Castle

A Castle refers to a medieval European fortress (though the term is also applied to a variety of non European fortresses as well), usually used as the residence and seat of power of some noble household. Castles are distinct from fortified towns and cities with walls, though towns often grew around castles and castles called citadels were sometimes constructed in or near cities to protect them. The word comes from the Latin castrum, referring to the fortified bases in which the Romans stationed their legions.

Naturally most GrimDark fictions don't show one of the keep roles of Castle, protecting peasants during wars. After all if they all die who's going to man the farms which feed your troops?

Parts of a Castle

• Walls - Designed to keep those filthy barbarians from breaching your stronghold. Can be made from a wide variety of hard materials, ranging from wood to stone. Smart architects would use multiple concentric walls, with the outer walls being lower than the inner walls, allowing for archers and defensive weapons on the inner wall to fire over the outer wall for double the amount of defensive projection.
• Gates - Allows entry and exit from your castle and usually well fortified to prevent the enemy from using it during an attack.

• Portcullis - an added defense to the gate in the form of an iron grill that can be raised or lowered. Some gatehouses used two of them as a means to trap would-be intruders.
• Barbican - a dedicated gatehouse set apart from the main castle walls that is filled with defenses such as murder holes and arrow slots. Enemy forces would face much tougher resistance getting through a barbican than a simple gateway.

• Moats - A body of liquid that encircles the outer perimeter of your castle, designed to prevent enemy troops from assailing your walls by forcing them to either cover up the moat or deploy specialized siege engines to quickly cross it. Traditionally, moats are simply filled with water (and sewage) with the occasional ferocious animal thrown into the mix, but fantasy settings typically fill them with nastier things, such as acid or toxins.
• Turrets - Tall towers that give your sentries full view of your castle and also gives your archers or siege engines an elevated, defensive position to shoot at the enemy from.
• Keep - The heart of your castle. This is usually where the commanding officers of the castle reside in. Thus, taking the keep is as symbolic as taking the entire castle itself.
• Armories - A place to store all the pointy sticks and lumps of sharp metal that your troops will use to give it to the enemy good.
• Granaries - Your castle's central food storage. An army fights (and defends) on its stomach, so be sure this place is always stocked up and safe from sabotage.
• Dungeons - Usually the underground level of your castle where prisoners are tortured for information, punishment, and/or just for fun.
  • Since castles come from an era when people surrendered, dungeons held prisoners to be ransomed back or exchanged.
  • Some of the dungeons that went overboard with the torture equipment could easily have been /d/ungeons.
• Traps - More defensive emplacements designed to bleed your enemy's forces. This ranges from a wide variety of hidden emplacements spike pits, pots of boiling water that spill over, spiked walls that force the enemy to be deliberate with their movements, or rigged trenches.
• Kitchens - Where your cooks prepare food for consumption. Be sure to have good cooks, otherwise your army may think of revolting against you.
• Trophy Room - A place to store all the mementos concerning your castle's achievements. This can be anything from a personal commendation by the king, to kill trophies from slain opponents.
• Rest room - Knights needs to poop, you know?
  • More commonly, this was a convenient window overlooking the moat. Or streets.
• Parapets - A low wall on the roof, more cover for your archers.
• Basements sometimes led towards the larva room (if you ever play resident evil 4).

Types of Castles

• Motte and Baily: A fairly basic type of castle in the Dark Ages. A hall of either stone or wood (the Baily) is built on top of a hill, a basic wooden wall is put around it, at the base of the hill was built some stabled and similar which were also walled off. In some cases the wall (the Motte) circled both, in other cases there were two rings of walls around both the hall as well as the support structures, with a walled off corridor between them. Some of these would be upgraded to have stone walls as time went on.
• Concentric Castle: A castle with two or more walls, with the walls getting increasingly taller as you go in. This allows for archers on the higher inner walls to fire down on enemies if they captured the outer walls. Despite the name they did not have to be circular.
• Bastion Fort: The widespread application of gunpowder in warfare was generally unfriendly to medieval-era castles. Tall walls, which used to be a massive advantage, would now be death traps as cannons could easily knock them down, with taller walls merely adding more rubble to potentially collapse on you. So a bunch of renaissance Italians came up with bastion forts, also known as star forts- these are low to the ground and instead of towers have pointy "arrows" called bastions at the corners to prevent enemies from having a place to take cover from and allow the bastions to support each other. Relatively easy to fortify, many went for a simple sloped hill to absorb cannon fire, but you could also build redoubts in between the bastions to add another layer of defense.

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