Do castles make sense in a world of dragons & spells?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Nah, that's in the undersea castle... a flock of sea ghouls.

After that line, your only defense is to run, run so far away. Run, run all night and day.

You can't run underwater, though you could have swum. Swum all night and day.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

I've been playing Mass Effect 2 so the posts about Monte Cassino make me think of an orbital dreadnought firing linear accelerated slugs at 1.8% light speed, hitting at 33.8 kilotons each, one every two seconds...
no more castle, PERIOD!

or in D&D terms, get a Spelljammer, drag a barge loaded with metal ore, drop it from orbit and KABOOM!! Mushroom City

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I've been playing Mass Effect 2 so the posts about Monte Cassino make me think of an orbital dreadnought firing linear accelerated slugs at 1.8% light speed, hitting at 33.8 kilotons each, one every two seconds...
no more castle, PERIOD!

or in D&D terms, get a Spelljammer, drag a barge loaded with metal ore, drop it from orbit and KABOOM!! Mushroom City

Don't know much about spelljammers but my limited understanding is that nothing resembling real world orbital mechanics applies in the D&D 'verse, otherwide it would be a pretty devastating tactic.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I think the abbey of Monte Cassino was pretty well destroyed by the fraction of bombs that hit it (out of the kiloton-plus dropped in the general vicinity).

It was not militarized at the time of bombing. The Allies killed or drove out the monks and refugees who actually occupied it. A couple of days after the heavy bombing, German troops moved in.

The rubble served well enough for cover, maybe better than the abbey. The height itself retained a commanding view the valley -- which is why the Allies in the first place assumed that it either was or would be an observation post.

The rubble was only good for cover when the Allies were not dropping ordinance from on high. The cellers were very useful though to the defenders.

I do agree that the aboveground structures was pertty much demolished by the bombardment.

 

[El Mahdi]

deleted

 

[Haltherrion]

What is the magical society like given those two facts? What's important about this approach is that almost everyone assumes #1 and #2 first because they are the standard tropes of the setting, and only afterwards starts thinking about whether #1 and #2 are incompatible. Some people here seem to want to give the answe, given #1, #2 must be false and they proceed to then invent the conditions for a magical society where this is true. But, those assumptions depend entirely purely individual and utterly pliant opinions about the setting. None of them strike me as having nearly as much reasonableness as, "It's a standard fantasy, ergo castles exist." Therefore, I'm more inclined to say, "Given #1 and #2, what must the society and the magic be like to achieve this?"

It’s a fair enough approach to start with given #1, how to allow #2 as long as it is clearly acknowledged. I would expect it to be very common; I tend to do it myself but it isn’t quite the same thing as imagining a world where there is magic, presumably in nearly all settings from the beginning and in such a place, wondering if castles would come to be.

The first is, more “I like castles, how do I make them reasonable given magic.” Fair enough and useful for most of us who find the castle one of the must-haves in a campaign. This is distinct from the mental exercise of what you really get, given magic.

Since the original post only defined the discussion so well and even “castle” itself could stand to be defined (are we talking stone fortifications, or at also wood and earthen? Military fortifications separately from a fortified lordly dwelling?), there is ample room for confused and heated discussion. Similarly, what is meant by magic and how accessible is it?

Re: my reference to a “Rome”

You see this is itself an internal contridiction. Unless the society superficially resembles the historical periods of our own non-magical world, I cannot imagine a 'Rome' within it. If we don't assume as a starting point 'superficial resemblence to our own history and myth', and instead choose as a starting point, 'lots of magic exists', then the whole question becomes utterly unanswerable except to say that, "A society with pervasive magic would look nothing like our own history and myth, and would likely require the lifetime of a dedicated polymath to even begin to imagine what it would be like for a given set of assumptions about magic."

Actually I didn’t mean “Rome” in a strong sense of the particular Mediterranean Empire only in the sense of an aggressive, expansionist entity that was effective at exploiting available methods. Rome is interesting, though, in that they only originated so much technology; their innovations were more organizational.

Turning it back around, and admitting that “castle” hasn’t actually been defined, I would venture that most people are thinking stonework, fortified lordly residences in Europe of the period 1150-1350. That’s a very narrow period in time and place and one could as easily claim that they are no more likely to develop than Rome itself or any other Earth analog used on this thread.

That is, the castle itself as is commonly stereotyped, is a fairly specific evolution from a specific culture on earth, change any of those a little and you might get military forts (like the stone and wooden Roman forts) or Asian castle and forts or the old earthen and wood, massive fortifications of Iron Age Europe.

Even broadening "castle" to include realm-fortifications (like Edward I's Welsh castles) and military order fortifications doesn't really broaden the definition much in terms of time and place.

And keep in mind, most of the really important questions about magic and its use aren't really answered by D&D RAW at all, and often are never even addressed by people who play D&D because questions like, "Can anyone with sufficient intelligence learn to be a wizard?", "How much experience do you get training to be a mage and simply practicing magic as opposed to overcoming lifethreatening challenges?", "What makes magic work?", and "What can't magic do?" don't really come up in most games because they are tangental to the standard goals of play.

True enough and fodder for another lengthy thread but in the end, all those parameters are very much setting specific.

All I note is that judging from the amount of magic items generally present in treasure hordes and other magic prevalence indicators typical in a game world, there must be some reasonable pool of mages, and that magic has obvious military value, therefore, just as happened with, on Earth, Rome, the Mongols and other conquerors, someone would figure out how to exploit and make effective use of it. Perhaps not everyone could have many mages but enough powers probably could manage it and that would be enough to change the face of castles.

I do agree it is hard to take this any farther without more definition of what magic is and what do we mean by castle. That in itself would be an epic argument no doubt but perhaps entertaining.

I find these mental exercises stimulating if they don’t get too heated. And to be absolutely clear, I wouldn’t run a D&D game without castles; my players are happy with my castles and any niggling doubts I have about whether the castle would really be there is irrelevant to the campaign.

 

[Celebrim]

Actually I didn’t mean “Rome” in a strong sense of the particular Mediterranean Empire only in the sense of an aggressive, expansionist entity that was effective at exploiting available methods.

And in my response I meant that, given nothing more of a starting place than 'magic exists' I'm not sure we can gaurantee the development of government, much less authoritarian conquerers, much less castles.

To provide an example, published D&D modules are filled with examples of the sort of fairy tale magic where curses take root in responce to some evil or calamity. Generally speaking, its the rare published module that limits its imagination to what is strictly allowed by the rules made available to PC's, and this was especially true of earlier editions before 3e generalized item construction and made it more accessible.

So, if we take this general account, and that the magic of 'D&D' generally follows the description of mythic magic, its not clear at all if we don't also constrain the rest of the world to also resemble or own mythic history and traditions, that even government would exist. The reason being, in a world were widows and children can smite you with their death curses and the evil that you do comes back to haunt you, its not at all clear that any king or tyrant can long survive if hundreds or thousands of individuals blame them (fairly or unfairly) for their misfortunes. If every one you treat unjustly (or worse yet, which thinks you've treated them unjustly), can toss a curse your way, its not at all clear that government is functional or would ever develop.

Now, certainly you might argue that Kings and Emperors might have the resources to fortify themselves against the curses of widows and mothers who've lost their sons and daughters, and so become more or less proof against such events, but this argument presumes the existance of kings in the first place. It imagines a world were kings are a given and then magic comes into existance, not a world of fairy tale magic from first principles.

In this world, perhaps heirarchal leadership paralleling the military command chain never develops, because it has no utility. Perhaps in this world fame is greatly to be feared, and people spend most of their time trying to hide their identity and name from everyone else. Large associations rarely exist, except in the form of loosely governed secret societies. The notion of leadership as we know it isn't highly prized, structures larger than tribes, clans, or villages are unknown and the deadliest part of war is its supernatural aftermath.

If you protest and say, "Well by magic I obviously mean only the magic in the rules of D&D as written and not every fanciful idea every module writer has ever come up with.", my first complaint against that is that no published setting has ever conformed strictly to the rules as written. For example, no edition of D&D truly explains the abundance of magic items that is observed in the game from the rules of magic item creation nor the existance of high level NPC's from the rules on character advancement. So, it's not even clear that D&D follows from D&D, much less castles. And my second complaint is that even then there really isn't enough information to judge what the outcome will be, even just going by the rules as written. The open nature of D&D's magic system is such that it can never be completely described, so we don't know what can happen the way we might be able to describe completely society given a system of clearly defined enumerable powers.

 

[Hereticus]

Castles will be useless, or use-impaired, only in a setting where both of the following are true:

• Powerful spellcasters are common.
• The spell list presented in the rulebooks is exhaustive (these are all the spells that exist) rather than representative (these are the spells that are generally useful for adventurers).

Castles would only be useless if the attacker has access to higher level magic than the defenders.

If the level of magic is even I give the advantage to the defenders. Unless the defending high level mages walk around in the open. If all is even the defender wins because he has the stealth advantage to strike the attacker who is out in the open.

Since the rules allows for the creation of new spells, the second point is not relevant.

 

[S'mon]

Castles would only be useless if the attacker has access to higher level magic than the defenders.
.

One would normally expect that to be the case, since the attacker will normally be superior to the defender.

It does however raise the point that a fortified strongpoint is even more effective than IRL when backed by superior magic; the two act as force multipliers each increasing the effectiveness of the other. A castle + wizards (fly, fireball etc) is immensely effective at defeating vast, low magic armies or orc/barbarian hordes.

 

[Hussar]

Magic's not really a huge problem. GIANTS are a huge problem. Trebuchets are great and all, but, you still have a firing rate to worry about. OTOH, Mr. Giant can lob boulders that are pretty close to trebuchet sized (with a big enough giant anyway ) as fast as you could throw baseballs and probably about as accurately. A couple of dozen giants would level a castle in a serious hurry.

Never mind what you could do with any number of other monsters. Brown mold inside a hollow stone lobbed into the town freezes and kills lots of people, just as an example.

Never mind what you could do with giant insects.

It's not a problem when you have an army with one high level wizard attacking. It's a problem when you have a fantasy army attacking.