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 gaming history
- The Cult of the Cult of Gygax™
- It was never a secret to us back in the day that the staff at TSR played the game themselves, and that they played the game with custom rules and custom worlds.
- Was table-top gaming inevitable?
- Gods & Monsters rolls an 18 for age today, pioneer game writer Greg Stafford died two weeks ago, and stories about the early days of gaming has me wondering, was the discovery of table-top gaming a perfect storm, or was it inevitable?
- The First Language
- Scholars once believed that, or seriously discussed whether, Hebrew was the first language of mankind. In a fantasy game, there really can have been a first, holy language of the gods.
- Currency and economic policy in the middle ages
- Prices, credit, and currencies. If you know the system, you could make a mint!
- House of Gold, House of Passages
- The emperor Nero’s House of Gold sounds like the backstory of a great megadungeon right under the adventurers’ sandaled feet.
- 18 more pages with the topic gaming history, and other related pages