing for a hundred men with learning disabilities. Which sounds nice except I know stories and those places were Fail. Maybe they could work if less cramming and more democracy and self determination.

Tell you what though, the grander it is the more likely it is to be epic fail for wheelchairs. All them grand stairs up the front, whose bright idea was that?



I daydream a castle and an abbey and a big house with lots of dining rooms and a little balcony for looking down on your guests and Judging them. Or music. Whichever.

They're three different physical expressions of different modes of power, which could be fun to play compare contrast on.

And you'd build three different sorts of community to go in them.



So, my day was super productive :eyeroll:

But I have not been sick again, so on balance it is a win.

(no subject)

I read a bunch about Hardwick Hall
and am now significantly more impressed with Malfoy money.
I mean I know it's not the same place, but to be even similar to something built by one of the richest women of her era?
And just being an Elizabethan house.
That's Money.

Also Bess of Hardwick is badass.
Married four times, ended up a Countess with a bazillionty money.
Also sad, but, advantageous marriage alliances all the way up, and her kids in a way better position than she was.

Fantasy novels seldom pay enough attention to the marriages. Goes with treating women like the prize cup at the end. Not a great way to weave a kingdom together.

Also it makes all the civil strife basically different bits of the family having a fight about the silver.



Also recently I was trying to read about MacLeods, because Highlander, but Duncan is a very au. But you start reading an it's all feuds and getting in fights with your brother in law that may or may not involve fifty to five hundred men turning up under arms. Messy.


History is fascinating, sprawling, and not exactly a tight narrative. Until history books get hold of it an trim so much.


I really should try sources beyond wiki more, but you can just keep clicking on wiki until you know a very little about ever so many things.



Also I found Hardwick Hall has all the interior features my story needed, including the balcony of Judging You From Above. So that's neat.

And if it was magic then all the plasterwork with plants and animals on would get up and run around and wave in the breeze and such. Which would be cool.

But the place kind of isn't big enough, I'd have to make the old hall inhabitable to get the sprawling many bedrooms feel going on.

I might poke a later house instead. There was one that isn't being restored, just kept exactly as fall apart as it was when it was donated, because the decline is part of history too.

I think it was the same house with far too many heads on the walls.
I mean there's a solid argument to be made that any heads is too many.
But you can certainly make magic story out of all the dead things of odd species all over the place.

Also I like places with their own chapel but places with their own crypt are even more awesome and worrying. Mostly people just kept their dead relatives under the chapel floor though. Or that's what it looks like, I dont know, why put the gravestones there if not graves?



See the research and ideas phase is so much fun it always gets me haring off after new input and then story fails to appear.

Ah well. Knowledge. Yaay.