COMMANDEERING A STRONGHOLD

You have finally managed to wrest control of a stronghold, whether by hook or by crook. Perhaps you successfully laid siege to a castle, or maybe you methodically cleared a dungeon of the collection of creatures that once called the place home. Either way, you have likely got one heck of a mess on your hands.

Before you can start hiring your own staff, before you can even think about moving in, you have to clean up. This involves more than having someone drag the bodies out of the guard posts. As the new tenant, you don’t know the place as well as you need to, and the old tenants aren’t likely to show you around the place.

Welcome Home

It’s up to you to personally oversee the exploration of every nook and cranny in your new stronghold. You want to turn the place upside down and inside out, shining a light into the place’s darkest corners. You don’t want any surprises sneaking up on you later.

What if, for instance, the previous tenant kept a menagerie of monsters imprisoned in the sublevels of the complex? You either must kill or remove the creatures or hope that the old owner’s defenses prove sufficient to protect you and your friends. Most people aren’t so trusting as to rely on their defeated foe’s devices to keep them safe, but it all depends on the situation at hand.

While you can certainly have some help looking over the place, be sure you’re on the premises if at all possible. If someone makes a fantastic discovery about the place, you should be there when it happens. Otherwise, you can’t ever be sure that the newfound information will ever make its way back to you.

Disarming a Stronghold

Many strongholds have all sorts of traps and secret doors riddling the place. Barring ownership of accurate architectural plans that reveal these various secrets, it’s up to you and your friends to find them personally.

In such cases, a rogue is invaluable. They can find and disarm the various traps throughout the place, and they can locate and mark the secret doors too. Many rogues should be watched carefully while they take on this job. If they were to somehow stumble upon a cache of valuables, they might choose to pocket the treasure for themselves, reporting nothing to the one who needs to know about it most: you.

You also must ensure that no enemy forces hide anywhere in the stronghold. It’s not uncommon for trapped foes to hide themselves away in a pinch and then come out only once everyone is either asleep or gone. Failure to find such people quickly can even mean losing the stronghold to them if they decide to attack when your guard is down.

This kind of thing is what you should take as much time to accomplish as possible. Have your searchers Take 20 every time. The proper attention to detail here is vital. If you’re paranoid about it, have several people search each location in the stronghold, just to make sure.

Containment or Abandonment

Sometimes, you may come across a hazard that you can’t do anything about. If that’s the case, you have to make a hard decision. Is taking over this place worth the risk of being close to that hazard on a daily basis? Can you ask your staff to take that kind of risk as well?

Sometimes it’s simply a matter of putting up a wall around the hazard and doing the best you can to contain it. Few things can’t simply be sealed away, but if you run up against one of them, then it might be time to find yourself another stronghold.

Mark the place as a dangerous zone so that no one accidentally falls victim to the hazard. Some adventurers are notorious for ignoring such cautions, since you may have done yourself in the course of your adventuring career. If you warn them, then it’s their own fault.

If the hazard is truly frightful, the best method for handling it is often to bring the entire place down on top of it. While someone might eventually dig through the stronghold’s remains, chances are good that they’ll never find the hazard you did your best to protect them against.

If they do, despite your best efforts, that’s their own problem at that point. You hope.

Rearming a Stronghold

Once you get the place cleaned out and searched top to bottom, it’s time to rework the stronghold’s security to your own design. This element is essential, especially if you expect a return visit from the former owners.

The most important thing you can do is post your own guards and set up your own magical and mechanical locks, wards, and traps. Until that happens, the place is open to the public, which is the last thing you want. In fact, while you were searching the stronghold, you should have already set up a perimeter defense to protect the area from any new incursions.

At first, stick with quick and easy defense systems: regular guard patrols, the occasional new trench or pit, perhaps a hastily constructed palisade. Assuming you make it through the first few weeks that way, you’ll have plenty of time later to try more complicated methods of protection. In the early days, though, the watchers should be especially vigilant. Until they learn the area and shake out any bugs in the new system, they and the stronghold are terribly vulnerable to attack from quarters both known and unknown.

Retrofitting a Stronghold

Eventually, you may decide that you want to remodel part of your new stronghold. After all, you’re not the one who designed it, so it very likely doesn’t perfectly fit your needs.

The first question you have to ask is whether or not the retrofitting is possible. For instance, it’s difficult to knock out a room that sits underneath another room. All you’ll end up with is a huge mess.

If your project falls into the realm of workability, from there it’s largely a matter of degree. If you need only to make some changes to the space to alter its purpose, this is fairly easily done. The cost for doing so should range from 10–50% of the original cost of building such a room, depending on the extent of the changes you would like to make.

Altering a bedroom into a library, for instance, isn’t all that difficult. You move out the old furniture, bring in some tables, chairs, and shelves, and you’re all ready to start filling the place with books. The cost of such a venture might only be about 15% of the standard cost to build a library from scratch.

However, if you want to actually gut the room and start all over again, it’s going to cost you. In this case, the difficulty of having to work around the other existing spaces is mostly offset by the ability to make use of those same spaces and the already built framework of the space. In other words, redoing the entire space costs exactly as much as it would have if you built it from scratch.

You can also add on to a stronghold if you like. For this, use the standard rules for building new spaces.

Retaining Staff

Once you have kicked out a stronghold’s previous owner, you should decide what to do with the place’s current staff. While it’s perfectly legitimate to hire on some of these people to work on your own staff, it’s often not the wise thing to do. Sure, they know the place well and have their work patterns already established, but it comes down to a matter of trust.

If these people have a loyal bone in their bodies, they’ll still feel some attachment to any former employer that didn’t treat them like dirt. That can work against you if the ex-tenant ever returns. One of the old employees might decide to take vengeance on you on behalf of his old boss, waiting until you’re at your most vulnerable before he makes his move.

On the other hand, if the employees were generally abused by their hated ex-boss, they might be ready and willing to step up to help out a new, kinder employer. In fact, they might even feel some gratitude toward the character who rescued them from the horrible life they lived. This kind of loyalty can’t be bought with any kind of coin.

Of course, if an employee is willing to betray one employer so readily, who’s to say which side he’ll take if the chips fall again? It’s your call as to who you want to hire or let go. Only you know best the situation and the people involved. This can be shaky ground, so tread carefully.

The best benefit of retaining some of the old staff— even if only one valuable, or at least watchful, employee—is that he can let you in on all the place’s secrets. It’s a lot easier to find and disarm traps or to locate secret doors and passageways if you have someone willing to show you where they are.

Additionally, the old employees can help you out with handling your new neighbors. If the locals liked the former tenant of your stronghold, you can be in for a long, bad time. If you can’t get anyone to sell food to you, for instance, you’re not going to have a wonderful stay in your new place.

However, a retained employee can help smooth over those ruffled feathers for you. His is hopefully a trusted face, and he can best explain to everyone in the area exactly what happened in the area and why working for you is honestly the best thing that ever happened to him. Some people might wonder if the man is under the influence of some kind of spell, but once that possibility has been debunked, the employee’s favorable words about you can be as good as gold.