I found a great video about one of the most famous fantasy tropes, dungeons. It’s pretty long, but well worth a watch. If you’re interested in learning about everything from castles and manor houses to swords and jousting, I’d highly recommend Shadiversity on YouTube.
Now that you’ve had a chance to watch that, let me tell you why he’s wrong.
As he rightly points out, the purpose of a castle is as a display of wealth as well as a fortification against one’s enemies. In a world with magic, aspects of real world castles become problematic, specifically, the use of towers as a method of imprisonment. In a world where flying is not only possible, but likely, the tops of towers become liabilities, not assets. In a world where teleportation and scrying are common, simplicity likewise can become a liability. If you’ve seen one castle you’ve seen them all, the royal jewels will be gone within a month. The more valuable the items, the more would be thieves will risk in order to get them. The more powerful the lord, the more force would be usurpers will bring to bear against them. Therefore, castles and other fortifications will need to be designed based on three competing requirements: protecting the people inside the castle, protecting valuables, and allowing the noble to do the business of ruling the area.
In terms of fortifications, the standard castle design using ramparts, crenelations, moats, machicolations, and properly designed gatehouses will work for the conventional forces. When it comes to the defenses against magic, consider fighting magic with magic. Force walls, dispelling wards, and any number of runes will protect your forces from enemy wizards, and these should not only be used, but incorporated into the castle design. In terms of the structure itself, open ramparts and towers will leave your forces open to attack or area of effect spells from above. Therefore, your forces will need cover from these sorts of attacks. These will need to prevent enemies from landing on the rooftops, so traps, highly sloped roofs, and spikes should be provided. The defenders will also need some way to counterattack air-born forces. This could mean open sections between the covered areas on ramparts, shuttered windows that can only be opened from the inside, or arrow slits in the ceilings.
Dealing with valuables presents an even bigger challenge. Without magic, you don’t need to do much more than have a vault, safe, or otherwise locked container and some guards. Put the valuables on the top floor of your keep and now any would be thieves have to go through several floors of guards, advisers, guests, and whoever else is in the keep just to get to the lock. With magic, you now have to worry about a lot of issues. The first, and most obvious, is invisibility. Now, sneaking through the area is a snap as long as you have enough spell duration to get to the end. All they have to do is kill those guards, grab the loot, turn invisible again, and escape before anyone knows you’re there. How do you deal with this with architecture? Doors. Lots of them. Invisible people still need to open doors. Just put guards on a rotation and you have a simple invisibility detector without magic.
The big problem is teleportation. This bypasses all of your defenses and likely gets them out the same way. How do you deal with that? You could have some material that prevents teleportation. This is your setting, after all. You could simply build areas out of the material and no problem. If you don’t want that (why not just make everything out of the material?), another way is to do exactly what the video above says not to do. Build a labyrinth of strangely laid out rooms with narrow corridors and lots of dead space filled with rock. Make them have to go through several rooms in sequence to get to the vault. The corridors should have traps and be narrow enough to allow one person down them. They should also be long and straight into each room, which should have cover so the guards can simply shoot down the hall while protecting them from any attack from that direction. The vault itself should be in a strange location near the center of the complex to prevent people from simply burrowing in from the top or side. Unless they know exactly where they are going, teleportation becomes extremely dangerous, if not impossible.
This arrangement is complicated and expensive to build. It would also be extremely difficult to actually conduct business with such an arrangement. After all, who wants to spend half an hour going from the throne room to the dining room, disarming traps and giving passwords the whole way? How do you have a wedding, or just walk around the living area? Do we compromise the security of the keep for convenience? I doubt it.
The answer is the traditional fantasy dungeon. Bury the labyrinth and place the more traditional keep in the castle. This gives you the best of both worlds. If the castle is attacked, people who need to be protected can simply get to the labyrinth, making their way to the safest part of the area. You can even use the area for a prison. After all, if it’ll keep your valuables safe, surely it’ll keep your prisoners where they belong.
It might look something like this:
Disney had it right!
Next week, I’ll talk about how magic changes a specific type of building, the prison. Thanks for reading (this was a long post!). I’ll see you next Sunday.
