Editing Castle (section)

== 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 tops of the outer wall for double the amount of defensive projection.  Walls generally favored many hard angles, such as a star shape, if they expected to be set upon by enemy artillery, especially cannons, as the shape helped deflect projectiles.
*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. If you have a moat and drawbridge, the Barbican would be your first obstacle before you’d even think of crossing either one. Or, you would use the Barbican on the outermost wall, offset from the entrance to the main castle proper, forcing the enemy to travel along sharp right angles against even more defenses once they’ve broken through the first gate. Enemy forces would face much tougher resistance getting through a barbican than a simple gateway.
*Moats - A deep trench 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 (which may not always be available to them). In media, moats are commonly depicted containing either water or toxins, with a dangerous creature in the mix. In real life, however, moats rarely contained water (they typically only did so, if the castle is near a flowing body of water), and is simply a dry trench.  The reason for this is that the maintenance cost is high: the owner would have to regularly replace the water due to it becoming fetid and attracted insects, which can spread diseases and is a general nuisance for the castle. Due to this, only rich nobles could afford to maintain a water-filled moat for their castle. Dedicated military fortresses mostly had dry moats filled with anything that could probably slow the attackers down, like thick shrubs, spikes, and other easily-maintained nasties.
*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. Typically used on the corners of the outer wall and the gatehouse, allowing defenders to hit anyone trying to scale the walls from the side.
*Hoardings - wooden sheds built on top of turrets or outer walls for added protection, especially to archers to give them extra room to fire 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. A well-built keep would also have internal defenses, such as limiting access to certain parts and making it very difficult to take critical areas such as treasuries, storerooms, or residential areas.
*Great Hall - A room located within the Keep where the lord of the castle holds court, or feasts. This is one of the few rooms that the general public can visit.
*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.
*[[Dungeon]]s - Usually the underground level of your castle where prisoners are tortured for information, punishment, and/or just for fun.
**A particularly nasty feature of a dungeon would be an Oubliette, which is basically a dark, lightless pit to throw someone into. The only way out was for someone to lower a ladder for you.
**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, false floors that would drop out, 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. Be sure to treat the cooks well, as abused cooks don't do a good job and might be bribed into seasoning your stew with some arsenic.
*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.
*Battlements - A wall located on your ramparts, acting as more cover for your archers. The two main kinds are Crenellations, which have alternating high and low sections for optimizing protection and firing positions, and machicolations, which extend outward from the wall and have holes for dropping stones, dumping boiling water, or firing arrows
*Basements sometimes led towards the larva room (if you ever play resident evil 4).