Yeah, that's me.
Let's start with a pic of a castle, shall we? Cause you just can't go wrong with castles.
This is a first in a series of articles in which I’m gonna talk about how living in the UK really informed my gaming life. Particularly by giving me first-hand experience with a lot of the sort of stuff that pops up in games all the time. You know what I’m talking about: Castles, medieval towns, inns, and cathedrals. But not just the medieval stuff—also Roman forts and steam-age/Victorian stuff and sailing ships and lots of other peeks into the sort of places and lives that are part of the fictional worlds we inhabit.
OK, to start with, a disclaimer or two. By “live in” I mean “spend some time in.” But more than just a five-day visit—enough time to really see and experience a lot of what I’m going to talk about. Oh, and by “England,” I really mean Great Britain—England is not the same thing as Wales, Scotland, or even Northern Ireland, but they’re all part of the UK. In fact, that picture above was taken in Wales, and to say it was England would really (and justifiably) piss off a lot of Welsh. Confused? See yesterday’s post on the topic.
This isn’t a travel guide, per se—though a gamer visiting the UK could do worse than treating it as one. And I’m going to skip over a lot of the most common tourist destinations in Britain. If I don’t cover your favorite spot, it’s not because it isn’t absolutely wonderful—I’m sure it is!—but because it’s not chock-a-block stuffed with relevancy to the gamer. Or, more likely, it’s slightly less chock-a-block relevant than the places I did choose to cover. Cause that’s the point of this series: Almost every square inch of the UK has something cool to offer the gamer’s imagination.
Oh, one more thing before I (finally!) get to the point: I’m only going to cover places I’ve actually been. Indeed, unless otherwise noted, every photo you see in this series was taken onsite in a Ryan family visit. You get the benefit of my personal experience, but, sadly, it does mean there are great places I just didn’t get to in my four years there (like the entirety of Scotland).
In This Episode: Castles
I picked castles for this one because, as the caption above says, you just can’t go wrong. Every gamer who’s picked up a funny-shaped die has spent time in an imaginary castle. So what’s the real thing like?
What is it?
We all know what a castle is. But to get more specific, my poster child for this excursion is Conwy castle in northern Wales—but the competition was stiff. Caernarfon? Beaumaris? Caerphilly? Dover? Bodiam? Chepstow? Warwick? You can hardly swing a cat in the UK without hitting a castle (that’s rough on British cats)—and a lot of them are Really Cool. (You might think any castle would be Really Cool, and you’d be right. But there are sooo many in the UK that you eventually become discriminatory.) By the way, if you’ve ever read David Macaulay’s excellent book Castle (and any world-building GM should have it on his or her shelf), the fictitious castle in question is closely based on Conwy—though the floorplan isn’t the same, all other aspects look more like Conwy than any of the other castles in the region.
See where that guy's standing? That's the front door. Have fun stormin' the castle!
What’s Cool About It?
Edward I built Conwy in the 1280s as part of a program of building that has made northern Wales the world’s undisputed mecca for castle visiting. He and his predecessors had been struggling with the Welsh princes for, well, ever, and Edward eventually decided that building a bunch of the world’s toughest and most outlandishly expensive castles—in hostile territory—would be cheaper and easier than the wars he’d waged so far in the effort. This is significant to the gamer for two reasons:
- First, this was at the absolute peak of the castle’s technology, and most of these castles were built from the ground up instead of modified from older castles. These are the platonic ideal of the castle, built by people starting from scratch and using every trick in the book. Beaumaris, in particular, looks more like the castle a modern GM would create than anything on earth. You can practically see the graph paper grid on the ground.
- Second, Edward was, for all intents and purposes, the evil overlord in this scenario. And that’s why I picked Conwy: It’s the most imposing and overlordish of the lot.
When I call northern Wales a mecca, I ain’t joking. The castles were built densely enough so that they could reinforce each other—within a day’s travel, or about 20 miles. In many cases, you can stand on a tower in one of them and see one or more of the others. Edward’s building program was so successful that two of the castles—Caernarfon and Beaumaris—were never completely finished. They were awesome enough to cow the rather fierce Welsh even in an incomplete state.
And that was no accident: These castles were built to impress as much as defend. Caernarfon’s angled (not round) towers and striped stonework was deliberately chosen to resemble the walls of Constantinople—because Constantinople those days was associated with the Romans, the only group who had previously subjugated the Welsh. (This fact implies that your 13th-Century Brit on the street had some idea of what Constantinople’s walls looked like, which in itself is an interesting factoid.)
Modeled specifically after Constantinople. Do you know what Constantinople looks like? Apparently the Welsh did.
In Conwy’s case, check these out:
Are those stone spiky bits sticking up there?
Why, yes. Yes, they are.
Conwy isn’t just huge and tall and dark and imposing. Although they’re now weathered down to near-invisibility, when it was built every single crenellation was topped with vicious-looking stone spikes. That’s right: Edward put spikes all over this castle just to make it look extra mean. You see that sort of thing in fantasy all the time, but it’s pretty darn rare in the real world. Most castles are like battleships: Imposing, but utilitarian. See what I mean about the evil overlord thing?
Whew! This has been a long post, and I’m barely getting started. I think I’m going to break it here, and come back with the rest tomorrow!
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Castle really is an excellent book.
Your right about not being able to swing a cat for castles. Conwy is a great castle. Harlech’s pretty good. Rhuddlan just along the coast is OK but has the motte of the previous Normal castle next to it – which is only really impressive once you climb it and see the drop down to the river. Carew Castle in South Wales isn’t that exciting but has a medieval tidal mill across the river – one day I will use it in a D&D scenario. Sadly my home town of Nottingham lost its castle in the Civil War but you just have to see the castle rock it stands on to realise how impressive it must have been (and why every Robin Hood film needs there location hunters getting a strong talking to for missing the cliffs it stood on).
Nottingham may not have much going on castle-wise, but it’s got a lot of its own cool stuff to recommend it!
Your absolutely right – the caves cut by hand into the sandstone certainly used to be worth a visit. Its just a shame that Castle Rock doesn’t have a castle on it anymore.
Looking good Charles, I can’t wait to read more.
Shame that you missed Scotland Charles, ’cause even as a Londoner, in 40 years of castle visiting nothing’s ever topped Edinburgh.
I agree; a real shame. It wasn’t for lack of desire; we just never were able to make it (being in the far south of the UK).
Did you ever go to Caerphilly – one of the most awesome Welsh castles with a lake for a moat!
Hi, Creighton, great to hear from you!
Yeah, we went to Caerphilly a couple of times. Definitely one of the good ones. In fact, you’ll see a little bit of it in tomorrow’s half of the post.
Nice! Can’t wait for the next installment.
May I make an honourable mention of Leeds Castle in Kent (just in case you don’t) please? Not because of its size, as it’s rather small, but mainly because of it being on an island in what surpasses any standard moat. The narrow paths to get to it must’ve been a pain for all concerned.
Cheers Charles
We would have liked to have gotten to Leeds castle (in, as you say, Kent–NOT Leeds). And it was pretty close to us. Unfortunately, our kids were preschoolers at the time, so we were mostly stuck with castles in which it’s OK for kids to run and climb and shout. We did Berkeley, but never Windsor or Arundel or others that were still preserved and furnished and otherwise museum-like. Which I understand Leeds to be.
Which gets me to some of my favourite pet-peeves about D&D and fantasy gaming in general. The 5 ft scale is ridiculous. Almost every real stairway in a real castle is about 3 ft wide MAX (often more like 2 ft), and steep as all hell, with tricky angled stairs. And yet, the two handed sword was actually used and useful in defending these narrow stairs. One defender could keep a large number of would-be attackers at bay with a two-hander, where a shield would be unnecessary, since the shield side is blocked by the centre column, and the right-handed attacker would be at a severe disadvantage fighting upstairs. The two hander meant that the defender could keep the attacker far enough away to avoid ankle stabs, and also use two hands so as to avoid tiring so fast.
It’s a sad truth that as simulation engines, RPGs will always have points at which they fall short.
That’s why the GM is so valuable. And why it’s important to remember the it’s the GM’s duty to interpret the =world= being described, and not just the rules. The fact that the GM can bend the rules to fit the situation is precisely how RPGs stand out from other forms of games.
I do agree that, for better or worse, D&D has been increasingly focused on understanding and interpreting rules instead of visualizing and interpreting the world. There are advantages to that, but it does change the experience and steal away, perhaps, a bit of the roleplaying magic.
I agree that simulation must fall short. However, a simple design change like that of changing the scale (was 3 ft units in AD&D) to 5 ft was unnecessary and unrealistic. Carriages that are 10 ft across? Most roads in England are not that wide. Even american carriages were no more than 5 ft wide.
On the issue you bring up, I feel that the WotC approach to sales is designed to kill each version in about 8 years or less. By ever expanding micro-ruling, and basing sales on selling new books of micro rules, the game is bound to become too cumbersome after a period of time. In fact, the time is shorter the more successful they are. My guess is that this strategy is driven by the knowledge that there are more players than DMs, and players may buy “player options” books, whereas only DMs will buy other content books that would tend not to “break” the game over time (or at least not as quickly).
As for stealing away from the RP magic – again I agree. Having feats or powers for everything means that characters without the feat or power cannot do the thing in question – otherwise it would not be fair for someone who has invested in the feat or power. That takes away from a lot of the coolest stuff about the game. It makes it hard to properly reward imaginative combat moves, or clever RP conversation just because someones’ stats or abilities don’t say they can do this, especially when someone else at the table has the stats and powers but lacks the imagination to use them.
All this suggests that RPGs as we knew them will never be suited for mass-market companies, but the best RPGs will always be produced by boutique-style companies or labour of love efforts from individuals.
You know, having spent four years at WotC R&D and two years as Brand Manager, I can tell you there’s nothing so nefarious. Really, the only thing R&D is trying to do is make the game better. But every change in the rules and underlying philosophy has consequences, foreseen and unforeseen. In this instance, a general move toward crystal clarity in the rules (through 3.5 and 4E) has led to the unintended consequence of focusing the GM’s role on rules interpretation instead of world interpretation. I get a sense (Mike Mearls recently wrote an article on the issue) that that has been noticed at WotC.
Game rules are like any other technology–they evolve over time as the underlying concepts are better understood and developed upon. That’s true without any form of planned obsolescence, so there’s really no need for WotC (or any other game publisher) to build strategy around making their game obsolete.
As for the specific issue of 3-foot or 5-foot squares, why not simply say that each square on the map equals 3 feet instead of 5?
Probably true enough (about the lack of deliberation). My comments were more to the point of there not being a very big business behind RPGs. By their nature, they can’t sell more than a couple of books to each gamer, and a few more to dedicated DMs per version. As far as I can see, attempts to do better will all have “unintended consequences”.
Perhaps more promising was the idea of “one system to rule them all” behind d20 and the ogl. At least one could sell several different games on the premise that “it is like/as easy as D&D, but another genre”. It wasn’t perhaps obvious, but creating competition probably made the overall market bigger. Killing off the easy licensing chilled the industry and gave critics ammunition (not to mention strengthening the competition from ones own earlier version).
I think this just comes out of the fact that RPGs do a range of things, and one reason 4e is my favourite edition of D&D is that it picks one ‘taste’ and does it well, rather than trying to have all tastes mixed into it. If I want simulation (and many times I do), I go to another system that specialises in that (HârnMaster, usually).
It seems to me that roleplaying games are like a menu or a smorgasbord, but many gamers seem to keep looking for “the perfect dish” to take and eat time and time and time again. If they don’t find one, they try mixing up all the dishes available to get “the perfect dish” (because if all these taste good, a mix of them all must be even better, right?). With 4e originally I thought that WotC (at least) had finally figured this out, and decided to try for a good, well balanced game that did one thing well. The jury is still out, but I’m not so sure they have really realised what they did right.
P.S. For those who like Sintra, the Cathar castles of the Langue d’Oc (Montsegur, et al) are simply stunning, too.
Cool article, castles are always interesting! Me and my wife have had plans about going to travel around UK some day, but haven’t done it yet. Castles are one of the main reasons, isle of Islay is another one.
Castles are one thing why I’m planning to turn towards Sword & Sorcery from D&D, and cavalry being another one – importance of such things is reduced in D&D. Heroes that fly have little respect for those things. While D&D is fun, if one plays it as the only type of fantasy IMHO he’s missing something fine.
There *are* squeezing rules, so you can indeed go down a 30″ wide corridor in v3.5. Eh, don’t get me started.