This got me thinking. Just how does the density of fortifications compare?
So I knocked up a quick map. Now I'm going to have to refine the UK plan because some of the locations are later than the period that Harn's based around but at first glance Harn's fortifications seem quite sparse.

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"You're gonna cut off the Dragon's what?"

Ummm....I was not talking geographically but populationally...(I know there is no such word!!!). Wales and Scotland I would expect to have a much higher geographical density than civilisations on Harn...Keep the rebels down etc..

It is a good comparison though; and shows how medieval armies in Britain would have problems bumping into them. However, they would likely have more than the 200-300 men of the vast Harnic armies..which I think was the original point

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Plots and schemes are the same thing..

I got that. Which is why I started a new thread rather than post this in the Harnic warfare one. I only said it got me thinking not that I disagreed.

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"You're gonna cut off the Dragon's what?"

Also, there's the matter of what they're made of. A wooden fort is easy; a motte-and-bailey is probably a bit more demanding; a stone keep is harder; and a real castle is hardest of all to construct and maintain. Basically (numbers pulled from derriere for purpose of illustration only), a motte-and-bailey might require a population of 100 people, a keep 5000 people, and a castle 10,000 people.

Of course, those would be some kind of weird population-over-time units, too...

There are so many troubles with trying to make a direct comparison. On Harn there is a clear distinction between manors and keeps (at least, on the map!). In Britain the distinctions are less clear - what constitutes a castle is rather subjective. The data on Britain is surely incomplete, and it would require a heroic effort to create a map that was a complete snapshot of the situation in, say, 1200AD.

But the most important problem is relevance. Looking at the British map, the difference between the south and north is obvious, and there is no mystery about it. The question is, is Harn more like Scotland or Essex? The answer, IMHO, is it is like neither. Harn is like Harn.

Every keep on Harn was built for a specific reason. Most were either constructed by petty states or built to pacify and control a conquered mini-state. They were built for the long-term and to impress the local population - ergo, many are stone, and the wooden keeps that were once built have not been maintained. The closest analogue in Britain might be Wales, but the analogy should not be stretched very far. Norman England had very different needs and priorities than the Corani Empire or the progenitor states of Kaldor. Viewed from the perspective of Harnic history - not English history - the number and distribution of keeps is perfectly sensible.

LOL



That is a rather broad statement, and one I disagree with

But seriously, looking at Harn and England as a comparison for the political or needs of stone castles is not accurate, I agree.

However, if one were to use a time/period, the best correlation might be 7th-9th century Saxon England, which did not have a lot of castle or keep building.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

I don't think you can use that as comparison either because the technical know how on and style of warfare on Harn is much more advanced.

What I do find a bit odd though is that the areas of heightened tension, i.e. the Kanday, Rethem, Thardic republic borders, don't have more in the way of Castle's a'la the Welsh marches. There is after all 70 years of on and off conflict along those borders.

Of course there is the question of when is a Castle a castle and when is it a keep or even a substantial fortified manor?
I suspect that a lot of the manors in those areas would be described as castles in today's tourist guides.

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"You're gonna cut off the Dragon's what?"

Yeah, that is an issue, thugh I would not say Harn is much more advanced, based upon Harnic Information, but a few hundred years more advanced (which does not mean a lot in the technology slow moving middle ages).

Was it that there was not the technology? Or was it more of a manpower issue? Or even one of style?

Stone could certainly be used at that time for building, though the secrets of concrete had been lost.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

But a different kind of conflict than in Wales. In Wales you had a small Norman minority holing up in castles against a hostile general populace. In Tharda the wars are entirely between the elites. (Those massive 300-man armies again!) What purpose would building a new keep serve?

Also, note that every baron owns a keep. (This is, of course, completely ahistorical.) Social pressures are clearly at work - barons are apparently obligated to live in a keep, whether there is any military need or not. This is not the only area in which Venarivan society places social factors above raw military calculation. (And there are lots of examples in the real world, such as the persistence of cavalry in warfare.) This might rub both ways - every baron needs a keep, and only barons build keeps. Rather than pay the expense of building new keeps, kings apparently rely on their barons to do the building. And barons naturally place their keeps according to their own priorities, rather than the king's.

My general question is: If you think there are too few, who would you expect to build a new keep, and where? If you think there are too many, which keep do you think would not have been built?

I don't see any clear "must builds". You could argue that the Thardic Legion ought to build something west of Moleryn and Geshtei, but would the Senate approve such moves? Building right on the Rethem/Kanday border is logistically improbable. The Oselbridge is a well discussed possibility. And I don't know of any clear "tear downs", but maybe someone else can find one.

A couple of points on this debate.

1. One needs to take time periods into account in order to make the comparison sensible. In England, castle building didn't really get underway until the Normans arrived, so by the time one reaches the high medieval period one has only 200 to 300 years of castle building. Harn appears to be both somewhat technologically static and to have been building castles since the post Lothrim petty kingdoms - c500 to 600 years. Since castles are a fairly durable capital good (I.e. one can accumulate them over time) the length of time in which a society has been building castles will have an influence on the number of them. To my mind this is the primary explanation for Harn's disproportionately high number of stone castles. They were originally built in wood, but have been gradually upgraded into stone, and Harnic lords have had twice as long as their Terran equivalents to do that upgrading.

2. Population. Harn's total population is c500,000. About 1/10th of medieval England's. Looking at the map, while Harn may have more than 1/10th the number of castles, it's actually not that far beyond reason.

Cheers,
De Coucy

Well, I sort of view it more as "the definition of a baron in Hârn is 'a noble with a keep' ". The problem, of course, comes from the fact that it's all so damn neat: every noble who has barons as vassals has a castle himself (thus, an earl), and no baron with a keep has other barons with keeps as vassals. It's obviously very game-y.

I mean, if this is Norman England, the earls would be "barons" as well, since it pretty much meant "tenant of the king who provides military service"...


Also, is that England map current ruins and fortifications? Because if it is, it represents something like 800-900 years of building compared to Hârn 500-600 (by a fraction of the population of England over that time), doesn't it? That means the disparity of Hârn is even greater.

Well, this almost had me believing in the high number of Harnic stone fortifications until this comment:



I'd say most castle building in England was between 1066 AD and 1500 or so, so England actually probably had 450 years of castle building, which is roughly comparable to Harn.

However the 1/10 of the population is a huge factor here as well why there should be less Harnic Castles/Keeps.

And Manor houses, if made of stone with a wall would probably be incuded in the "castles" of england, so Harn has far more castle type structures.

I look at manor huses being predominantly unwalled unless on the frontier. And even if on a warlike frontier, you are probably looking at wooden walls, not stone.

It would be interesting if there were any true estimates as to the man days needed to construct keeps, castles and fortified manor houses.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

Magna Carta coming to a P-Harn post 720?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/mi ... t_01.shtml

Having expanded his power as far south as Powys by 1208, he then fought off the attempt by King John to conquer Wales in 1211-12. Due to the humbling of King John (1199-1216) by his barons (they forced him to agree to the rulings of the Magna Carta), the French invasion of 1216, and the succession of Henry III, aged only nine, the English Crown had lost its authority.


Llywelyn then allied his cause with that of Simon de Montfort, the last baron to stand unequivocally against Henry III. De Montfort defeated the king at the battle of Lewes in 1264, and then recognised Llywelyn's title as Prince of Wales in return for a promised payment of £20,000.

He led a nation secure in its past, with a strong oral tradition of myths and legends, but one somewhat behind the social change wrought in the rest of northern Europe.

The Treaty of Montgomery, in 1267, ratified the deal, signed now by the restored Henry III. It marked the peak of Llywelyn's power, with the notion of a Welsh Principality recognised to have its own statehood elements.

Llywelyn now faced the problems of having no heir, rival brothers who claimed their traditional inheritance (which by Welsh law should have been split between them all) and only a £5,000 income to pay the £16,000 he owed Henry III to secure the treaty!

Sort of. It was just a quick and dirty cut and paste from another map I have that I use as a route planner. So yes you're right. Several of the sites on the map probably shouldn't be there. Mind you when I started to look into it I ended up adding in as many as I was taking out. For example, three artillery forts disappeared, (Pendennis, St Mawes and St, Catherine's) from Cornwall but six timber motte and bailey or ringwork and baileys went in, (Helston, Cardinham, Bossiny, Upton, Botreaux and Penstowe.)

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"You're gonna cut off the Dragon's what?"

I wonder, if you're including motte and baileys, if the Hârn map shouldn't have all the manors with stone fortifications in it, too... Kaldor has a huge number of those.

Just a notes about population. According to Harnview, the population of the seven civilized nations of Harn is ca. 670,000.

England at the time of the Domesday Book was ca. 2,000,000 and around 3,000,000 a century later (high estimates).

Seems to me over the years most folks here have argued for a just this timeframe as a touchstone for Harn, so rather than a 1/10 ratio, perhaps it is more on the order of 1/3 or 1/4. YHMMV.

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The Melderyn Campaign

That's something I've always wondered about. Leirel is a castle according to canon but it's a motte and bailey, albeit in a larger enclosure, as are some of the fortified manors. Is it classed as a 'full blown' castle because of the earthworks? If so some of the keeps should probably qualify as well.
As you pointed out earlier 'the trouble is that it's all damn neat."

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"You're gonna cut off the Dragon's what?"

I'm not sure about the map, but (in a box in another country) I have a book on the medieval castle in Britain (fairly academic) which has a number of maps of known castles in England following the Anarchy. The density of castles (albeit largely wooden) isn't out of line with the map presented here - and this is only a century or so after castle building began in England in earnest. In my comparison of time periods I was comparing the gap between the fall of Lothrim's empire - which is when many of Kaldor's castles seem to originate - to the present (c600 years) with the gap between the norman invasion and the high medieval period (defined as roughly equal to an average of Harn's technological and historical setting - c250 years by my reckoning). This does, I think, give HArnic lords a longer period of time to accumulate expensive capital items like stone castles.

Similarly, as noted, the population gap isn't as big as one might think - particularly if one assumes a larger population pre-migration wars and the red death.

Cheers,
De Coucy

Decoucy wrote:



Rothesay wrote:



Well, if the population loss on Harn mirrored the Shorkyne population loss during the Red Death (20%) then the pre Red Death population would have been 837,500.

Of course, this is not even correct, as Harn has had almost 2 centuries to recover from the population loss. I would think putting the Harnic Current population at 90% of the pre Red Death population would make more sense, so a population of 737,000.

Ironically, Shorkyne (and Possibly Harn) saw a 20% death rate during the Red death - this perhaps is desigend to mirror the Bubonic plague, where Germany and England lost roughly 20%, but France, Italy and others lost closer to 50%. I see a more urbanized Trierzon more similar to France, and closer to the source, whereas Shorkyne strikes me more as Germany during this time, and Harn of course as England.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

That line kept bouncing around my head for some reason. So I re-read Lloyd and Jennifer Laing's "Anglo-Saxon England", part of their "Britain before the Conquest" series published in 1979. Ran into a little piece about the "Laws of Ine in Wessex" that proclaimed the following on fighting forces:

"Upto seven men are thieves, from seven to thirty five is a warband and more than three dozen is an army." It goes on to state that in 786 Cynheard's Army of 85 men was nearly sufficent to capture Wessex from King Cynewulf !!!

Avoiding the obvious comparison of the numbers in most PC parties equalling the lowest division of that law it seems that at least in the Anglo-Saxon period, a relatively small number of men could threaten to topple entire Kingdoms. If it can be argued that the Harnic Kingdoms are more akin to those Kingdoms than the larger, monolithic state of post Norman England, than even relatively small fortresses with a single company of troops can mean the difference between surviving a war and having your entire clan exterminated in such a conflict.

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...and I'm not dead yet...

gronkgroks wrote: Nevertheless, it should be remembered that most folk view the PCs and their retainers as most likely to be brigands, especially when the PCs are traveling off the main roads.

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Laboro diem, carpe noctem.

I'd fully agree here in regards to the scale. england at this time probably had a population of double that of Harn, but Harn also has those small kingdoms more similar to Saxon Europe. One difference I think is that Harn seems to be far more "militarized" than most historical kingdoms.

But the other thing - Saxon England did nto have many stone defensive works (castles with a broader definition ).

Again, it takes a lot of money to build in stone, money, time, and workers.

It's not that the Saxons did not build in stone - but the churches and monastaries were suually what were made of stone, showing that these structures were though to be more permanent and were built more "expensively" out of stone.

Here is an investory of manpower needed to build Dover Castle:



Much of it was fished by 1216, so the time period seems to fit Harnic Castles. Look at how mush a day you are paying in labor -Lets say 2d for the masons, quarrymen, smiths and maybe 400 carpenters at 4d. 1d for the uskilled labor.

That's about 3,660d per day merely for the labor, not materials, no extra money for the head people in charge of design.

Dover is a big castle, no doubt, but even quartering that you are looking at about 900d per day for labor. AND what makes it even tougher, finding a work force of 700 workman would be tough in population challenged Harn.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

Laborer is 42 d a month so 1 & 3/4 d at the minimum and could easily be 2d+.

Hard to believe any skilled guild journeyman would be paid less than an unskilled laborer since Mason is a canon example of being paid up to 600% standard wages to build a castle or fortification.

Depending upon which Harn publication you are looking at

But the 42d makes a lot more sense than the 24 or 30d to me.



Well, Journey men get room and board + 30-60% of the normal labor costs. If we factor into providing room and board for the Journeymen, that raises the price a fair amount.

I do think the 600% though is only applied to the Master in charge of the project - So 6x the base for the master Mason, probably for the master quarryman and carpenter as well, and probably a couple more paid more than normal.

And also I would think there would be a charge for the Engineers - A master Engineer would probably get the 600% as well, unless the master mason is also a master engineer.

I forget how engineers work - is this a skill that some guildsmen acquire, or is there a seperate guild? I think it is the former.

The master mason in charge if this is the case would probably have high skills in both engineering and masonry - and be well worth his high wages.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

2,600+ people working on the castle, before factoring in the support personnel and material infrastructure with any kind of realistic supply and demand economy particularly in a dual labor shortage (common laborers or skilled laborers and Guildsmen) in a P-Harn.

Teamsters ranging further and further to transport food and other supplies IMO driving up prices and wages because no one is going to work at standard rates when they are getting overcharged because of demand and transport costs. Easiest to figure that the Master Mason (and his Castle patron) is supporting the core work force with food and shelter since these are not issues the builders want to deal with since they slow down the project.

Most Harnic kingdoms top out a little over 100,000+ for the largest like Kaldor and Melderyn. Neither kingdom has that many canon Masons [Little gray regarding the number of wood crafters which is theoretically doable if they leave their manors].

IMO in canon, mostly plausible with Tharda because of the Legions or by dragging out construction over years and decades in other kingdoms with a smaller workforce in stages.

Edit: Harn Manor 11 Manors Masons are in that group of other 5% Masters for Village Craftsmen, after the nine most common. Based on the Manor Households there are four common Bonded Masters Clothier, Ostler, Priest and Herald which accounts for most typical manors up to 2,400 acres. Not very many very wealthy double and triple fee 2,700+ acre manors in canon where two or so other Masters could be hired in lieu of a Bonded Master Mason at 1,500 d a year (kind). Tashal goes into detail on the Masons but there are still not that many for one of the largest cities on Harn in one of the largest kingdoms. Basically construction is doable on an extended scale with a smaller workforce.

Look at the size of their standing armies for a scale comparison. Take Kaldor for example, I do not believe there is a Bonded Master Mason on the staff of every Baron and Earl or Franchised in their seat of power.

I believe there is only one or two canon Master Millwrights in Kaldor [Tashal].

IMO there is a serious shortage of skilled labor in most P-Harns and the Guilds enter the picture when anyone starts upsetting the apple cart and it infringes on their monopoly.