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A sixteenth-edition Cookbook scholar classifies dungeon castles into ordinary structures, conquerable governments, and fully owned village ecologies.
Herot identifies three recurring castle forms. The first is simply a fortified building with monsters, perhaps a boss or incidental quest, but no lasting governmental significance. The second is a quest-linked government conquered by claiming its throne room or killing a boss, transferring dominion while making the structure itself irrelevant.
The third is a self-contained village with NPCs and guard ecology. Conquest adds it to the crawler's owned settlements, provides taxes, permits guard control, and exposes special defense and upgrade interfaces. Herot has not owned one personally; the crawler who did threatened violence when he kept asking for details.
He links the second type to ninth-floor faction wars, where every faction receives a throne seed and one day to place it in a visible structure. Capturing that castle defeats its armies and transfers dominion.
Herot's taxonomy helps frame the high-elf castle as both a narrative endpoint and a potentially conquerable settlement system.
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