“The elites (ahem, Barons) don’t want you to know this, but the castles in the wilderness are free. You can make them your home. I have 458 castles.”

In AD&D it’s well understood that many of the classes allow for the establishing of domains. For fighters, that might mean building a castle. For Clerics, a church or monastery. This can mean a long-term and expensive process, especially when one is using 1:1 time. An industrial player may want to short-cut this process. How to get a castle faster?

Well, you might just find one. Really? Really.

Pages 182 and 183 of the DMG, discuss the finding of castles.

So, of encounters in uninhabited areas, one in twenty of encounters will be a fortress or castle. These castles will be of various sizes and types. And, of these, a significant percentage will be “totally deserted”.

What does “totally deserted” mean?

Note that there is a second category of deserted which includes a monster. So, if the monster is defeated, then you now have a deserted castle. If these are included then the category is expanded considerably.

But how many encounters will there be in the uninhabited wilderness. That depends on terrain type.

What we see here (p.47 DMG) that uninhabited/wilderness encounters occur on a roll of one in ten and from two to six times per day depending on the terrain type (for parties of 100 or fewer).

We now have enough information to figure the odds of finding a deserted castle. I’ve crunched the numbers.

What we learn here is, one will have to be exploring the wilderness a lot. But, also, it’s not all that rare to find a deserted castle. Nearly three per year found in the plains, with two of those totally deserted. Best odds are forests and marshes, with 5.6 encountered per year, 3.5 of which are totally deserted. Worst odds are mountains, and even there you get close to two per year with half of those totally deserted. So, with some luck, and arduous exploration of the wilderness, deserted castles can totally be found. Of course, one must survive all the other encounters 19/20 that happen while looking for that fixer-upper.

As a basis of comparison Lewis and Clarke took 542 days to reach the Pacific during their exploration of the Louisiana Territory. Under a very crude estimation of terrain types, they should have encountered five deserted castles, three of which contained no monsters. That’s one per hundred days or so (which makes sense because it was mostly plains).

It is worth noting that while Lewis and Clarke did not encounter any castles or forts per se, they did encounter a number of native palisade villages which could be considered strongholds. Including (depending on how you evaluate it) something like 5-10 abandoned palisade villages. So, within a factor of two between what AD&D would generate.

So, it looks like, decent odds that one season’s worth (or a bit more) of wilderness exploration has decent odds of turning up a deserted castle to take possession of.