Worldbuilding Option: Fortresses, Temples, & Strongholds [Second Draft]

What? What's that you say? I've been avoiding updating my 17-page, huge document of world-building stronghold options because it takes SO LONG and is a huge pain in the butt?

No I haven't. That's not true. You can tell, by the fact that the second draft of it is right here.

Minor tweaks, all around, but important ones all the same. Let's take a look!

WHAT I CHANGED:

• The Trading Post can now be built as a Large House, for those of us looking to make an effective inn. 

• Expansion Units and Expansions are no more! They are now replaced with room points and rooms, which specify that they are used to furnish existing, unfurnished rooms. 

• Rooms no longer upgrade spell slots used. Rather, some rooms increase spell duration, as well as halving the price of reagents used for a spell. 

• The Chapel and Graveyard have been reworked. The Chapel is now permanently hallowed ground, and the graveyard provides some minor quality-of-unlife improvements to aspiring necromancers. 

• Added a sidebar for the Magical Enchanter because not every game needs easy access to magical items. 

• The Tavern now produces alcohol you can sell and is overall probably one of the best rooms you can buy, which I'm pretty alright with. 

• Updated the skills required for Hidden, and replaced Wisdom (Insight) with Dexterity (Sleight of Hand).

• The Sphere of Annihilation now costs significantly more and will still fuck you up just as much. 

• Reduced the time it takes to cast year-long spells in a structure, down to every-day-for-a-month, which seems more reasonable in many campaigns. 

CONCERNS:

• Room balance is still imperfect, but I don't care about this so much because it isn't as aggressively out-of-line as it was before. Structures are the sort of things that you will build up how you want, regardless of balance, so long as balance issues are minor. 

• There's a LOT that I have planned for expansions to this content, and I'm dreading making it. It's so cool that I definitely will anyway, though, so don't worry about that too much. 

WHAT I LEARNED:

• The good thing about introducing large content packs is that I don't have to add every brilliant new idea the people reviewing the content have, because I can just introduce everything in an expansion. It saves me from the formatting nightmare that re-editing 17 pages of content is to add new things, so I'm thankful for that at least. 

EXPANSION CONTENT:

• Teleportation Circles for easy transit around a large structure.

• Golem Forge for constructing golem hirelings.

• Magical Hirelings because who doesn't want to hire a fey cleaning staff?

• Druid Circle to attract defenders of the wild to also defend your structure, maybe.

• Tinker's Workshop to make mechanical devices and contraptions!

• Labyrinth to amaze and confuse (mostly confuse) unwanted visitors.

• Brightsmith to cut and forge magical gems.

• Mining to provide resources for your structure.

• Baths to keep a clean, satisfied population.

• Sewers to keep a clean, satisfied population in less speakable ways. 

• Secret Passages to conjoin rooms in sneaky ways. 

• Planar Binding Circle for when you absolutely have to summon up Asmodeus and not die. 

• Topiary Enclosure because who doesn't like shaped plants?

• Hospital because the sick need somewhere to go besides the Graveyard.

• Catacombs are always cool, and can effectively hold treasure and secrets.

• Thieves' Enclave for thief guild shenanigans.

• Soothsayers, Graverobbers, Cultists, and other specialized hirelings.

• Crossroads to bring the trade to you!

• Well/Oasis for clean drinking water.

• Vault to keep your treasure (and you) nice and secure. 

• Lighthouse for seeing at sea at night.