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It may be said that I fear too much. Surely, considering the state we stand in, I think it less danger to fear too much than too little. —Sir Francis Walsingham OceanofPDF.com
INTRODUCTION The world is a dangerous place—especially when you’re up to no good. But even a person of unblemished character and sterling repute may make enemies, especially among those of more blemished character and more tarnished repute. Perhaps your deeds have intruded on someone else’s interests, or soon will, and they’ve resolved to stop you. Perhaps the wealth you’ve amassed is becoming an irresistible temptation to larcenous minds. Perhaps you’re making discoveries that others would prefer to keep under wraps—or would appropriate for purposes of their own. Whether you’re a rampaging monster, a renowned hero, a despised tyrant, an ambitious schemer, a paranoid recluse, or the current possessor of the Golden MacGuffin, someone’s going to come at you. Probably more than one someone. You need to be ready. You need a lair. When you’re writing your own adventure material for a tabletop roleplaying game from scratch, you have all kinds of freedom. You decide what environments the player characters will travel through. You decide what villains they’ll fight, what those villains’ plans are, and what kind of minions those villains will have. You decide what kind of help and hindrances the PCs will encounter along the way. And here’s a point of underrated importance: You draw the maps. If you’re throwing your PCs and monsters at each other in a plain, rectangular room, or designing your dungeons as an essentially (or literally) random maze, you’re missing all kinds of opportunities to add flavor, challenge,
complexity, and narrative. Designing a well-defended stronghold gives you opportunities to show off how your antagonists think and what they consider important. In The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters and MOAR! Monsters Know What They’re Doing, I break down the stat blocks of fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons monsters to determine their unique tactics and styles of fighting so that every combat encounter with a different monster or villain is a distinct experience. In this book, I discuss how to create the environments in which those combat encounters take place so that they feel as real and alive as the monsters and villains do. Outfighting the enemy is no longer enough: PCs will have to outthink the enemy as well. Pushing your players to consider how to solve problems without running at them head-on, weapons swinging and fireballs blasting, is as much a gift to them as it is an obstacle, because some of the best gaming memories are born from the cunning plans that come together to produce success against the odds—and from the ones that go riotously sideways. Having a lair is all about establishing surroundings that give you every available edge over those who want to kill you and take your stuff. For example, in The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, I make three observations that are essential to understanding how kobolds fight: First, by necessity, they fight in darkness or underground, not under broad daylight. Second, they’re small and weak yet instinctively coordinated, so they seek strength in numbers. Third, they make use of traps. The D&D sourcebook Volo’s Guide to Monsters, in a delightful section on kobold lairs, sensibly depicts a kobold lair as an anthill of twisty subterranean passages, full of traps and choke points, in which larger creatures will get lost, stuck, or both. It’s customized to maximize kobolds’ comparative advantage over their likely foes. The foes are big, and kobolds are small; therefore, the passages are small. The foes may not be able to see in the dark, and the kobolds can; therefore, the passages are unlit. The terrain is familiar to the kobolds, unfamiliar to their foes; therefore, the passages are full of traps to punish the unwary and ignorant. Designing defensible space is both art and science, with more than two millennia of recorded experimentation to draw from. The ideas behind today’s
best security practices date back to the building of the earliest ringworks. Introducing fantasy elements to your game setting doesn’t invalidate those ideas. Just the opposite: It presents new options and new challenges, to both the defender and the attacker. Overlook the fundamentals of security planning, and your villains will get rolled. Pile on an implausible, unsustainable number of defenses, however, and the game’s not fun anymore. It’s a delicate balance: A defended area has to be locked down tightly enough to repel any reasonable number of ordinary invaders, but extraordinary invaders, such as a group of PC adventurers, have to be able to make their way in somehow. Building the perfect lair begins with the unglamorous step of a behind-thescenes security assessment. As the Dungeon Master, ask yourself what your monsters and nonplayer characters need to protect, whom or what they need to protect it from, and what resources they have to protect it with. From there, move on to their unique methods of detecting, deterring, and responding to external threats. Decide how they might employ spies, concealment, and traps, if at all, and how many layers deep their defenses can be. Determine what climate and terrain features they can use to their advantage. Populate the lair’s environs with dangerous creatures, both loyal minions and opportunistic predators present for reasons of their own that have nothing to do with the defense of the lair but add interest to the experience of getting there. If your antagonists employ a guard force, decide how large it will be and how to deploy it. Figure out how much magical protection they’ll have access to, based on the prevalence of magic in your setting. Draw up a battle plan that the defenders will follow. Decide whether they’ll take prisoners and what they’ll do with them. Then, finally, draw the map. You’ll find you’re thinking about it very differently than you did back when you were rolling dice to generate dungeon layouts randomly. OceanofPDF.com
Like my previous books, this one discusses fifth edition D&D at length, although you’ll still need the core books to play the game. Unlike my previous books, this one contains an abundance of information that applies regardless of which tabletop roleplaying game system you’re using, so players of games other than D&D can find plenty to use in it. The sample lairs draw from D&D lore and are presented using D&D rules, but they’re intended as illustrations first, playable scenarios second. They’re there to inspire you and get you thinking, regardless of whether your level of familiarity with D&D is exhaustive or nonexistent. Take what you like from them and run wild. Throughout this work, in the interest of brevity, I refer to the expansion books Volo’s Guide to Monsters, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything as Volo’s, Mordenkainen’s, Xanathar’s, and Tasha’s, respectively. (These short forms are more pleasing to my eye than the alphabet-soup abbreviations often used online.) To distinguish it from Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, I refer to Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse simply as Monsters of the Multiverse. All stat blocks from Volo’s and Mordenkainen’s cited here also appear in Monsters of the Multiverse. When citing these books, as well as the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Player’s Handbook, I refer to chapters and sections, rather than page numbers, because page numbers can change from printing to printing. Finally, in certain places, I use an (X) or a(T) to indicate that a spell or magic item not included in the D&D basic rules is found in Xanathar’s or Tasha’s. OceanofPDF.com
CHAPTER1 PRINCIPLES OF DEFENSE So you’ve decided to build yourself a lair. The good news is that defense is easier, cheaper, and less inherently risky than offense. If you play your cards right, you enjoy a number of advantages: freedom of movement within your own territory, detailed knowledge of the location, the ability to set up defenses however and wherever you wish, and at least as much time to prepare as your would-be attacker, if not significantly more. The bad news is that nothing is unlimited, least of all cost, time, and your own intelligence. No matter how much circumstances favor you, you still have to work within constraints. One of these constraints is the impossibility of protecting yourself against every threat. You have to play the odds. The typical Dungeon Master is accustomed to drawing a map, populating it with creatures, and lastly deciding what treasure to place in each location. Instead, I’m going to suggest that you start by thinking about the things you intend your lair to protect—treasure, yes, but other assets as well. Next, figure out how much help you’ll have protecting it. Then, and only then, draw your map. Because when it comes to planning effective security arrangements, you have to know what assets you’re trying to protect, and you have to know which of those assets are most important. Designing a lair (or other defended location) is an exercise in risk management. You can’t eliminate all risk. What you can do is identify particular risks, determine the relative significance of those risks, and thereby decide where
to focus your defensive efforts. The more critical, sensitive, or vulnerable an asset —that is, someone or something you’re trying to protect—the more it should figure into your security strategy. If you have more resources, you can prepare for more contingencies. If you have fewer resources, you have to focus on what’s most important and be willing to let other things go, or at least leave the responsibility of protecting them up to others. As an illustration, in the movie Seven Samurai, a group of vagrant samurai takes on the job of defending a farming village against bandits who raid it after each year’s harvest. The local terrain works in their favor, with one exception: Three houses and a mill lie outside the village proper, on open land across a creek. The creek is a natural moat that can be improved further with a palisade fence. Beyond the creek, however, the samurai have no such advantage. The land is flat and open, with no cover for the defenders, a circumstance that favors the mounted, fast-moving bandits. To the samurai, the conclusion is obvious: The outlying houses and the mill must be evacuated and abandoned. They’re not worth the effort of defending them. While they’re highly vulnerable, they’re not critical—not compared with the village proper, the collected harvest, or the villagers’ lives. ASSETS Assets generally fall into three categories: physical assets, information, and people. You can think of these as “the Three Ls”: loot, lore, and lives. You may not assign equal value to all the loot in your lair, or all the lore—or, bluntly, all the lives. Also, not everything you’re trying to protect necessarily possesses the same kind of value. How do you determine what’s most critical when it’s not intuitively obvious? Here’s one method, which I use elsewhere in this book: To begin with, make a list of all your assets. Next, rate the value of each one according to six measures: intrinsic, monetary, economic, operational, regulatory, and intangible. Common practice is to use a scale from 1 (negligible) to 5 (vital), but in this book I use a scale that runs from 0 to 4 instead. These ratings are qualitative and relative; they don’t have to be perfectly quantified. Total these six ratings up to determine an asset’s overall value.
Intrinsic value needs no justification: A thing with intrinsic value is valuable simply because it exists. Loot is generally considered to have no intrinsic value (except by dragons, which have a wholly different perspective on the matter—see sidebar, page 11). Scholars, sages, spies, and members of esoteric societies view lore as having intrinsic value, but most other creatures don’t. Life, on the other hand, is the quintessential example of something that’s considered intrinsically valuable even though it may not possess any other kind of value. That being said, your alignment may influence your estimation of this value. Good creatures, generally speaking, consider lives to have equal intrinsic value. Neutral creatures agree that lives are intrinsically valuable, but they tend to assess this value unequally, based on relative status and social proximity. Evil creatures may or may not agree that life has intrinsic value at all; some may consider only certain lives to have intrinsic value, and not others. Unaligned creatures assign intrinsic value to lives within their own social units, but not outside them. Monetary value is a straightforward measure of how much money something can be sold for or how much it costs to replace. Creatures that don’t use currency for trade don’t assign monetary value to anything. Economic value is a cousin of monetary value, with a couple of key differences: First, it doesn’t depend on currency. Even in a society that doesn’t use money, something might still be tradable for goods, services, or knowledge. Second, it can refer to how much wealth something has the potential to generate over the long term—a future monetary value greater than the present monetary value. A productive mine, for instance, is worth more than the land it occupies. Creatures that don’t engage in trade at all and don’t make investments for future benefit don’t assign economic value. Operational value refers to how necessary something is to whatever activity you’re engaged in. Guards need weapons. Musicians need instruments. Artisans (and thieves) need tools. Scribes need paper and ink. Alchemists need reagents and laboratory equipment. These things have a special kind of value to those who use them; to others, it’s likely that their only value is monetary. However, lives can have operational value as well—the lives of workers, for instance, have operational value to their employer—without detracting from the intrinsic value
they also possess. Creatures that engage in no activity beyond surviving don’t assign operational value. Regulatory value depends on the existence of a legal system; it measures how necessary something is to compliance with the law. Feudal vassals, for instance, are required to keep records of their lands’ agricultural output to show to their lieges. Guilds keep charters that document their right to local monopolies on their crafts. Providers of certain services may need to hold licenses to practice. Creatures that don’t exist within systems of law don’t assign regulatory value. Intangible value, in the case of loot, typically reflects sentimental attachment. Your collection of sad-eyed kitten figurines has no intrinsic, monetary, economic, operational, or regulatory value, but it may be so precious to you that you consider it worth defending nonetheless. Certain antique items may also have intangible value, because they hark back to a significant era in history or were once owned by an exceptionally distinguished personage. In the case of lore, intangible value most often reflects the benefit of keeping information under wraps. You may possess specialized knowledge—a unique pottery firing technique, the forms of a powerful fighting style, a spell formula, a blend of herbs and spices—that elevates your reputation as a practitioner in your field. If it exists in written form, it becomes a sensitive asset that you wouldn’t want to fall into anyone else’s hands. You may also possess secret correspondence whose contents would tarnish your name or taint your relationships, or those of others, if someone else got their mitts on it—blackmail material, in other words. Alternatively, the intangible value of lore may lie in its significance to you, as in the case of a chronicle of your family’s history or a journal of meditations by someone you admire. In the case of lives, intangible value reflects special, irreplaceable relationships. All lives may have equal intrinsic value, but your children’s lives have intangible value above and beyond that to you. Even creatures with minimal sentience may assign intangible value to things, as anyone who’s seen a dog carry around a favorite stick can attest. Finally, in most instances, the value of any asset that can’t be neatly categorized under any of the Three Ls—such as privacy, authority, or psychological equilibrium—is primarily intangible.
Of course, what an asset is worth to you isn’t necessarily what it’s worth to someone else. Chances are, a group of adventurers isn’t going to come after your sad-eyed kitten figurine collection, but they may be very keen to divest you of some loot or lore on which they place high monetary or operational value. Therefore, when you’re assessing what kinds of threats you need to protect against, you have to be able to look at the situation through your enemy’s eyes. Even as you prioritize your security arrangements according to the values you place on your assets, how much time and money you subsequently decide to spend on protecting them should be, in large part, a function of how badly other people want them, lest you overspend on protecting something you’re not really at risk of losing—or underspend on protecting something whose value to others you’ve underestimated. A security arrangement that considers only the point of view of the owner of the lair is flawed and weak. Once you’ve totaled up the overall value of all your assets, arrange them in descending order. Then, for each asset, starting with the one that’s most valuable and working your way down until you run out of resources, ask yourself these questions: Whom or what am I protecting it against? Rivals, looters, hired thieves, enemy kingdoms, opposing factions, parties of adventurer-heroes? (PCs aren’t the only threat; sometimes they aren’t even the threat you have the most reason to worry about.) How vulnerable is it? Can it be kept under lock and key, or does it need to stay out in the open for some reason? Will there be times or situations when it’s more vulnerable than it is now? Does it need to be taken out on a certain schedule? Will it ever need to be transported someplace else? Have my activities drawn extraordinary scrutiny lately? What happens if I lose it? Would that be an “oh, well” situation, or would it disrupt my activities significantly? Is it something too dangerous to allow out of my own hands? Would it cause a scandal? Do I still owe money on it? Would I grieve the loss?
How thoroughly do I want to protect it? What arrangements are appropriate? What are my limits? In most cases, you’ll want to place the strongest protections on the assets you value most highly, but not always. Sometimes the desirability of a particular item to thieves will warrant stronger protections; sometimes an item may be worth a great deal to you but not so much to anyone else, in which case you can devote fewer resources to its defense, leaving you more to apply elsewhere. For each adversary you identify, consider how that adversary is likely to come after your assets. Will visible security measures deter them—or encourage them? Are they most likely to come at you head-on, blockade you, try to break in or sneak in, or gain assistance from a disloyal insider? What can they learn about your defenses by spying on you? The more you can accurately predict, the better off you are. Because of how we assess different kinds of value, we might place a total value on a material object or an item of lore higher than we place on our own lives. Does that mean we’ll die to protect it? Sometimes, but not always. Nor does it necessarily mean we care about that asset more than we care about our survival. What it does mean is that we’ll go to greater lengths, and incur greater expense, to protect that loot or lore than we will to protect ourselves alone. (Suppose, for example, that you own a $150,000 diamond necklace. You might decide that protecting it requires you to spend $1,250 to install a wall safe—even if you don’t spend any money at all on protecting yourself.) When push comes to shove, we’ll still try to save our own skins, but maybe we’ll take our most precious loot or lore with us when we flee, or maybe we’ll leave it locked away or defended by mundane or magical barriers or traps. The point is, we try to ensure that it’s still protected even if we can’t risk our own necks to protect it. OceanofPDF.com
The Affinity is a criminal organization in the town of Granwick. Its members are mostly thieves, but some also engage in smuggling, extortion, or usury. Its assets include: Ready money, which it uses for operations. This cash has significant monetary (4), economic (2), and operational (4) value. Its value in other respects is negligible (0). Total value: 10. A stash of stolen goods ranging widely in bulk and value. Most of these goods have negligible value in every respect except monetary. Their monetary value varies, and they can be divided into two categories, ordinary stuff (1) and valuables (3—they would be 4, but the Affinity tries to fence them quickly, keeping as few of them as possible on the premises). An exception is a cache of gems (4), which also have some modest operational (2) and intangible value (2), since they’re pretty and also useful for bribing officials with. Total value: common loot, 1; valuables, 3; gems, 8. A few magic items: an eversmoking bottle, gloves of thievery, and a hat of disguise. These items relate directly to the Affinity’s activities and therefore have operational (2) and intangible (3) value in addition to their monetary value (3). Total value: 8. An equipment supply comprising various pieces of leather armor, hooded cloaks, weapons, and pouches of thieves’ tools, plus a ledger tracking members’ tabs, which they must repay out of their takings. The equipment supply has monetary value (2), but only in the sense that if it were lost, it would need to be replaced; the Affinity isn’t going to sell it. It also has operational value, especially the thieves’ tools. It’s not essential, but it’s handy. More important, the Affinity recognizes that some of its own members might abscond with that equipment if they could get away with it. Therefore, it gets assigned a slightly higher operational value (3), reflecting its value in the eyes of those members more than its value to the organization itself. The armory ledger’s value
is economic (2) and operational (2). Total value: equipment supply, 5; armory ledger, 4. Enciphered records of businesses that are paying the thieves’ guild for protection, payments made to individuals within or associated with the guild, and payoffs to local officials and city guards. The value of these records is economic (4) and operational (4). The record of bribes has regulatory (4) and intangible (4) value as well, since these payoffs are what allow the Affinity to conduct its activities with impunity. Total value: protection and payment records, 7; payoff records, 16. The floor plan of a noble’s mansion, with the locations of valuables marked. Its value is operational (2), economic (2), and intangible (2): It’s the reason why the noble is now paying the Affinity for protection. Total value: 6. An intercepted letter of introduction, along with a crate containing five intricately tooled orbs made out of a highly polished, reddish-gold metal. Until recently, the letter and the crate were hard to assess, because the Affinity wasn’t certain of the orbs’ function or purpose. Now it knows: They’re essentially magical grenades. As such, both the letter and the crate have tremendous monetary (4) and intangible (4) value, with some potential economic (2) value as well. The orbs have some operational value to the Affinity, but other parties could do all sorts of things with them; therefore, they’re assigned an operational value of 4 rather than 2. Total value: orbs, 14; letter, 10. The members themselves. While the Affinity values its members’ lives, it values the life of its feared and respected chief, Kruno Skriven, most of all, and his lieutenants’ lives behind his. Thus, Kruno’s life is assigned intrinsic value (4), intangible value (4), and even regulatory value (4), because his reputation keeps the law at bay; the lives of his lieutenants, intrinsic value (3), intangible value (2), and operational value (3), since they’re experts who train others in their skills; and the lives of other Affinity members, intrinsic value (2) and operational value (1). Total value: Kruno, 12; lieutenants, 8; other members, 3.
Largely, the Affinity must protect these things against rival criminal organizations, which might stage a raid if they discovered a vulnerability. Such a raid probably wouldn’t occur unless the rival group managed to infiltrate the Affinity. However, other crooks aren’t the only ones who might take an interest in what the Affinity’s got. If the town guard happened to be taken over by a more straitlaced commander with a dim view of corruption in the ranks, he might employ someone to fetch those records of payoffs for him so that he could clean house. Also, in order to determine the function of the orbs, an Affinity loan shark gave one to a lackey to test out on the Blind Squirrel, a tavern whose proprietor was behind on his payments. The resulting explosion attracted much more attention than the Affinity generally prefers, and there’s a good chance that someone may come sniffing around. Thus, all the Affinity’s assets are more vulnerable now than they have been in the past or will be once things have settled down. Finally, the Affinity is an organization of thieves, and thieves are generally understood to be people who steal things. Measures must be taken to keep them from stealing from the organization itself. If the Affinity lost the enciphered records of payoffs, its entire existence would be threatened. Therefore, they must be safeguarded as thoroughly as possible. Even if his own life is in danger, Kruno will make sure those records remain in the Affinity’s hands. If he has to flee the group’s base to survive, he’ll take them with him. Likewise, among those who know, Kruno’s name is almost synonymous with the Affinity; without him in control, its enemies (and victims) would be much bolder. Special care must therefore be taken to safeguard his life in the event of an attack, even at the cost of the organization’s other assets. Losing the orbs would be disappointing, but losing the orbs to a rival group would be deadly. The same is true of the intercepted letter; however, its lower value means it can be traded off (to the right people, of course) in order to protect Kruno, the orbs, or the payoff records, whereas the orbs themselves must be absolutely secure. Losing the ready cash or the gems would be a heavy blow to the Affinity, but probably not a fatal one—unless the protection records were lost at the same time. If it became known that the Affinity no longer had
records of those payments, resistance might arise, severely disrupting the organization’s cash flow. Accordingly, reasonable and practical precautions are taken to protect these assets, but exceptional precautions are probably unnecessary. All the Affinity’s other assets, including its members, are replaceable. Protecting them can be left in the hands of the members themselves. OceanofPDF.com
WHAT CREATURESVALUE Creatures come in many different types, each with its own perspective on loot, lore, and life. Consequently, each type values these three asset categories differently. A beast, ooze, or plant creature is generally concerned only with its own life, along with the lives of any offspring a beast is rearing. Beasts that live in social groups value the lives of other members of those groups; there may even exist social oozes that value the survival of their colonies, or awakened plants that value the preservation of their forests or fields. Still, even the most intelligent of these creature types generally don’t value material loot or lore as assets at all. A bird may instinctively gather shiny objects, but it’s not going to defend them. Only if they attach some meaning to a particular object will they treat it as an asset worth protecting. Monstrosities may occasionally care about loot, and a small handful (notably sphinxes) may hoard lore, but generally, their lives are their foremost consideration. Dragons are keenly interested in preserving their loot, on par with their lives. Craftier ones, such as green, bronze, and silver dragons, may hoard lore they want to keep to themselves as well. Giants value their loot and their lives, but only cloud and storm giants tend to care about lore enough to place it under guard. Most undead are too far gone to try to defend anything except, perhaps, the physical assets of a particular place. However, the exceptions—mummy lords, vampires, liches—are loath to part with anything they possess, and they’ll defend it all.
Celestials, fiends, and fey, by and large, are indifferent to mundane loot but highly sensitive to transgression on places that are important to them, and they take the guarding of secrets very, very seriously. They value others’ lives to the extent that their alignments imply. Aberrations’ interest in loot is idiosyncratic, but they protect information jealously. They value their own lives consistently and the lives of others inconsistently, although if they’re part of a hive culture, they act to protect the existence of the colony first and foremost. Constructs defend whomever and whatever they’re ordered to defend. Protecting themselves comes second. The only elementals that are likely to establish lairs are genies, and they closefistedly guard everything they’ve got—loot, lore, and life. Good genies, however, defend the lives of others under their protection as fiercely as they do their own. Which leaves humanoids. Most humanoids are about life first, loot second, and lore third, but their jobs and affiliations may rearrange their priorities. Ambitious young wizards may value their lives first, then their books and notes, without much regard for other material property. Loyal treasury guards may place their liege’s loot before their own lives. Members of a mystery cult may readily sacrifice their lives to protect the cult’s secrets; well-trained spies will do the same. DETECTION, DETERRENCE,AND RESPONSE Protecting yourself against loss of loot, lore, or life involves three main components: detection, deterrence, and response. That is, you have to become aware of threats as early as possible, stave them off long enough to do something about them, then actually do something about them.
All three components are necessary. There’s no point in knowing about a threat if you’re unable to mobilize against it. If you happen to deter a threat you never knew about, that’s just dumb luck, and you gain no knowledge with which to plan for the next attack. And having the capacity to respond is of little value if a sudden, swift attack catches you off guard. DETECTION The sooner you’re able to discover a threat to your assets—and the farther away from your lair that threat is when you discover it—the better. Maybe you possess supernatural senses that can detect the movement of intelligent beings for miles around, or access to divination magic that warns you of threats before they materialize. Wonderful! Super-handy! Then again, maybe you don’t. In which case, you’re going to have to detect threats the old-fashioned way: by employing guards, alarms, scouts, and spies. If you employ a force of guards to defend your lair, you’ll need to assign some of them to security functions. However, you don’t want to assign more of them to these tasks than you absolutely need to. Most of your guards should instead be kept on standby, to provide the response if and when detection and deterrence fail to prevent an intrusion. They’re not going to be standing at the gate or keeping lookout atop the walls. They’re going to be waiting in the courtyard or the main hall in overwhelming numbers, bristling with spears and arrows, ready to shish-kebab trespassers who make it past the foyer. Exactly how many guards to divert to security functions and reconnaissance operations depends on a lot of variables, but an eighty–twenty ratio of main force to access control, surveillance, recon, and screening missions is a good place to start. If your lair defense plan includes forward observation posts, you need to assign a couple of squads of eight to twelve regular guards or scouts to each post to ensure round-the-clock coverage; hence, it usually isn’t feasible to keep observation posts continuously crewed if you employ fewer than a hundred guards. Have guards take note of any unfamiliar visitors, report on them to you or to a commander, and escort any visitors who need to be brought into restricted
areas. Have them check the carts, sacks, chests, and crates brought in and out by outside workers and be present whenever wagons are being loaded or unloaded. Have them take all messages and inspect all deliveries. (Suspicious items should be reported immediately, left alone, and kept under lock and key until you or a designated underling can check them out personally.) All important activities in your lair—other than your own, of course—need to happen where guards on surveillance duty can see them clearly, so arrange the spaces within accordingly. If these guards notice something fishy, it’s their responsibility to take control of the situation by making contact with the suspected enemy, detaining them, and not allowing them to proceed or depart. At least one guard should be free to leave the scene immediately to report on what’s happening: The duty to report on an evolving situation is paramount. If a fight should happen to break out, your security guards’ new responsibility is to keep your enemies occupied until your response force arrives. Normally, guards on surveillance duty don’t engage in combat except in selfdefense. However, if you’ve already received warning of a threat and assigned guards to screen the area around your lair, and they detect scouts or spies conducting reconnaissance against you, it’s their job to intercept, apprehend, and, if necessary, destroy them. Zero tolerance for sneaks! If you have scouts available, you should be sending them out to gather information all the time. Usually, they’ll have little to tell you about except the weather or the state of the roads. However, you may get wind of a threat brewing against you before your enemies try to breach your lair—or you may learn that they’ve already breached it successfully, then slipped through your fingers. When this happens, you need to send out a reconnaissance patrol with the specific objective of discovering and reporting back how numerous your foes are, what they’re up to, and what resources they possess. Once they’ve found your foes, they’ll switch from zone reconnaissance, which is wide-ranging and time-consuming, to reconnaissance of the specific area where your foes are, in order to collect more specific information about them—and, if the opportunity presents itself, clear them out. If you have the personnel, you should also assign guards to a screening mission, to keep those foes from ever reaching—or
breaching—your perimeter. (I’ll discuss reconnaissance and security missions in more detail in chapter 6, “Battle Strategy.”) SPIES Early detection of threats is vital. If you’re shrewd, you can prevent an attack before it happens by spoiling your enemy’s plans—learning their intended objective and defending accordingly, seizing a necessary component of their attack, disabling them with a preemptive strike, or simply scaring them off. And a key component of early detection, reaching far beyond the physical boundaries of your lair, is espionage. In fact, without espionage, your chances of discovering and neutralizing a threat before it’s carried out are slim to none. For the purposes of an individual lair owner (as opposed to a state entity), spies fall into two categories: those who are assigned merely to observe and report, and those who are assigned to acquire information more actively. These two categories have many qualities in common, but they differ in one important respect. Spies in the first category are “gray people”: ones who possess no quality that makes them stand out. They blend into the background and watch and listen unnoticed—often beneath notice. Spies in the second category, on the other hand, are charismatic and memorable. They approach targets under observation and ingratiate themselves with sincere smiles, strong eye contact, casual body language, and unflappable poise. They introduce themselves by commenting on something they have in common with their targets, then get those targets talking and listen with rapt interest. They copy their targets’ bearing, gestures, and speech habits. In no time, they become trusted confidants. Regardless of the type of spy you employ—and you’ll want to employ both types, but if you can afford only one, go with the first—your primary goal is to become aware of anyone and anything out of the ordinary. In particular, when newcomers arrive in town, you want to know who they are and what they’re up to. An inn or tavern near your lair is a place where you’ll want to have eyes and ears; a nondescript bartender, server, housekeeper, or regular patron is in a good position to report on new arrivals and can be hired to do so at bargain rates. Market-square beggars make outstanding informants, since most people are uncomfortable maintaining eye contact with them. So do scavengers, who
perform a public service gathering scraps and in the course of their work gather rumors as well. You don’t need a shadowy snoop to tail a group of strangers through the streets when you have informants all over town. When creating stat blocks for your spies, the spy stat block in the fifth edition D&D Monster Manual isn’t necessarily the ideal place to start. Intelligence and Wisdom are more important than Dexterity: Above all, a spy must have a detailed memory and the ability to immediately notice anything out of the ordinary. Consider striking the Sneak Attack trait and replacing it with traits that borrow from the Player’s Handbook feats Observant and Keen Mind (see, for example, the snoop and the plant in appendix B). Deception is an essential part of a spy’s job, and Charisma is important for the second category of spy, but spies of the first category engage with the targets of their observation as little as possible; they simply report what they see and hear in the course of their ordinary activities, and the only pretense they need to engage in is that they’re not also watching and listening. In fact, since their deception relies on seeming perfectly ordinary, it might make more sense to base their Deception checks to avoid being noticed on Wisdom rather than Charisma (see Player’s Handbook, chapter 7, “Variant: Skills with Different Abilities”). Self-control, not force of personality, is the deciding factor in whether they succeed in their task. Skill in Stealth or Sleight of Hand can certainly be helpful, but being unseen and unheard isn’t the ultimate goal—being unnoticed is, and the best way to be unnoticed is to be unimportant. DETERRENCE Deterrence lies in showing that getting into your lair will be difficult, dangerous, or both—too risky to be worth the attempt. Elements of deterrence need not be subtle to be effective. High, solid walls send an unmistakable message. So do heavy doors, iron bars, loud bells, steep cliffs, deep moats, narrow entryways, mazelike approaches, wooded paths that mysteriously turn back on themselves. So do fire, ice, howling wind, crashing tides, foul stench, pitch-darkness. Flaunting your detection and response measures sends the message that trespassers will be seen and will be dealt with. However, it’s important to make
sure that would-be intruders don’t know all the things you can do to them— and know that they don’t know. The more concrete information they have, the more accurately they can judge the risk (or believe they can), and upon weighing all the pros and cons, they may decide it’s worth a go after all. Uncertainty, on the other hand, encourages them to fear the worst. One surprisingly effective method of deterrence is the “no admittance” sign, along with any variation thereon that sends the same message, from a simple curtain hung in a door frame with a velvet rope across it to a row of heads on spikes. These visual statements tell observers that an area is off-limits and that the owner of the property cares enough whether someone unauthorized enters to deal with them if they do. By themselves, however, they don’t work as well on someone who’s determined to get in; if anything, they’ll make such an individual say, “Aha! This is where I’ll find what I’m looking for!” (For this reason, they also make good decoys.) Implementing finicky procedures can have a deterrent effect—for example, insisting that all vehicles use a specific entrance or requiring visitors to sign a book. Couldn’t someone just sign a phony name? Of course. The point isn’t to have an infallible record of who’s come and gone. The point is to make deviation from the routine conspicuous. If a “farmer” doesn’t know which entrance to drive their wagon to, or a visitor makes a scene about having to sign in, their departure from the script casts suspicion on them immediately. Also, these procedures are often plain good sense by themselves: making visitors relinquish or bind their weapons, dismount from and stable their horses as soon as they’re inside the gate, or pass through a magic-detection field. Don’t make exceptions for local superstitions such as “On All Fools’ Day, neither rich man nor poor on the Fools’ Parade may close his door, or laughter and joy will be his nevermore!” You know your enemies are going to try that stunt. CONCEALMENT If you’re engaging in activities that you want to keep out of the public eye—or, more to the point, that may run counter to the interests of others who’d shut you down given the opportunity—an important aspect of deterrence is concealment. If the location of your base of operations is known, you have to
present enough obvious obstacles to make it clear that trying to gain access is a fool’s game, and still, some foes will remain undaunted no matter how many obstacles you place in front of them. Thus, there’s a lot to be said for preventing others from locating your lair in the first place. There are three primary ways to go about concealing your lair: hiding, blending, and disguising. Hiding your lair means placing it behind some kind of visual obstruction, such as a waterfall in front of a cave mouth. Blending, or camouflage, refers to making your lair indistinguishable from its surroundings, like an unremarkable rowhouse on a street of identical buildings. Disguising your lair means making it appear to be something other than what it is—for instance, establishing a chapterhouse of a secret society in the cellar of a brewery or a serpentfolk nest in a former monastery. Alternatively, rather than conceal your entire lair, you may choose to conceal only your assets. You can hide loot in a safe behind a painting, lore in the room behind the trick bookshelf, lives in a safe room whose trapdoor is covered by a rug. You can dress yourself and your family as servants, label your most precious books with deceptive titles, employ illusion magic to camouflage or disguise treasures, or use codes or ciphers to keep those who find your notes from knowing their contents—and, perhaps, their worth. Thieves are well aware of the importance of concealment, which is why they employ thieves’ cant—a form of conversational concealment, in which discussion of illicit activities is disguised as innocent conversation about card games and the well-being of family members or hidden behind a wall of impenetrable slang. LOCKS AND SAFES I can’t top these two sentences from the National Crime Prevention Institute’s The Use of Locks in Physical Crime Prevention (Boston: Butterworth, 1987), so I’m just going to give them to you verbatim: “The sole object of using any lock at all is to delay an intruder. A good lock makes entry riskier or more trouble than it’s worth, and that is the objective” (emphasis in the original). Every lock, given enough time, determination, and skill, can be defeated by manipulation, force, or simply stealing the key. The relevant questions are whether the amount of
time and degree of determination and skill it will take, along with the threat of response, are enough to stop someone from trying; and whether the expense of the lock is justified by the value of the asset behind it. An off-the-shelf lock from the Player’s Handbook’s list of adventuring gear costs 10 gp, weighs 1 pound, and is moderately difficult to pick. Positing that the baseline technological level of a typical fantasy RPG campaign is late medieval/early Renaissance, we can conclude that this is a warded lock made of iron. Warded locks don’t use tumblers and pins, as modern locks do. They’re simple machines in which the key either turns or doesn’t turn based on the arrangement of wards, or barriers, inside the lock housing; the key is shaped to bypass the wards, and keys of other shapes will either be blocked by the wards or fail to move the bolt. “Your DM may decide that better locks are available for higher prices,” the Player’s Handbook adds. So how would those locks differ from the standardissue lock? Before the invention of the tumbler lock in 1772, I the science and technology of the time limited the ways in which a warded lock could be improved upon, but locksmiths employed all of them: A lock could contain several different wards. The wards could be more intricately shaped. A key could have parts that turned separately. A lock could require two, three, or even four keys to operate. One or more of the keyholes could be hidden behind sliding panels—or accessible only after using another key first. The bolts could be large and heavy and require commensurately large and heavy keys to move them. Any of these methods might be employed by the “better locks… available for higher prices” described by the Player’s Handbook, and the more complicated and expensive the lock, the more of these methods it might employ. However, there are also at least three other obvious paths to superior lockmaking in a fantasy RPG campaign. One path is simply looking to other cultures, such as Southwest Asia, where the engineer and polymath Ismā‘īl al-Jazarī described how to make a sophisticated combination lock in his Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices in 1206 CE. This lock employs four dials, each controlling three concentric, notched discs. Opening the lock required turning all twelve
discs to the positions where the notches lined up. Mechanically, the principle is the same as that of a warded lock, except that, rather than a key, it’s the wards that rotate, making it much harder to defeat. Any learned, technologically advanced society in your setting might come up with a similar lock concept. (A simpler, cheaper version of al-Jazarī’s lock might have two discs per dial, or even just one. Naturally, it would also be easier to defeat.) Another path is the skill and inventiveness attributed to certain folk—rock gnomes especially, but also dwarves and elves—which might justify the existence of craft techniques advanced enough to create lever tumbler locks or even pin tumbler locks out of available metals. Those techniques would be closely guarded secrets, of course, and such locks would command premium prices, but even the most basic tumbler locks would be hard to pick compared with a generally available warded lock, at a fraction of the size and weight. The last is magic. An enchantment placed on an otherwise ordinary warded lock might increase the difficulty of picking it by resisting the insertion of lockpicks, causing the lockpicks to turn red-hot or bitingly cold, providing false tactile and auditory feedback, or creating “smart wards” that anticipate the lockpicks’ movements and block them. Alternatively, a lock might be brought to life as an animate construct, clenching its keyhole shut against thieves’ tools, twisting away from them, or biting a lockpicker’s fingers. The rarest and most advanced magical locks might be opened not by any mechanical means at all but in response to passwords, arrangement of objects, application of elemental energy, the light of the moon(s), or some other esoteric catalyst. And let’s not forget the spell arcane lock, which takes an ordinary lock and adds enchantments to it. Rather than merely slap an extra 10 points onto the Difficulty Class, consider how this spell makes the picking of a lock more difficult. Just that one small detail can add memorable flavor. These improvements to the ordinary lock increase the difficulty of the ability check made to pick them, but you don’t have to stop there. It stands to reason, for instance, that locks that require multiple steps to open should also require multiple actions to pick. An absurdly complicated puzzle lock, with sliding panels, latches disguised as rivets, and multiple keyholes, might require not only a successful Dexterity (thieves’ tools) check and an Intelligence (Investigation)
check but also a full minute or more to bypass. For that matter, although it may be mathematically impossible for a rogue with Reliable Talent to fail to pick an ordinary padlock, if a door happens to be locked with four of them, it will still take that rogue four actions to spring them all—and that’s assuming that the rogue is on the right side of the door. Typically, just like in our own houses, only important doors need locks on them. However, it’s not only doors that need to be locked. Chests containing valuable assets need locks, too. The problem with putting a lock on a chest, however, is that it doesn’t stop someone from carrying off the whole chest and taking their sweet time to defeat the lock someplace safer. That, in fact, was the preferred approach of burglars and robbers for centuries, when cash was often kept and transported in strongboxes, made first of iron-banded oak and later of sheet iron. It wasn’t until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries CE that what we’d think of as safes—that is, strongboxes that were either fixed in place or too large and heavy to carry off—were adopted on a large scale. Some of these early safes were cabinet-like, as we typically imagine safes today, but many others still took the form of a lidded chest. However, unlike the chest listed under “Adventuring Gear” in chapter 5 of the Player’s Handbook, which holds 12 cubic feet and weighs 25 pounds, one of these wrought-iron boxes, with a capacity of only 6 cubic feet, weighed in the neighborhood of 175 pounds. And while some of these strongboxes featured elaborate locking mechanisms, as often as not, their makers relied just as much on hiding the keyholes, occasionally including obvious but fake keyholes as decoys. Recall the ultimate purpose of a lock: to waste the thief’s time. SAMPLE LOCKS Lock Cost Weight DC to Pick Rounds to Unlock Rounds to Pick Warded lock, crude 5 gp 1 lb 10 1 1 Warded lock, common 10 gp 1 lb 15 1 1 Warded lock, elaborate 100 gp 1 lb 20 1 1 Warded lock, h 1,500 gp 3 lb 25 3 3
three-step Gnomework lock, lever tumbler 200 gp ¼ lb 20 1 1 Gnomework lock, pin tumbler 2,000 gp ¼ lb 25 1 1 Combination lock, 3 × 1-disc 35 gp ¾ lb 15 1 3 Combination lock, 4 × 2- disc 300 gp 2 lb 20 4 8 Combination lock, 4 × 3- disc 3,500 gp 3 lb 25 6 12 Puzzle lock, masterwork, twelve-step 30,000 gp 30 lb 30 6 18+ Interestingly, while the development of safes plodded forward over many centuries, mechanical traps were in widespread use as early as the medieval and Renaissance eras. The needle trap isn’t just a fantasy invention: Not only does it have historical precedent, there’s an account of at least one trapmaker’s accidentally proving the efficacy of his invention by setting it off himself and getting stabbed in the hand. Other tricks can be played, too. One involved constructing a chest with a tray beneath the lid that a thief had to lift out in order to get at the contents—using helpfully provided finger holes with snapping-jaw traps inside them. TRAPS Speaking of which, an often overlooked yet essential issue in trap construction is the fact that you don’t want your traps to endanger your own minions—and you absolutely don’t want them to endanger you. Deadly, hidden traps that activate automatically when triggered, despite being a well-worn pulp adventure trope, are outrageously impractical in any kind of lair that’s a locus of ongoing activity. The only places you want to employ these, if at all, are (a) at vulnerable intrusion points that you and your minions never enter or exit by and (b) in the perimeter area around your lair, in both cases because you don’t have enough live guards to keep an eye on those locations.
If you’re considering placing traps inside your lair, two particular types are far more practical than Acme Spring-Loaded Corridor Blades: In a high-traffic area, a concealed trap operated manually by one or more guards on duty, generally (though not always) designed to capture rather than maim. The point of this kind of trap is to immobilize intruders and render them defenseless, at little or no risk to your own people. In a low-traffic area, an obvious trap that forces intruders to mull over whether to try to defeat it or to back off and take another route. The point of this kind of trap is to delay the intruders, giving you more time to respond to their presence. You don’t expect intruders to fall into the trap; the threat, rather than the execution, is the point. Both of these types of trap rely on intruders’ having no choice but to pass through a choke point in order to get where they want to go, so the ideal places to put them are within the boundaries between defensive zones (see “Concentric Defense” below), including the outer physical boundary—the “envelope”—of your lair. Traps should include a detection component—something that signals you to the presence of a threat if you’re not aware of it already. When intruders set off a trap in your lair (or are balked by one), you have only a brief window of opportunity to respond while they’re at your mercy. Wait too long, and they may find a way to slip out of your grasp. RESPONSE Enemies have invaded your lair. You failed to deter them, but you’ve detected the breach. Time to make them pay. If you have a guard force, 80 percent of it, give or take, is tasked with response: taking up positions where they can contain, weaken, and ultimately subdue the invaders. Using the information provided by your detection elements—primarily reconnaissance and security forces—they engage where it’s most advantageous for them to do so, and at the right moment, when the invaders’ plans have fallen apart, launch a decisive counterattack.
This engagement is the “boss fight.” You don’t need to be anywhere near it, necessarily. You can be part of it, if you’re that much stronger than your minions. Or, if hiring guard troops isn’t an option for you—say, because you’re a weird monster that lives outside civilization and its economic systems—maybe you constitute the bulk of your own defensive forces, and response falls to you because there isn’t anyone else. Then, okay, this is your time to shine. If you can delegate the job to someone (or something) else, though, why put your own life on the line? Your defensive response doesn’t need to be complicated. Simple overwhelming force gets the job done. However, at the very least, you do want to keep your enemies from knowing just how many of your minions they’re going to face once they get inside. The final number should come to them as a deeply unpleasant surprise. Keep in mind, though, that the objective is not to kill intruders. The objective is to protect assets. Your defenders can kill two of those pesky adventurers who got in Crom only knows how and capture two others, but if the fifth one gets away with the Golden MacGuffin, that’s a failure. For this reason, constant gathering and transmission of accurate information is essential. Fights can’t take place in isolation. Even during a breach, whatever units you have assigned to surveillance, reconnaissance, and screening need to continue gathering intel, tracking the invaders’ progress through your lair, and handing that information off to your responders, all for the purpose of preventing any loss of valued loot, lore, or lives. CONCENTRIC DEFENSE In planning your defense, one of the limits you’ll face is the need for freedom of entry and exit. Not only do you yourself have to be able to come and go (or, at least, have minions come and go for you), so do the goods you supply yourself with, as well as any goods you may supply to others. For that matter, your business, whatever it is, may from time to time require allowing others inside to meet with you. Think of your lair in terms of concentric zones: unrestricted zones, where people can come and go freely; controlled zones, which require people to present
valid reasons for entering; and restricted zones, sensitive areas off-limits to anyone who’s not assigned to be there, such as private residences, armories, records rooms, and vaults. Then forget about the first zone entirely. A lair, by definition, should have no unrestricted zone. You’re building a redoubt, not a convention center. In fact, even the region around your lair may be a controlled zone, if others normally can’t enter it without going through a checkpoint. (That being said, a disguised lair, such as a thieves’ den with a legitimate business as a front, might allow the false front to seem unrestricted. Maintaining control while also maintaining this pretext, however, requires having ready excuses for bouncing anyone who doesn’t belong.) Access control measures exist to keep the general public from wandering into controlled areas without a legitimate purpose—and to keep anyone from entering a restricted area without permission. If any business goes on in your lair that you aren’t personally and directly involved in, it takes place in a controlled zone. Generally, once people are admitted to the controlled zone, they can move around it freely with little or no interference—which is not to say little or no surveillance. The controlled zone is always closely watched. Access to restricted zones should require additional controls: more guards, more gates, more locks. No one unauthorized gets in, no one gets in unobserved, and no one goes wandering off on their own. The outer extent of your construction, the hardened exterior, is called the “envelope.” It may be a wooden palisade or stone curtain wall, a glacier or mountainside, or the places where your building abuts the ones next door. An enemy who approaches your lair, after crossing the ground around your site, has to get through the envelope next. Think of the envelope as a six-sided die: You need to prevent penetration not only through all four sides but also through the top and bottom. The field of military engineering has given considerable thought to how to prevent forced entry and sabotage from below (the literal meaning of “undermining”), but hardening against attack from above is difficult, costly, and feasible only over small areas; it thus requires more emphasis on detection and response. Doors and windows are inherently vulnerable, which is why medieval European castles tended to have very few of them; depending on your plumbing arrangements,
sewers might also offer intruders a way in. Outer wall materials have to be able to withstand your enemies’ attempts to break, burrow, or burn through them. Inside the envelope, you’ll want to add extra access control to your restricted zone(s). The two main ways of doing this are by architecturally limiting the number of ways in and through them and by posting guards. Depending on your resources, you might also employ technology, such as additional gates, or magic. The ultimate goal of all these defenses is to stop intruders from reaching your assets, and one of the chief ways of accomplishing this goal is by slowing them down. The more deeply they penetrate your lair, the more difficult it should be for them to proceed—and to escape without getting caught. WEAK POINTS Once you have an idea of the basic components of your security, there are certain specific questions you need to ask yourself, lest you leave gaping holes in your defensive plan: How will my lair be defended when I’m asleep? Guards can’t stay on duty 24/7. They need breaks. They also need instructions on how to handle matters when you’re not there to direct them. If you’re the most powerful being in your lair, you need to make sure you have enough defenders, and strong enough defenders, to blunt an attack—or an alarm that will wake you up so that you can deal with it yourself. How will my guards deal with potential intruders? With legitimate visitors? Enforcement of the boundaries between uncontrolled and controlled areas, and between controlled and restricted areas, is essential, but how heavy-handed do you want to be? You can order your guards to attack anyone they can’t positively identify as friendly, to simply turn away anyone whose credentials they can’t verify, to wave them through if their credentials seem legitimate, or to allow them past the outer gate but then trap them or take them into custody and interrogate them. Whatever approach you choose, make sure you have enough guards to carry it out. If a visitor needs an escort, make sure the escort’s post isn’t left shorthanded.
Also, if you expect to have visitors, determine a way for them to verify their identities and their right to be admitted. How can I ensure that my guards are loyal? A disgruntled guard is one of the worst security vulnerabilities you can have, because they can potentially compromise every other security measure you have in place. Actively recruit guards who’ll care about their job, and screen out ones that will be easy to turn. Give them reasons to like you, or at the very least, don’t give them reasons to hate you. At the same time, watch your watchmen—and make sure they know you’re watching. Don’t try to keep a constant eye on them; nobody likes that, nobody wants it, and it just isn’t practical. Instead, do random integrity tests, and reward those who pass. Also, if you have assignments that differ in their desirability, or in the opportunities they present for disloyalty or simple laziness, rotate your guards through them. Assigning everyone to the same job all the time creates incentives for subversion. How can I ensure that my guards have the best view of my lair’s surroundings? You’ll need someone keeping an eye on every approach. Intruders are more likely to use some approaches than others, and those are where you should place the most eyes, but you should have someone— preferably at least two someones—watching any direction they may come from. The farther your sentries can see, the more time they’ll have to respond. Visual obstructions too close to your lair invite blitzes that take out your guards before they can raise the alarm. How will my guards and I respond to a breach? Develop a response plan, as described in chapter 6, “Battle Strategy.” Choose where you want fights to take place—that is, where you have the most advantages possible, and intruders have the fewest—and prepare your battle positions in advance. But also consider interventions that don’t involve bloodshed. Some intrusions can be resolved by confronting the intruders and firmly escorting them out. Some intrusions may merely be simple misunderstandings. And some “intruders” may even be seeking you out to express their interest in aiding you in your activities or your cause. Don’t
be a sucker, but exercise good judgment regarding when a situation calls for combat and when it doesn’t. How will I handle goods being moved in and out? Frequent, regular delivery of food and supplies creates a schedule that enemies casing your lair can memorize and exploit. They may slip in while your gates are open, either invisibly or hidden in wagons (or under them). However, if you don’t let anyone past your gate and instead require your guards to bring your supplies in from there, they can’t stay behind and watch that gate at the same time. If your guard force has a reserve, use it for these kinds of auxiliary responsibilities. How will I send and receive messages? This question applies both to messages between you and your underlings and to messages between you and the outside world. Your lair needs some kind of communication system, whether it consists of bells or wooden clappers, horn calls, signal lanterns, shouting from post to post, relay runners, sending stones, or magical paper airplanes. In the absence of a Westeros Postal Service, longdistance communication requires either magic or the participation of couriers. The latter entails summoning a courier, getting a message into their hands, trusting that they’ll make the entire journey safely and convey your message to its intended recipient, and being able to reverse that whole process in order to receive a reply. Every time the message changes hands along the way introduces an opportunity for error—or treachery. Come up with a system, or resign yourself to the life of a hermit. How will I protect my most valuable loot and my most sensitive lore? These assets will require defensive measures above and beyond those you employ to protect your lair as a whole. Extra locks, extra alarms, extra bars, extra concealment, extra guards, extra magic—any or all of these things, and more, may be called for. The question is how much your budget, and your powers, can support. If you possess unique traits or abilities that prospective intruders probably don’t, it’s wise to use this comparative advantage to protect your most critical assets. Can you fly? Then place these assets high up, in a location that can’t be reached by stairs or ladders. Don’t need to breathe? Put them in a room without air. Are you
enormously strong? Put them behind a door or gate that humanoids of normal strength can’t budge. Are you a crafty trapsmith? Smith a crafty trap. How will I protect myself? This question is simple to answer if you’re the most powerful creature in your lair—Fight! Fight! Fight!—but what if you’ve always relied on the muscles of strangers? It behooves you to know what you’ll have to do if intruders make it past your strongest defenses. Have an escape route, a safe room, or a place to hide. Carry a clutch magic item. Create or purchase a device you can use to summon rescuers. Be in the good graces of your god—like, really, really good. Hire a bodyguard, or keep a watchbeast. The principles of detection, deterrence, and response all still apply, just on a smaller scale. If someone makes off with my loot, can I track it down again? In the vast majority of cases, the answer to this question is no. However, maybe you’re the type who employs skilled trackers and assassins. Maybe you have contacts in the merchant community, or you know someone down at the docks who sees every sailor and ship’s passenger who passes through. Maybe you were able to tear off a bit of an intruder’s clothing and can use it to scry on them, or you got a close enough look at them to cast locate creature. Or maybe you know a local fortune-teller who can give you a reading accurate enough to help you track down your stolen property. All in all, it’s better not to lose your assets in the first place, but these expedients may be able to offer you a smidgen of hope once you’ve already been burgled. CASTLES
Castles weren’t solely private strongholds for their owners. They originated as places of refuge for the people of the entire area around them. It might have been infeasible to protect sprawling farms from raiders, just like the buildings across the stream in Seven Samurai, but at least the people could be protected by getting them inside the walls—as could livestock and stores of grain. (That’s how the nobility justified levying the taxes it took to build them.) In later centuries, castles became hubs of social activity: Holidays and weddings were celebrated, and legal disputes heard, in their great halls. Village mills were often situated in their baileys, and villagers brought their grain inside to be ground into flour. A code of hospitality meant that traveling dignitaries could show up, even without prior notice, and be put up for the night as honored guests. A castle isn’t a lair, and a lair isn’t a castle. Running a castle is a huge operation conducted (at least nominally) for the benefit of an entire domain and requiring its full support, so there’s no way to hide it and no good reason to. In fact, historically, building a castle was often an act of conspicuous consumption, a way of showing off one’s status. Your activities, however, are probably more self-interested—and more clandestine. So why devote attention to castle design in a book about lair defense? Because castles represented the state of the art of defensive fortification during the eras that most fantasy role-playing campaigns are designed to evoke. They’re case studies in how to apply engineering and technology to the problem of defense. A basic motte-and-bailey castle, typical of the early Middle Ages, provides a tidy illustration of each of the three components of defense. The role of detection is played by the tower; deterrence, by the palisade wall; and response, by the garrison. These are simple, low-technology methods of accomplishing these basic goals, and they stand up to simple, lowtechnology assault. The more sophisticated the attacker, the more sophisticated the defenses required to defeat them. By the fifteenth century CE, castles had concentric
curtain walls with corner towers, elaborate gatehouses with portcullises and zigzagging entrances, and an assortment of architectural devices that granted cover to defenders as they shot back at attackers from the walls— and gunpowder cannons were beginning to render even these cutting-edge measures obsolete. While austere castle keeps evolved into opulent palaces, the walls around them evolved into gun emplacements. CONSTRUCTION Castles were often built near borders, roads, or rivers, their sites chosen for defensibility, the value of the surrounding land they could control, or both. The jackpot location was a hilltop or mountain crag with bedrock beneath, in the bend of a river, with both farmland and woodland within easy reach. Elevated terrain allowed defenders to see farther and forced attackers to work harder, rock foundations prevented sappers from mining underneath them, and rivers provided multiple benefits: fresh water for drinking, boat traffic for delivery of heavy building materials (and, sometimes, the privilege of exacting tolls), the ability to fill a moat, and an obstruction for attackers to cross. A castle had a defensive reach—and, by extension, an administrative reach—of about 10 miles, so castles built to control conquered territory were often situated about 20 miles apart from one another. An early motte was about 100 to 300 feet wide at the base, 50 feet wide on top, and generally between 20 and 30 feet high, although some were as low as 10 feet or as high as 100 feet. The earth to build the motte came from a dry moat dug 10 feet deep around what would become the bailey. The keep atop the motte was built out of wood, because the mounded earth wouldn’t support the weight of a stone structure. Because of this downside, motteand-bailey construction went out of fashion fairly quickly: By the thirteenth century CE, “donjons”—stone-walled keeps built directly on the ground—had become the norm in Western and Central Europe. These keeps were between 70 and 120 feet tall, up to 70 to 100 feet long, and up to 50 to 80 feet wide, with walls generally 5 to 7 feet thick.
While donjon walls were made of stone, the floors generally weren’t, nor were any outbuildings in the bailey that weren’t required to withstand a direct assault. Timber was much more plentiful than workable stone, so floors, roofs, outbuildings, and scaffolding were all wooden. For stability, the stone walls were built with holes for the insertion of scaffold beams, called “putlog” holes. European castles’ outer walls, also called curtain or enceinte (en-saint, or if you’re feeling especially Gallic, ahn-sant) walls, were between 5 and 15 feet thick and reinforced by buttresses. The less natural defense provided by the terrain, the thicker the wall. If high-quality stone was difficult to obtain locally, a castle’s outer wall might be a sandwich of two layers of carefully cut stone filled up in between with loose rubble suspended in mortar, a method developed by the Roman Empire. These core-and-veneer walls typically rose between 10 and 30 feet high and were one-fourth as thick as they were tall. Stone walls were the norm across most of the castle-building world; Japan, however, was a salient exception. For pretty much the entire castlebuilding era in Japan, walls and keeps were built from wood—sometimes coated with plaster to make it more fire-resistant—with stone used only for foundations. (This choice was partly due to material availability and partly because wood structures were more flexible and therefore more earthquakeresistant.) However, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE, those foundations became quite elaborate, as buildings and even entire baileys were raised up on elevated stone terraces—the motte principle again, but with much fancier and sturdier execution. But back to Europe. As time went on, castle moats grew wider and deeper—by the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries CE, the heyday of the medieval castle, they were 40 to 60 feet wide and up to 30 feet deep. Whether a moat was filled with water depended a great deal on the presence of nearby natural water features, because that was the only dependable way to direct water into them. They were essentially open sewers, receiving all the waste from inside the castle, so crossing them was not only challenging but deeply unpleasant. Also, they often concealed a bottom dotted with
sharpened stakes. If you fell into a moat while trying to climb a wall or stay on top of one, you could look forward to getting impaled on stakes, then— if that didn’t kill you outright—contracting infections through the wounds. Meanwhile, keep walls doubled in thickness and began to follow a rounded pattern, since the corners of square towers created blind spots. Outer walls were built on plinths, which both gave them more solid foundations and caused objects dropped from atop them to roll forward into an enemy’s formation, and they gradually rose in height to match the keeps within them. Finally, towers were incorporated directly into the walls, eventually freeing the keep from its role in detection—and allowing it to evolve into a palatial residence. Whether castle defenders used stairs or ladders to climb to the top of the walls depended in large part on what those walls were made of. The more stone was used in their construction, the more likely that stairs were built into them; the less stone used, the more likely that defenders had to scale them with ladders. Once towers were incorporated into the walls, the stairs were moved inside them, so that attackers who managed to reach the top of the wall would then have to break into a tower in order to get back down safely on the inside. Stairways in large towers were often made of wood and occupied a continuous vertical space that granted access to every floor. Inside the keep, however, stairs performed an additional function beyond vertical access: They also communicated social access, or the denial of it. In particular, spiral staircases, which were usually made of stone and built into corners, signaled a transition from more public spaces to more private spaces—that is, from controlled zones to restricted zones. (Note how easy it is for a handful of guards, or even just one or two, to block access to an enclosed spiral stair!) Spiral stairs quickly became the norm as soon as building engineering and material availability allowed stone stairs to supplant wood, but in later centuries, materials and forms both began to diversify to reflect further divisions in social status. For the private spaces of the castle’s owner, spiral stairs (and for the servants who needed to access those most private spaces,
narrower and tighter spiral stairs); for high-status personnel and guests, straight stone stairs, with turns to signify crossing thresholds into spaces of distinction; for the common folk, wooden stairs; and for those of no social significance at all, ladders. In hyper-hierarchical medieval Europe, there was no confusion at all about what these different types of stairs were saying. Contrary to popular belief, the lower levels of medieval castles didn’t serve as prisons or dungeons. Prisoners were usually held in the highest room of a tower, from which it would be most difficult to escape. Because the most secure place in an early medieval castle was in the donjon, the term “dungeon” became synonymous with “prison”—and later, in the Renaissance, when prison cells were moved underground, that part of the castle became known as the “dungeon.” In the Middle Ages, however, the lowest level of the keep was generally either a storage cellar or—if a rudimentary sanitary system had been installed—a cesspool, where waste from indoor toilets (“garderobes”) ended up. (Woe to the peasants who had to clean it out twice a year.) Speaking of toilets, if a keep didn’t have a cesspool, they had to be located on the outer wall, where they projected outward and opened directly over the moat. This arrangement could be quite inconvenient for the residents of the keep if it happened to be located far inside the wall, which is why “sanitary towers” were occasionally built, inaccessible from the rest of the outer wall, and connected to the keep by a covered walkway. In many cases, however, such an arrangement simply wasn’t feasible, and the castle’s inhabitants used chamber pots, which had to be carried to the outer wall and dumped over the side. Castles were stanky places. THE GATEHOUSE As the aperture through which nearly all the daily traffic in and out of a castle is channeled, the castle gate is obviously of paramount defensive importance. How to limit access only to those authorized to enter and exit, make would-be intruders think twice about trying to trespass, and stop those who go ahead and try it?
The simplest and earliest solution was to close the entryway with a large, heavy, barred door, under the watchful eye of guards who could see and, if necessary, shoot approaching outsiders from a parapet—a low-walled balcony—above it. From there, it wasn’t a great leap to adding a battlement: an alternating pattern of high walls (“merlons”) that defenders could take cover behind and low walls (“crenels”) that they could see and shoot over. Even really big doors, however, have a weakness: leverage. A massive enough strike against them—say, from a battering ram—at the edge farthest from their hinges can force them inward, flexing the bars holding them shut and snapping them like toothpicks. Enter the portcullis, or vertical gate. Or rather, do not enter. Unlike the hinged gate door, which was designed to swing open and thus did so fairly readily under the not-so-gentle encouragement of the battering ram, the portcullis was built to be raised and lowered within grooves in the stone walls on either side of it. Its lattice design distributed force and contained damage, so that any impact was more likely to punch a small hole in it than to knock the whole thing out of place. And unlike doors, which had to be pushed shut by defenders inside against the resistance of attackers pushing them open from outside, portcullises could simply be dropped, letting gravity do the work. The vertical bars of portcullises were sharpened to points at the bottom, so you can imagine how fatal it was to be caught beneath one when it fell. Sure, a whole bunch of strong warriors working together could lift a portcullis gate. But that’s a slow endeavor, and once you’ve lifted it up, you still have to make room for the ram to get through and deal with the door just past the portcullis. Yeah, they didn’t get rid of that. By late in the Middle Ages, castle gatehouses contained series of portcullises and doors that visitors, or attackers, had to pass through to get inside. These locked-down vestibules also included arrow slits, narrow windows through which defenders could see targets and shoot arrows while enjoying nearly complete cover; and machicolations, stone structures that extended over the exterior walls and gate passages. Machicolations evolved
out of hoardings, temporary wooden structures that cantilevered over the edges of castles’ outer walls in order to solve the problem of being unable to see, or counterattack, enemies directly below. Machicolations were more permanent and stronger than hoardings, and braced with buttresses. What hoardings and machicolations had in common is that they had openings in their floors through which defenders could observe attackers and drop rocks or boiling water on them. In gatehouses with multiple portcullises and doors, machicolations were built over the areas directly in front of each of those obstacles, so that defenders on the floor above could further harass intruders as they tried to penetrate the entrance. Interior machicolations were called meurtrières in French, roughly meaning exactly what we call them in English: “murder holes.” Even before portcullises were widely adopted, there were already drawbridges, which we’re all familiar with. In a way, though, drawbridges are the opposite of portcullises, because they have to be lifted up to close the way and lowered to open it. Thus, they’re not suited to the portcullis trick of trapping an enemy force by dropping them. Their one and only application is to bridge a moat when you want to allow authorized individuals to enter, which means a castle generally has only one drawbridge, placed wherever the moat is. However, drawbridges do have the nice advantage of almost total immunity to battering rams: If you can’t cross the moat, you can’t get at the drawbridge to break it down, and anyway, it’s designed to open toward you. How about we take this already difficult obstacle course and make it even tougher? Let’s build a barbican: a preliminary gatehouse standing some distance in front of the enceinte wall that one has to pass through first before proceeding through the gate in the wall itself. The path from the barbican to the castle proper, called the “neck,” is flanked by walls connecting the two, so it’s impossible to deviate from the path, and defenders stationed on top of those walls—and on top of the enceinte wall, and in the towers of the barbican—can take free shots at intruders as they make their way forward.
Or we can simply force our visitors to take a hard 90-degree turn in order to face the first gate they come to. So much for having the benefit of forward momentum while trying to strike it with a battering ram. While we’re at it, let’s put a tower on the other side of the approach as well, opposite the gate, so that when they turn to break it down, they’re turning their backs on the tower—and our guards can shoot them from the safety of their arrow slits. At this point, you’re probably wondering why anyone would bother trying to breach a castle gate at all. Most of the time, they wouldn’t—not by force, anyway. It was a deterrent, and a successful one. It was so successful, in fact, that the usual approach to attacking a castle was to sit a safe distance away, block food and other supplies from being delivered, and hope that the inhabitants could be starved into surrendering before the troops called up to conduct the siege lost interest and went home. If that didn’t work, the approach next most likely to succeed was to try to scale the wall—or smash a hole in it. A variety of siege machines were built for both of these purposes. Sometimes these measures succeeded; sometimes they failed. Either way, they still made more sense than trying to bust through the gate. That would have been folly. OceanofPDF.com
POSTERNS “We’ll find the back entrance and sneak in that way!” is an RPG trope as well-loved—and worn-out—as a favorite shirt. Is it really plausible that anyone who took fortification seriously would include such a vulnerability? Surprisingly, yes! They’re called posterns, and their main function was to allow the inhabitants of a walled city or castle to exit and enter unobtrusively, particularly mid-siege. However, it wouldn’t be wholly accurate to characterize them as vulnerabilities, because they were defended as well as the front gate, if not as actively. They were built as small and narrow as possible, to prevent a large force from rushing through. They were often hidden, requiring close reconnaissance to find them. In early walled cities, they weren’t built directly through the walls; instead, two neighboring sections of wall were built to overlap, with the postern between them. They were generally barred, or had doors barred from the inside. Sometimes they weren’t even at ground level, requiring ladders to be lowered whenever anyone came or went. In short, yeah, there were back entrances, but honestly? You’d have better luck trying to slip into a castle by using chicanery to enter via the front gate under false pretenses than by trying to get inside through a postern. I. Or, rather, the reinvention, since the ancient Egyptians applied the tumbler principle to make locks out of wood, with keys nearly as long as a person’s arm. OceanofPDF.com
CHAPTER2 TERRAIN Location, location, and location are said to be the three most important things about real estate. It’s certainly true of real estate that you have to defend. You want a site that offers good defensive sight lines; few places where your enemies can hide from you; natural features, such as slopes, bluffs, and rivers, that limit the directions from which enemies can approach; and consumable resources, such as food and building materials, close at hand. A climate that you’re adapted to but your enemies aren’t is an added benefit. The more Mother Earth does for you already, the less you have to do for yourself. However, terrain can also constrain you. You have to consider what building materials are available to you, how many people (or creatures) the land can feed, how you and others will travel to and from your lair, and what your options are if you’re forced to flee. The environments listed below are organized by how many complications they present. GRASSLAND/HILL Constructed lairs in grassland and hill areas will look a lot like castles, because the defense of locations and populations in grasslands and hills—land coveted for its productive capacity—is exactly what castles were designed for. In these types of terrain, movement is easy, sight lines are long, and both food and building materials are abundant: the perfect conditions for building a solid fortification. Even if your lair isn’t a castle per se, it will most likely follow the
form of a castle, with a ditch and bank, an outer wall atop the rampart, a gate in the wall with a parapet above it, and at least one observation tower. The only drawback to these types of terrain is that they’re also the easiest to attack across, which means a fortified grassland or hill lair has to be extremely sturdy. For this reason, a hilltop location is preferable to one on flat ground: Higher vantage points allow sentries to see farther, improving detection, and would-be attackers have to work against gravity, improving deterrence. Also, attackers can come from any direction if you’re not using environmental obstacles to hinder their approach, so while a hill is good, a craggy hill is better. One thing to be mindful of if you’ve chosen a hilltop location: Hills can be steep. If you need others to deliver supplies to you, you don’t want to make them go straight up the side—they’ll charge you extra, if they don’t simply refuse to deliver to you. Approach paths should be gently sloped, traveling mostly across the incline rather than right up it, with occasional hairpin turns. This design is both easier on those you want coming to your door and harder on those you don’t: The length of the approach gives you more time to see them. And shoot at them. URBAN Establishing an urban lair is a piece of cake: Just buy a building and retrofit it. The local vernacular architecture may not be as sturdy as a stone castle, but as long as you don’t hang out a shingle, you’ll blend right in with the neighbors. For an urban lair, camouflage and disguise are every bit as important as a hardened envelope, if not more so. Of course, inside the walls, anything goes. Your building may be halftimbered wattle and daub on the outside, but you can line the interiors with stone—or lead, if protecting against X-ray vision is among your priorities. The appearance of the exterior can deceive intruders about the arrangement of the interior, making a building appear to have more or fewer floors, or to end where it continues or to continue where it ends; it also offers no clue as to how far below the ground the basement levels extend or what passages might exist in the walls between rooms. Maybe your building is TARDIS-like, bigger on the inside