DESTROYING A STRONGHOLD

Sometimes you’re going to find that it’s better to destroy a stronghold than to convert it into something you can use yourself. If the whole place has been imbued with a series of permanent desecrate spells, it’s likely that it’s not fit for heroic inhabitation. Perhaps the joint is filthy beyond your desire or ability to clean. Maybe you took down too much of the place while you were invading it.

Anyway, now it’s time to finish what you started.

Neutralizing It

The first thing to worry about with many strongholds is neutralizing the magic contained therein. To do this, you’ll need to find a high-level spellcaster with access to the dispel magic spell.

Most spells used in the construction of a stronghold include permanency to keep the effects in constant use, put there by a spellcaster of at least 9th level (the minimum needed to be able to cast permanency). The spell upon which the permanency is cast may have an even higher level requirement.

In general, you should assume that the wizard who created the permanent magical effect was of the minimum level to cast each of the spells involved. This factor is important because it sets the DC for your spellcaster’s dispel magic spell. Remember, the higher the level of your spellcaster, the better her chance of getting her dispel magic spell to work.

Of course, the higher your caster’s spell level, the more it’s going to cost you as well—unless you cast the spells yourself. Since each casting of dispel magic only affects one spell, you may end up casting dispel magic several times to eliminate the previous tenants’ magical effects. The cost to do this can add up quickly.

Remember, though, that dispel magic only works temporarily (1d4 rounds) against actual magic items, whether they’re portable or an embedded portion of the stronghold. This interval is usually not long enough for most invaders’ purposes. If you want to destroy the effect, you want it gone forever.

Looting

Once you force your way into a stronghold, you earn the spoils of war. Not all of a stronghold’s value is its walls, doors, and towers. The furnishings, art, and other contents also have value, and they can be carted away.

In general, you can recoup about 5% of the cost of each stronghold space as loot. Fancy stronghold components return 30% of their value to looters, and luxury components return 40%, because more of their cost comes from the deluxe furnishings rather than architectural elements.

Most extras aren’t able to be stolen—it’s hard to move a freestanding wall from place to place, and there’s not much of a secondary market in doors. Bulky items such as tapestries listed in the wondrous architecture section can be looted by attacking armies.

Bringing It Down

The fact is that nothing works if it’s broken into little pieces, magical or not. If you want to eradicate a stronghold—to make sure that no one can ever use it again—you have to raze it to the ground.

A lot of ways exist to do this. The cheap and slow way is to hire a destruction team and send them in to do the job. For game purposes, you can usually assume that the team does the job in exchange for the rights to anything they can salvage out of the structure.

Of course, if the entire place is somehow cursed, this isn’t much of an incentive. The same goes if getting to or from the place or being in it is extremely hazardous. At some point, the destruction team is going to figure that no amount of salvage is worth the risk, and no one is going to step up to replace it.

All sorts of ways exist to destroy a place magically: lightning bolt, fireball, disintegrate, and so on. A number of different magic items can come in handy as well, especially fully charged wands, which can allow you to fire off several spells in a row and make quick work of the job.

Bringing down a massive stronghold takes time. Sure, it’s a lot easier to destroy than build, but if you want to do a thorough job, you’re going to be at it a while.

It’s rarely necessary to level a place entirely. Instead, savvy wrecking teams concentrate on removing floors and supporting walls, leaving the shell of the stronghold intact. Those outer walls are usually made of the most durable kinds of stuff, and bringing them down is often more effort than it’s worth.

Most of the time, it’s safest to work at wrecking a place from the outside in. After all, you don’t want any of that massive debris falling on your character or the other workers. Less cautious characters can speed things along a bit with a bit of creative thinking and a bit more risk.

For instance, a mage could take a wand of lightning into the basement of a stronghold and begin blasting away at the various support beams holding the thing up. Once the ceiling started coming down on him, he could then teleport away. Destruction of two vital points—like the corners—in a floor or ceiling is enough to cause the whole thing to fall. A delayed blast fireball is great for destruction as well. Just make sure that you have an unobstructed route out of the place before casting the spell. Those 5 rounds can tick by fast.

If the stronghold is made mostly of wood or some other flammable material, those parts of the place can be destroyed in a matter of hours by simply setting fire to them. More durable kinds of material take a lot longer.

If you’re not in a hurry, you can assume that you or your team manages to dismantle the place in good time. In only one-fourth as long as it took to build the place, it can be entirely destroyed, its valuable parts carted away to be sold or used elsewhere. In one-tenth of the building time, the place can be rendered unusable, a shell of its former self.

Sealing It Away

Sometimes it’s not possible to destroy a stronghold. Perhaps the place is built out of too-stern stuff, or maybe it still contains magic, traps, or monsters that are beyond the character’s ability to take care of permanently. Possibly, there’s not enough time. In any of these cases, the right thing to do is seal the place up as best you can, post a lot of warnings around the area, and leave the region to its own devices.

Fantasy literature is filled with all sorts of strongholds that were occupied by some evil force or another that was beaten back into a portion of the place and then sealed in. Protecting such a place might be a constant source of adventure.

Then again, such seals can be broken, and then it’s usually up to you and your compatriots to come back and finish the job they started. You may have hoped that the threat you buried was long gone and forgotten, but now there’s little left to do but give your best shot at putting it to rest on a more permanent basis.

The best kinds of seals are the ones that use the natural environment to your advantage. If the main doorway into the stronghold is in the face of a mountain, a massive avalanche should make it impossible for just about any nonmagical creature to get in and out of the place again.

To seal off a place, though, you can’t beat magic. At the very least, set up an arcane lock spell on each and every entrance into the place. The fewer the number of exits you have to deal with, the better.

Magic mouths do a fine job of frightening off potential trespassers, although they’re only good for a single warning each unless you use permanency on them. You can cover entries with a permanent wall of fire or wall of force or permanent symbols of any kind. Explosive runes and glyphs of warding are wonderful too, although they’re only one-use tricks.

The best magic security system is a permanent guards and wards spell on the stronghold. To do this, you effectively have to create a massive, immobile magic item (see Chapter 2): not a task to be undertaken lightly.

Ideally, you would also have an imprisonment spell cast on any powerful creature trapped in the stronghold—something you couldn’t otherwise kill, of course. Then the stronghold serves as a means of keeping other people from coming to the creature’s aid, intentionally or not.

Once you have done your best to seal the place up, your next job is to prevent other people from undoing what you have done. Two schools of thought exist here.

The first says that you should warn everyone far and wide about the dangers involved in even getting near the place. That way, you reduce the chances of someone stumbling upon the stronghold and poking around it without knowing what they’re getting into.

The second line of reasoning is that you should keep the existence of the place as secret as possible. This way, you prevent those who might be interested in such a place from even finding out about it. Unless the stronghold was hidden or remote in the first place, though, this can be pretty difficult to pull off.

Either way, if you’re concerned about the place’s security, set up multiply redundant lines of defense around the stronghold, just as you would if you were trying to keep things out.