Stronghold Builders Guidebook

[trancejeremy]

I don't have any of those other books either (though I've seen Sword and Fist) and this seems awfully different from anything I've seen.

Basically, it's got a huge listing of different components, along with maps of them. And you just pick them and put them together. Kinda neat, actually. Just begs for a computer program.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

I grabbed the Stronghold Builders Guide when it came out, mostly for the fun of skimming through it, rather than for any pressing need to build a Stronghold (as a character) or to populate a world with sensible buildings (as a DM). Since intent colors what I get out of the book, I'll just mention that up front. It also means I havent gotten a chance to playtest either, so bear that in mind too.

The Stronghold Builders Guide is a nice, chunky 128 page soft-cover. There are 4 chapters, with the first two covering the crunchy rules bits of stronghold building, the third offering musings about strongholds, and the last presenting sample strongholds ranging from very simple to very complex. In more detail:

Chapter One: Building a Stronghold. (9 pages.)
This section covers the mechanics of actually building your castle. It provides a series of steps, starting with "Choosing a Location" and leading up to "Map Your Stronghold", which should guide you through the building process. The rules here seem very clean; they are purposely kept simple in order to make stronghold building fun while keeping a veneer of realism.

Chapter Two: Stronghold Components (73 pages.)
This chapter gives you a system and a set of modular components for creating buildings. There is a lot of material in here; standard room, magical rooms, useful items, heavy weapons, traps, walls and so on. This is the real meat of the book. Some of it is very narrow (like a paragraph on the use of "Mattock of the Titans" for building or attacking strongholds) but much of it, like room types, descriptions and cost applies to everything you would ever want to build.

Chapter Three: Strongholds in Your Campaign (17 pages.)
A bit of colorful, inspirational material about the uses of strongholds in a campaign. It includes suggestions for attacking other peoples castles and for defending your own. There are a few crunchy rules scattered throughout, things like modifiers to the standard Spot checks for watchmen or a discussion of precisely how much damage a "Soften Earth and Stone" spell might do.

Chapter Four: Example Strongholds (24 pages).
This section has maps and commentary about five totally different strongholds. They demonstrate that the book is not about building a couple variations of a simple European castle; its about building fabulous and strange edifices in a magical world. One, for instance, is underwater; another one flies.

So, now on to the subjective part.

The Good:
1)The basic building rules seem rock solid, and they are pitched at a level of complexity I think is just right. D&D is not a game about building castles, its a game about heroic adventurers; and these rules reflect that. Thats not to say that they are shallow; there is enough depth and variety here to keep people interested for a long while; but you will, mercifully, not be calculating stresses on load bearing walls or using your Appraise skill against DC35 to determine if a quarried stone has a hidden structural flaw in it. You will be able to generate a highly individual building with a minimum of effort, which is beautiful for both DMs and stronghold-building PCs.
2) The amount of imagination put into the Stronghold Components and the Example Strongholds is just fabulous. There were individual ideas and even whole classes of ideas there that I had never considered or had thought could never be quantified nicely in rules.

All in all, the content of the book is just great. You expect this book to perform a certain task and there is no question in my mind that it does its job. But, all is not perfect.

The Bad:
1) The editing. Oh my. Someone needs to have their hand slapped with a ruler for this editing job. The book is filled with the sort of sentence fragments and disjointed words you get when you cut and paste too quickly in a word processor. I'm not generally picky about this sort of stuff, but that means that when I notice it, you've done a really bad job. Here's one from the "Desecrated Shrine" - "Undead cannot be created within nor summoned into this space. Undead summoned or created in this space gain +2 hit points per HD." Huh? It seemed that there was something jarring like that every couple of pages or so. And since I bought the book for enjoyment rather than for a particular purpose, I was extra-aggravated when I came across something like this.

The Unknown:
1) Permanancy. There are tons of fabulous rooms listed in Chapter 2; at their core they are common spells made permenant during the creation of the room. Some of them are incredibly powerful; things like the "Bier of Resurrection". How much would you pay for a "large stone platform that casts Resurrection on any corpse laid upon it"? There are certain other ones, like the "Hall of Truth" that you'd expect every courtroom in the land to implement. Without watching players (and DMs) try to abuse these things I cant tell which ones are broken, but I'll bet that some of the about 150 rooms are.

The Nitpicky:
1) The Traps section from Song and Silence is reprinted here. There are probably other reprints in here as well.

The Result:
Its a good solid book at its core, but its not like you cant run a campaign without it - hence I gave it a baseline value of 4 points on the 5 point review scale to start with. The problems with editing dropped it a third of a point, and my worries about play-balance dropped it another third to 3.33. Rounding that off gives a rather harsh 3 points. I feel a little guilty rating this "average", because I enjoyed the book on the whole. If its time in your campaign for characters to be building their strongholds and you dont know where to start, I wouldnt hesitate to buy a copy of the book for your group.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

I own Sword & Fist and Quintessential Fighter, and I would say that the Stronghold Builders Guidebook far outstrips anything offered by those two supplements.

I think that's only what can be expected when you compare a chapter in a book about fighters/warriors to a whole book dedicated to the subject of stronghold building.

I purchased Strongholder Builder's Guidebook right away and was not dissapointed. I highly recommend it!



"Where's the treasure? I'm an adventurer, damn it! I demand fiscal rewards for acts of premeditated homicide!"

The Black Company Campaign
http://home.earthlink.net/~lich3

 

[Messageboard Golem]

The section on Traps is reprinted from Song & Silence, which is a little frustrating for me since I bought S&S just for that section. I dont have S&F or QSF and cant comment on them.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

This is the place to go whether you're a player that got a keep from the Deck of Many Things, or a DM that needs to make the ultimate dungeon experience. And don't be fooled by the title, this is also a quick way to see how much a character would need to start a tavern, brewery, or blacksmith shop. This book has four chapters, the first two about building your stronghold, the third about keeping it (or getting it), and the fourth with examples of what can be done with the rules.

Chapter 1: Building a Stronghold

This explain the factors that go into getting your stronghold starting, from picking your terrain, to choosing your walls, to labor costs. Simple and straightforward, it's enhanced by a "running commentary" in the sidebars that constructs a keep progressively as you move through the chapter.

Chapter 2: Stronghold Components

This gives you descriptions of all sorts of places and rooms you can have in your stronghold. But this is only the beginning. Everything from locks, windows, and doors are all addressed. What makes this book really interesting is how they describe the use of magic in the building, protection, and everyday use of your stronghold. In the previous chapter they mention that you can get discounts on your stronghold by casting spells (discounts on stone walls by casting wall of stone, cheaper upper levels by use of air walk or levitate). Special augmentation can make your walls particularly deadly by covering them with blades, fire, or frost.

Here is also the place where it explains the use of bag of devouring in your waste disposal, the need for everburning torches, and infinate uses for a decanter of endless water.

Another thing that tickled me was the mobility functions. Now you can have the floating wizard's tower you've always wanted, or the burrowing temple of the evil mole god, or castle that sinks beneath the waves (airtight and submersible).

Uses for several spells (some made permanent) are discussed, as are the uses of portals, and ever-popular traps. Things like having several magic mouth spells as a kind of tour guide of your home are rather amusing, but having that same magic mouth act as an alarm could be very useful.

There's a particularly fun section on wondrous architecture. There's rooms that reveal people's alignment, several different varieties that impede scrying, others that can be left as traps for the unwary, tables that reveal poison, or larders that are never empty.

In several places this chapter offers advice on how to place things in your stronghold (stables shouldn't be near the bedrooms, for example) which is a nice touch of realism.

Chapter 3: Strongholds in Your Campaign

This chapter discusses matters about getting your stronghold built. Everything from getting the locations, to hiring people to build it, to defending it. Most of it is general advice, but some of it a DM could use to add a touch of spice to what otherwise might be a routine endevor.

Also discusses is assaulting a stronghold. From the full-frontal assault, to the strike team, to the seige, this chapter touches base with all the major strategies. It doesn't go in depth, but it gives a place to start. Also presented are sapping rules, and collateral damage rules for walls.

Chapter 4: Example Strongholds

This is an example of what can be done with the rules. This presents five different stronghold, each examining different aspects of keeps. One is the "cheap keep", the uber-simple stronghold. One is an underwater stronghold, a huge dwarven redoubt, a floating castle, and a keep spread out over ten different planes.

Overall the rules are easy to understand and presented in a reasonable straightforward manner. However, some rules were slightly buried, so you must read the entire book very carefully as not to miss anything. A single window in each stronghold space is free, for example, but they don't tell you that until the windows section on page 42.

There were several minor editing gaffs, each enough to make me stop and re-read. There's a character that switches gender in mid-example, a sentence cut off in mid-though, an obviously single sentence made into three, a room with two names (in the Wondrous Architecture section, the piece titled the Cacophonous Chamber is referred to as the hall of noise in the description), and a mis-labled map. Probably there were more, but that's what I noticed.

Despite these minor flaws, I would recommend the book to any interested in adding some spice to any structure.

 

[CBS Brian]

While most of your point are valid, I'd disagree with your statement that the dead-magic area isn't expensive enough.

Lets assume you are creating a 400 sq foot room and intend to make it magic-dead.

Look at the spell itself: Antimagic Field, 6th level spell. Covers a 10' radius, the area of which adds up to approx 314 sq feet. So the spell itself doesn't quite cover 400 sq feet, but it's pretty close. You have to be 11th level to cast it (min).

So now then, assume it's a use-activated item, it would cost 11 (caster level) x (6 spell level) x 2000 (base price) which equals: 132,000 gp.

Now look at the downsides: you can't move it around like a magical item. You can't turn it off. So I'd say reduce the market price by 50%. Which equals...wow! 66,000 gp. I guess WotC agrees with me.

Anyways, I'm just saying it sounds too easy at first but you have to look at all the angles.

Brian Murphy

 

[KDLadage]

entered on 06-MAY-03

Reading this book, I got a strange feeling I was looking at a book that was in the same boat as the Enemies and Allies volume. It is coated in a Player's style, when it should probably be a Dungeon Master's book (much akin to the Book of Challenges). However, one thing is for sure: where the E&A was thin, this book is thicker than the other splatbooks from WotC. In fact, it has 32 more pages than the class books, and costs only $2.00 more. Total page count cost is reduced by about 3-cents). You get your money's worth on this one.

The volume opens up with the standard Introduction. What's inside, and How to use this book are basically a brief rehash of the other books in WotC's splat-line. Not bad, material.

Chapter I dives right into the heart of this book: Building Strongholds. It coverts everything from selecting the site to how to map it and what it will all cost and how it can all be done.

Chapter II (which comprises 70 pages of the book) is a shopping list of the sorts of things you can put in your castle. This is, by far, the most fun chapter of things my character can buy I have ever read. I was grinning from ear to ear as I turned each page. It was fun. Fun in a way I cannot describe. Despite the length of the chapter...

Chapter III came all too soon. This chapter covers how the stronghold can fit into the campaign. This is everything from how to build it, to how to defend it. Nicely written with an eye for a typical D&D game.

Chapter IV is then some worked examples of strongholds built using this system. Most of them are interesting and well illustrated.

THE CONCLUSION
Of the splat-books, this is my favorite. It is is interesting, fun to read and useful for a Dungeon Master. I still do not know why it is dressed as a Player's Supplement. I rate it as above average.