DMGR2 The Castle Guide is a book which I was apparently misremembering rather badly before I sat down to reread it.
Prior to my taking another look at this in anticipation of writing this post, I was under the impression that
The Castle Guide was just about that: castles. That is, that the entire book was fixated on nitty-gritty details of various modularities involved with constructing a fortification in a fantasy campaign setting. And to be fair, there are elements of that in here, but not quite in the way I was thinking, and there's also more besides.
In hindsight, I suspect that I was recalling the
Stronghold Builder's Guidebook more than this one. Though at this point I wouldn't put it past me to be incorrectly recalling what's in
that tome also. I seem to remember that there were some cost-guidelines for various aspects of a castle in the AD&D 1E
Dungeon Masters Guide as well.
The Castle Guide, however, is a book that's not only concerned with the building of castles, but also with most other aspects surrounding them. That is, it wants to go over the sort of pseudo-medieval setting where castles - in their classical idea of a keep surrounded by a curtain wall - would be built in the first place (and in this regard, hews a bit closer to the quasi-European tropes than baseline D&D does), the knights that make use of such structures and the activities they pursue (jousting and tournaments get their own chapter), and the role of the castle in war.
This last one is worth noting. While the book desperately wants you to use the
Battlesystem Miniatures Rules for any sort of battle large enough to involve besieging a castle, it does dedicate an entire chapter to "quick resolution" rules that don't require a separate product to run.
I should mention that the book does try and round things out by glancing over things like demihuman approaches to knightly orders and what sort of castles other classes and races would construct. Insofar as the castles that non-fighters would raise, I confess to chuckling, simply because of how much this transported me back to the days when "name level" was a thing and everyone got their own stronghold as a matter of course (usually 9th level or thereabouts). I can
almost see the divide between players who would want to pull this book out and go over the details of their new keep in exacting measure, and those who'd want to just gloss them over. Of course, anecdotal evidence suggests that most players eschewed being tied down like this, and would want to keep adventuring, leading to what I now think of as the
loss of D&D's endgame.
That, however, brings me to my major criticism of this book. Maybe it's because I'm approaching this right after having gone back over the
Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide, but I'm struck by how there's no real advice here about how to transition your campaign into one where having a castle - along with the attendant people and territory - under your command is a feature rather than a bug. Maybe it was because the advice in the aforementioned book was taken to be generic enough that it didn't need to be called out here, but if that was the thinking then I disagree with it heartily.
The Castle Guide makes a good showing of what having a castle is for, but never gets around to why PCs would want to command one in a D&D game; that this leads to a new kind of adventuring rather than an end to it.
This is the reason I've been so enamored of the
Adventurer Conqueror King System for several years now: it ties the evolving nature of the campaign into the rules at a fundamental level, to the point where it's in the name of the game.
The Castle Guide, by contrast, is exactly what it says on the tin: a guide, not a system for running campaigns where the PCs are more than tomb-raiders and dungeon-delvers.
To be give credit where it's due, TSR did try this with the
Birthright Campaign Setting, which I remain interested in playing to this day but grow increasingly doubtful as to whether I'll have the chance to. Even then, reading over the various supplements suggests that the line was very much a mixed bag, as it had a lot of unique enemies (found in
Blood Enemies: Abominations of Cerilia, a book that I purchased before I bought the actual campaign setting) who were intriguing for the fact that they were political, economic, and military opponents as much as things to kill in a tactical skirmish, but also insisted on feeding us unappetizing supplements like
Player's Secrets of Stjordvik.
But I digress.
The Castle Guide is good at what it does, but does a poor job at explaining why you'd need it in the first place. That's a shame, since I think that what's here could be used as part of a great campaign, one that all too often goes ignored in favor of endlessly killing monsters and taking their stuff.
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