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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6986922" data-attributes="member: 4937">The fort will need defensive structures to serve its purposes.  The fort will need a gate house.  The gates house will have double doors, double portcullis, and an outer drawbridge preferably of copper or bronze sheathed wood, reinforced by iron nails and bands.   The passage through the gate house will be covered by arrow slits and murder holes.  The gate house otherwise acts as a large tower.  The exit of the passage is always into a courtyard over looked by the keep, so that if the gate falls any attacker that forced the gate or bypassed it finds themselves trapped in an exposed area and subject to missile fire (and possibly spells).   When the gate is open, it is always defended by sentries with dogs trained to alert the sentry when they smell an intruded that they cannot see.  More elaborate defenses may also be possible.The fort will be enclosed in walls not less than 20' high.  All walls will be surmounted with covered ramparts that provide full 360 degree and overhead cover, and project out from the wall.  Ramparts will be regularly pierced with arrow slits, and will be able to fire projectiles both down at attackers at the base of the wall, and up at attackers flying overhead.  Cross shapes to the arrow slits give maximum field of vision while minimizing exposure.  All walls will be able to fire down on interior courtyards and defenders within a wall (there is no being 'on a wall' of a fort in a world with fireballs and dragons).  Walls generally are only accessed via towers, and any courtyard access is controllable.  Roofed areas will be covered with tile or slate to avoid fires, and sloped at least 45 degrees to shed snow and force anyone atop the rampart to balance precariously.  Ramparts will have wet hides on hand in a siege to patch roofs damaged by missile fire, and buckets and barrels of water for extinguish fires.All walls will be overlooked at least the corners by towers that are at least 10' taller than the top of the ramparts.  Towers will have 360 degree fields of fire, including into courtyards.  They will project out beyond the walls to allow firing along the base of the wall.   Towers will act as expedient keeps as necessary, and will have their own separate storage, barracks, and miniature gate houses (even if only an 'airlock' style set of doors), and be able to shut themselves off from outside access in the event adjacent walls are overrun.  Towers are of two basic types - anti-personnel towers and anti-siege towers.   Anti-personnel towers are topped by ramparts similar to walls, but have roofs that are more steeply angled to make purchase difficult.  Anti-siege towers are topped with anti-siege weapons - usually a mix of ballista, mangonels, and catapults - with direct fire weapons preferred in most roles.  To provide for better fields of fire and to ensure the fort has no blind spots, these must generally be uncovered.  Anti-siege engines are generally mounted on platforms that can pivot (some times operated from the room below) and will have windlasses that can quickly adjust elevation.   Ammunition can be stored in the room below the platform and passed up through a trap door.   In general, one of the primary jobs of anti-personnel towers is ensuring that no unharrassed foe can get in range to deliver harassing or destructive fire at the anti-siege towers.   Archers will be trained to single out unarmored attackers with wands or staves or the like for special attention.  Anti-siege towers in turn focus on threats that could damage the ramparts of an anti-personnel tower, such as siege engines and large monsters.   All towers will be close enough to each other to provide useful mutually supporting fire.  Secondary positions for indirect fire are sometimes located behind the wall in inner courtyards.  These will hold catapults or in larger fortresses trebuchet.   These positions are not as exposed as those on tower tops to enemy spell or missile fire, but aren't useful against overhead attackers.   They are good positions for launching barrels of flaming oil or similar hazardous projectiles if the fortress has those resources.  However, they require a spotter to report the fall of the missile and the locations of targets, since the crew will not be able to see it themselves.There will be a keep, acting as a both a refuge of last resort and insurance against any attack overrunning part of the fortress.  The keep will have its own separate gatehouse, much like the main gatehouse and protected in much the same way.  It will have its own ramparts and towers which will naturally be able to mutually support each other.  All towers in the keep will be at least as high nearby towers in the outer perimeter, and walls will be nearly as high as the towers.The keep will have alarm bells, horns, and gongs for signaling or spreading various alerts.</blockquote>

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