D&D (2024) Bastions in the 2024 DMs Guide

Yaarel

🇮🇱He-Mage
In the YouTube interview, 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide | Everything You Need to Know, Perkins describes the playtest bastion system as a "glimpse" of what bastions are in the DMs Guide. The official bastions incorporate much feedback.

Of note, characters can start building a bastion from level 5 on up − after the student tier, and gaining some modicum of money and fame. However, it is the players that run the bastion, not the characters. The characters can be on the other side of the planet, saving the world. A bastion is its own entity that can receive instructions from a character but can also operate autonomously.

At the same time, the character can use the facilities of the bastion such as to craft items, while there.

Characters can "recruit" creatures to inhabit the bastion.

The bastion of one character can combine (more like ally) with the bastion of an other character to gain certain advantages such as sharing a common defense.

Bastions make more sense for adventures where there is a "home base". They might make less sense for adventures that sprawl endlessly across who-knows-where.


"A bastion is a location that belongs to a player character: a home, a stronghold, and a place of power that develops over the course of a campaigns."
 

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Yaarel

🇮🇱He-Mage
The 2024 bastions emphasize that it is the place where a player can tell stories. The player determines the people and their lives in the bastion. It is the home that the character is fighting for. But it is especially the boundary within which, the player is functioning as the DM.

"Players are essentially DMing their own microcosms, within the larger campaign, giving identities to their hirelings, triggering events that happen in the bastions, and seeing the results and consequences. ... Its allowing the players to get a taste of what DMing is like."
 



Arilyn

Hero
If this is true, I really hope the random rolls of the Bastion "meeples" disappearing are gone or modified more logically.
 

Lidgar

Gongfarmer
I also hope they have some consideration for where Bastions might be built, like in the wilderness or in an established urban setting like Sigil, or the Bastion being a vehicle or demiplane.
They did say that the chapter on Greyhawk will include suggestions on where players could establish bastions, so definitely a possibility.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
I liked the comment that dungeons are just bastions gone wrong in a sense
The home base (i.e. bastion) the company of adventurers has in the game I play in is a converted dungeon: we cleared the place out and realized it'd make a damn fine base of operations. We've been renovating ever since. :)

At-will long-range travel capability is essential, however, if the bastion is to be deep in the wilderness or (like ours) on an island. Otherwise nobody will ever go there.
 


DarkCrisis

Spreading holiday cheer.
Found a screenshot for the VTT version

onde-jogar-stardew-valley-1-.png



Just joking. Whatever floats people's campaign boats. Still that wording that a character can like psychically rule their Bastion is just weird.
 

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