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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kigmatzomat" data-source="post: 2248149" data-attributes="member: 9254">Yes, for various reasons.  1) magical foes are not the norm: big creatures with teeth or lots of humanoids with pointy sticks are.  2) tax collection, primarily at river crossings, mountain passes, and other choke points.   3)Communication (what, no heliograph or carrier pigeons in your world?!?)   4)Nobles gots to sleep somewhere and it's dang well gonna be niftier than the merchants' houses!This tends to refine castles to two sizes: cheap places to house soldiers and drive off small orc hordes and big expensive fortresses that can withstand siegies.  A simple tower keep with an earthen wall is sufficient to provide an outpost against a lot of humanoid activity and house a fighting force able to deal with the abherrations and magical beasts that rear their ugly heads.  The keep should only need to hold position for 2 days, tops, before relief arrives.  Nahhh, I like keeps to be rare and expensive.  Two reasons: requires players to shell out major coin and co-opt an entire town to build a castle over a few years and it reinforces the status of anyone with a keep.  I don't think a house rule is necessary.  90% of a castle does not need to be immune to teleportation; just the main keep.  simple towers would get lead-lined walls out of expediency, probably with the lead at half the wall's thickness to really irritate anyone trying to stoneshape their way into the castle.  Fortresses, which are expensive as sin and have massive defenses, rely on the primary walls being multi-layer, consisting of stone, earth, sand, and wood with occassional 1' gaps between the walls.  Why 1' gaps?  To stop the disintigrate, dig/tunnel/stoneshape spells of course! Same thing goes for the mixed materials.  Use of earth and sand will cause cave-ins that fill in some of those holes.  Expect various moderately cheap, semi-permanent magical defenses, especially if they are mobile (e.g. Hallow+Dispel Magic or a Symbol engraved on a mobile banner)The fortress's inner keep will be set up with the lead walls and will also be Hallowed with some defensive effect (90' radius invisibility purge or negative dimensional anchor is quite nice!).   Use of the nightengale floors, bead curtains, rice paper floor-runners (makes noise and leaves marks), and the like are all likely candidates.  Almost definitely.  Any noble worth their salt will have a temple within their keep.  It means the noble has healing magic immediately accessible, is probably within the temple's Hallow (what, every temple with a cleric isn't re-Hallowed annually in a celebration?), and causes anyone who attacks the castle to gather the ire of the temple's religion.  Hounds are good, creatures with blindsight are decent too.  I'd also factor in trained falcons, owls, and/or bats.  Bats?  Sure, they can fly and see invisible creatures.  Train the bats to swarm airborne people without attacking and then pepper the 5' volume with arrows.  Also update the siege engines.  Notice there's nothing using alchemist fire?  A simple catapult can fire a barrel, if the barrel is filled with oil and has a small amount of alchemist fire as an ignition system you can easily destroy formations.   Trick barrels with rope wrapped around them that unwinds while the barrels in flight would create a rain of flaming oil over a much larger area.  Oh, and siege engines should be behind the walls with 100% cover: no fireballing the oil-slinging catapult.</blockquote>

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