Magical sieges.

[gridlore]

Very few cities have walls anymore. They were once the must-have accessory for any up and coming metropolis. City walls are mentioned in the Bible, you can still find their old paths in ring roads in many places, and in a few special locations, lengths of the walls still stand intact. Istanbul is one such place, and I was able to look with awe at the remains of the walls of Theodosius and Constantine's sea walls, still enclosing what was Constantinople.

Those walls repelled would-be invaders for a thousand years, only failing twice. The first, in 1204 when a force of Crusaders and Venetians led by a blind badass in his 90s Doge Enrico Dandaldo. Epic Badass.) and then when the Roman Empire was nothing more than the city, the Ottomans blasted through with weapons Theodosius' designers could never imagine: cannons.

Which is what put an end to city walls and fortified castles: a weapon that could defeat the defensive posture of thick stone and covered firing points. So what happens when we throw magic and monsters into the mix? Are you still going to have those great walls and gates? I'm going to say yes. Because building a defense means understanding the nature of what may attack you. The engineers tasked with building city walls are going to know about the threat of hostile magics and summoned creatures.

There are two kinds of defense: active and passive. An active defense reacts to an attack, a passive defense just soaks it up. In modern terms, a passive defense is a concrete bunker. The minefield and interlocking fields of machine gun fire are the active defensives.

Let's start with passive defenses. First of all, you can just make the wall big and thick enough to absorb a lot of damage. This is labor and material intensive, but it does give you an option that doesn't depend on magic. Plus you can fix the wall at night when the enemy (hopefully) can't see you. You can find any number of books on how walls were built here in the real world if you're interested.

Your second layer of passive defense is materials. In many settings, there are things that frustrate magic. Cold iron, magic crystals, the bones of a saint, etc., all can be built into the walls and gates to absorb magical energies harmlessly. Some variants might store this energy as fuel for the active countermeasures. Some items, especially holy relics, might not be part of the fortifications but instead by brought out and paraded along the battlements both to raise the morale of the fighters and as part of a ritual to harden the city against attack. Be a darn shame if someone stole the Shield-arm of Levene the Stalwart . . . (this is a scenario idea.)

Now for some active defenses. These come in two parts: trigger and action. The simplest one I can think of is a set of Glyphs of Warding carved into the walls and activated as the enemy approaches. Explosive runes would be a favorite.

There are game mechanic reasons why that wouldn't work, but the image makes me giggle.

But there is any number of spells that can be set as traps. Illusions, charms, summonings . . . All just waiting for the local mages to wake them. Add this to the very material hail of arrows and large rocks coming out, and the besiegers are going to have a hard time of it.

However, two real-world issues that ended more sieges won't be present in our fantasy universe. In our world, plague and starvation were the usual pushes that caused one side to give up, and it usually was the besiegers. Cities tended to have large stores of food and internal wells, and on the approach of a hostile force, the peasants would burn what they couldn't take with them into the city. But disease and starvation were pretty much assured in a long siege.

That's where the clerics come in. Spells like Create Food and Water and Restoration make it possible for sieges to go on for a long time. It's not perfect, the spells are high enough level that you'd need a lot of clerics to feed an entire army, but it makes it easier for both sides to keep fighting.

Lastly, air attacks. Fantasy worlds are filled with flying mounts, dragons, and wizards with the Fly spell. Again, passive and active. Cover battlements with the same level of defense you give to the walls. Make sure that there are interior lines of supply and communication that are not exposed to anything flying overhead. Actively, weapons similar to the Korean Hwacha or Roman Scorpion would be used to discourage flyers from coming too close. Of course, nothing beats sending up your aerial knights to battle their bad guys . . .

Comments

[feyandstrange]

Some of this varies with how rare and expensive magic is in any given place. If it's rare, then the cheap option is always gonna be slave labor to build walls. If it's cheap and readily available, then you've got magic to do some of the labor of wall-building and repairing. (Oh, it must be the first of the month, here comes Wizard Breck and his earth elemental to check the walls and shore up the cracks.)

Of course, if you've got earth elementals around, you might want to make sure the enemy can't just tunnel under the wall with one. (Maybe this is why fantasy cities always have layers of under-caverns and dungeons and passages. The wizards seal off the breaks at the wall, but there's still some passages down there full of whatever stray cheap monsters the enemy herded or summoned in there. Call the rat-catcher, put up posters with a bounty, three coppers per vampire rat corpse!)

[kevin_standlee]

We were lucky to have one day in York, England, and part of the time we spent walking along parts of the extant Roman walls of the city. The path is relatively narrow, there's no safety rail, and if you fall off the inside edge you are likely to get hurt, possibly quite badly. And they told us the UK had a Health & Safety Gone Mad culture!