Stronghold Expansion: Traders & Merchants [ROUGH DRAFT]

When I initially set out to make an expansion for my Strongholds content, this is not the expansion I had planned.

It just kind of happened. All 20+ pages of it.

The situation with merchants in my Strongholds project was something I was never happy with. I had some nice random-roll tables to give people an idea of what merchants they were getting, but then just shrugged and walked away when people asked exactly what these merchants were selling.

This expansion takes all the guesswork out of the equation, giving you access to 20 different types of merchants to frequent your strongholds, or even other places in your world.

And yes, I'm definitely still working on a Stronghold expansion with proper new rooms and features and what-not, this just needed to be released first to properly complete what I intended to do with merchants in the first place.

If I'm really, really lucky and have enough time, expect the next expansion to be out around this time next month.

FEATURES:

• Twenty merchants of seven different qualities, bringing almost the entire item content of the PHB to your doorstep!
• Purchasable animals and magic items, because you have to fill those animal pens somehow.
• A wide variety of fun fluff items, from flowers that burn to clockwork mounts!

CONCERNS:

• I'm hoping the rules here aren't too obscure. I tried to make them obvious, but we'll see if anyone has complaints. 
• Magic items are always tricky to include, balance-wise. I attempted to balance what I included, and I also included options to omit them, if necessary. 

WHAT I LEARNED:

• Sometimes, twenty-three pages of content just happens. 

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

Part of designing expansions for half-year old content is going back and reconsidering the rules. Especially so when I made most of these rules from whole cloth.

This piece of homebrew is something I'm pretty proud of, on the whole, but it had plenty of rough edges. Having only two drafts of a project this large was never what I really wanted, and it gives me a good deal of satisfaction to have fixed errors that have been with this project for this long.

The way it is now, I feel this content is finally in shape to be expanded upon. Which is good, because I also have its first expansion complete and ready to publish.

CHANGELOG:

• Minor modifications to many rooms, with the intention of fixing verbage and adding clarity.
• Several rooms now directly generate income, because that made much more sense than just shrugging and expecting the DM to figure it out. 
• Moat and Defensive Walls have been removed, and will be reintroduced in a new form in a coming expansion. Until that is introduced, feel free to use the rooms in the second draft of this option. 
• Barracks and Lodgings have been combined, because it didn't make a whole lot of sense to say ONLY SOLDIERS CAN SLEEP HERE.
• Merchants have been reworked, in preparation for an upcoming expansion.

CONCERNS:

• Nothing really. I think I've hit all the major points that have come up in the past half-year, but feel free to remind me of anything I've missed. 

WHAT I LEARNED: 

• It's amazing how much this project has proliferated. Turns out, people wanted something cool to spend their hard-earned gp on. Who knew?

Vacation and Projects

Hey folks! Just an update to let you know I haven't forgotten about the blog. I just got home from a small vacation, and my work will start up soon, but I've been working on a pair of massive projects I'm betting you'll all enjoy. Seriously massive. The one I'm working on right now will likely have over 20 pages, and I can generate a page a day, if I'm lucky. I'm expecting to have something to show about middle-to-end of this month, and I'll let you all know if that changes.