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Realms of Chaos
2009-10-09, 06:19 AM
One thing that I keep noticing is that too many castles in DnD resemble Medieval castles far more than makes sense. Although such castles were good at dealing with traditional siege weaponry, they would crumple like toilet paper before most common monsters or even a single disgruntled mage.
For an example of how things stop working, think of servants. In Medieval times, having a bunch of servants to help you was just plain common sense. However, in DnD, where such servants may end up being dragons, vampires, phasms, doppelgangers, or enchanters, having any number of servants means taking a great deal of risk, something that at least some rulers would try to avoid (while real life servants could be nearly as dangerous, all of these risks can be avoided in DnD by people with wealth, like kings, so they are more inclined to do so).
Likewise, why would a king sleep in a bedroom (where they could be poisoned, cursed, or stabbed in the throat) when their great wealth could let them sleep in extradimensional space.

I'm asking you of the playground if any of you have thought up of relatively sensible castles for a DnD setting, stuff that actually takes into account the dangers that a high level aristocrat may end up dealing with in the long run?

Below is an example of a castle that I just threw together right now. There aren't any teleportation circles in it but I did pretty much everything else that you would expect from a DnD castle.

Castle of Barralia
Surrounding the castle of Barralia are three concentric stone walls, each of which is 20 feet tall and 10 feet wide. Crenellation runs along the top of these walls, as do a few pieces of siege equipment. The siege weaponry is built into the walls such that they can’t be turned fully around if it falls into enemy hands. The walls are scaled via rope ladders (on the interior of the walls), ladders that can be pulled up if needed.
Built into each wall are 8 gates, spaced equally along the wall. The gates are large and formed from iron, iron that has been treated by a hardening spell (From the spell compendium, CL 12). Furthermore, each gateway bears a permanent audio alarm. The alarms, rather than random (and annoying) ringing, are regal and elegant, such as a procession of trumpets, a violin quintet, the sound of wind chimes, and a flurry of bird calls. As such, guards can normally tell what gates are being used (although there are occasional false alarms).
In the two rings of space between these three walls are the only living servants of the castle. Weaker and newer guards live in the outer ring, along with a blacksmith and the stables. The Inner ring is occupied by stronger and more loyal guards and knights, supplies that the castle is saving (mostly food) along with guests that aren’t important enough to keep in the castle itself (or that can’t be fit inside during busier times). Rather than trusting outsiders in the long-term or forming contracts with them, there are many summon monster traps installed in strategically important locations. If an intruder doesn’t trip them off, a guard is chosen to set it off and run for his life, using the logic that he’ll hopefully know more about the castle layout (such as where to hide) than the summoned creatures or intruders. Because of these traps, most guests are accompanied by a guard as they wander through the rings.
One more person of note is kept in the rings, a level 1 illusionist named Trevil. Whenever the king needs to make a proclamation, Trevil casts disguise self and announces it himself from atop the wall, wearing royal clothing and using a disguise kit to improve the disguise. A number of measures have been put into place to keep Trevil under the king’s control. First, he has ten guards guarding (read: watching) him at all times. Secondly, his spellbook is being held “for safe keeping” by another guard unless Trevil needs it to prepare spells while his familiar is being kept in the stable “for sanitary reasons”. Third, he is being paid triple what he would be making for just selling his spells. Lastly, Trevil receives endless requests for minor scrolls from the king (often for things like mending or detect poison), something that he can’t really refuse politely but that keeps him drained of energy and thus prevents him from becoming a direct threat.
The castle itself is 10 stories high and about 200 feet in diameter. One the ground floor, there are eight gates into the castle, each of which has a permanent alarm like the outer gates. Entering the castle, there is a winding hallway surrounding a room with 8 more doors. In the hallway are 4 stairways leading up to the next level and a total of 16 golems. Each door is guarded by a force golem (MM V) ordered to attack suspicious people and a stone golem ordered to follow the force golem’s orders.
The central room is the king’s bed chamber. It is 60 x 60 feet and a mere 10 feet tall, putting the ceiling within reach of the 18 stone golems (2 guarding each door, all ordered to kill anyone other than the king that enters the room). In the center of the room is a single magical pillar with the power to use Mage’s Magnificent Mansion 1/day (where the king actually eats and sleeps). This room is safe from aerial attacks due to the lack of windows and the nine other floors that an attacker would need to pass through. To stop burrowing creatures, the floor of this room is coated with one foot of adamantine. Also, this entire room is filled with a permanent Mage’s Private Sanctum (CL 9). Lastly, there are 8 wall sections (one for each gate leading out of the castle) that are permanently invisible (although Mage’s Private Sanctum keeps people outside from peeping in).
On the second floor is another hallway spiraling around a similarly large room, this one with only 4 entrances. One force golem with a stone golem guards each of the stairways leading downstairs and 4 more stairways lead upstairs.
The new central room is an audience chamber. The room is 90x90 feet and is 50 feet high (taking the remaining height of the 30-foot cubes below and using 4 more cubes of Mage’s Private Sanctum’s area). A throne sits near the center of the room. Mirrors are placed strategically on the walls and the throne can pivot, making it hard to sneak up on the king. Also, two greater stone golems stand near the throne at all times. Lastly, hidden in the throne itself is a compartment with a ring of feather falling and there is a secret trap door so that the king can drop into his bed chamber in an emergency.
The third through tenth floors are smaller hallways heading in a circle with 6 rooms lining the circle’s exterior. Each floor (other than the tenth) has four stairways leading to the next floor and each floor has a single force golem guarding each stairway heading downwards and a single stone golem (ordered to follow the instructions of force golems). The tenth floor has an adamantine ceiling approximately 6 inches thick.
Each of the private rooms is nearly identical, although they get fancier as you approach ground level. Each room has a barred window with an arcane lock active upon it and a permanent alarm on the area outside of the window. Furthermore, a force golem is placed in each room to guard (and observe) its occupant. Lastly, each room’s bed a masterwork scimitar hidden beneath and has a compartment under the mattress that can be hidden in (DC 25 search check reveals). All rooms have excellent locks, the only copy of which is given to that room’s current occupant.
There is, however, one additional area of note found in the third floor. The interior of the circular hallway is actually a room, although it’s solitary entrance is difficult to find (DC 30 search check reveals). The room is 30x30x30 feet (using the last cube of Mage’s Private Sanctum’s area). From a few hooks on walls hang a total of 10 rings of feather falling and a trap door rests in the room, leading down into the audience chamber. This hidden room is guarded by 6 force golems. This room also has a false ceiling 20 feet up (DC 30 spot check reveals), above which over a hundred bags of holding hang from hooks, in which is the vast majority of King Barralia’s wealth.

Feel free to tell me what you think and give your own castle ideas. :smallbiggrin:

JellyPooga
2009-10-09, 06:31 AM
It's all well and good having this castle purpose built for the king to be as well protected as possible, but don't you think it's a little like a prison? Any decent assassin would just wait for the king to leave his stronghold...after all, if his fortifications are impregnable, create a reason for him to leave it. If the king is so paranoid that he never leaves the castle, then he's not likely to be a particularly good king...after all, he would have to rely on the reports of his advisors. If any one of them were corrupt, then the king could be fed false information and issue proclamations that are detrimental to the well-being of the kingdom.

Chrono22
2009-10-09, 06:35 AM
In a world where magic can burn, melt, decay, or disintegrate most impediments.. I can see portable emplacements having alot more utility. Building fortresses partially or completely underground would also be advantageous.

So, if i was going to build a fortress... it would be a castle built into the side of a mountain. Think the castle from the Two Towers. Add in enough bottlenecks, murderholes and arrow slits that taking it by force of numbers is a pyrrhic victory. Inside the mountain, ring it with a maze-like mesh of dead ends, false starts and traps. And when all else fails, a means of causing some of the tunnels to collapse on the heads of my enemies.
It would have a normal stone wall ringing the exterior, and some portable wooden walls (think wall sections on wheels) on the outside. Water access isn't really a problem, because of wells.
Battle tactics would revolve around some well placed fog clouds, message cantrips, and an antimagic trap for the intrepid caster.

bosssmiley
2009-10-09, 08:10 AM
...relatively sensical castles...

<red pen>
The word is 'sensible', or, in the context, logical. Sensical (sic) is an archaism and generally deemed poor use of English. (That's a bugbear of mine, like the mis-use of "malus" when "penalty" is intended)
</red pen>


The castle itself is 10 stories high and about 200 feet in diameter, making it pretty small as far as castles go.

:smallconfused::smallconfused::smallconfused:

You might want to read up on pre-modern military architecture. The famous White Tower of the Tower of London is about 100' on a side, and has substantially less than 10 stories. Heck, the famous central tower of the Château de Coucy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_de_Coucy) - one of the largest castles in Europe - was only 55m (about 180ft) high. For all their bulk castles are generally quite small buildings by modern standards.

Building walls and towers crazy-high just makes them easier to knock over. You want to keep them relatively squat and low, like modern gun emplacements. Add dinky little side-turrets if you want some extra height for look-outs, but don't build something that'll smear the entire bailey when it gets toppled.

The quickest and most efficient way to add height and defensibility to a castle? Stick it on a hill. Half the grandeur of places like Mont St Michael or Edinburgh Castle comes from the fact they're built on slopes. Half of that dizzying height, it's just hillside with some dressed stone cladding over it.

On the subject of defending your castle:
"The Enemy at the Gates" (Dragon #160) - how to defend your city against magic and monsters.
"Fiendish Fortresses" (Dragon #233) - how to build emplacements that can stand up to the iconic SLAs of devils and demons. Also lower-planar siege weapons.

Given the importance of LOS/LOF for magical effects in D&D star forts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_fort) are likely to be more prevalent than linear curtain wall defences, which are just a crushing hazard waiting to happen.

Even more defensible are well-designed dungeons and/or Maginot Line-style fortifications. The Book of Gears talks a little about dungeon as active military emplacement...

Calmar
2009-10-09, 08:32 AM
For an example of how things stop working, think of servants. In Medieval times, having a bunch of servants to help you was just plain common sense. However, in DnD, where such servants may end up being dragons, vampires, phasms, doppelgangers, or enchanters, having any number of servants means taking a great deal of risk, something that at least some rulers would try to avoid.

In RW, where such servants may end up being thieves, murderers, assassins, rapists, or traitors, having any number of servants means taking a great deal of risk, something that at least some rulers would try to avoid. :smallconfused:

Foryn Gilnith
2009-10-09, 08:40 AM
In RW, where such servants may end up being thieves, murderers, assassins, rapists, or traitors, having any number of servants means taking a great deal of risk, something that at least some rulers would try to avoid. :smallconfused:

Except in D&D, you can actually avoid taking those risks.

But yeah, the ruler definitely needs some way to both be safe and get useful information about his kingdom.

Da Pwnzlord
2009-10-09, 08:41 AM
I think underground bunkers would be more efficiant. Use Magic to dig out a cave miles deeper then we can today. Have only a narrow and twisting shaft connecting it to the surface lined with AMFs. Ward the rest of the bunker with Anti-Teleport spells. Anyone who tries to bust in will be forced to use non-magical combat in a bottleneck. You could even collapse the tunnel and live off of your Wands of Create Food and Water indefinately.



Sevants could just be Unseen Servants. Perfectly loyal, and probably cheaper too.

Choco
2009-10-09, 09:28 AM
hmmm I have made a few, ima post em here as I think of em...

Underground fortress-city (forgot the name, and dont have the damn file on me... I'll update it later):
This was basically a fortified city about 2 miles underneath a lifeless desert island.

The whole place was warded against divinations (those nifty self-resetting anti-divination traps, but bigger and badder) and it's first line of defense was simply that the only people in the world that knew it existed were those from the city.

The desert above was literally lifeless, the site of some epic battles millenia in the past whos effects can be felt to this day: no life can exist for more than a few days up there unless magically protected.

The only way to enter the city is to tunnel the 2 miles down into it. The residents had among them mages who used special earth tunneling magic to do this, which was basically a modified version of how earth elementals travel through earth, except it actually makes a tunnel that you can take other people into it with you, and it seals up after a few seconds automatically. This was fatal unless you knew where you were going, because the entire trip down was full of auto-resetting AMF traps set to tremor senses that will effectively trap you underground if you trigger them. Same goes for entering the city itself, a fatal fall (enforced with AMF's) will greet you if you tunnel out of any place that isn't a designated entry point.

The city itself was designed both to keep people in as well as to keep people out. Everything made of earth/stone/sand/yougetthepoint inside and within 200 feet of the city was magically hardened. Each small segment of the city was separated by 50+ feet thick solid stone walls, and the only way to get around the city was the same way you got in: earth tunneling. All of the city guard are mages who have the ability to do said tunneling as a spell-like ability, in adition to having tremorsense (In this setting there were groups of elemental-based people. These guys are obviously the earth group. If this would not work well for your setting, simply have small tunnels going through the walls with guards set to detonate/collapse them if needed). These walls also had AMF traps like on the way down, so better know where ya tunneling. There was one huge main path, snaking throughout the entire city in the longest route possible, fortified along it's entire length, that was always kept open but could be sealed off anywhere at a moments notice. Travelling this path took a long time cause the very layout of this city was a hemisphere, with multiple layers and sections of city one on top of the other, so the main path was very much 3 dimensional.

In the center of the city was it's main purpose: A huge, 2-mile radius spherical chamber with a permanent portal to the Abyss at its center. The people of this city were fighting a nonstop battle against the incoming waves of demons, and only managing the stalemate because of all the favorable advantages they built for themselves.

Underneath the city, another mile down, was an underground farming zone (magically sustained of course) that supplied water and food to the whole city.

Yeah, thats bout all I can remember off the top of my head, been a while since that game...

Wailing Spire
This fortress sat atop a 2 mile high pillar of stone and was surrounded by a permanent maelstrom. Got it's name because the fortress and the pillar were cut in such a way that it sounded like a banshee was wailing somewhere from within the fortress, all the time.

The pillar itself was was 1 mile in diameter, hardened, and had multiple layers of seige weapons placed within it going all the way to the top. The pillar and everything within 2 miles of it (except extending upward) was covered in layerd AMF's, all originating from within the pillar. A single winding path made its way through the pillar, and this was the only way to make it to the fortress by land.

The fortress itself was surrounded by a permanent, rather huge, and transparent Prismatic Sphere. Course in case anything got through the shield, it was greeted with the magical D&D equivalent of flak cannons and the uber powerful casters that made them.

So yeah, I think those 2 are my "best" D&D fortresses, and by best I mean uber high powered, made by epic level casters, and would really require some epic level stuff to storm...

Of course, those are just the fortresses themselves, not gonna mention the high level casters using divinations and other methods to keep them safe.

I guess for a less epic challenge, assume that every powerful nation has some high level arcane caster in its service, and basically design the castles that nation builds about the same way said caster would design and defend a wizard's tower, only on a much larger scale.

Ormur
2009-10-09, 09:42 AM
I've also been trying to picture how strategists and castle builders in a D&D world would combat possible threats to their castles an buildings as cheaply as possible.

It's hard for a single DM to think of everything so a good way would be a contest to figure out creative ways of defeating a conventional castle.

I think you could group the biggest threats in two categories, infiltration and storming. An example of the first would be your PC's sneaking into the castle to steal the crown jewels or kill the King. The second would be the neighboring kingdom laying siege to your castle or a dragon getting pissed at you.

You'd have to set up some parameters, like of what level the threat could be. I figure the average castle couldn't afford anything powerful enough to stop a bunch of 20th level wizards.

But if we set the limit at perhaps level/CR 15 how would you infiltrate/storm a castle (without excessive cheese the DM could just overrule)?

I think the design of conventional castles would at least have to take flying threats into account, allowing archers or spellcasters cover for shooting at dragons or flying wizards and preventing them from just landing in the courtyard or on the roof.

Lysander
2009-10-09, 09:44 AM
If the setting has such abundant magic why even bother with castles? Just have lots of protective spells and magic items on the King, and they can sleep in a flimsy palace made of glass and gold leaf.

Guinea Anubis
2009-10-09, 09:52 AM
You could make a living castle, like from Girl Genius (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/) I used something like this in my one game.