Stronghold Expansion: Bastions of Eldritch Power [ROUGH DRAFT]

Download a selectable-text, printsafe version here!

Surprising no one: people like Strongholds! In fact, people like it enough that they've used Patreon to commission even more Strongholds content from me.

So if it's what the people want, well, I just gotta make more of it. Thanks to IceAssassin77, a Walrock-level backer, for requesting this work!

We started off thinking: What if warlocks had strongholds that centered around their themes? Not necessarily "evil," but certainly cult-ish and otherworldly, a place where forgotten powers could contact the Prime Material and bleed over into more mundane planes of existence. And so, we added two new structures, some associated rooms, new hire-able minions, and some related items!

What specifically got added? Well:

FEATURES:

• New Structures: The towering Ziggurat and the elusive Coven, enabling you to work your magics in as secretive or obvious a manner as you see fit.
• New Rooms: Invocation Chamber and Illusory Shroud, which call out to the eldritch powers for aid, or hide your structure entirely from prying eyes. 
• New Hirelings: Cultists and Cult Fanatics, just in case you're a charismatic individual looking to make a compound in the middle of the hinterlands.
• New Optional Rule: Rituals and Sacrifices, enabling you to use cultists, spellcaster hirelings, and sacrifices to empower your ritual spells. 
• New Items: Mordenkainen's Mystical Model and the Rings of Rooms, giving your structures a pair of helpful, magical dodads. 

CONCERNS:

• The Invocation Chamber is pretty good, for what it is. I'm wondering if it should be made into a 2 room point Room (with the Ziggurat adjusted accordingly). 
• The Cultists and Rituals optional rule is very all-encompassing, while attempting to be flexible. I'm sure there's something this rule might be able to break that I haven't thought of yet. 
• The wording on the new items has to be pretty elaborate, because neither of the items does just one simple thing. I'm wondering if there's a way to streamline that. 

WHAT I LEARNED:

• Smaller, piecemeal Strongholds expansions are a lot of fun to make! I should see if I can't make another of these sometime soon. ;)

Stronghold Expansion: Traders & Merchants [Second Draft; DM's Guild Variant]

Available on the DM's Guild (pay what you want) at this link!

It'd be awfully silly if I was to host content on the DM's Guild and omit the largest thing I've ever made, wouldn't it?

It took some searching, some editing, and some doing, but Traders & Merchants has been updated to use entirely public domain artwork. It was a difficult process (and one that unfortunately doesn't pay dividends in new content or rules updates), but it needed to be done as I continue to move from fair use art into public domain art.

What changed? Well, about that...

CHANGELOG:

• 32 pages of new artwork!
• Made Quality and Legendary Merchants operate off of a d20 (to improve probability distribution).
• That's it.
• Exciting, right?

CONCERNS:

• Gimmicks present in some Legendary Merchants may need balancing or adjusting.

WHAT I LEARNED:

• I never want to re-do 30+ pages of artwork ever again. 

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

Available on the DM's Guild (pay what you want) at this link!

Yup. I finally updated it, yet again!

Easily the most popular thing I've ever made (though the Common Man paladin gives it a run for its money), the stronghold rules here have sort of become the gold standard on the internet for building structures in D&D 5e. And, while I'm proud of that, it's also pretty easy to chalk it up to stronghold rules being a massive pain in the butt to make.

In this iteration, I added a ton of suggestions from you guys, updated it to my newest template, and of course swapped in public domain art to facilitate hosting it on the DM's Guild. Let's run down exactly what got updated in this pass, as we do:

CHANGELOG:

• Added rules for rebuilding damaged structures, which seems to be a pretty common occurrence for adventurers.
• Added nine new rooms! So a if you've ever wanted a bank, baths, a boutique, catacombs, a clock tower, planar docks, a lighthouse, a mill, or sewers, you're in luck!
• Updated Traders and Merchants rules to coincide with how that expansion has progressed.
• Added Secret Passage and Teleportation Rune room modifications, by popular demand.
• Adjusted pricing on room modifications, making them by and large more affordable.
• Added hirelings from Volo's, which has notably more than quadrupled the spellcaster hirelings list.
• Added rules for a flying stronghold falling out of the sky, as that appeared to be a big old question mark last draft.

CONCERNS:

• I've got a ton more content that I had to cut off here, such as rules for building canals and roads, because I just couldn't make it work to my satisfaction. I'll probably add it in sooner or later, but knowing how these things go, it might end up being later.  

WHAT I LEARNED:

• I actually like the public domain look for this option way, way more. Looks more relaxed, austere, and less overall eclectic. 

Stronghold Expansion: Traders & Merchants [Second Draft]

REMINDER: Any donations to this blog for the month of February will be passed on to the ACLU, in full. 

Donations can be made to the blog, or to the ACLU directly at the link above.
I'll try and keep a running tally with each release. So far we have $30 to donate! Great job! 

Bet you wondered where I went, didn't you?

One of the difficult parts of updating old content is when I've switched over to a new template since making it. For the previous version of this project, I had my second-iteration template. Now, I'm using a third-iteration template with different sizing and standardization that pretty much exactly replicates the PHB. That's great and all, but what it really means is that I need to re-do every page of a project if I want consistent sizing and aesthetics with my newest content.

And that's a problem if a project is 23 pages long. Even more so, when you inflate the project to 32 pages after working on it.

Almost twice as long as the core Strongholds rules, this is now officially the biggest project I've ever worked on, and hopefully contains a merchant for just about every situation.

What made this pile of insanity worth doing? Well, since you asked...

CHANGELOG:

• Added 8 new merchants, including legendary merchants, rare super-merchants a player can stumble upon once in a lifetime!
• Added new and altered items to all merchant inventories, to make the lists more representative of what they're supposed to be. 
• Added a Quantity column, so players will have a hard limit on how many throwing knives they can purchase. 
• Removed Very Poor and Very Good merchants, folding them over into Poor and Good qualities.
• Merchants are now determined by a d100 roll, allowing for food merchants to show up more often than potion merchants.
• Fixed textual errors referring to incorrect sources and similar.

CONCERNS:

• I've added more than I've ever added to just about any project to date. I'm betting there'll be a mistake or two somewhere.
• I might need to change the probability numbers on the legendary merchants, to make encountering a time traveler or the devil himself significantly less common than say, an enchantments merchant.

WHAT I LEARNED:

• I'm not looking forward to updating the Strongholds core to the new template, I'll tell you that much. Although it'll probably be way easier than this, tables are an absolute nightmare to format. 

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?

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.

Worldbuilding Option: Fortresses, Temples, & Strongholds [ROUGH DRAFT]

A mysterious 2-week long absence? What happened?

Did I give up on homebrew? Did life happen? Did I straight-up die?

Turns out, I was working on an incredible 17-page long set of optional rules for strongholds! Well, that and a bit of the second one up there, but mostly the 17 glorious pages linked above.

What's it got in it that's so great and takes so much time? I'm glad you asked:

FEATURES:

• A collection of base structures to build! Ranging from abbeys and colleges to palaces and trading posts.

• Rooms to expand your structure, giving it (and you) special boons and bonuses. 

• Tables for merchants drawn to your structure by the expansions you build!

• Ways to further modify your rooms including building traps and making the room itself extradimensional!

• Lists of hireable hirelings! Including gold values for combat hirelings, slaves, and spellcasters.

• Two new spells! One of which summons the structure you build, the other which raises and moves sky islands.

• Guidelines for making money with your structure or making peasants revolt through taxation.

CONCERNS:

• Oh god is everything alright so much math aaaaaaaagh

• Are expansion (room) buffs roughly balanced against one another? Which are weak and which are strong?

• I'd like to differentiate the prices on expansions a little more.

• Adding more information on merchants and making money would be nice. 

• Are these gold values reasonable for level 13+? This math helped me, but I'm still not 100% sure. 

• Does anything break the game?

WHAT I LEARNED:

• Building core gameplay mechanics is hard.

• No, I probably didn't need an image on every page, but damn if it didn't make it pretty. 

A newer version of this option is available.