Real Castles and Dungeons

I've taken a few trips to the UK and (recently) Ireland, and one common element to each trip was exploring real castles -- some ruined, some not. It's wonderful and fun, but from a D&D perspective, a little disheartening. See, real castles and dungeons aren't at all like those that we draw on our sheets of graph paper, with 10-foot squares.

In a typical medieval castle, the great hall would be around 20 feet wide and maybe 30 feet long (and that's big). But that's just two squares by three on our sheet of graph paper. A medium-sized room at best, right? And there's not a 10-foot-wide corridor to be found in the whole place.

But, you need to take liberties with reality when dealing with fantasy. Real dungeons were basically holes in the floor that led down to a smelly pit. Not much fun to explore that.

Here are a few useful tidbits and ideas from my experience in real castles that you might find useful when designing your own adventure locales:

Low Doorways: Doorways in castles and fortresses were intentionally constructed small, so that you had to bow your head as you walked into a room, without a weapon raised. This gave the defenders in the room the advantage. In such a situation, with a narrow door, the DM could give the creatures inside the room a +2 circumstance bonus to their initiative rolls.

Defender-Favoring Stairwells: Like the doors, the spiral stairs ubiquitous in castles were always made so that the defender at the top of the stairs could more easily use his weapon than the attacker who was fighting upward. In such a fight, give the person lower on stairs a -2 circumstance penalty to attack rolls.

Trick Stairs: Castle builders intentionally made stairs uneven and difficult to climb. They called them trick stairs. The defenders got used to it -- the attackers, having never used the stairs before, were at a disadvantage. In a castle with trick stairs, force any newcomer to make a balance check to use the stairs at any speed above half his normal speed. If the climber is moving anywhere from half to his normal speed, the DC is 15. If above their normal speed (double moving or running), the DC is 20. Failure means the attacker falls prone on the stairs, ending his move right there.

Wood: As a general rule, we sometimes think that castles and dungeons should be all stone. We forget about the uses of wood. Wooden floors and roofs, platforms, and walls should be common. Often, only the outer walls of a tower or even a keep were stone. The rest were wood, built into stone supports jutting from the walls. In your fantasy game, you could even have a dungeon with wooden floors, hiding a crawlspace underneath (for some reason). A castle or dungeon might have a large room partitioned with wooden panels to make it into smaller rooms. These panels could be painted or carved, and sometimes could be moved around without too much trouble. A high room might have a wooden platform, reached by wooden steps or a ladder, to create a balcony or loft.

Whitewash/Plaster/Paint: Images of bare stone walls in castles are almost always wrong. They were usually whitewashed, not only to brighten them up, but because the whitewash helped get rid of mold, mildew and even (although they didn't understand it at the time) bacteria. Sometimes, a thicker plaster was used to create smooth walls over the rough stone. And what bare stone there was, such as in carvings and even figures, was commonly painted. Castles and occupied dungeons don't have to be as gray and dreary as we think. Adventurers exploring a ruined castle might find it in chipped and faded paint and plaster as a sign of its former glory.

Murder Holes/Machicolations: We probably don't use this technique enough in our adventures. In history, defenders really favored the tactic of dropping things -- from boiling oil to human waste -- on their foes, through holes in the ceiling (murder holes) or special fortified holes in the battlements of the castle's outer wall (machicolations). Treat dropped liquids as grenadelike missiles in that they inflict most of their damage in a 5-by-5-foot area, by also splash nearby areas. A large pot of boiling oil inflicts 2d6 points of damage, and 1d3 points of splash damage. A murder hole or machicolation can attack only one specific area with dropped weapons, however (the one that they are directly above).

Part 2 of this article deals with real caves and caverns.