The Gentleman’s House
I was browsing around looking to see what kinds of things went into manor house cellars yesterday in order to finish off the maps for Lisport Manor and ran across The Gentleman’s House, an 1865 book by architect Robert Kerr. It appears to be a guide, with floorplans, for a variety of eleventh through nineteenth century noble homes! It’s a 603-page monstrosity including plates of real floor plans such as Bridgewater House (1849, plate 19) and tables of accommodation and cost (see page 396, or page 471 in the PDF). For a really nice adventure map, look at plate 20 (PDF page 130) for the 1863 map of “West Shandon, Dumbartonshire”.
Looks like a great source for game masters in need of realistic maps, or who want to know what goes into building one of these things that player characters destroy with a single fireball. You can download the PDF from Google Books. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell the text version is not downloadable, which makes it difficult to search the document off-line. It’s still a pretty cool resource.
- The Gentleman’s House
- “How to plan English residences from the Parsonage to the Palace.”
More historical gaming
- The Yuma Territorial Dungeon
- The Yuma Territorial Prison looks like a great dungeon setting. It’s history provides inspirational ideas for more fantastic dungeons.
- Twisting (recent) history
- What to do with real historical figures when fictionalizing history is a tough question. I ran into it several times with Helter Skelter.
- Tournaments
- Organized combat-like tournaments are a great excuse for a celebration in fantasy-medieval worlds.
- Living the Past
- Val Horsler’s account of historical re-enactments, full of pictures, is a very useful resource for game masters looking to describe every-day life in a fantasy world.
- Splendors of the Past: Lost Cities of the Ancient World
- A fantastic book of ruins and lost cultures, with just a hint of the kind of adventurous archaeologist that fuels fantasy literature. One archaeologist is rebuilding the pyramids of the Hittites piece by piece; another fled jungle ruins to escape the Khmer Rouge.
- Three more pages with the topic historical gaming, and other related pages