#fantasy castle

[oldschoolfrp]

Those who try to steal from the hoard may become part of the hoard (Carl Lundgren cover for Dragon 50, June 1981)

[assassin1513]

⚜️The dreaming Fairy Castles ⚜️

[dorkagedoodles]

Page 29-32 of Empyrean. These are some of the oldest pages that I made.

[wakingdreamworld]

Fantasy Art - Pt 2

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[blogfanreborn777]

Brid Castle by boosoohoo

[cmrosens]

Fantasy Castle Thoughts

Wandering around castle ruins on the weekend while thinking about my fantasy WIP had me thinking about more worldbuilding stuff in fantasy (the obvious ones being covered by others, such as, where does the shit go? How do they get water? How do they not poison themselves while answering Qu 1?):

That film where they erased the entire town and the castle was sat there for no reason (meant to be Rochester) - look, even if your castle is a strategic fortress in the back of beyond, it will have some kind of nearby settlement. Because: who is building it and how long does it take and where do they all live while they're constructing it? Where do they go afterwards? How do the garrison get food (easier to grow crops and raise livestock nearby than have vulnerable wagons bringing it in and being ambushed).

A lot of castles were not built by locals, because you can't trust the fucking locals, that's (usually) why the castle is THERE. If you don't need a defensive structure you build a manor or a stately home. If you're building a castle, it's usually to subdue the population or to defend against the neighbours, but either way, what often happens is that the king or whoever will round up people from his patrimony he knows he's already whipped into shape and can trust, then force-marches them across country and re-settles them in the area the castle is meant to be. They are the ones who then farm and raise livestock, and push out the locals to do so. Over time, you get some intermingling and after a few gens it's a very different demographic, but you have a story of settlement going on with tensions bubbling under the surface. See also: William Rufus wanting to subdue the North of England, forcibly uprooting his tenants in the South of England and making them build and settle in Carlisle, where he built his castle (11thC); the Earl of Lincoln dragging a load of Yorkshire and Lancashire and Lincolnshire men to re-settle his newly bestowed North Welsh lordships, pushing the Welsh into the uplands while the settlers took over the lowlands (12th-13thC).

The settlers around castles bring their own forms of folk religion, superstition, folklore, dialect, and naming patterns, which are specific to their original region. These may be very similar to the ones where they've been settled. What does that look like? Is the culture of particular villages and settlements a little bit different or maybe strikingly so the closer you get to the castles in your world because of this? What are the issues faced by settlers and by local people, how do they get resolved (or do they)? You'd imagine settlers are favoured in court disputes, but depending on the politics, they may actually be overlooked in efforts to appease the locals, leading to some lords really upsetting the very people they took for granted that they could trust. What's going on with all this local level stuff? By the way:: 21stC "my religion is better than yours" is so fucking boring and overdone imo from Western fantasy. Not every fantasy people has to have a US Evangelical approach to faith. Maybe they just don't care, or as soon as they hear something new they're like oooh this is interesting let's incorporate that! And they do. And it's fine. And that's a normal attitude to have. That might be a lot more fun, because then you get multiple variations on a theme, which create lots of little layers and nuance to your world, rather than a very one-dimensional impression of "homogeneity" with the danger of slipping into ye olde "X Bad, Y Good" dichotomy.

Technology and adapting tech: building castles requires tech, and once you know how long something took to build, you know what the tech was and can work out how it may have developed since then. Also think about how it can be adapted. If you've got a world where castles are required because fighting happens, you have a world full of disabled people. War causes disability. Even tournaments were EXCEEDINGLY dangerous. Henry VIII got permanent brain damage at one. Other knights were left paralysed, many died, some were amputees as a result. People get their legs hacked off due to gangrene from wounds. People get arrows lodged in their spines. People get sick from malnutrition and develop conditions like osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, etc. Picture this: your lord gets severely injured and may never walk again just by falling from his horse (common). Unfortunately, the castle steps are DESIGNED to be difficult to get up and down, because it's a defensive structure, and you DO NOT want to make it easy for enemies to just stroll up to the upper levels which are the most defensible. Bear in mind that the majority of a castle is empty space: the ward. The domestic quarters are built into the walls, usually the inner walls of a concentric castle. Your lord had an upper floor room. In a castle, space is at a premium. You need all the space on the ground floor and it's already occupied. What do you do? Well - you remember that pulley system for heaving big tons of dressed stone up to the top of the scaffolding when constructing the tower? Yeah. Yeah you're going to use that. And if your lord is now permanently disabled and cannot use the stairs, you can work out how to refine that. But right now, you need to get him into bed so the physician can look him over, because if he dies right now this would be terribly politically inconvenient . Even if this hasn't happened in your current story right now, if this was the case for the lord or two BEFORE, the equipment may all still be there, and still be in place.

Anyway if you like this, you might like my newsletter and podcast, and the books I write.

[joelchaimholtzman]

Book Cover I was commissioned to paint by Tor Books / Macmillan.

Forge of the High Mage: A Novel of the Malazan Empire, written by Ian C Esslemont.

The book was actually released before I got to work on it, and the cover was initially made with stock imagery before I was asked to paint it from scratch.

A bit different than my usual work, but hope you still like it,

Cheers!

[youare-number6]

Vintage Illustrations and Maps

I didn't really ask for this style but I'm glad they happened.

Once again (still) the prompt had a lot of descriptive text about a famous painting. That is where the text came from. You might be able to figure out which painting it is based on the text.

[locationbuildingprompts]

Location Building Prompt #283

[redrabbitkreations]

[princeruby]

Paradise or prison? 👀

- Prince of Erosia -

[oldschoolfrp]

Illuminated by dragon fire, adventurers and Githyanki battle for a stolen vorpal silver sword (Peter Clark cover art, Dungeon 43, September/October 1993, featuring Steve Kurtz' plane-travelling adventure "Into the Silver Realm")

[artinspire]

By https://www.artstation.com/innochoi

[hitsugiyukirpgart]

With the spiral staircase, you will have a choice of three types of walls: two different types of stone walls and one half-timbered masonry. You can assemble the entire staircase with only a stone wall or combine the first two floors with stone and print the remaining floors with half-timbered masonry.

[wakingdreamworld]

Fantasy Art - Pt 1

I created a spaceship prompt and recently shared the results of that. Then I added a lot of descriptive text of some important art and sometimes that meant no spaceships at all.

[theangryscribble]

A majestic castle fit for a king