An alternate evolution of the castle in fantasy

[Fernandel]

Yeah, magic would bring a raft of changes to sieges, but other than the "walking WMD" casters, it'd be more utility stuff to enhance sapping and assaults rather than direct magical bombardment to destroy the walls themselves.

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There might actually be a change in things like the design of fallback defenses and assault strategies.

If your gatehouse is vulnerable to, say, a stealth teleport takeover, you'll need to design counterstrategies.

Those will be more based on human behaviour than fortification design though, methinks.

 

[Ironanvil1]

There might actually be a change in things like the design of fallback defenses and assault strategies.

If your gatehouse is vulnerable to, say, a stealth teleport takeover, you'll need to design counterstrategies.

Those will be more based on human behaviour than fortification design though, methinks.

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I suspect it might go broadly a hybrid between traditional medieval fortifications and the practices of the latter half of WW1, with light tripwire sentries on the outer defences, and protected redoubts with reaction forces. As well as mine and countermine at an ever more elaborate level, with magic involved.

 

[Vindictus]

If your gatehouse is vulnerable to, say, a stealth teleport takeover, you'll need to design counterstrategies.

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I mean, I mentioned this in a rant the other day, but sufficiently available and powerful teleportation just completely changes the game of war. I'm no tactical genius, and even I can tell that if enemies can just ignore the fact that you've got walls at all, your walls are not very useful- not to mention potential implications on logistics (and implicitly trade), if you can teleport goods.

The easy answer to this, of course, is to make it so that teleportation is either unavailable, or restricted in some important way. Harry Potter and Schlock Mercenary, amusingly enough, get around it through the same basic method- You can't teleport into or out of an area with an anti-teleportation field set up. This could justify a sort of 'Castle Wizard', tasked with maintaining the fortification's wards against intrusion.

Alternatively, make it so that teleportation is only possible through specifically created teleportation circles connected to a network of similar circles, and make these circles expensive and hard or impossible to transport, and then set up your fortifications so that anyone coming in through the circles would have to pass through security to get in anyway.

 

[Ironanvil1]

I mean, I mentioned this in a rant the other day, but sufficiently available and powerful teleportation just completely changes the game of war. I'm no tactical genius, and even I can tell that if enemies can just ignore the fact that you've got walls at all, your walls are not very useful- not to mention potential implications on logistics (and implicitly trade), if you can teleport goods.

The easy answer to this, of course, is to make it so that teleportation is either unavailable, or restricted in some important way. Harry Potter and Schlock Mercenary, amusingly enough, get around it through the same basic method- You can't teleport into or out of an area with an anti-teleportation field set up. This could justify a sort of 'Castle Wizard', tasked with maintaining the fortification's wards against intrusion.

Alternatively, make it so that teleportation is only possible through specifically created teleportation circles connected to a network of similar circles, and make these circles expensive and hard or impossible to transport, and then set up your fortifications so that anyone coming in through the circles would have to pass through security to get in anyway.

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I liked the method that Tiger! Tiger! used to retain security. You had to be familiar with the area you wanted to teleport to, as well as having the raw power to do it, so retaining privacy was paramount, and/or having stuff like mazes between the "public" teleport entrance and the private areas, so any nefarious type couldn't orientate enough to jump there.

 

[SinisterPorpoise]

Something important to note on the "cannonball vs fireball" point.
A cannonball doesn't explode, per se. What happens is that a cannonball made of metal is propelled at a target through gunpowder and releases its kinetic energy on impact, either tearing the target apart, pulping it, smashing it, or getting torn apart on impact and releasing lethal shrapnel.
A fireball is... made of fire. It burns, probably releases a cone or radius of flame on impact, uses up a lot of oxygen and sets flammable shit on fire and thus being incredibly lethal, especially against personnel -- but it acts in a completely different way than a cannonball would.
It's difference between firing a stone or a claypot with Greek Fire out of a trebuchet. Or using a cannon versus a flamethrower.
A mage that can conjure flame will not have the same impact as a cannon, and thus magic may not actually have a great impact on fortification unless they can directly destroy the fortification or circumvent it.

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Right, an Orb of Force or similar would be closer to a cannonball than a Fireball is.

 

[Ironanvil1]

On the bronze issue:
What if? - Alt. History - A World of Bronze

 

[Bassoe]

The castle is sentient and alive.

To elaborate, everything inside it is magically animated. It can open and close the various doors, puppet the suits of decorative suits of armor, watch through the eyes of the paintings and speak through the mouths of the taxidermy trophies. It is also smart enough to form allegiances/symbiosis with humans. Human allies get a well-defended place to live. In return, they work alongside the armor in continual resource extraction and construction as the castle continually grows.

The wizard who built the castle to defend against other magic-users is now long dead. The castle repaired itself from the damage done in their conflict. The throne room is basically this.

 

[Fernandel]

The castle is sentient and alive.

To elaborate, everything inside it is magically animated. It can open and close the various doors, puppet the suits of decorative suits of armor, watch through the eyes of the paintings and speak through the mouths of the taxidermy trophies. It is also smart enough to form allegiances/symbiosis with humans. Human allies get a well-defended place to live. In return, they work alongside the armor in continual resource extraction and construction as the castle continually grows.

The wizard who built the castle to defend against other magic-users is now long dead. The castle repaired itself from the damage done in their conflict. The throne room is basically this.

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What, so basically Castle Heterodyne?

 

[Avernus]

Anther thought; castles may have to have some kind of defense against being burrowed into from below, given how common rapid-tunneling underground species are in fantasy.

Hiring your own troop of dwarves to lurk below your castle in their own tunnels is one obvious solution; fight fire with fire. If that isn't practical (they might well be your enemy), another possibility is to build and cover over large reservoirs filled with something like water or fine sand, so if someone tries to dig from below their tunnel gets flooded and they drown or suffocate. Or you dig a shallow artificial lake and build a floating fortress in the middle of it.

Speaking of the other kind of floating fortresses, the aerial ones. Your classic "castle in the clouds" makes little sense; what use are castle-style defensive walls for a building that can only be reached at all by fliers in the first place? I figure a flying fortress would be a sphere regularly studded over its entire surface with openings for weapons and low turrets for archers (or war-mages, or whatever) to fire on anything that manages to actually land on the sphere.

 

[Pirx]

As has been said several times in this thread, it depends on the kind of magic available in the setting.

If magic is very powerful, fast to use and widespread enough that any attacking army can be expected to have enough magic users to obliterate any conventional fortifications in short order, large conventional fortifications will no exist, as they are a waste of money. Fortifications must be magically protected to defeat the thread of attacking magic users. It's just siege warfare as usual with another angle of attack besides breaching walls, infiltration or starving the besieged fortress. In this setting, the role of soldiers is to fight their counterparts and free your wizards to engage their equals unhindered. A more concrete answer to this question is not possible with out guidelines on how magic works.

If powerful offensive magic is a thing, but for what ever reason defensive magic does not exist, things change. Suddenly, large fortifications are not practical, because they tie up a lot of resources and are an obvious target for any attacker. instead, I'd imagine one would see more, but smaller castles dotting the landscape. Just large enough to hold down the land and crush bandits, peasant uprisings and other low-level threats that do not validate the use of very destructive magic. Wars between two armies that both have access to magic would become wars of manoeuvre instead of wars of sieges, I imagine. If your enemy possesses a vast destructive power that you can't protect yourself against, it's mandatory to not have them reach your cities, but instead engage and (hopefully) destroy them in the field, away from anything you want to defend. In such a setting soldiers would be most useful as raiders to attack the enemy logistic train or rear, as scouts and as guards to hold down your lands in peacetime and protect your logistics against enemy raiders. Warfare would resemble more 18th/19th century european warfare than high medieval warfare.

If magic is powerful, but slow to use (as in, you need rituals that take hours or days to perform), siege warfare is again viable and it becomes crucial to get informations on the actions and plans of your enemy's wizards, so your own magic users may have time to prepare a counter to it. Soldiers are important to maintain the siege, guard your wizards while they perform their rituals and storm any breaches, they create. Or hold your walls and make a breakout to disrupt, capture or kill the enemy casters.

If magic is very rare, I doubt most people would take any special care to prepare against it, unless it's easy and cheap to do so. If there a five magic users in the kingdom powerful enough to affect the outcome of a siege, it's not practical to prepare for a magic attack in most cases, unless your the king or something.

 

[Logan]

lets take a break from magical bombardment and go to a somewhat more conventional enemy of a castle, a horde. Whether they are a horde of orcs, undead or some other "we'll use our dead as a ramp to get over the walls" type of enemy hell-bent on getting into your castle and kicking you out of it. The castle evolved to weather a siege not keep a horde at bay, it was designed with and enemy that wanted to lose as little soldiers as possible not one that doesn't care what the losses are so long as the objective has been accomplished.

Also if anyone has an idea what a fantasy castle could face, feel free to post the question.

 

[SinisterPorpoise]

lets take a break from magical bombardment and go to a somewhat more conventional enemy of a castle, a horde. Whether they are a horde of orcs, undead or some other "we'll use our dead as a ramp to get over the walls" type of enemy hell-bent on getting into your castle and kicking you out of it. The castle evolved to weather a siege not keep a horde at bay, it was designed with and enemy that wanted to lose as little soldiers as possible not one that doesn't care what the losses are so long as the objective has been accomplished.
Also if anyone has an idea what a fantasy castle could face, feel free to post the question.

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Incoporeal enemies, undead spawning from corpses without proper burials, infiltration by demon cultists, or infiltration by mind-reading shape-changers, etc...

 

[Logan]

Incoporeal enemies, undead spawning from corpses without proper burials, infiltration by demon cultists, or infiltration by mind-reading shape-changers, etc...

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to deal with incorporeal enemies, could one make incorporeal walls? as for the undead, make sure all corpses are outside of the walls? or even better, create a moat with vertical walls to throw the bodies in so they act as a layer of defense for the castle

 

[SinisterPorpoise]

to deal with incorporeal enemies, could one make incorporeal walls? as for the undead, make sure all corpses are outside of the walls? or even better, create a moat with vertical walls to throw the bodies in so they act as a layer of defense for the castle

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OR you could just treat the dead in a respectful manner, since I was assuming that they would only rise from stupid shit like some imbecile murdering someone and stashing the body somewhere dumb.
And why not just build an entire second incorporeal castle if you are already going to the trouble of building walls...because just making sure to Ward the walls and entrances is fine for anyone who isn't a cheapskate, that's why.

 

[Vindictus]

"we'll use our dead as a ramp to get over the walls" type of enemy hell-bent on getting into your castle

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Include.... a roof?

Or just build taller walls? Or multiple walls, with kill-zones in between?

Seriously though, if you're outnumbered to the extent where your enemy can afford to stack their own corpses into a ramp tall enough to climb over your walls, you've got more problems than just "Oh they got through the walls"

 

[Sassy Sauron]

Your magician is no god. What troops are doing the most is holding ground, garrisoning, patroling and generally providing security.

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A wizard can do all that, but better.

Crystal balls, familiars, earth spells, golems, etc.

lets take a break from magical bombardment and go to a somewhat more conventional enemy of a castle, a horde. Whether they are a horde of orcs, undead or some other "we'll use our dead as a ramp to get over the walls" type of enemy hell-bent on getting into your castle and kicking you out of it. The castle evolved to weather a siege not keep a horde at bay, it was designed with and enemy that wanted to lose as little soldiers as possible not one that doesn't care what the losses are so long as the objective has been accomplished.

Also if anyone has an idea what a fantasy castle could face, feel free to post the question.

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Just throw a bomb down every now and then to blow away the bodies. Or put a big wooden board flat against your wall that occasionally pushes the pile over.

 

[Ironanvil1]

Include.... a roof?

Or just build taller walls? Or multiple walls, with kill-zones in between?

Seriously though, if you're outnumbered to the extent where your enemy can afford to stack their own corpses into a ramp tall enough to climb over your walls, you've got more problems than just "Oh they got through the walls"

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It also leaves aside basic logistics constraints - a horde so numerous as to be heedless of any number of casualties is going to starve as soon as it has to stop moving for even a brief period in order to overrun a fortification.

 

[Fernandel]

It also leaves aside basic logistics constraints - a horde so numerous as to be heedless of any number of casualties is going to starve as soon as it has to stop moving for even a brief period in order to overrun a fortification.

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If we're talking zombies animated by magic or as servants of an evil deity, things like food are less of a concern.

You have other concerns, like any faction that can animate sufficient numbers of the dead to create a ramp of its own bodies probably having enough other tools and firepower to use magical means less costly in mana, and probably also requires depopulating the entire countryside on the way to get the numbers. And using that tactic makes the horde weak to counterattack from elsewhere when attacking major strategic targets, while using it on minor objectives is probably a complete waste of resources.

But nonetheless, it's a strategy. In that case, though, it's a rather simple matter of placing the castle where the strategy won't work, like on high mountains or near water with strong natural currents, creating the layout so you create overlapping kill zones for normal and magical missile fire that funnel and destroy the horde before they reach the walls, the "phase line" layout of having several walls and defenders retreating to the next inner wall as each outer wall falls, installing magical traps like explosives, wards, or runes effective against the undead, and installing large-scale missile systems like trebuchets, ballistas, or whatever the equivalent of a magical mortar is to deliver long-range fire.

It's absolutely doable.

 

[willyvereb]

A wizard can do all that, but better.

Crystal balls, familiars, earth spells, golems, etc.

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If a wizard is a more viable alternative then we talk about a high fantasy setting where nearly everyone can cast magic and there's a good deal of common spells to rely on.
In such world being a magic-user is a distinction between priveliged nobles and commoners. A literal physical divide based on actual superiority.
My general peeve with this whole topic is that everyone just makes up whatever they want for the mage's ability, how common they are and what skills they might possess while also remaining a capable mage. Thus of course they can do anything. You guys treat this as if it's a play-doh for making up whatever for the mage thus it can be of course do X or of course better than Y.
The OP even shared his thoughts on the capabilities of the said mage. How about sticking to only what was confirmed?

 

[Fernandel]

We could, of course, also just have some fun sharing our thoughts by examining different scenarios and theorising based on that...

 

[Sassy Sauron]

If a wizard is a more viable alternative then we talk about a high fantasy setting where nearly everyone can cast magic and there's a good deal of common spells to rely on.

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We already were talking about high fantasy so...

In such world being a magic-user is a distinction between priveliged nobles and commoners. A literal physical divide based on actual superiority.
My general peeve with this whole topic is that everyone just makes up whatever they want for the mage's ability, how common they are and what skills they might possess while also remaining a capable mage. Thus of course they can do anything. You guys treat this as if it's a play-doh for making up whatever for the mage thus it can be of course do X or of course better than Y.
The OP even shared his thoughts on the capabilities of the said mage. How about sticking to only what was confirmed?

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Even within the OP's stated confines, that still means you have magical warriors that can sling up to around the equivalent to tank rounds, rendering everything less than multiple inches of protection obsolete. Assuming he can cast spells weaker but more numerous than that, that also means

What's that? Thicker walls? You still need slits to see and shoot through, and wizards are better shots than siege engines.

He also doesn't exclude utility spells that enhance reconnaissance and movement. Nor does he really set any parameters on anything, which makes discussing this more difficult. Are the dragons and giants big or big-big? How common are mages relative to the population, 1:10 or 1:10000? Can they create familiars and golems? Can they put permanent enchantments on objects without required their constant application of the spell?

 

[Esarey]

A castle with a defensive "moat" which functions almost like a wall-less TARDIS. Approaching it from the outside will cause you to keep walking and walking and not seem to grow any closer, while when you turn around, you can go back the way you came just as easily.

 

[Logan]

who'd of thought that leaving a thread for a week on its own would leave you with a lot to answer? and to my surprise, most of it is about magic
Magic: try to keep it to a minimum, do not invoke magic, spells or enchantments if a mundane solution exists.
mage rarity: roughly 1 per village, that is not there is one in every village; but in general, there is a mage for every village. Mages prefer isolation and the fact that a mage has a higher chance to parent a mage creates a huge disparity in the mage distribution.
also I said that the spells had the same explosive energy as a 120mm artillery shell not a tank round. castle wall thicknesses are measured in meters not inches. arrow slits getting hit by a mage? I don't remember commenting on the accuracy of a mage. I'll do it now: a mage is essentially throwing the spell at the target, I don't know how accurate one can be at 100m but I don't think one can hit a 10cm by 75cm slit.
On a related note, I may end up saying this is a low fantasy setting if it means you people will stop arguing about magic.
familiars? lets say no as I haven't much experience or knowledge regarding them
Golems: yes, their maximum size will be 5m minimum size of 0.9m; almost any material, must be homogeneous; can be any simple form, no squids. the material of a golem maintains its mundane properties (a golem made of paper will break apart in water) and must be animated by either placing a soul into the golem. I completely forgot about golems and just what they could do during a siege.
for permanent enchantments, for the sake of simplicity and to hopefully end the 3 page argument about magic: no, you can't
Can you please stop making posts dedicated to magic, I don't recall naming this thread "Ways magic can affect castle design" or "What magic can do in the context of medieval sieges"

 

[Hykal94]

who'd of thought that leaving a thread for a week on its own would leave you with a lot to answer? and to my surprise, most of it is about magic

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Well you should have put those point in your OP in the first place!

 

[Sassy Sauron]

who'd of thought that leaving a thread for a week on its own would leave you with a lot to answer? and to my surprise, most of it is about magic
Magic: try to keep it to a minimum, do not invoke magic, spells or enchantments if a mundane solution exists.
mage rarity: roughly 1 per village, that is not there is one in every village; but in general, there is a mage for every village. Mages prefer isolation and the fact that a mage has a higher chance to parent a mage creates a huge disparity in the mage distribution.

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Don't invoke magic if a mundane solution exists? So never invoke magic?

also I said that the spells had the same explosive energy as a 120mm artillery shell not a tank round. castle wall thicknesses are measured in meters not inches. arrow slits getting hit by a mage? I don't remember commenting on the accuracy of a mage. I'll do it now: a mage is essentially throwing the spell at the target, I don't know how accurate one can be at 100m but I don't think one can hit a 10cm by 75cm slit.

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You can't throw something out to 100m. That's over 300 feet. That's twice as far as a soldier can throw a grenade.

Regardless, a 120mm explosive going off anywhere on a castle wall is not good for any medieval fortification.

On a related note, I may end up saying this is a low fantasy setting if it means you people will stop arguing about magic.

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Then what's the point? I mean, the only other thing to talk about is stuff like dragons, to which the answer is just,"put a fireproof roof over everything."

Also, you said one mage a village, but then say it's a low fantasy setting. That's like the exact opposite of a low fantasy setting.

Unless by low fantasy you mean,"Fantasy but in the real world", but then there's still magic.

familiars? lets say no as I haven't much experience or knowledge regarding them
Golems: yes, their maximum size will be 5m minimum size of 0.9m; almost any material, must be homogeneous; can be any simple form, no squids. the material of a golem maintains its mundane properties (a golem made of paper will break apart in water) and must be animated by either placing a soul into the golem. I completely forgot about golems and just what they could do during a siege.
for permanent enchantments, for the sake of simplicity and to hopefully end the 3 page argument about magic: no, you can't

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What if it's a permanently enchantment using a soul like with a golem?

Can you please stop making posts dedicated to magic, I don't recall naming this thread "Ways magic can affect castle design" or "What magic can do in the context of medieval sieges"

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Your OP specified magic as one of the factors, so you can't blame people for talking about it.