Under Siege

I’m incredibly excited for this afternoon, because I’ve managed to orchestrate a medieval siege. (In Dungeons and Dragons. But still.)

I spent last weekend with my parents, ostensibly for the purpose of getting rid of a load of old stuff I didn’t need so there was space in my room for the old stuff I do need. The main thing I jettisoned were my old university notes, which I’d kept in the vain hope that one day I would need to refer to them. (Of course I never have, and if I do ever need to look up a topic I studied I can just consult all the lecture reading lists and the many gigabytes of articles that I’ve still got saved digitally. And I’ve kept the essays and important stuff like that too.)

But what I did keep, weirdly enough, were some books from my GCSEs – which definitely weren’t 13 years ago, how dare you – because thanks to the vagaries of different exam boards, I actually got to study interesting things back then. No 20th-century politics for me – we got the history of medicine, cowboys, and a local history project. And for a school in the old Welsh Marches, that could only mean one thing. Castles.

There are more castles on the Welsh border with England than there are anywhere else in the world, because my ancestors were professionally irritating – which meant that we as students got to spend many glorious hours studying and visiting them. Ludlow Castle was our nearest one, and is still a favourite: I worked festivals there, saw plays, wandered endlessly within its high stone walls. It’s even where I got my sword, and in unreleased fiction I have both besieged and blown it up. But there were many more within easy reach: Chepstow, Eastnor (even though it’s not really a castle), Clun, the list goes on.

The inner bailey of Ludlow Castle, 2017.

And so I have studied them all. I learned all the intricacies of mottes, baileys and keeps; the benefits of different tower shapes, how to defend a wall-top, what a machicolation is and what it’s for. Arrow- and rifle-slits, volley fire, the list goes on – but not before mentioning my favourite feature, the batter, which is the angled bit at the bottom of a wall that lets you safely drop rocks off the top and have them bounce into an attacker’s face. At college I studied some seriously big sieges in the Crusades – most notably Antioch – and how a vast army can be stymied by something as simple as a big wall. And in more recent years an awful lot of Sharpe has taught me how a siege changes when you can blow stuff up.

And, y’know. Helm’s Deep has lived in my head in its entirety for decades now.

So when, in our last DnD session, our characters managed to infiltrate and steal a small fort from under our enemies’ nose, when we realised that we could now hold this fort against our enemies when they came back… I just started talking. For about 5 uninterrupted minutes. I ordered trenches dug, barricades built; I deployed the magicians and archers high and the heavy hitters at the front, with multiple fallback positions and chokepoints so we can make the bad guys pay for every inch of ground we give. I painted hidden range markers for our various bows and spells and scattered them in the open ground. I drew two maps.

They’ve really gotten sloppy at Ludlow; get rid of all those trees, your sight-lines are awful!

And this was all in character, mind; Sir Geoffrey is a former soldier with siege training and experience. He knows what he’s doing… because I’ve studied all this for years and I think I know what I’m doing, and Geof is, when you take away all the fictional life experiences, an extremely silly version of me at his core.

When I’d finished talking, I looked around the group, somewhat embarrassed, and asked if anyone minded awfully if we had a go at this obscenely detailed plan. And because my friends are the best, and because, as our game master admitted, I did seem to know what I was talking about both in and out of character, they gave an enthusiastic yes.

Quietly, our GM told me that my eyes lit up like a kid at Christmas, and they could all tell it meant a lot to me. So thanks, guys.

Now I just have to hope that I do vaguely know what I’m talking about and am not about to get all our characters killed. We’re about to find out…