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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haltherrion" data-source="post: 5391163" data-attributes="member: 18253">Personally, I've always felt that the main way magic/fantasy would affect castle design is not flying mounts but the D&D equivalent of a mid to high level party. I'll acknowledge that it clearly depends on the prevalence of such parties both for offence and defense but in general, a classic walled fortification is good for 2D defense: keeping people outside the walls. If people can subvert the gates or go over the walls, much of the value of a classic castle or walled town goes away. As a case in point, while the ancient world developed impressive siegecraft in time, it took a long time and was for most of the period, a time consuming and costly endeavor to crack a fortification by siege. Much preferred was to take it by treachery. For some of the period, certainly in the Punic Wars, commanders would also early on try to take a fortification by storm. It didn't often work but it might and it was worth trying before laying siege. To my read, a reasonably high level, group of 4-5 adventurers/mercenaries, typical of your normal combined arms D&D party ought to be able to accomplish the same thing as a treachery. They should be able to scout out a weak point and penetrate it in a way to allow an army in. Defensive parties would offer some counter measure but in a large fort or walled town, it might get hard for the defense to "defend everywhere". A counter to this, at least for smaller fortifications, not necessarily towns, is to build things that look more like bunkers: self contained strong points with limited ways of ingress. You might still have some walled out works but the balance of effort and cost might be towards the strong points and less towards multiple concentric walls, for instance. I'd rather defend a few stout block houses connected by tunnels than some lighter towers connected by open curtain wall and courtyard. Alternately, one could have light towers and walls, even towers open on the inner face (as was sometimes built). This might be a light deterent and readily abandoned at limited harm with the real defense centered on a heavy keep. Even then, I would imagine a compartmentalized center keep that allowed for interior defenses which would make sense in case someone penetrated the keep. Put another way, in the presence of small, hard hitting raiding parties, I'd rather defend a few portals than a lot of wall. Aerial mounts offer an interesting axis of attack. One could imagine that for any one attacker and any one defender, the attacker might be able to muster a large aerial force and use it to breach the walls but in general, it would seem that large aerial forces would be extremely expensive. You can look at the normal cavalry to foot ratios and extrapolate something even worse for aerial mounts. Aside from the cost of acquiring and training the aerial mount (which is setting specific and possibly no where near what the D&D source books make it), they would still eat a huge amount and ought to be very hard to maintain. I took a stab at  the cost of feeding a griffin force based on energy expenditures of large flying creatures in one of my EnWorld blogs. Lots of different choices to make in such an analysis and different ways to cut it but all of them seem to suggest a griffin eats a lot more than a horse, almost certainly meat. I came up with 17-26 cows per griffin per year, YMMV of course. That might be practical for a small party or a lord and his attendants but even a decent size kingdom probably could maintain no more than a few scouting squadrons, it seems to me. So castle impact from aerial forces might be minimal.</blockquote>

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