Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Haltherrion" data-source="post: 5120551" data-attributes="member: 18253">Defenders training their own flyers is an excellent point and one likely to happen in a &quot;real&quot; fantasy world. New military technology may allow an advantage to one side in the short run but in the long run others will acquire it (or be eliminated and no longer matter).&nbsp;But it does raise several points: rulers have finite resources and if you spend more one place, you have less money for other places. Raise a large flying force and you might not be able to afford the big stone castles, for instance. Or perhaps just as important: you might not see the need for the castle.&nbsp;For much of the middle ages, the castle served as a place to project force from, for controlling an area or for preserving forces that an invader could not affort to bypass. If you can fly your force in from a distance, do you need the castle?&nbsp;On the other hand, one would think that a flying creature needs a huge amount of high energy food (meat). It might be very expensive to maintain flying forces in large numbers or for long. Maybe they are more for recon.&nbsp;Some years ago I ran a campaign where the premise was that the players were playing a people conquered by invaders who had used griffins to overthrow the old regime. But decades had gone by and the griffins were much fewer in number now since they were so expensive to maintain and the balance had changed although the conquered did not realize it yet.&nbsp;Anyway, I love a big stone castle as much as anyone and I use them. I try to address the most egregious aspects of &quot;castles in a fantasy world&quot; but I also realize that in a world of real magic and creatures people would figure out ways to use them that would probably leave little place for castles as most of us imagine them from the high middle ages.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Haltherrion, post: 5120551, member: 18253"] Defenders training their own flyers is an excellent point and one likely to happen in a "real" fantasy world. New military technology may allow an advantage to one side in the short run but in the long run others will acquire it (or be eliminated and no longer matter). But it does raise several points: rulers have finite resources and if you spend more one place, you have less money for other places. Raise a large flying force and you might not be able to afford the big stone castles, for instance. Or perhaps just as important: you might not see the need for the castle. For much of the middle ages, the castle served as a place to project force from, for controlling an area or for preserving forces that an invader could not affort to bypass. If you can fly your force in from a distance, do you need the castle? On the other hand, one would think that a flying creature needs a huge amount of high energy food (meat). It might be very expensive to maintain flying forces in large numbers or for long. Maybe they are more for recon. Some years ago I ran a campaign where the premise was that the players were playing a people conquered by invaders who had used griffins to overthrow the old regime. But decades had gone by and the griffins were much fewer in number now since they were so expensive to maintain and the balance had changed although the conquered did not realize it yet. Anyway, I love a big stone castle as much as anyone and I use them. I try to address the most egregious aspects of "castles in a fantasy world" but I also realize that in a world of real magic and creatures people would figure out ways to use them that would probably leave little place for castles as most of us imagine them from the high middle ages. [/QUOTE]

Verification