im fully aware of curtain walled keeps or castles having in the past lived in the shadow of a partiaculary large and impressive one in northern england but these were built a lot later than the period depicted.
Aquilonia is based on high medieval western Europe. It has nothing to do with the Romans, apart from a few names and an imperialist attitude.
and im guessing that the hyboria of the game at least is set earlier than the castle period, with peoples like the romans, the saxons, mongols etc being represented by kingdoms in hyboria.
If there are any Romans, they are in Koth. But I doubt it even then: Howard doesn't seem to have been very inspired by the Romans.
was wanting to include mutants in my new kingdom, just a standard human but with extras lol, making a random table of mutations. thought it could be caused due to the corruption of dark magics practiced in the citys/duchy they are from. was going to have a sort of evil empire lol with fell magic of epic proportions being undergone by them in their high temple fueled by the tortureous sacrafice of scores of people at a time in brazen bulls or some other suitable methods, the sounds of the bulls echoing accros the city.
Sounds perfect! I'd put in in Shem. Sounds like exactly the sort of thing they'd get up to, and the place is a region of small kingdoms, only a handful of which have been mentioned.
Of course, Hyboria as Howard wrote it isn't very consistent in terms of the historical periods it draws on - it's more like the back lot of a 1950s Hollywood film studio, where you can run across Mongols talking with bronze age Egyptians, 18th century pirates (though without their guns), medieval knights, Ottoman Turks, Vedic era Indians and inscrutable Chinamen.
That's largely the point of the place. Howard began as a writer of historical fiction, and his early heroes were firmly on earth. He had some pirates, some indian fighters, some adventures on the North West frontier of India, and a magnificent cycle covering the confrontation between Europe and the near East, begining with the fall of Edessa and ending with the repulse of Suleiman from Vienna. But he was disatisfied with the genre for several reasons: one because history could not be tampered with too much, so his heroes always had to play rather secondary roles to real historical figures, and he couldn't use a character with an interesting history across the works because they were centuries apart. Thus for example he has in his Crusades cycle a whole succession of western knights who are essentially the same character, but have to have different names and no continuity between them, because the tales span centuries.
Hence the Hyborian Age: a collection of Howard's favourite historical backgrounds in a mythical ancient age, so that he can tell all his favourite tales with one hero. It then developed a momentum of its own, of course, and it had a lot of background even at the start from his already existing fantasy tales, especially Kull. But mostly its a background for historical/wierd fiction without having to worry about history.
