I’d love to see the high fantasy/D&D version of “I am an adult now and I did not get my own place to paint my room beige.”
Like, there’s an adventuring party, they’re decently strong, the kind of strength where most of them are looking for their own place to live between adventures. And they’ve just vanquished the latest Evil Overlord, and the group healer’s been looking around as they’re finishing up and goes, “Um, hey, guys? Would anyone mind if I kept the castle? I’ve been checking out the market, and this place is actually really convenient for getting to my order’s main temple. I’ll take a proportionally smaller share of the loot in exchange.”
And the group looks around at this grim, dark place, lit by skull lamps and decorated with more spikey wrought iron than is by any means necessary, then look at their literal ball of sunshine healer, and go, “Well, it’ll take some fixing up, but if you want it, sure, why not, we’ll even give you some extra loot as a housewarming present so you can fix it up better.”
“Gee, thanks you guys are the best! <3!”
They split up for after-mission R&R, notify the local authorities of the castle’s new ownership, and go their separate ways.
The next time they need to meet up, they’re coincidentally near the healer’s new place, so the healer kindly invites them to all meet up there,especially because they’d love to show off what they’ve done with the place!
What they’ve done with the place is purify the moat water, cleansed any evil corruption still lingering, disarmed any lethal and/or inhumane traps, and put up little plaques under the skull lamps saying who they were in life, their proudest achievement, and thanking them for agreeing to the continued use of their skulls as sources of light and illumination. Other than that, the only change is that the place is cleaner now and their healer is an even bigger, happier bundle of sunshine than usual.
“Yeah, I’ve always wanted a place like this - evil overlords are terrible, but their aesthetic is on point, and I talked with my patron deity and they didn’t see any problem with me living somewhere like this as long as I uphold their ideals and really living somewhere that makes me feel happy and good about myself is something they encourage anyway as long as I’m not hurting anyone, so it all works out! And wasn’t it nice of the people to let me keep using their skulls? I was going to give them proper burial and replace them with illusory or fake ones, but then I remembered that beautiful bone church we visited when tracking down the ruins of Oolanin deWorst, so I thought I’d check and-!”
You know, stuff like that.
