palacing

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WHAT IS A PALACE?*


It's a fancy castle . Castles are for defense. Palaces are for going NO ONE CAN EVEN TRY TO ATTACK ME extra pointless thin towers.

So a palace is an excuse to make some ludicrous architecture with making it plausible to defend or even live comfortably in.

It's also an excuse to make a series of interconnected rooms with some unusual way of getting from one to the other, either through standard or nonstandard use of the architecture.

Okay maybe that's not a Definitive thing about Palaces but if you can imagine a palace without tall spindly towers and dainty bridges , I dunno man.

Tall spindly towers suggests being able to grappling hook between them , and dainty bridges suggests rooms broken up with open air.

Palaces also suggest extravagance, madness, waste and wealth and those are all hot-shit adventure location fuel.
"location fuel" let's ignore that


It , is of course easier to run a Palace if things are being dysfunctional , so a Gormenghast or a Miss Havisham Palace or the classic ruined and rehabited palace or it's space haunted , or it was never meant to be lived in just a vast display of wealth and then it gone and get monsters all in (like the real life Taj Mahal ).

By "easier to run" I mean as "adventure" adventure. Interacting with a palace with numerous, co-ordinated, and organised inhabitants is going to be a be a diplomatic, heist, running battle, or siege adventure. Or mostly likely an adventure that moves along that list as a farcical progression.

*the actual definition is not relevant to us right now GOOD FELLOW

Here are some palaces that have unusual traversal options , "adventure" adventure and have the architecture noteworthy somehow.


1. The Sky Gazing Palace of Marque Toad-Toad-Toad:

A palace built in an of hubris after the swamps had been drained and course of the river changed. It was not to last.  The palace sunk  but due to its rare construction it did not break apart; it tipped back  but remained intact, its facade now tiled towards the sky. The back half of the palace is underwater, the front half free of water but not of roots and trees.
  The current self declared  ruler is the Marque Toad-Toad-Toad, a giant toad dressed in the mud stained rags he's found here. He has another toad growing from his head. This toad also has a toad growing from his head. All are festooned and crowned. He is often out touring with his court  (a weird mix of swamp dwellers, lunatics, and the truly desperate)
His court is split between his pope (toad pope) , his general (toad general), his archivist (toad archivist) , and his fool (frog).  They are extremely willing to work against each other.
Other things hanging out here included duncan the alligator , a witch travelling backwards in time, a band of catfish musicians who make instruments out of human bones, and some goblins pretending to be a ghost king.

2. The Squirming Palace of the Cliff Bound Urchin King
This is giant sea urchin attached to side of a cliff. It's organs and muscles have been pushed out of the way a little to make room for rooms and passages. This was done by glass walls so on the other side of the glass you can see all the squirming.  The ruler here is a Louse . A wizard Louse. A really messed up teleport spell sent some of wizards intellect into a louse. This louse is basically a coherent wizard some of the time and the rest of the time it just sucks blood out of the walls. The most coherent thing it does is patrol the palace and demand proof of guests that they truly have been working against its enemies (the ocean and the land, must be working against both at once). The Urchin King is backed up by shellfish golems. Failure to satisfy the Louse will mean it will try and capture you and put you in cages to be lowered out over the ocean to die of exposure.

Other denizens included a foul humoured sadistic group of skua bandits, a shadow stealing octopus, anemone men (from Fire On the Velvet Horizon) , sinister elven fleshmancers, and an unemployed and child-eating dwarven circus.

3.Too Many Kings Palace

The Mouse Queen died and the will wasn't found and now all her 56 children claim ownership of the palace.  Magics by the Mouse Queen mean the children can't directly act against each other so they instead turn to make each of their sections bigger. These mice are a foot tall each but like making biiig rooms, but by their standards. So they are cramped rooms but with to scale decorations.

The mouse Queen is still here as a mummy. There's a haunted (regular sized book) , library that has the pages fold themselves up in the form of what they describe and attack people , there's ants dressed and acting like England at the height of its take over the world period.

4.Red and Boreal Palace To The Whales Grief

A big dead frozen whale being carved into a ritual palace by snow elves. Snow elves actually make themselves by carving themselves out of frozen megawhale corpse. They ritually move from the tail to the head, and don't care what happens to the rooms they leave behind themselves (each elf needs an entire room carved out to make them)

Cautiously occupying the other spaces are Mercenary Polar Bears who are starting to get on abit and are thinking about their retirement, A disgraced and scheming shaman, Ghost krill making a song craft to travel to the aurora borealis, maddened yeti (allergic to whale flesh, they keep gorging and vomiting) , drill worms, and  murderous crab philosophers (not all of them, just most of them).

5.The Scavenged and Street scattered Palace of the Gutter Knight
This is a series of interconnect houses, street bridges, barricaded off alleys , teetering trash towers , and sewer repurposement. Collectively it forms a palace. Hovel Knights and Roof Lords ritually duel over ownership as the city moves through the palace somewhat awkwardly.

Also unusually Large alley cats, Gutter dryads , Kid's Chalk Drawings of Gargoyles that work more or less like real ones, The Library of Mistakes, Brain Replacing Pigeons , an identity market , A treasure of useless trash (yet each item will insanely invaluable to one person somewhere), the embassy of the under-owls, sewer sharks and the fishers of men.

6. Earth Exiled Palace, The Horse Rotovator , Grave Thief
It's a giant skeletal horse machine that travels underground stealing graves and forgotten cities.

It's sinister purpose is to erase evidence of tragedies, massacres, disasters of terrible scale , so future people are more likely to repeat them.

It's run and loosely maintained by oily looking human-sized centipedes with baby hands and faces of tedious bureaucrats. Their eyes are dull  quartz stones which nevertheless will work unnaturally well as bribes in bureaucratic matters.

FEATURIng:
broken but possibly fixable apocalypse engines , all kinds of confused guardian undead, historic evidence , mad spirits, bound Ozymandians (Fire on the Velvet Horizon again) ,  a small gentlemens club of experimental avantguard necromancers (lively but amoral) , bored ghosts, clay men trying to come up with the perfect society (and breaking into fist fights about it) , rusting semi-living warmachines.

*let's not bother with the actual definition 

Some Locations that might be hard to map

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(note people at bottom for scale)

So there are these things called Washingtonia filiera or Washington palms and that is some terrible colonyist name for them but hey.

Anyway they shed their leafs and it all builds up in a big ass skirt thing.

There is (on some? all?) a crawl space between the the trunk and the palm skirt. It's a cool , dark , quiet and dusty and a occasionally throughfare for all kinds of life that lives in the skirt
(tarantulas, rats, wasps, scorpions , some birds I think, my research here was pretty light)

Now the thing about the skirt is that it can slough in big heaps , crushing and suffocating anything caught in its way.

Let's imagine a gianter palm, like a 100 stories , with the barks forming  stairs and platforms , and occupationally rooms and niches in the every present hatches. And a variety of vermin and flattened life cable of moving freely through the hatch.

Or just keep it how it is, with something humanoidish making nests in the skirt, accessible by climbing up the trunk, but with the danger of movement or activity bringing a section down with you or ontop you, pressing you against the trunk but still kept aloft. Maybe the nest is firmly attached to the trunk , so sections of the skirt can be defensively sloughed as an ablative fortress.

Climbing on the outside is extremely risky as there is no handout that might not give away with no notice

(Note as is these skirts are highly flammable. Accept,  adjust or accommodate this as a g.m)



Other places:
 A dungeon in a house. But in the house, a series of interlocking false ceilings, crawlspaces, wall cavities and slender rooms, the house and the secret house interlaced completely, each traversable without realizing the existence of the other.

An easy said than done approach is to start with a isometric building plan and carefully start moving walls and dropping ceilings and blocking off corridors until you have the second house.

The Dead are still here:
The astral and the ethereal planes are generally described as space limitless.
Let's go the other way. The astral plane is contained in anything solid and rectangular . Its astral dimensions vary. Sometimes the same size sometimes 10 fold.
The dead might stay in the walls. A round room is one the dead cannot watch you from. The astral plane only maps to these spaces. Astral forms squeezing through walls and along floors , underground tracing a box around the unalterable curves of a cave. A series of acute angles suggests a curve and these are astral significant as traps and portals.

Ethereal space is maybe a  2 dimensional shadow world painted on surface of everything. Except inside. That's the astral. It hurts to travel from the astral to the ethereal.
EDIT: I just realized how much this owes to "Foundation" from China Mieville's short story collection "Looking for Jake". So shout outing to that right now.