D&D (2024) Dungeon Master's Guide Bastion System Lets You Build A Stronghold

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The Dungeon Master's Guide's brand new Bastion System has been previewed in a new video from Wizards of the Coast.

Characters can acquire a bastion at 5th-level. Each week, the bastion takes a turn, with actions including crafting, recruiting, research, trade, and more.

A bastion also contains a number of special facilties, starting with two at 5th-level up to 6 at 17th-level. These facilities include things like armories, workshops, laboratories, stables, menageries, and more. In total there are nearly thirty such facilities to choose from.

 

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Or not . . . maybe you now agree with me that there is nothing special about the assassination compared to any other event in the fiction?
Very well then, we retcon two last sessions, you didn't left the pub, we will now do the staff hiring process and then we will travel again, and I will roll for random weather and random encounters, we will waste total of 12 hours to make sure all in-universe fiction changes accordingly to the player whims.

This is what you are asking for right now.

But it doesn't imply what you say. All it implies is that we have to make a somewhat arbitrary adjustment of the calendar, to allow for the fact that we all know that, in the fiction, the king was alive on the day the PCs talked to him. It's a change in the assignment of an event to an imaginary calendar, not a change in the process whereby the GM has decided that the King gets killed.
You know what I would say to you if I was at your table and you told me the king is killed a day after we talked to him and it effectively doesn't matter if we arrived at 23rd or 25th, this event would only trigger after we arrived? "Choo choo, all aboard the railroad!"
 


Re: Zone of Truth
I don't know what you mean by "enforced properly" but just off the top of my head
1) Nothing forces you to answer a question
Questioner: "Failure to answer a question will be interpreted in a manner highly unfavourable to you."
2) Giving an NPC a quirk such as referring to themselves in the 3rd person can be utilized with a false identity. "The Great Flannegan would never betray his fellow man!" Sounds like it is open and shut truth... but what Zsarl says about the Great Flannegan doesn't apply to Zsarl
3) Most people aren't trained interrogators and it is trivially easy to answer questions in a way that sounds honest, but is deceptive. Player's might not catch someone answering "What is your name" with "You may call me Timothy my lords, unless you prefer a different name?" Which doesn't actually confirm the kid's name is Timothy. Or a question of "Do you mean us harm." could be answered with "Not right now, but if you lay a hand on me I'll gut you." Which again, is a true answer, but could obfuscate the actual intent.
2 and 3 overlap with the name piece: if someone gave me the answer "You can call me Timothy (etc.)" I'd ask the question again: "What is your name?". Continued obfuscation would end the interview real fast.
4) Magic items that block it, but that's cheap
Indeed, but they do exist. :)
5) "Well, you never asked" type situations. You could ask "do you mean us any harm in the future" and the person can honestly answer no, but you didn't ask if the demon hiding in their shadow means you harm, so you can't uncover that with a Zone of Truth
"Well you never asked" situations are usually the fault of the questioner, who should have asked unless it's really obscure (and a demon hiding in someone's shadow would to me qualify as obscure).
Or we could not equate doing good deeds, helping people, and growing in personal power as an inevitable slide into assassins interrupting your breakfast every third sunday. Because that's kind of boring. And ridiculous.
And realistic. Not every third Sunday, though: I'm trying to defend against it happening once, because once is all it takes if the assassin is successful.

That, and the definition of "good deeds" very often depends on whose side you're on. The character of mine I'm referring to here has been in parties that have done covert ops in an enemy nation that have resulted in some serious messes being made - all "good deeds" to us and our home nations but not at all good deeds as seen by the place we were messing up.

And we-as-PCs already know that nation knows who we are (or thinks they know, their info is a bit inaccurate) - at one point we stole a copy of a supposedly top-secret intelligence brief that had half our names in it along with some half-decent sketches of some of us, though the matching of names and sketches was largely out to lunch.

And we also know this nation has the means of reaching out halfway around the world to screw with us.

So yeah, a bit of good old-fashioned paranoia ain't always a bad thing. :)
Exactly. You wouldn't trust. So the next NPC passes by, and then the next, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle where you are constantly on watch for spies and trust no one, so you never actually get the chance to encounter good people or relax. Because relaxation is a knife to the back.
Expect it when you least expect it. :)
 

That's the way I'd do it. But I'm not the one arguing the DM should let retcon those two days in for PC convenience and move everything accordingly, even things unrelated to PC actions, @pemerton is.
Well, if it was an error my side I would rule that it took less time than expected due to favourable circumstances. But I don't see any problem with the rules here, the problem is due to the way the game is being run.
 

Sounds very railroady. What if the PCs decide to assassinate the king before the assigned date?
If they're successful then the King dies when they kill him.

Successful or not, though, the attempt would occur during the normal run of play. It wouldn't be retconned.

That said, in a multi-party game this could still cause some serious complications if one party has already played through the King being alive on the 23rd before another party, whose play hasn't quite kept up in game time, murders him on the 19th. Stuff like this is a constant concern when running multi-party campaigns. :)
 


Why are you letting players retcon time in the first place? I’m pretty sure that’s not a rule. If they forgot to assign staff, then no staff are assigned.
This would in fact be my reply to the request, yes; I wouldn't let it happen.

I threw in the date change idea as an example of a seemingly-trivial retcon that turns out to be anything but, in order to explain why I wouldn't let it happen.
 

That's the way I'd do it. But I'm not the one arguing the DM should let retcon those two days in for PC convenience and move everything accordingly, even things unrelated to PC actions, @pemerton is.
I've not argued anything about retconning. That is @Lanefan. I've explained, in two posts, why I think the change to the calendar is silly. But if it's going to be done, then it needs to be done to everything - otherwise things will become incoherent.
 

Up to page 7 currently of this.
Makes me wonder if they use a Feat to gain access to a Bastion initially and then work to improve on it noting they can't wander away anywhere otherwise risk losing if thos mention of the rules are accurate.
Off the top of my head I'd go for a Sanctuary and a Garden for my Fey Cleric whose uses the Consecreate spell to create new shrines that allow her access to her "Bastion" an abandoned ruined temple with a minor part of the Feywild.
Then there's Tenpaces the elf who is maintaining an old Ranger outpost occasionally going on missions for supplies and respurces to maintain his bastion he calls the Stardancer Citadel.
Sorry just ideas off the top of my head from what I've listened and read about this so far.
On to Page 8
 

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