NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Set" data-source="post: 5123959" data-attributes="member: 41584">Alchemy can also provide cheaper lower-magic options. A salve that makes wood hard to ignite, suddenly those wooden hoardings aren't so useless. (Plus, the vast majority of fire spells and attacks don't actually *start fires,* so, barring the few that do, like burning hands, you might not even need to do more than splash some water on the wooden barriers to keep them wet when a seige has begun.) An alchemical compound of stinging nettle and foul-smelling alkaline plants that, when burned, creates thick clouds of stinging smoke that rise into the air and inconvenience those flying attackers. Possible downside is that an untimely wind could bring some of those clouds drifting back down to inconvenience your defenders... Flyers find themselves blinding by watering eyes, possibly even risking suffocation, and, if alchemy is used, and not just burning foul crap, the smoke might be specially designed to only affect the sort of creature that is attacking, like 'Wyvern-Be-Gone.' A solution combining blessed silver (or gold) and holy water worked into the mortar, preventing shadows, wraiths and spectres from passing incorporeally into the keep and slaughtering everyone. The tanglefoot catapult / ballista ammo, mentioned upthread, used to bring down winged flyers. The ammo itself barely hurts them, but gravity kills. Giant harpoons, fired from ballita, or spiked nets, fired from catapults, can do similar things without the alchemy. The roofs of buildings can be adorned with magical glyphs, sigils, runes, symbols, scripts, etc. that cause havoc on any flyer who can read them, while being completley harmless to the defenders below, since they'll never be able to look down at the roof and see the big permanant Symbol of Be Stunned for One Round and Forget How to Fly and Fall Down and Die. If the local area has ever displayed a problem with climbing foes using spider climb or similar abilities (giant riding geckos, or whatever) to motor right up the walls, they can be designed to have caltrop-like spikes in the upper sections, *or* have glyphs of warding that blast climbers right off the side of the wall, *or* be enspelled with some sort of grease effect (temporarily, again, perhaps via alchemical oils, or flat-out mundane grease from the kitchens!), or some combination of the above, so that those giant spider-riding fools end up falling off the walls to their death before they make it up to the defenders. It's relatively easy to come up with counters for this stuff. The spells and alchemical items and mundane items in the PHB are great for attacking stuff right here and now, and not at all designed for making a position defensible for decades. It's a game designed for adventurers, who are more pro-active, and more likely to be assaulting a castle than defending one. And even then, there are a ton of spells that *can* be used to defend a castle (starting with Hallow -> your cleric spell here), and potentially unlimited spells and mundane and special equipment items that can be dreamed up by the retired adventurers who now live in that castle.</blockquote>

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