Strongholds in the Campaign

Creating a stronghold isn’t like running down to your local blacksmith’s shop and picking out a longsword with a balance to your liking. Although you might prefer it to be, it’s not that simple.

First, strongholds never come prefabricated (though Chapter 4 provides some predesigned strongholds that you can use in your campaign). Each one must be custom-built, making it by definition a one-of-a-kind place. Sure, there are some common elements to certain types of strongholds; a great portion of this book is based upon that premise. The way in which you put these elements together makes each stronghold unique.

Second, there’s more to a stronghold than just owning it. Even if you manage to get your hands on a stronghold in reasonably good condition, there’s no guarantee that it will stay that way. Weather and wandering monsters aside, if you went to the trouble to make or take the place yourself, somebody else out there will likely covet it too.

What’s more, strongholds aren’t—generally speaking—portable like most of your possessions. They’re real estate. You can’t pop your stronghold in and out of a portable hole or a bag of holding whenever you like. Places that large are simply hard to hide, no matter what steps you might take, magical or otherwise.

Building a Stronghold

The previous chapters of this book discuss how to put together the plans for your stronghold. Once you have done that, you’re kind of like an architect with a finished set of blueprints. You might have the gold necessary to hire people to get the thing built, but actually getting the place built is something else altogether.

Location, Location, Location

The first thing you need to do, if you plan on building a stronghold from the foundation up, is find yourself a place to start digging out that basement. As the saying goes, there are only three things you need to worry about in real estate: location, location, location.

The place you choose to plant your roots defines much about your stronghold. Is it in a city or the country? In the middle of a desert or on the seashore? Atop the highest mountain or in the darkest depths of the ocean? Selecting the right place to build can mean a lot.

Of course, there’s more to it than just picking out a likely piece of land. Beyond simple geography, there are the challenges presented by your likely neighbors. Setting up shop on the edge of a cliff might seem like a great idea at the time—until you discover that the cliff is smack in the middle of orc hunting grounds. These orcs are famous for hunting dragons.

Sometimes even what looks like a good idea falls apart once you actually break ground. Who could have known that the idyllic field you chose for your building site is actually the site of an ancient graveyard? You can bet that the spirits of the bodies your workers have disturbed will be less than understanding about your mistake, no matter how much money you may have paid someone for the rights to the land.

Chapter 1 details the ramifications of a site choice on building costs.

Supply Routes

Don’t think about what location might be the most defensible. Other concerns. Include Is the stronghold on a common travel route, or is it far off the beaten path?

If your stronghold is in a remote spot, how will you build it? After all, you have to haul the building materials to the spot, and the workers building it have to come from someplace. They have to live somewhere while they work on the stronghold. Builders like to charge hardship fees if they must subject themselves to ordeals just to construct your new stronghold.

Along that same line, once you finish the place, how will you bring in supplies on a regular basis? Unless you plan on feeding yourself and your workers by magical means on a daily basis, you had better have access to places that can provide what you need.

Alternatively, you can request that the local traveling merchants put your stronghold on their routes. Of course, that means you need to spend some money with them when they arrive. Otherwise, their visits start to trail off or disappear altogether. They’re in this to make money, and if they can’t make a profit off your stronghold, it gets crossed off the list.

Lining Up Workers

Unless you plan on building the entire place with your own two hands, you need to line up a contractor to slap the place together. As with most things, the prices from contractor to contractor can vary a lot, up to 25% in either direction—or even more. It’s in your best interests to get quotes from as many different builders as possible and then evaluate them based upon not only cost but timeliness and quality.

There’s an old saying about services: You can have it fast, cheap, or good—pick two. In other words, if you’re in a hurry and want quality, you’re going to have to pay for it. If you have some time, though, or you don’t care about the craftsmanship of your new home, you can often get a break on price.

Many times, contractors specialize in certain kinds of buildings, whether they’re stone, brick, wood, or whatever. They also limit themselves to certain kinds of building. A mason who lays the bricks on your new place doesn’t necessarily know how to raise a roof. For that, you need a roofer. If you want any kind of magical effects in the place—and your character isn’t already a wizard or sorcerer with the right know-how—you need to hire on a contractor with the right kinds of special abilities.

From reading the earlier parts of this book, you should know that help like that doesn’t come cheap. Special requests start to add up, and you can suddenly be looking at a wizard’s bill that as much if not more than the fee you’re paying the more mundane builders.

Getting Gouged and Cheated

The closer you are to civilization, the easier it is to find good people at a reasonable price. If you’re out in the middle of nowhere, you may not be able to find qualified craftsmen at all. That means you might have to bring them in from somewhere else, along with the raw materials they need to perform their duties.

The trick here is to be flexible. Anytime you put yourself in a position in which you absolutely must have things a certain way—and the rest of the world finds out about this—you set yourself up to be gouged. The price for services rendered can suddenly skyrocket to up to 10 times as much as you might have planned.

Worse yet is that you might find that you’re being cheated. Unscrupulous people are everywhere and the building industry is no exception. Of course, there are magical means you can employ while interviewing prospective employees, but unless you’re willing to go to such lengths with even the lowliest apprentices on a job, you’re not likely to ferret out every possible person that might try to take you for everything she can.

Sometimes the cheating is more obvious, such as when the builder substitutes cheap materials for the higher-quality and more expensive ones you have agreed to pay for—or simply sells the materials off and then claims that they have been stolen. Other times, it can be a lot subtler, such as the masons shaving a foot off the walls surrounding the place.

The trick here is to pay attention and to find at least one person on the team who you can trust, preferably a leader of some sort. That individual becomes your set of experienced eyes and ears on the job. You aren’t a builder; you’re an adventurer. You likely don’t know the first thing about putting a place together. That’s where it pays to have friends who do.

Also, make sure that you don’t pay for the entire job up front. Builders who have all their money in pocket before they start have a bad habit of becoming lazy about completing the work. It’s just human (or humanoid) nature. The fair way to do things is to pay for the materials when they arrive on the site—or half up front and half on delivery.

The same goes for the labor. If it’s a long-term job, arrange to pay the workers on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis. If it’s a shorter project, pay the workers half up front and half on completion. That bit of money waiting at the end of the job does wonders for a team’s motivation.

Forewarned Is Forearmed

The best way to avoid most of these kinds of problems is to do a bit of research before you start. Don’t swoop down on your winged steed and proclaim a seemingly abandoned area for your own. Ride into the nearest town or step into the closest inn and talk over your plans with the locals a bit. Learn as much about the site from them as you can. Do yourself a favor and make friends with these people. After all, if everything works out, they’re going to be your neighbors.

This opportunity is a good chance for a bard or a rogue to make use of a few Gather Information rolls. Since you will live in this place for some time—you hope—make sure that you take your time and learn as much as you can. This can be a source for many an adventure, since you may want to investigate some or all the myriad of rumors swirling about a chosen locale, hoping to determine if your chosen home is right for you.

One reason that many people choose to build their strongholds near their childhood homes or their current stomping grounds is that they don’t have to do this kind of background check on the area. Simply by living in the place, they have already been doing it unconsciously for years. Better the devil you know, as the old saw goes.

Of course, because you find out something dismaying about a location doesn’t mean you have to pull up stakes and find someplace else. Many of the problems you may face could very well be the sorts of things that a stalwart party of adventurers would be perfect for handling. This situation at least answers one nagging question for you: If the locale you’re so in love with is all that fantastic, then why hasn’t anyone ever built there before?

If you can determine the answer to that question— perhaps there’s a nearby graveyard full of ghouls, or maybe that island is the nesting place of a group of dragon turtles—then you can try to solve any problems you have identified.

RUNNING A STRONGHOLD

There’s more to a stronghold than building it. Once it’s up, you must take care of the day-to-day operations of the place. As anyone who’s ever run a household of any size knows, this is not a trivial task.

In general, you can assume that your stronghold runs itself as far as the game is concerned. Just because you don’t have to micromanage every detail of the place’s operation, though, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know more than a little bit about how the place works.

It’s embarrassing when you can’t introduce your own servants to your guests. Once you figure out who you need to keep your stronghold in tip-top shape for you, take the time to think about who they are and how they came to be in your employ. You’ll want your Dungeon Master’s help with this exercise, since he may have some ideas of his own about the true backgrounds of the people that you have hired on to lend you a hand.

These are the people that you will live with between adventures. You must rely on them at all times, both when at your stronghold and when away in some distant land. In time, these strangers will become part of your extended family, people you trust with your life and the lives of all those you hold dear.

Delegate

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is all about glorious adventures, not keeping house. Lounging about the stronghold day and night, engaging in the domestic dramas of daily life isn’t the sort of thing that stirs the blood of great heroes. Just because you knows how to cut the wings off a passing fly with your longsword doesn’t mean you has the first clue about how to keep a place running smoothly. So don’t saddle yourself with that task.

Hire someone to do it for you.

If you have enough discretionary gold or power to build or take over a stronghold, you should have enough to hire some talented person to run it for you. They have a name for people who do exactly this kind of thing: they’re called butlers.

The first thing to do when you move into a new stronghold is hire on the best, most trustworthy butler you can find. Truly talented butlers are worth their weight in gold and then some. They take the dull domestic duties off your plate, freeing you up to do the thing you does best: adventuring.

Determine Your Needs

Once you have your butler in place, sit down and determine exactly how many other positions you need to fill to keep the stronghold ticking along like a well-oiled watch. Again, the butler’s opinion is going to mean a lot here, since he’s the one with the experience in this field.

The number of staff you’re going to need does depend on the kind of stronghold you have. Many strongholds have a cook, a scullery maid, a stable hand, a handyman, a groundskeeper, and so on. Chapter 2 describes the minimum staff required for various stronghold components.

If your stronghold has special needs, make sure that those are met as well. A place that relies on magic might want to have a wizard on staff—or at least on call for when things turn bad. Similarly, underground strongholds might want a dwarven engineer or architect on hand to keep everything in working order.

If your stronghold has many protective traps, you might need a rogue on staff to keep them all in working order. Even the best traps can go bad with long disuse, and the best rogues maintain their efforts regularly to keep them in tip-top shape.

If your stronghold has a chapel to your character’s favored deity, you might want to have a cleric on staff. After all, the deities aren’t all that impressed by a character who lets his personal altar gather dust.

If concerned about security, hire some extra guards to keep any undesirables out in a pinch. If yours is a large place, the leader of these soldiers is normally known as the captain of the guard, and the welfare of the entire stronghold is charged to him. In the household, the captain’s rank is equivalent to that of the butler, and people in these two positions may butt heads on a regular basis. After all, they each have their own particular jobs to do, and they may not always line up perfectly well.

The truly paranoid may include spellcasters on her security detail as well. They can use their magic to handle details from spotting poison in the stronghold’s water supply to placing wards around the place’s perimeter as a backup to the sometimes all-too-fallible guards.

Fulfill Your Needs

Your butler and the captain of your guard can help you find people to fill the various staff positions in your stronghold. In the course of rising to their current positions with you, they’re sure to have made many essential contacts for handling this sort of duty. Let them do their friends a favor by hiring them. You’ll find that you can quickly build a happy and motivated staff this way.

Of course, you have likely also met all sorts of people throughout your travels, and you might decide that hiring on one of them to help out around the place is a fine idea. You not only want someone who’s good at his job, of course; you want someone you can trust too. After all, you’ll be living under the same roof with these people, essentially putting your life and livelihood in their hands, not an area in which you want your character to be lax.

When budgeting costs for your stronghold, don’t forget about the salaries of your staff. Find the right people for you, and then pay them what they’re worth. These are the people that help transform your stronghold into a home. Without them your new place would be a lot colder and quieter, for sure.

Making It Pay

As far as the game is concerned, once you get your stronghold up and running, you can safely assume that the operation is self-sufficient in the sense that it pays for itself. In other words, the income it generates is sufficient to cover the expenses that crop up for maintaining the place (not including staff salaries).

This guideline is not a blank check for you to make extravagant demands on your DM with regard to amenities in your stronghold. If you go overboard, the DM can and should assign a yearly maintenance fee to you in order to keep the place smoothly purring along. In most cases, it shouldn’t exceed 1 to 2% of the total stronghold cost, and only extraordinary cases should bring it to more than 5% of the total cost of building your stronghold. In all cases, the DM’s call is final.

In order to avoid such costs simply coming straight out of your pocket, look into ways that the stronghold itself can generate additional revenue. The most obvious method is by taxing the people of the surrounding countryside. Of course, most people aren’t willing to pay taxes in exchange for nothing in return.

In many cases, the owners of a stronghold offer their protection from exterior threats as services rendered for the tax income. This adds a bit to your responsibilities, although your staff should be able to take care of most problems such as hungry wolves or the occasional ogre making off with livestock.

Every now and then, though, some larger menace may threaten the surrounding land. What better opportunity for adventure could there be? This situation is exactly what calls for you to rise to the clarion call to arms and rally the land about you to save the day.

Less noble characters can run a similar kind of operation, but it’s actually a protection racket. In other words, your guards “suggest” to the locals in the area that they cough up their “taxes” because, hey, you never know when the master’s pet monsters might get loose and go rampaging through the neighborhood. “Accidents” can happen. Those taxes can go a long way toward making sure that they don’t.

Many times, when you purchase the land for a stronghold, you also get the rights to much of the area around it as well. This land may be filled with all sorts of things that can generate an honest coin: farms, orchards, mines, and so on. Chapter 1 describes how you can incorporate an income source into your stronghold’s construction costs; such sources typically return a value of about 1% of the stronghold’s cost per year. If you have paid for it in this way, you don’t have to build the infrastructure or hire the hands to help make money from these resources on your land.

Some strongholds include an academy, where tutors mentor younger students in the ways of their chosen professions (their classes). The tuition fees help pay for the cost of keeping the stronghold running.

If you are particularly aggressive about building the area around your stronghold into a little empire, the DM could even decide to award a yearly payment to represent the profits the place generates. This should never be higher than 5% of what the stronghold cost to build in the first place, and it should most often be closer to 1–2%.

The Ties that Bind

Just as a stronghold should not constantly drain your resources, nor is it meant to be a regular boon. If you insist on building yourself a business instead of a home, it means you will be less available for adventuring. Businesses require constant attention, especially ones that are struggling to grow. Leaving the details to an underling—no matter how qualified—is not acceptable.

If the underling is that amazing at business to be able to handle everything without your involvement, the underling is likely to bolt at the first opportunity. Why should he spend his days making someone else rich when he can clearly do so for himself? More reliable but less spectacular employees can maintain a stronghold at as a break-even proposition, but that’s about it. For the business to truly grow, you must invest as much time into it as money—if not more. If you plan on continuing as an adventurer, that will become a problem.

This conflict of interest should become clear the first time your fellows call for you to join them on an adventure and you finds that you can’t get away due to your business obligations. If this happens too often, your friends will eventually get the hint and quit calling on you.

In fact, if you end up doing this much at all, the DM should step in and ask you to retire the character. If you’re only going to be a landed lord or lady from here on out, there’s little point for you to be involved in an adventure game.

If this happens, the character becomes an NPC fully under the DM’s control, and you should set about creating a whole new character from scratch. If you don’t want to start all the way over again, you might consider taking on the role of your previous character’s captain of the guard or one of his lieutenants, or some other character affiliated with the stronghold. In this way, the new character can represent the original character on adventures as a kind of proxy both in name and spirit, lending some continuity to your involvement in the campaign. Either way, it’s the DM’s call as to whether or not this should be permitted.

In any case, the original character should still crop up in the game from time to time, perhaps asking you and your fellows to go on missions for her or to lend her a hand. In certain cases, you might even return to playing the original character for a session or two. However, until that character gives up her involvement in the business of her stronghold, this arrangement can’t possibly last.