ASSAULTING A STRONGHOLD

Building a whole new stronghold from scratch can be a heck of a hassle. Assuming you can find one, it’s a lot easier to take one that you like. Of course, good characters don’t wander around stealing people’s homes from them. However, if you manage to find a villain who happens to live in a stronghold you want, then stomping on into that place and booting out the current tenants is likely fair game, especially in the more lawless lands.

In the more civilized parts of the world, however, it’s not acceptable to waltz on in and take someone’s home, no matter what their alignment. Laws are in place to prevent theft of any kind, especially if it’s connected with the murder of the owners of said property. Without proper planning, you can actually find yourself on the wrong side of the law if you’re not careful.

Remember that D&D is a game about skirmishes between groups. Its rules represent the action between a small number of creatures and heroic characters. It’s not designed to represent the confrontations between armies. To best make use of the D&D rules, even if your story involves a larger action of hundreds or even thousands of troops, your game session should reflect the actions of the characters in actions against smaller numbers of foes: infiltrators, spies, and invaders. For the most part, you should be using the same tactics whether the characters are attacking or defending a stronghold. Characters attacking a stronghold rely on infiltration and stealth to accomplish their objectives; they don’t generally bring catapults to the fray. Just the same, you can bring to bear hostile creatures, enemy forces, and villains to engage the characters’ stronghold. The larger story of a battle or war is something that your characters can participate in, but are ultimately up to the DM to decide.

The rules here focus on attacks against the structure itself and dealing damage to its parts and components.

Strike Team

One of the most popular ways of invading a stronghold is to send in an elite strike team of adventurers to take out a key portion of the place’s defense—or simply to eliminate the stronghold’s owner. This idea can be the source of many adventures.

The benefits of using a strike team are easy to see. Coordinating an army to invade a stronghold is difficult and costly. It’s hard enough to get a party of adventurers all headed in the same direction at once. Imagine the difficulties when multiplying the number of people involved a hundredfold.

A strike team, by comparison, is fairly straightforward. You gather a group of people who have the skills necessary to get the job done, you come up with the best plan that you can, and then you execute it.

Best of all, the rewards for the members of a strike team are usually much better than they are if an army is involved. Those soldiers expect to be well paid for their work, after all, and that means that much less can be had by you and your closest friends

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In the heat of battle, an army can do a tremendous amount of damage to a stronghold. If you’re trying to capture the place and take it as your own, this means you will have a lot of cleaning up to do after it’s all over. In some cases, the damage may be bad enough that you decide to call the place a total loss. Lots of ruins exist in the world that got their start this way.

Even if the army leaves the structure of the stronghold intact, many invaders feel that sacking the place is part of the privilege accorded them as the victors. These are the spoils of war, so to speak. No matter how you might try to govern such behavior, you can be sure that some foot soldiers will stuff their pockets with as many valuables as they can. You’re not going to be able to stop it all.

With a strike team, on the other hand, if the goals are achieved efficiently, there can be little damage done to the stronghold, and most of the valuables will likely be left in place. When the current occupants are run out of the place, you can be sure that they’ll try to take everything with them that’s not nailed down, but since they’re on the losing end of things, they likely won’t have enough time to do more than grab a few essential items. The trick with a strike team is getting enough intelligence about the target before you move in. A poorly forewarned strike team is walking into a lion’s mouth. No matter how good the party may be, you can be sure that eventualities will crop up that the invaders couldn’t possibly have planned for.

Fortunately, many strongholds are only set up to prevent massive attacks from large, well-armed forces. Often, a small, well-informed strike team can find many security holes to exploit, things that an army wouldn’t be able to do. If the characters are good, they might even be able to take over the place without having to spill a single drop of blood.

Don’t count on it. As you will discover firsthand once you’re in charge of your own place, the people who own strongholds rarely are willing to give them up without a fight.

Laying Siege

Sometime the straightforward ways are the best. If defenders repel your strike team—or if sending one in seems too dangerous or fruitless—then it’s time to pull out all the stops. It’s time to gather an army and lay siege to the place.

The means by which you lay siege to a stronghold can vary, depending on the style of stronghold. It’s difficult, for instance, to lay siege to a flying fortress, but establishing an aerial blockade around the place can do it. Similarly, there are often too many ways for people to get in and out of a submerged stronghold, but naval, submersible blockades can do a lot here as well.

The whole idea behind a siege is to set up camp around a stronghold and cut off the flow of essential supplies to the place. This presupposes that the forces inside the stronghold would have their heads handed to them were they to meet the invading force on an open field of battle, that the only thing keeping the invaders from succeeding outright is the not-so-trivial matter of the stronghold’s formidable defenses. Otherwise, the defenders would simply open the stronghold’s gates, storm out onto the area outside their home, and make quick work of their would-be attackers.

Few places in the world are entirely self-sufficient. Many have their own ready supplies of water, but food and other resources are another matter entirely. Eventually, a place under siege will exhaust its stores and end up surrendering peacefully, aware that it has little hope of standing against the invading force before starving to death.

At least, that’s the theory of those laying siege to the place. It doesn’t always stand up to reality.

Spellcasters, for instance, can help supply clean food and water from thin air, providing some sustenance to those trapped inside the stronghold with them. Even a low-level cleric has access to spells such as create water and purify food and water, and a 5th-level cleric can cast create food and water to keep five allies sated indefinitely. Strongholds tight on storage space store scrolls of create food and water for this very purpose. Certain magic items can help out here a lot, such as a decanter of endless water, but even these are usually only stopgap measures.

Furthermore, the defenders can use magic to circumvent the siege. Most armies have little chance of stopping an invisible flying character going in and out of a fortress, and a high-level wizard or sorcerer with teleport can supply a decent-sized stronghold without the besieging forces suspecting a thing.

Many strongholds also have secret ways in and out for such an eventuality. Unless the attackers manage to find and plug each and every one of these holes—both magical and mundane—the siege is going to be a long one and may not succeed at all

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The longer a siege takes, the lower its chance of success. All but the most vile villains have friends or allies they can call upon to aid them in such times. Once the cavalry arrives, the attackers can quickly find themselves fighting a battle on two or more fronts, and this is often a losing proposition.

Worse yet is the effect that a long siege can have upon your own ranks. Soldiers are fighters, ill-suited for long periods of inactivity. The simple matter of sitting around outside a stronghold for too long can dull their senses and their skills. Keeping their attention focused where it needs to be can be a true challenge on a daily basis.

So the trick with a siege is to lay as much pressure on the defenders as can be done to get them to capitulate as quickly possible. If this can’t be done, then other alternatives need to be explored, or the effort is doomed to failure.

Smoking Them Out

One of the biggest dangers to any stronghold is fire— with the exception of underwater strongholds, which are, of course, immune to such things. When a fire rages through a stronghold, putting it out becomes the top priority, surpassing even that of keeping invaders from knocking down the front door.

This reason is why many strongholds are built from nonflammable materials, such as stone walls and slate roofs. It’s difficult to make a place entirely fireproof however. Even if the building itself is impossible to burn, the same can’t often be said for its contents. Many stone strongholds have wooden floors or support beams throughout them, and the furnishings are almost always susceptible to fire.

The real problem here is that the invader is making a choice to damage the stronghold directly. If you’re after the stronghold itself, this is probably not such a great idea. However, if the place can be brought down so simply, perhaps you would be better off with another stronghold. If you were to move in and occupy the place, it would likely only be a matter of time before someone else would use your same tactics to drive you out of your new home.

Using fire inside the stronghold ensures that if you carry the day you’ll be taking damaged goods as your prize. Fires are often unpredictable and certainly indiscriminate. They devour everything they can.

If the fire drives the defenders out of the place, you may then find yourself fighting to put out the very blaze you caused. If the defenders don’t simply head for the hills, you can end up battling against them at the same time—not an enviable position to be in.

More restrained invaders can simply set fires upwind from the stronghold and hope for the resultant smoke to choke the defenders out. In most fires, it’s actually the smoke that kills someone long before the flames actually get to them, and a number of strategically placed fires can make even the best-defended stronghold a fairly uncomfortable place to be.

The real danger with this strategy is that a shift in the wind can place your forces in the very position into which you were planning to place your foes. Wise commanders make sure to have a friend with a control winds or control weather spell handy to make sure that the conditions continue to favor their side. The same can be said for the defenders, of course, and the result of the struggles between two opposing spellcasters often means the difference between victory and defeat.

Attacking the Structure

Sometimes there’s nothing else for it. If you want to get into a stronghold, you’re going to have to do it the hard way: by knocking down the front door and storming on in. Tactics for this scenario vary a lot depending on the kind of stronghold you’re attacking. However, there are always a few common elements in any of these situations that you can try to tilt in your favor.

Barring significant power discrepancies, superior numbers generally triumph in most battles, especially in a large stronghold in which you don’t want to give the defenders any place to hide. With a larger force, you can attack from several different directions at once, forcing the defenders to split their limited resources. The more fronts they fight on at once, the more difficult it is for them to coordinate their defense. As an attacker, you only need make a breakthrough on a single front for the defense’s whole plan to fall apart.

It’s always easier to attack then defend. The defenders must wait for you to come to them, meaning you can select the time and manner in which the fight begins and progresses. If things turn badly against you, you can often call a retreat without fear of being pursued. You can then lick your wounds for a while and give it another shot on another day. After all—in most cases, at least—that stronghold’s not going anywhere.

There’s a lot to be said for the element of surprise in any attack. It can be difficult to pull off, especially with a large force, but if you can manage to catch your foes unaware, you can do a lot of damage to their chances before they can even muster a response.

The flip side of this is that forewarned defenders have the chance to prepare a nasty surprise for your forces. It’s amazing how resourceful people can be about protecting their own homes. If you let them know you’re coming and bringing hell along with you, all you’re doing is giving them time to heat up the boiling oil in the kettles on the ramparts.

The best tactic then is to hit your target hard and fast, before the defenders can realize what’s going on. If you can do this under the cover of night, all the better, especially if your solders can see in the dark and the defenders cannot. Little is more terrifying than trying to fight off an assault by attackers that can’t be seen.

Attacking the stronghold is like attacking any other object: the walls have armor class, hardness, and hit points. Each must be overcome in turn for you to destroy the structure. Furthermore, some parts of a stronghold get saving throws against magic attacks.

Armor Class: This hurdle is the easiest to overcome, because strongholds are (usually) immobile and have very low armor classes. A stronghold has an AC of –3: 10 – 5 (for its effective Dexterity of 0) –8 (most fortresses are Colossal in size).

Aiming at a specific part of a stronghold is harder. Most doors are AC 4: 10 – 5 (Dexterity 0) –1 (size Large), and most windows are AC 5 (they’re effectively Medium-sized).

A stronghold isn’t tough defensively because it has a high AC. It’s tough defensively because it grants high AC to its defenders (mostly through cover bonuses).

Hardness: A wall’s hardness rating represents how well it resists damage. Subtract this hardness rating from damage before it’s applied—no matter what the source of damage is. If you deal 10 points of damage to a wall with hardness of 8, the wall takes 2 points of damage. Hardness is strictly a quality of the material, and it doesn’t change based on its thickness. One foot of stone has the same hardness as 10 feet of the stuff.

In general, wood has a hardness of 5, stone has a hardness of 8, and iron has a hardness of 10. That means that no dagger wielded by a Strength 10 character will damage a wooden wall, nor will a longsword wielded by such an attacker penetrate stone, and only a greataxe has a chance to cut through iron. Hardness counts for each blow, so dealing two 4-point attacks won’t damage a wall with hardness 5.

Hit Points: Once you have hit the stronghold and overcome the hardness of the wall, the rest of the damage reduces its hit points. Each 10-foot-by-10-foot section of wall has hit points listed for certain thicknesses; walls twice as thick have twice the hit points, and so on. For example, a 1-foot thick masonry wall has 90 hit points. A 3-foot thick masonry wall has 270 hit points.

Immunities and Resistances: As with other objects, strongholds are immune to critical hits and subdual damage. They take half damage from ranged weapons, except for siege weapons such as catapults, ballistas, and trebuchets (see below). Strongholds also take half damage from acid, fire, and lightning attacks, and one-quarter damage from cold attacks. Divide the damage by the appropriate amount before applying the wall’s hardness. Sonic attacks do full damage.

Effects of Damage: Once a wall or other part of stronghold has taken 10% of its total hit points in damage, the scars and gouges are noticeable. If the part was particularly artistic—a fresco painting on the wall, for example—it’s noticeably marred at this point. When the wall has taken 50% of its hit points in damage, cracks and rends appear. At 75% of its hit points in damage, holes are apparent (although opponents on opposite sides of the wall have nine-tenths cover from each other). The wall collapses when its hit points are exhausted.

If you’re attacking a multilayered wall, you must overcome each layer in turn. A single attack that has “left-over” damage after destroying the previous layer must overcome the hardness of the new layer before damaging it.

Collateral Damage: If you destroy a 10-foot-by-10- foot section of wall, you weaken nearby walls. Wall sections to either side of the destroyed wall take 10% of their total hit points in damage, and walls above take 50% of their hit points in damage. Figure out the total damage, then subtract the wall’s hardness. For example, if you destroy a 10-foot by 10-foot section of masonry wall (90 hit points) on the first floor of a stronghold, the wall sections to either side will take 1 point of damage each (9 – hardness 8). Masonry wall sections above the destroyed section take 37 points of damage (45 – hardness 8). Collateral damage is cumulative; a wall section on the third story takes damage when the first story section below it is destroyed, and again when the second-story section below it is destroyed.

Characters standing near a wall when it’s destroyed risk getting caught in the rubble, unless the destruction was caused by something such as a disintegrate spell. Characters within 5 feet of a wall section when it’s destroyed suffer 1d6 points of damage, plus an additional 1d6 points for every 50 hit points of the wall section, to a maximum of 10d6 (Reflex save DC 15 halves). Those who fail their Reflex saves are pinned beneath the rubble, and they take 1d6 points of subdual damage per round. Pinned characters who fall unconscious from subdual damage must make a Constitution check (DC 15) or take 1d6 points of normal damage each minute thereafter until freed or dead.

Saving Throws: Nonmagical parts of a stronghold always fail their saves, but magic components and extras get saving throws. Their Fortitude, Reflex, and Will saving throw bonuses are equal to 2 + the caster level of the magic component or extra.