Bill did a great job on the Library of Bletherad book (which I got on Friday, and will review once we have our air conditioning working again... Screw Hades, people in the Palladium World really fear being condemned to a Houston summer without air condition), but I noticed he neglected some of the more fun medieval ammunitions for siege weapons.

You see, very rarely did you win a siege by killing everyone inside, and pounding the walls to rubble takes a _very_ long time; plus, you then can't use the fortress. Thus, the way to really win a siege is to demoralize the enemy so much that they surrender. Starving them out is part of it, and so you surround their castle. Dropping large rocks on them also adds to the demoralizing factor. Two main tools in the war on castles, though, were dead bodies and beehives.

A medieval beehive wasn't as sophisticated as those today. Rather than having large, removable cones, they were essentially fired clay boxes. When it came time to gather the honey, you smoked out the bees, cracked open the hive, and took all the honey you wanted. Since these hives were fairly difficult to move, they would be left outside when a siege came up. These hives, of course, provided ready-made missiles for anyone with a catapult, onager, or trebuchet. Upon impact, they would explode, showering the area with shrapnel, honey, and, most of all, angry bees.

When fired from a medium catapult or onager, the beehive has only half the maximum range; they're much heavier than the normal shot. Heavy catapults or onagers, or any trebuchet, have no problem with the weapon. Anyone taking a direct hit from a beehive will take 6D6 damage (only 2D6 against buildings and similar objects; while very heavy, the beehive is also very squishy). Anyone within 5 feet of the exploding hive will take 3D6 damage from the shrapnel, 2D6 if within 10 feet, and 1D6 within 20 feet. To dodge the shrapnel (or parry it with a large shield) requires a roll of 15 or better. In addition to the immediate damage, a cloud of angry bees will emerge from the hive in any month except for winter. While damage from bee stings is usually minimal (1 point of damage), most people within 50' will be stung by 2D4 bees. Additionally, some people are dreadfully allergic to bee stings, and will die in 1D6 hours unless treated by a someone trained in medicine, meaning they have the skills of Animal Husbandry, First Aid, Holistic Medicine, or Surgeon. Animal Husbandry or Holistic Medicine combined with either First Aid or Surgeon will add a +10%; this bonus is only added once, even if the character has both skills.

Disease is the constant enemy of any large encampment. With soldiers passing freely when not on duty, a plague can spread quickly. Those outside the walls, however, have many techniques that can be used to reduce the chance and spread of disease; watering the animals downstream of where the humans are watered, but upstream of where the humans bathe, carting garbage and offal far from the encampment, keeping the sick and injured in quarantine, etc. Inside the walls, people are not so lucky. Most castles will have only one water supply, and cramped, dirty conditions are the norm even in times of peace; with the addition of the defenders and those taking shelter in the castle, it becomes even worse. Castles are breeding grounds of disease.

Enemy commanders can take advantage of that fact, and often do. Most often, they will kill a cow or badly wounded horse and leave it in the sun for a couple of days, protected from most of the larger scavengers but exposed to rats, flies, and whatever other nastiness the commander desires. This body is then loaded into a trebuchet (the load is usually too much for a catapult or onager, but smaller corpses, or even parts of bodies or enemy soldiers can be substituted) and thrown over the wall. Damage from the projectile is minimal, as such things go; only 6D6 damage, and only on a direct hit. However, if a full corpse is used, it is very likely to explode on impact (due to the gases built up from decomposition, and the fact that it's just been thrown from a catapult), showering the area with whatever foulness it contains. While not a foolproof method of causing disease in an enemy castle (each such load has only a 10% base chance of spreading disease, tripled if it exploded), many such assaults over a long time are likely to catch, eventually, and having dead bodies raining down from the sky is a very demoralizing thing to have happen.