Good stronghold rules?

A while back my players were gifted a tract of land with an abandoned (sort of) tower on it. They've since cleared the area and one of the PCs with the Leadership feat (3.5E) has invested heavily in making it into a stronghold of sorts for the party and their followers. I at first tried using the rules in the Arms & Equipment Guide (3E) for building the stronghold, which worked ok, but left me wanting more. After a recent thread here I also just checked out the rules in the D&D Rules Cyclopedia (BECMI). While they had some good advice on things that can come up, and some information about titles, the rules just don't work very well. For example, the rules suggest that a dominion of 100 peasant familes grows by 25 families per month! mindblown So after all that I still am not very satisfied with the support for including strongholds in play. There's a wealth of information about building a stronghold, but honestly that's the least interesting part of it to me. I'm interested in how to incorporate a stronghold into the game.

Do any of you have any recommendations for good rules on how to include a stronghold in an ongoing game? I'm looking specifically for information such as:

• Ongoing maintenance and income
• In-game benefits and boons from owning a stronghold
• In-game challenges from owning a stronghold
• Events and situations that might arise
• The general impact that owning a stronghold can have on the game and how it's played

I'm not sure the D&D Rules Cyclopedia has all the BECMI rules. Does it not have the events table? Does it not talk about how a PC ruler does things?

So...it is true a lot of the Ye Old BECMI rules were made a bit...silly...and more so they are made to, quote, "keep PCs poor so they would still have to go on adventures".

Supplementary to the Dominion rules in the Cyclopedia, Bruce Heard (Product Editor of the Mystara line for TSR) wrote a couple of Dragon Magazine articles on costs and rules in Dragon 187, 189, 190, and 191. If you can't find those Dragons issues.....I think they are on the Dragon CD (if you can play a CD in 2024) Check at the Vaults of Pandius, they should still have all the articles

The Castle Guide has a lot of "dark ages lore" .It was on WotC's free downloads for years....not sure where you can find it now.

If you can find a Birthright book it has a whole system for PC domains and an economy.

Magical Medieval Society...third party....has rules with a good system.

3e had the Stronghold builder's guide. It was OK but felt more like fantasy interior decorating to me.

I upgraded to Mms:WE, which has a highly detailed system for economics, construction, artisans and staff plus rules on generating cities, guilds and entire regions. I love it but I also love a good spreadsheet, so take that as you will. It's very good but is probably lacking on clear in-game events. It is so dense with info that those things are in there but buried.

Tome of Heroes has a much simpler three page system for PCs that kind of pop in every few weeks to fill out paperwork and skim off profits. Combine a few of the other downtime activities (trading companies, magical gardens, political status, etc) to engage the other players without needing a special source book for each one. It's 5e but the mechanics of the subsystems are so simplistic they would be easy to implement in 3e. It has a simple complications system to provide a germ of plot ideas.

bloodtide said:

The Castle Guide has a lot of "dark ages lore" .It was on WotC's free downloads for years....not sure where you can find it now.

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You can get it on the wayback machine. It's a text only file though.

The Pathfinder Rules at Buildings – d20PFSRD are great, though may be more comprehensive than you want

Thanks for the responses so far! I'll try to respond to posts individually when I get a chance, but in the meantime this gives me plenty to think about.

Tonguez said:

The Pathfinder Rules at Buildings – d20PFSRD are great, though may be more comprehensive than you want

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I haven't played PF outside of a few one shots so I don't have context for some of this.

Is it intended to be a giant money sink? Or some weird way for PCs to buy magic items without buying magic items?

One of the examples is a house and inn requiring more than 50,000gp equivalent.given that the PFSrd has a night's stay at a common inn being 0.5gp, it would require 100,000 guest-nights to hit break-even on construction, let alone operating expenses. It seems....wrong.

kigmatzomat said:

I haven't played PF outside of a few one shots so I don't have context for some of this.

Is it intended to be a giant money sink? Or some weird way for PCs to buy magic items without buying magic items?

One of the examples is a house and inn requiring more than 50,000gp equivalent.given that the PFSrd has a night's stay at a common inn being 0.5gp, it would require 100,000 guest-nights to hit break-even on construction, let alone operating expenses. It seems....wrong.

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the 50000 is for building in a kingdom of over 100+ 12-mile hexes, so we can assume its a good Inn (2gp) per guest night. However at GM discretion the Build Points calculation is revised for smaller domains so a new domain of 1 hex the house and inn building could just be 12000gp (which is a bit more reasonable especially if I assume a basic inn has 10 beds).

Honestly the maths in the system is a bit tedious, but the idea of bonuses and the events are useful

Tonguez said:

.... at GM discretion the Build Points calculation is revised for smaller domains so a new domain of 1 hex the house and inn building could just be 12000gp (which is a bit more reasonable especially if I assume a basic inn has 10 beds).

Honestly the maths in the system is a bit tedious, but the idea of bonuses and the events are useful

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Not wanting to derail the conversation further beyond pointing out that it would be a strange thing for someone to spend a nest egg equivalent to a life of leisure at the income level of a scribe or well-trained hireling (~40 years at ~1gp/day =12,000gp) just to become an inn keeper that doesn't turn a profit until your kids are fully grown.

OK, it makes sense for an elf or dwarf, where spending 20 years recouping an investment isn't a major fraction of your life and 40 years of living isnt even a child getting to adulthood.

That makes me want to do some math around demihuman finances.....

I'm going to go back to my assumption that for most games it's a strange way to get magic items as tribute or whatever rather than buying it ("Earn magic items with this one trick DMs don't want you to know!")

Schmoe said:

A while back my players were gifted a tract of land with an abandoned (sort of) tower on it. They've since cleared the area and one of the PCs with the Leadership feat (3.5E) has invested heavily in making it into a stronghold of sorts for the party and their followers. I at first tried using the rules in the Arms & Equipment Guide (3E) for building the stronghold, which worked ok, but left me wanting more. After a recent thread here I also just checked out the rules in the D&D Rules Cyclopedia (BECMI). While they had some good advice on things that can come up, and some information about titles, the rules just don't work very well. For example, the rules suggest that a dominion of 100 peasant familes grows by 25 families per month! mindblown So after all that I still am not very satisfied with the support for including strongholds in play. There's a wealth of information about building a stronghold, but honestly that's the least interesting part of it to me. I'm interested in how to incorporate a stronghold into the game.

Do any of you have any recommendations for good rules on how to include a stronghold in an ongoing game? I'm looking specifically for information such as:

• Ongoing maintenance and income
• In-game benefits and boons from owning a stronghold
• In-game challenges from owning a stronghold
• Events and situations that might arise
• The general impact that owning a stronghold can have on the game and how it's played

Click to expand...

Going in a completely different direction, if you want the "social stuff" but without the "bean-counting stuff" I highly recommend looking for a system that is very lightweight. Maybe not "as lightweight as possible" but perhaps very close. The reason is that the impact these sorts of things have on the game that aren't boring/bean-counting are mostly social. Sure, they can be a money sink and an interior-design mini-game, but mostly, it's about having duties to people, making allegiances with people, and dealing with the fallout of things going wrong with people. (Substitute "factions" as needed for "people".)

In that regard, I enjoyed a lot of the ideas in An Echo, Resounding, since it's lightweight but thorough. But ultimately, I've settled on an even lighter-weight mix of the faction and domain stuff from Errant, mixed with ideas from the fronts from Dungeon World, and the steading (settlement) rules also from Dungeon World. Errant gives you just enough meat, plus a boatload of procedures so it's very easy and clear to run, which I think most systems for this stuff fail at spectacularly. It has rules for running a domain, building institutions within a community, NPC-specific bonds and faction relationships, and carousing rules within a settlement. On top of that, it includes great mini-systems for rivals and scourges, which can be longer-lasting things to sprinkle in, which make a lot of sense for domain-level play. DW gives you slightly better-defined faction stuff in the form of Fronts (which work alongside Errant's procedures without a hitch), and the settlement stuff is dirt-simple but laser-focused on a community's Assets and Problems, which are the most game-friendly (and inspiring) stuff you need. With the the two of them, you really just need to track just a handful of traits or bullet points of info for each community or institution, and each faction, and the event die mechanic runs the rest for you.