Blog (A5E) Build A Stronghold

[Tonguez]

I'm guessing that it contributes to the size, and therefore Grade, of the Stronghold. Which doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me because 250,001 square feet is about 5.7 acres. But my (limited) research indicates that Medieval farms would be anywhere from 12-30 modern acres (admittedly, a lot or all of that farmland would actually belong to the area's lord). So if that's the case, then even poor farmers in the serf-less D&D world are going to have at least level 4 or 5 Strongholds.

The Taj Mahal covers 42 acres, and the Great Pyramids cover 13 acres, both of which would be, like, level 14 Strongholds.

Honestly, the sizes on the chart should probably be increased by a factor of 10, with the caveat that they represent both the immediate grounds as well as the actual building (extra land can still be bought, but the "front yard" is included if necessary). Either that or "Stronghold" should apply to only the heart of the building, and everything else may be part of the property but not part of the Stronghold.

@Morrus et al, I really think you guys need to redo the math here. The Strongholds are an awesome concept and everything is really cool except for the sizes.

When I was looking at domain rules the size maths got crazy so I Just declared “regardless of size every stronghold occupies an area of 120 acres. This includes the stronghold buildings and land (Pasture,field and woods)) to support them

Ie you pay to build your structures and the coverage/area of influence around them is abstracted. The 120 is based on the British Hidage system, where a Hide is a taxable unit of 120 acres (4yardlands)

I also declared that a Sq Mile contained 600* acres and thus had room for 5 strongholds (village, manor, church, Farm, wizard tower, Factory, school, forest, wilderness Etc). - for wilderness consider Poohs Hundred Acre Wood.
A Town could occupy a whole sq mile and thus have 5xsize urban strongholds inside its walls.

(* a Square Mile is actually 640 acres but 600 makes for easier maths)

 

[Kinematics]

OK, taking a fresh look at things, I think I see how they approached the mathematical part of things. Basically, they start with cost and effect, and work up to fitting that to a size, whereas we are looking at things from the opposite direction, looking at the stronghold as its own thing first, and then extrapolating size, and working down from there.

Consider Grade 1: 50-100 square feet. Why is it what it is? Well, clearly, this is based first on cost — 50 to 100 gold — and providing an effect equivalent to spending that much on a magic item. 50 to 100 gold is the price for most "common" rarity magic items. So the grade 1 feat for any stronghold should provide something similar to buying a common magic item.

Similar for grade 2, where you're providing an effect comparable to magic items that cost up to about 1000 gold — something you are likely to be able to afford by level 5. Thus the stronghold's size is limited to whatever would cost 1000 gold so that the feat bonuses are reasonably comparable.

From there, mapping size to cost has them using the square foot as the basic measure, because it ends up with results that are kinda reasonable at first glance.

However looking at things from the other side, such as farms or large external grounds, the math kinda breaks down compared to expectations of realism.

This also suggests issues related to the range of pricing. Grade 3 is 1001 to 10,000 gold. To get grade 3 benefits, there's mostly no reason to spend more than 1001 gold. The one reason to spend more is to gain additional staff. However there's no value there for anything less than 100 staff, where you get a follower. And that only really becomes common when you opt for Legendary quality (which basically exists to exchange feat bonuses for followers).

So the sizes are scaled so as to put a price on the stronghold's feature bonuses, not to put realism on the stronghold itself.

I'm not sure it's going to work, but I'm going to try to reframe the purchasing structure without tying it explicitly to a square footage.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

View attachment 144355

Not to mention that houses sizes used to be much smaller in the US and medieval homes where quite small.

 

[Morrus]

Thanks for all the (lengthy!) input folks. I would caveat that you don't have the full thing there, so some of it doesn't work quite like you'd get just using the preview there.

 

[Kinematics]

Thanks for all the (lengthy!) input folks. I would caveat that you don't have the full thing there, so some of it doesn't work quite like you'd get just using the preview there.

Yeah, kinda figured that was the case, but since you didn't provide the whole thing, that's the best we can do.

I'm not sure it's going to work, but I'm going to try to reframe the purchasing structure without tying it explicitly to a square footage.

So, buying by the square foot is more minutia than we really need. My inclination would be to divorce the price from the explicit size. Get rid of the square feet entirely, and base grades more on conceptual units.

I tried several approaches. Unfortunately, while mostly possible, there are some parts that don't really work, and even the parts that do are more complicated than they would be with a base unit method.

So my final conclusion was to simply change the concrete size unit (square feet) into an abstract unit (eg: Stronghold Investment Points), and rewrite the Size table as a more generalized idea about the stronghold constructs.

Grade	Investment	Description	Examples
1	50–100	About the size of a single room.	A hut, a personal library, a private workshop, a shop wagon, a small training room, a garden, a sacred tree, a bunker, or a campsite.
2	101–1000	A single small building with multiple rooms, or similar total space.	An apartment, a house, a shop, a tavern, a laboratory, a menagerie, a small temple, a sacred grove, or a minor guildhouse.
3	1001–10,000	Multiple small buildings, a large building, or a fair bit of land.	A small farm, a manor, a stockade, or a bandit encampment
4	10,001–25,000	A substantially large building, likely with surrounding grounds.	A mansion, a mage's tower, an emporium, a school, a keep, or a large guildhouse.
5	25,001–50,000	Multiple large buildings or expansive grounds.	A cathedral, a castle, a university, a large farm, or an army camp.
6	50,001–100,000	A very large building and grounds, or substantial lands.	A minor palace, a fortress, a basilica, a ranch, a forbidden forest, or a pyramid.
7	100,001–250,000	An imposing building (or collection of buildings) and lands, or large quantities of land.	A palace, a citadel, a plantation, or a hidden village.
8	250,001+	Massive buildings and lands.	A grand palace or great pyramid.

Notes for examples:
A shop wagon could be something like a traveling tinker's wagon, or a ramen stand or other food wagon.
A hidden village (more likely a hidden elf village than a ninja village) would be a high-tier encampment.


Investment points would translate directly to gold just like square feet do (along with the multipliers from environment and quality). The only table change needed would be for calculating staff, which just becomes staff per investment instead of staff per square feet (which also feels less problematic). For sub-strongholds, they just need to be noted as not using more than half the investment used on the main stronghold. And this eliminates the ambiguous "external grounds" thing entirely.

Of course "Investment Points" is just a placeholder term. If you still want to keep it tied to size in some way, you could also call it "Footprint", without referring to explicit measurement units. That would allow it to give a general sense of size without needing to imply a rigid linear relationship. Still, I think "Investment" works better.

Overall, this is a fairly trivial change, and not the complete rebuilding I was planning on. However the change from square feet to "investment points" gets rid of a lot of uncomfortable tensions in the original write-up.

 

[Faolyn]

A shop wagon could be something like a traveling tinker's wagon, or a ramen stand or other food wagon.

I love this idea!

 

[Kinematics]

Note: Edited

So, I want to look at the stronghold types separately from the example groupings. We don't have the full write-up, but we can guesstimate based on the example lists.

• Dwelling — Hut, apartment, house, manor, mansion, palace
• Encampment — Campsite, bandit camp, army camp
• Farm — Garden, farm, ranch, plantation
• Fort — Bunker, stockade, keep, castle, fortress, citadel
• Business — Cart, tavern, shop, emporium
• Guildhouse — Guildhouse
• Crafting — Workshop, crafting hall, manufacturer
• Training — Training room, dojo, practice fields
• Study — Personal library, laboratory, mage's tower, school, university
• Religious — Altar, shrine, church, temple, cathedral, basilica
• Misc — pyramid(?), great pyramid(?)
• Menagerie — Pet room, animal garden, menagerie, zoo
• Wilderness — Sacred tree, sacred grove, forbidden forest
• Entertainment — Gambling den, playhouse, carnival, circus, theater
• Hospice — Medicine room, surgery, treatment center, hospital

Aside from the ones that I'm not entirely sure of the categorization for, I added a few extra categories that came to mind:

• Animal Collections, because (while trying to figure out where to fit the menagerie) I was reminded of a rakshasa in one adventure with his own underground zoo of monsters, as well as other stories that come to mind of people keeping exotic animals. Suitable for an Animal Handling focus. Might use Menagerie as the category name. (Renamed)
• Headquarters, because nothing else seemed to connect to the guildhouse, but a secret hideout and a throne room seemed like they should have something. It could be that the Guildhouse can stand on its own, and Headquarters can remain for those other types. This feels iffy in a lot of ways. — Removed
• Hospice for medical treatment and healing. Suitable for a Medicine focus.
• Wilderness added as a collection for druidic/fey/natural environs.
• Entertainment added.

Thoughts? Expectations?

 

[King Brad]

I prefer the square footage/explicit sizes. Without them, it ends up being just like O5e's magic items costs where its some crazy ballpark and swing wildly but for no logical reason. Also, in terms of mapping, it becomes a choice for the players.

"Do I wanna get my stronghold now, or wait another adventure so I have enough gold to make it the size I want?"

Personally, while I get the abstraction that comes with more modern game designs, I prefer rigidity for this scenario. I've been running a campaign since Covid began using the MCDM strongholds and while they work, the abstract nature makes it weird and nebulous as for what feels appropriate.

I do also agree that the grades should be expressed more clearly. A grade 1 should really be labeled like "room, campsite, shack, hut, bunker" to emphasize it being cheap but not comfortable for a lot of people.

Also, did I read that right? For 100g you can have a haven anywhere? I know not all the rules are present, but that seems problematic possibly. Though perhaps not, given that I don't think we got the rules for time of construction.

 

[Kinematics]

Also, did I read that right? For 100g you can have a haven anywhere? I know not all the rules are present, but that seems problematic possibly. Though perhaps not, given that I don't think we got the rules for time of construction.

Are you referring to the Encampment feature where you can spend an hour to build one anywhere? You get that at grade 5, which means 12,501 gold on frugal, or 25,001 gold on average quality. It's not available for just 100 gold.

I prefer the square footage/explicit sizes. Without them, it ends up being just like O5e's magic items costs where its some crazy ballpark and swing wildly but for no logical reason. Also, in terms of mapping, it becomes a choice for the players.

I understand what you mean there, and part of that is that this is kinda like buying a magic item. Of course LU has much more concrete valuations for magic items in some thread around here somewhere.

But yeah, saying it costs somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 gold (grade 3) is really vague, and you're not really sure what you're getting if it's not tied to an explicit size.

The one mechanic that connects to that is staff size. With an average quality stronghold, that would mean you have between 2 and 20 staff — which also doesn't really mean anything if it doesn't go over 100 (at least as far as we know with what's presented; it could be that there are other rules impacted by staff size).

If there are other rules for staff, then the ambiguity of stronghold size kinda fades away. Maybe 10 staff gets you a kitchen with your own personal chef, so if you want that you need 5000 sq feet/investment with average quality, or 10,000 with frugal quality. That gives you concrete goals to reach without needing to have an architectural layout drawn up.

However at this point that's only speculative, since we don't have the full rules.

Barring staff having granular value, neither square feet nor investment points actually grant the player anything useful. They're just used as a mechanic for determining grade and cost. From that perspective, the only question remaining is whether you want to know exact sizes, or are you more comfortable to abstract sizes? And that comes down to personal preference.

I'll agree that there's some value in having explicit sizes, but my problem is that that starts breaking down once you're comparing things that operate on different scales.

"Do I wanna get my stronghold now, or wait another adventure so I have enough gold to make it the size I want?"

Though I don't actually think we need to make that decision. Maybe. OK, it looks like this is another ambiguous point. My original assumption was that you could always just spend more to increase the size of a stronghold, so you could buy a little stronghold now, and just grow it over time. However the rules don't clarify whether that's possible, or whether a stronghold's size is fixed once purchased. You can sell off quality, but not size. Something to add to the list of unclear issues.

 

[tetrasodium]

Are you referring to the Encampment feature where you can spend an hour to build one anywhere? You get that at grade 5, which means 12,501 gold on frugal, or 25,001 gold on average quality. It's not available for just 100 gold.


I understand what you mean there, and part of that is that this is kinda like buying a magic item. Of course LU has much more concrete valuations for magic items in some thread around here somewhere.

But yeah, saying it costs somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 gold (grade 3) is really vague, and you're not really sure what you're getting if it's not tied to an explicit size.

The one mechanic that connects to that is staff size. With an average quality stronghold, that would mean you have between 2 and 20 staff — which also doesn't really mean anything if it doesn't go over 100 (at least as far as we know with what's presented; it could be that there are other rules impacted by staff size).

If there are other rules for staff, then the ambiguity of stronghold size kinda fades away. Maybe 10 staff gets you a kitchen with your own personal chef, so if you want that you need 5000 sq feet/investment with average quality, or 10,000 with frugal quality. That gives you concrete goals to reach without needing to have an architectural layout drawn up.

However at this point that's only speculative, since we don't have the full rules.

Barring staff having granular value, neither square feet nor investment points actually grant the player anything useful. They're just used as a mechanic for determining grade and cost. From that perspective, the only question remaining is whether you want to know exact sizes, or are you more comfortable to abstract sizes? And that comes down to personal preference.

I'll agree that there's some value in having explicit sizes, but my problem is that that starts breaking down once you're comparing things that operate on different scales.


Though I don't actually think we need to make that decision. Maybe. OK, it looks like this is another ambiguous point. My original assumption was that you could always just spend more to increase the size of a stronghold, so you could buy a little stronghold now, and just grow it over time. However the rules don't clarify whether that's possible, or whether a stronghold's size is fixed once purchased. You can sell off quality, but not size. Something to add to the list of unclear issues.

I'm on my phone. I think the "something useful is s choice between abilities of the stronghold and renown (?). If a player wants to hob knob with important people, sometimes they need to look the part of someone important rather than looking like a hired thug who lives in the slums. It might also be possible that certain tools eldritch machines & valuables that bump the gold investment take up a certain square footage.