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Cost to build a keep.

Doctor DM

First Post
So, my players want to build their own fortress. They're modeling it after "The Alchemist's Eyrie" (Wotc free online adventure). They also plan to use the stone from the original Eyrie to build their keep.

Anyone have any idea how much this should cost? They'll need workers, a way to transport the stone, and even more stone and more materials.

How long should this take too? It should go a little faster for them though, as they have the services of a Maug.

Thanks.
 

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Arkhandus

First Post
You really, really need to give more detail on this place before anyone can give you any kind of decent answer on how much time and gold it would involve.

Edit: I had to search for and download the adventure to find any description of the alchemist's eyrie. *grr*

I'd eyeball it as being equivalent to the example Cheap Keep in the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook. 70,000 gold pieces, 7 weeks to build under average conditions (town, rock quarry, and decent labor forces nearby, frex). I'm not going to bother doing a detailed look-through of the SBG to figure out exactly how much time and money it would cost, but you probably can if you buy a copy of the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook. It's around 22 dollars give or take, depending on if your local game store or book store has it marked up.

The price and time I mention excludes any needed for building traps or adding magical features or alchemical laboratories. The Cheap Keep is priced on standard, mundane resources and no special defenses or the like. The Cheap Keep has only two floors and a small tower or whatnot, but it's wider than the alchemist's eyrie in the adventure you mentioned, and takes up a similar number of 'stronghold spaces' I think since the eyrie has about twice as many floors of varying sizes (if you check the book, keep in mind it says near the bottom that each space is 10 feet in the Cheap Keep's map, whereas the alchemist's eyrie you mentioned says its map spaces are 5 feet; so the cheap keep looks smaller on the map, but is actually somewhere around twice the length and width).
 
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Doctor DM

First Post
Rhun said:
Per the DMG 150,000gp for a keep. "Fortified stone building has 15-25 rooms."

I see. Isn't that to buy one pre-constructed though? They want to build their own.

And looking at that now it may be more like a tower...
 

Arkhandus

First Post
See my edited post. I already decided to download the stupid thing to see what the building was supposed to be like.


The Tower in the DMG is further described in Sword & Fist, one of the first few 3.0 supplements and still reasonably valid for its Buildings section at the back. According to S&F, the Tower, or Border Tower as they call it, takes 8 months to build, excluding furnishings (which it estimates as another 1-4 thousand GP or so depending on type and quality). 2 thousand GP is the estimated annual maintenance cost. The first floor is about 50 feet wide and long excluding the outer walls (which are about 5 or 10 feet thick), the second floor is about 40 or 45 feet wide and long, excluding the walls which are about 5 feet thick, and the third floor is 40 feet wide and long, with walls about 3-5 feet thick.


However, the square footage and whatnot of the Tower/Border Tower is smaller than the Alchemist's Eyrie, thus why the Cheap Keep in Stronghold Builder's Guidebook is a closer fit to what you're looking for.

I think SGB cuts the building times down by a large amount simply for the sake of adventuring PCs; it mentions speeding things up regardless of realism for the sake of making it easier for PCs to get their construction projects finished. Though it really cuts down the build times a huge, absurd amount, I think. So you might go with something more like Sword & Fist's build times. Ten or eleven months would probably be the S&F equivalent for a building of the Cheap Keep's scale.

Actually, checking the sidebar in the first chapter, it says that the SGB's build times assume you're using magic to expedite the process as much as possible. It mentions how real castles and suchlike took years to build. So depending on your players' resources, you may want to use one build time or another.


The services of a Maug should not seriously affect the build times or costs. That's 1 strong, tireless worker, who probably can't haul everything by itself and can't handle every construction task by itself, probably. It may reduce the time by 10% at most I'd guess, same as spending more money on extra laborers.

Surrounding terrain and whatnot will also affect build times and costs. Building on a field not too far from the nearest quarry or the like and not in a hard-to-reach place would be best, while tougher positions would take more time and money to get the building materials to.

The SGB has details on site-based build cost modifiers, which are small percentages. Different climates and locales will affect how difficult it is to build there, and different sizes of towns nearby determines how many workers you can get, and so on and so forth.
 





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