PROTECTING A STRONGHOLD

Once you get your stronghold built, you face the same problem that every landowner has faced since the first elf staked his claim on a particularly handsome tree: keeping it. As an adventurer, you have likely invaded and maybe even destroyed your share of strongholds in your illustrious career. Think about this for a moment. Every one of those strongholds was for a reason, possibly for the same reasons you want to create your own stronghold.

Then you and your friends waltzed in and made a mess of the place.

What’s to prevent other “adventurers”—“trespassers” you’ll call them now—from doing the same thing to your place? You.

The key here is preparation. When building a stronghold, security should be first and foremost in your mind. Sure, you want that beautiful courtyard to sun yourself in and that well-appointed laboratory for your innovative magical experiments, but if you leave the front door unguarded and unlocked, chances are good that someone will tromp right in and take the whole thing away from you while you sleep.

Some strongholds are more secure by their very nature. A floating keep is impossible for most landbound monsters and people to get at. An island fortress isn’t quite as secure, but it’s a lot harder to lay siege to.

If you can’t secure your place by fortune of geography, you can always fortify the place with strong walls, locked windows and doors, deep moats, and even weapons emplacements. The less you have to rely on these, the better. Sometimes you have no choice, but when you can you should do your best to stack the odds heavily in your favor.

For the Dungeon Master

Once one or more of your player characters has established his stronghold, you have a new means of crafting adventures—a ready-made hook for a new style of mission-based game. While usually the characters are the ones plumbing the depth of a foreign castle or dungeon, now they take up the role of the guardians of a locale. Why else should a character take time to employ soldiers or purchase military components, wondrous architecture, or traps?

Like any adventure, make stronghold-based adventures fit within the context of your campaign. Not every adventure should involve a character’s stronghold, and not every one that does should be a simple siege. One adventure may be a site-based adventure in which creatures assault the stronghold, and another a more event-driven adventure in which a villain has a series of objectives that the characters must first discover and then deal with. Variety is the spice of the adventurer’s life.

As a guideline, use stronghold adventures for somewhere between ten and thirty percent of your campaign’s adventure. If more than one in four of your adventures centers around the stronghold, the characters may feel bored and trapped within their own homes. If less than one in ten of your adventures involve the stronghold, the characters may rightly feel that their stronghold has been forgotten, or that it has no value.

Adventures featuring the stronghold should use the same rules for building adventures (such as encounter levels) found in Chapter 4 of the DUNGEON MASTER’s Guide.

Let Others Do Your Work for You

If you can’t afford to send your castle soaring over the heads of the world below or to bury it deep within the earth—or to even come up with a decent set of guard posts—there’s one obvious option for you. Set up your stronghold within someone else’s.

The residents of many walled cities would be happy to be home to a wealthy and powerful adventurer. Let the city’s own fortifications be your first line of defense. Sure, you may end up having to pay taxes to the local ruler, but that may prove cheaper than hiring on your own soldiers to keep your place safe.

The best part of setting up your stronghold inside someone else’s is that you have an ally when things go bad. If someone wants to break into your stronghold, they have to get through the rest of the city first. This eliminates the chance of a foe using the tactic of showing up on your doorstep with a well-armed army behind her—unless they really want you, in which case, you should be happy to have all your fellow citizens to rally around you against your common foe.

The downside to setting up shop inside a city or a large castle or whatever is that you make yourself accessible to a larger number of thieves and the like. After all, if they want to rob someone, why bother with hauling themselves all the way out into the wilderness to find a target when there’s one just down the block?

Of course, if someone does try to rob you, at least you can call on the local guard for help. If you’re out in the middle of nowhere, you’re on your own.

You Don’t Live in a Vacuum

As much as you might like to pretend it, you don’t live in a vacuum. The actions that you take have wide-reaching ramifications, many of which are practically impossible for to predict.

For instance, if you clear out a graveyard of ghouls, you may win the praise of the local clerics and the rest nearby town instead of the ghouls, creating a whole new problem to deal with. of the land. What if those ghouls were actually serving some kind of purpose in a gruesome sort of food chain? If the ghouls were feeding on the goblin tribe living in caves under the cemetery, their disappearance could allow the goblins to focus their energies on the nearby town instead of the ghouls, creating a whole new problem to deal with.

Similarly, when you come in and set up house in an area, the locals will notice. Perhaps the wizard on the next hillock over is jealous about the attention that her new “rival” is getting and so works to cause you problems every step of the way. It doesn’t have to be so black and white as good versus evil here, just the everyday, all-too-normal emotions of envy or injured pride at work.

In addition, if thieves in the area seek a juicy new target, you might have just as well painted a target on your shiny new front door. Until the local criminal element is shown differently, they may see your new home as easy pickings.

If you are evil, expect to become the foe of choice of every do-gooder in the region. After all, what could be more tempting to a paladin than the chance to root out a new infestation of evil before digs in too deep?

Keep a Low Profile

The corollary of the preceding fact is that it’s smart to keep a low profile—if you can. Many strongholds are too large to hide. A new tower in the center of town causes people to talk, no matter what you might do.

However, if you can keep the location of your stronghold hidden—or, at the very least, secret—that’s a wonderful first line of defense. After all, your enemies can’t attack your new home if they can’t find it.

For some characters, keeping a low profile can be hard work. Adventurers tend to be glory hounds by their very nature. Hiding their light under a bushel doesn’t come naturally to them.

Of course, magical means of hiding a stronghold exist. Illusions can do wonders for this. If an island fortress hides behind an illusion that makes it look like the rest of the lake, only someone who rows out to where the island actually is will ever notice it.

Underground and underwater strongholds can easily be hidden, by their very nature. Floating or flying strongholds are harder to hide, but when they’re discovered, it’s easy enough to move them to a whole new location, something impossible with most other strongholds.

Be sure not to rely entirely on hiding your stronghold to protect it. Sooner or later, someone with ill intentions will stumble across the place’s location. Whether this is by accident or on purpose, have some contingency plans in place for when that day comes.

Use It or Lose It

Once a foe actually discovers your place and attacks it, the best defense is often a great offense. This tactic is especially important if the location of your stronghold is now well known.

Often the best means of scaring off potential trouble is to do it loudly so that everyone knows what hap pened. If your foes simply disappear without a trace after invading your home, it can take weeks, months, or years for the slower predators in the area to take the hint.

In short, if you get into a situation in which you must fight to defend your stronghold, it’s in your best interest to make an example of the target in question. The more people who know about the your ruthless means of dealing with intruders, the fewer intruders you’re likely to have to worry about in the future.

Some canny characters even stage such events. They hire on stooges to make an attempt on their homes, and then they run them out of town in as public a manner as possible. Spellcasters have an even easier time of this. Often, it takes only a display of strength— a series of fireballs or lightning bolts, for instance—to scare off timid, would-be invaders.

Such tactics can backfire. If you are willing to fight for your place so hard, some members of your “audience” may decide that the place must hold something worth protecting. By scaring off the riff-raff, you may attract a higher class of trouble.

Greedy dragons, for instance, don’t bother with raiding keeps full of nothing but sheep—unless they’re hungry. When they hear about a place stacked to the ceiling with gold, it gets their attention. A dragon’s attention is something most characters would rather do without.

Hire Those You Can Trust

It’s one thing to forgo interrogating each and every member of the crew that builds your home. When it comes to members of your staff, take every step you can to make sure that they are 100% on your side.

Nothing can take a well-planned security system down faster than a traitor from within. If someone can eliminate protective measures before an attack begins, the invaders are surely going to have an easy time of it.

All sorts of magical means exist that can assure you of your staff members’ loyalty. If you can’t such details yourself, hire on those who can—as long as you can trust those people.

Casting enchantments to force loyalty is usually a bad move, especially if you rely on someone else to cast the spells and thus serve as the actual controller. If and when the enchantment ends, the targeted staff members will (justifiably) feel victimized. Having your staff that angry at you is not a good idea. After all, it’s likely that you will sleep under the same roof with these people.

The better and subtler way to handle loyalty is to earn it, but that takes time. In the meanwhile, cast detect evil or detect chaos when interviewing prospective employees. Detect thoughts comes in handy here as well. Of course, well-prepared moles find ways to defeat these magical means of detection, so it never hurts to rely on your own best judgment as well.

Earning the loyalty of staff members is a journey, not a goal. Employees who are your friends one day can transform into your most bitter enemies if they feel slighted. The only real way to prevent against intentional treachery from this quarter is to treat your staff as well as possible at all times.

Enemies can also blackmail or bribe your employees. The most loyal ones will alert their bosses to any attempts to subvert them, but sometimes even the best people can’t find their way out of a bad situation without hurting someone in the process. It always pays to keep your eyes peeled for suspicious behavior from even the most trusted members of your staff.

Outposts

The first line of defense for your stronghold doesn’t have to be the stronghold itself. If your place nestles in the heart of a peaceful valley, for instance, build an outpost or two on the roads leading into the place or overlooking the pass or river that leads into your home.

These can be as simple as wooden watchtowers or as elaborate as stone keeps. Each of them must maintain a guard watch around the clock to be effective, and the night watchers should have some means of seeing in the dark to be fully effective. A simple set of torches or a globe with continual flame cast upon it can work, but they also make the watchtower stick out like a full moon on a dark, cloudless night. If you’re trying to keep the location of your stronghold hidden, this is a dead giveaway.

Even more important, though, is having a means for the people in the watchtowers to communicate with your stronghold. Since the watchers will likely have a bit of a head start on anyone they spot, a simple runner or a horseman might be enough. For top-of-the-line defense, you can’t beat a mirror of mental prowess or other similar means of magical communication.

If you have a clear line of sight from the main stronghold to the outposts, cheaper and simpler methods are about as effective. The watchers can use a set of signal flags, for instance, switching to signal torches or lanterns at night. (One if by land, two if by sea, three if by air, and so on.)

Standing guard in a watchtower is the most dangerous guard duty there is. When someone decides to attack your stronghold, he’ll start by taking out the watchers before they can alert you to the impending danger.

Keeping Watch

The basic mechanic behind a watch is that the watcher’s Spot check is opposed by the invader’s Hide roll. That’s simple enough, but it can be affected by a number of modifiers.

Begin by determining the limits of the watcher’s vision. Table 3–1 of the DUNGEON MASTER’s Guide indicates the limits of spotting distance in various terrains. You can either use the average distance indicated or roll whenever appropriate. For instance, in a dense forest, the watcher can’t make a Spot check until the intruder comes within 2d4 times 10 feet (or 50 feet if using the average).

Once the intruding creatures come within spotting range, the watcher may make a Spot check each round to notice the intruders. The base DC to spot a creature at this distance is 20. If the intruding creature is actively hiding, the base DC instead becomes 25 + the hider’s Hide skill modifier. Don’t forget to apply any modifiers to this DC as listed on Table 3–2 of the DUNGEON MASTER’s Guide.

An elevated watch position may grant a circumstance bonus on the watcher’s Spot check in terrains where that would be helpful. Consult Table 3–1: Elevation Bonus on Spot Checks.

Table 3–1: Elevation Bonus on Spot Checks

Terrain	Elevation Bonus
Smoke or heavy fog	none
Jungle or dense forest	none
Light forest	+1 per 10 feet (maximum +2)
Scrub, brush, or bush	+1 per 10 feet (maximum +5)
Grassland, little cover	+2 per 10 feet (maximum +10)
Total darkness	None
Indoors (lit)	+4 per 10 feet (maximum +20

Make a separate Spot check for each watcher observing the area. Alternatively, when multiple watchers are part of the same patrol or guard post, you can assume that they assist one another. In that case, simply add a +2 circumstance bonus on the primary watcher’s Spot check for each additional watcher.

Don’t forget to allow guards to make Listen checks to hear intruders sneaking up on them. In this case, simply use the intruders’ Move Silently check as a target for the Listen check (add +1 to the DC per 10 feet of distance).

Creating a Watch Schedule

The captain of your guard should be happy to come up with a proper watch schedule, and he can even hire the guards to execute it. It’s up to you, however, to actually keep them happy by paying them on time.

The trick behind setting up a successful watch is using multiple people in each watch point and making sure that they get regular breaks. Keeping watch may sound like a lark, the easiest of jobs—all you have to do is keep your eyes peeled, after all—but in reality, it’s a constant battle against boredom and lax complacency to do the job right.

Assuming you run a 24-hour watch, set up either three 8-hour shifts or—better yet—four 6-hour shifts. Set up patrols in pairs so that every watcher has someone to help keep him from slacking on the job. Even if a sniper takes out one watcher, the other one might still have a chance to raise the alarm before he’s attacked as well.

Long or stationary watches tend to dull the senses. The DM should feel free to apply a –2 circumstance penalty on Spot and Listen checks of any sentry on the job for more than 6 consecutive hours, or who is stationed on a specific post (as opposed to being part of a roving patrol).

Thus, a fully staffed guard post requires either six or eight guards (depending on whether you use 8-hour or 6-hour shifts).