December Entry: The Siege of Dreeston

[RPMiller]

One other thing to consider regarding poisoning a well is that it can be done by one person. How much easier is it to sneak one person into a village or city than to try to invade it with a large force, especially if you are planning ahead and have it poisoned before you invade?

That might even sound familiar.

A small group having an easier time killing hundreds = recent attack in Mumbai proves that theory. History has hundreds of examples of these sorts of attacks and yet governments seem to refuse to listen to the historic lessons.
Planning ahead and poisoning the water supply before you invade = recent invasion of Georgia. The Russians actually launched cyber attacks against the Georgian infrastructure and took down their servers that controlled communication and infrastructure just before they invaded. Again, hundreds of times this has happened in history.

[torstan]

Indeed. This is why many castles have a fortified well with a locked cover on it in the basement store rooms. They make it hard to poison because it is an obvious weak point. If a besieged castle has no drinkable water it is game over.

Actually that would make for an excellent war time adventure for an adventuring group. Get into the besieged castle and poison the water supply. It would be a nice variant of the slip in and open the gates adventure theme and could be done by low level characters.