I want to gift my players a player base but im not 100% sure where to start. They are being gifted this base after saving some of the rulers of a kingdom.
There are a few things I already know: - They will get a building inside the walls of the capital city - The idea is that they would be getting a guild hall as many of them are artisans of sorts
How do I turn this vague idea into a decent player base? Besides choosing which room is for who, how can I allow them to interact with it?
Any and all tips and tricks are welcome and I am interested in what you have to say.
What do you want the base's role to be? Unless it's going to be a place where significant game action takes place, it's probably sufficient to say "you have been gifted a guild hall. It has room to sleep all of you in comfort, plus workshops and other appropriate facilities."
Maybe with the addition of "upkeep of your base will cost you X gold a year".
Of course, there's a lot of options for getting more game from the base:
Royalty often confiscate property from those out of favor, and confer it on those in favor. There's all sorts of options for vendettas, secret things left behind, etc., etc.
"Nobody's been in the basement for years. Well, more accurately, nobody's come back from the basement...."
You could add upgrades to it? Get some specialist NPC (guards, apothecary, wizard, chef, blacksmith, etc) and have them ask for upgrades that the players can pay for. They could give benefits like producing potions, magic trinkers, forcefields to defend the base, etc. Made the NPC quirky or interesting or relatable. Like, having the lead attendants be a really old couple raising their grandson. The guards could be bandits turning a nee leaf. The alchemist could be obsessed with making new colors for their paintings, etc.
Alternatively, if you want it to be more a fief than a guildhall, I think that Mattew Colville released a couple of books with optional rules for kingdom building and management.
The books are there but while I’ve used them a couple of times I don’t actually like them - too much additional stuff to keep track of. A better move is to look over some of the bases in actual modules/rule books. Acquisitions Inc. has bases built in with rules for them that are easier to use. Waterdeep: Dragonheist gives the players a tavern base early on then builds it into the plot nicely. My players used speak with dead to befriend the poltergeist and turn it into a functional part of the team. It also has a manor house and a double tower that my players ended up with for services rendered. Of course most of the wealth they won ended up in refurbishing them both so they were livable and (fairly) safe. One way or another it should be an ongoing part of the party storyline - all of the ideas above are good and might be used over time.
I'd say talk with your players about the kind of depth they want it to have. As an above poster says, they may be happy to say, we have a base, there's a guard or two to make sure no one steals our stuff, and they just leave it at that. If they want to start modifying it, that's when things can get tricky. The big thing to watch for is a base can really shift the tone of the campaign from "we go out and do things" to "we stay here and manage our base and underlings while things come to us." In short, do you want Star Trek: The Next Generation, or Deep Space Nine?
Neither of those options is inherently right or wrong, but they can end up being mutually exclusive -- to the point you should basically have a session 0 to figure out the direction from here on out.
- Make this an established place; IE: have an established map/floorplan and location for it
- Give them ownership of it; allowing for customization and tailoring of things gives players a huge degree of ownership. As they say "there are many like it, but this one is mine".
The new base is an old guild house. It hasn't been opened for years since the previous guild disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The party have to clear out whatever remains within the guild hall (and its cellars) before they can really take up occupancy again. (And there might be secret passages within the walls that the PCs don't initially know about too.)
As a couple of others have suggested, get an idea from your players about how invested they are going to be in this before you go and do a load of work. I'd love to give my players a home of some sort, but they just aren't interested - they'd rather move from tavern to tavern on a constant rollercoaster of adventures. If you are going to give them a base, then you should probably know that the campaign is going to stay in that location for at least 30% of game time over the course of an ongoing campaign. This will impact the types of stories that you want to tell. The players won't enjoy spending a couple of sessions getting their base in order if they're then off into the wilds for the next year of game time.
To give them a base the basics are:
A map of the building, that you can give to the players
A detailed list of nearby available businesses that the base can interact with
Stats and personalities for any staff who already work there, who the PCs are likely to keep on
Knowledge of wage rates in the local environment, and what resources are available because they'll want to modify it. But don't be afraid to modify things on the fly, e.g. "How long to dig out a secret room under the main hall?" Just make it up. Whatever seems reasonable.
However, if you want to make it more fun:
Give the guild hall problems that the PCs will need to solve. Examples might be:
Problem 1: the guild hall is haunted by several ghosts, or poltergeists who take umbrage at the PCs entry.
Problem 2: the former hall owner owed money to a local crime syndicate. The debt transfers to the new owners, and the criminals begin to cause trouble
Problem 3: The former owners had a bad reputation. The PCs need to raise the guildhall's profile however they wish to - throwing parties etc. Otherwise there is always graffiti smeared on the outside, knock-and-runs and so on.
Problem 4: The wooden beams are all rotten and need replacing, but good lumber is currently scarce in the area. Maybe an expedition to that weird forest is needed.
If you give them some challenges, and they have to fix the place up, they'll feel more attached to it and the game stays Dungeons and Dragons rather than turning into Admins and Architechts.
Let the players change the decoration, add a tower, and make it their own.
I've used this adventure as a jumping off spot for the party to not only pick the location of their base, but also the interior design and function. It comes with it's own possession and pet mimic.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
First, consult with your players about what they would want out of a base - not specifics like "a huge amount of gold" or anything like that. Perhaps even make a questionnaire.
If they enjoy developing their base and want to make it their own, then give them an old abandoned bank - lots of rooms, empty, thick walls and windows which once had bars, and a vault which is missing the door. Loads of potential, you can have secret passageways built in and bolt-holes, and perhaps even the high-security bank vault which is still guarded, operational, and not likely to be letting anyone in for a fair few levels. You could even make it unlockable - when the door is hung on the normal vault, a mysterious keyhole appears in it that the blacksmiths didn't put there, so ow they need to find the key - that sort of thing. It's also less done than "have this abandoned keep" or "have this old castle".
If they just want to have their own place to decorate then give them an empty guildhall or some such which is fit for purpose but otherwise empty.
If they want to have somewhere for the sake of it then give them a small manor with several servants already, fully furnished, and a basic gold cost for upkeep.
From there you can add all manner of secrets, intrigue, jealous former owners, ghosts, portals to other dimensions, dungeons, strange hermits, and plots from the royalty to have them killed, to add oodles of flavour!
Keep in mind that the "Base" is a place that is safe and lets them keep stuff safe while they are not currently using it. It also provides a place for long rests and downtime. The common device is a keep or tavern or guild hall that have been mentioned.
You could also use a ship, airship, large coach, or Horizonback Tortoise to give the party a base of operations and still be mobile. You could use your imagination for other large moving objects/creatures.
NPC interactions can still occur with captains, pilots, drivers, and tenders. These paid folks provide the party with someone to look after the base while the party deals with dungeons and monsters. They can be delegated to for minor tasks and can also be plot hooks and allies.
The mobile base still needs maintenance, repair, and upkeep so it still functions as a GP sink. Customization is always an option as well. If the party tires of it, it can be sold, stolen, or destroyed for plot reasons.
I think you should talk to your players and determine the wants for the base to determine the game/mechanical needs for you "running" the base as a feature of the game.
There's a spectrum. Some players just want some cool place to hang out with that keeps their hoard of loot secure (because most robbers can't get away with your gold if you turned your gold into a platinum staircase ... most robbers). i don't Crit Role that well, but I'm thinking the sort of Castle Vox Machina gets as depicted in the cartoon. Maybe in actual play they went into a detailed stronghold maintenance accounting, but my admittedly loose familiarity with CR has me thinking the players don't have time for that. In that sense the base/stronghold simply serves as a place for role playing, maybe a "danger room" to try out new magic or skills, but isn't really a thing attended to unless the story has a "scene" there. It can also be a plot device, narrative hand wavium describes a heist of the plantinum staircase and now the players are on a quest to figure out "who would do that?"
On the other side, there are folks who see a stronghold/base as an opportunity to play "Sim Castle" within D&D. Some tables find this tedious, but others really double down on this more crunchy form of world building. Prior editions had more official support, Stronghold and Followers is the most coherrent version of this "thorough" mode, though it's by far a not perfect system and should serve more as inspiration as to how one could go about grinding a castle than strict instruction.
Basically this will likely come down to somewhere between "cool fort as set piece" to "cool fort mini game" and the best gauge for that is your own DM knowledge of your player's interests.
Dear Dungeon Masters,
I want to gift my players a player base but im not 100% sure where to start. They are being gifted this base after saving some of the rulers of a kingdom.
There are a few things I already know:
- They will get a building inside the walls of the capital city
- The idea is that they would be getting a guild hall as many of them are artisans of sorts
How do I turn this vague idea into a decent player base? Besides choosing which room is for who, how can I allow them to interact with it?
Any and all tips and tricks are welcome and I am interested in what you have to say.
Thanks in advance!
What do you want the base's role to be? Unless it's going to be a place where significant game action takes place, it's probably sufficient to say "you have been gifted a guild hall. It has room to sleep all of you in comfort, plus workshops and other appropriate facilities."
Maybe with the addition of "upkeep of your base will cost you X gold a year".
Of course, there's a lot of options for getting more game from the base:
Royalty often confiscate property from those out of favor, and confer it on those in favor. There's all sorts of options for vendettas, secret things left behind, etc., etc.
"Nobody's been in the basement for years. Well, more accurately, nobody's come back from the basement...."
You could add upgrades to it? Get some specialist NPC (guards, apothecary, wizard, chef, blacksmith, etc) and have them ask for upgrades that the players can pay for. They could give benefits like producing potions, magic trinkers, forcefields to defend the base, etc. Made the NPC quirky or interesting or relatable. Like, having the lead attendants be a really old couple raising their grandson. The guards could be bandits turning a nee leaf. The alchemist could be obsessed with making new colors for their paintings, etc.
Alternatively, if you want it to be more a fief than a guildhall, I think that Mattew Colville released a couple of books with optional rules for kingdom building and management.
The books are there but while I’ve used them a couple of times I don’t actually like them - too much additional stuff to keep track of. A better move is to look over some of the bases in actual modules/rule books. Acquisitions Inc. has bases built in with rules for them that are easier to use. Waterdeep: Dragonheist gives the players a tavern base early on then builds it into the plot nicely. My players used speak with dead to befriend the poltergeist and turn it into a functional part of the team. It also has a manor house and a double tower that my players ended up with for services rendered. Of course most of the wealth they won ended up in refurbishing them both so they were livable and (fairly) safe. One way or another it should be an ongoing part of the party storyline - all of the ideas above are good and might be used over time.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
I'd say talk with your players about the kind of depth they want it to have. As an above poster says, they may be happy to say, we have a base, there's a guard or two to make sure no one steals our stuff, and they just leave it at that. If they want to start modifying it, that's when things can get tricky. The big thing to watch for is a base can really shift the tone of the campaign from "we go out and do things" to "we stay here and manage our base and underlings while things come to us." In short, do you want Star Trek: The Next Generation, or Deep Space Nine?
Neither of those options is inherently right or wrong, but they can end up being mutually exclusive -- to the point you should basically have a session 0 to figure out the direction from here on out.
Some ideas off the top of my head:
- Make this an established place; IE: have an established map/floorplan and location for it
- Give them ownership of it; allowing for customization and tailoring of things gives players a huge degree of ownership. As they say "there are many like it, but this one is mine".
The new base is an old guild house. It hasn't been opened for years since the previous guild disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The party have to clear out whatever remains within the guild hall (and its cellars) before they can really take up occupancy again. (And there might be secret passages within the walls that the PCs don't initially know about too.)
As a couple of others have suggested, get an idea from your players about how invested they are going to be in this before you go and do a load of work. I'd love to give my players a home of some sort, but they just aren't interested - they'd rather move from tavern to tavern on a constant rollercoaster of adventures. If you are going to give them a base, then you should probably know that the campaign is going to stay in that location for at least 30% of game time over the course of an ongoing campaign. This will impact the types of stories that you want to tell. The players won't enjoy spending a couple of sessions getting their base in order if they're then off into the wilds for the next year of game time.
To give them a base the basics are:
However, if you want to make it more fun:
If you give them some challenges, and they have to fix the place up, they'll feel more attached to it and the game stays Dungeons and Dragons rather than turning into Admins and Architechts.
Let the players change the decoration, add a tower, and make it their own.
I've used this adventure as a jumping off spot for the party to not only pick the location of their base, but also the interior design and function. It comes with it's own possession and pet mimic.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
First, consult with your players about what they would want out of a base - not specifics like "a huge amount of gold" or anything like that. Perhaps even make a questionnaire.
If they enjoy developing their base and want to make it their own, then give them an old abandoned bank - lots of rooms, empty, thick walls and windows which once had bars, and a vault which is missing the door. Loads of potential, you can have secret passageways built in and bolt-holes, and perhaps even the high-security bank vault which is still guarded, operational, and not likely to be letting anyone in for a fair few levels. You could even make it unlockable - when the door is hung on the normal vault, a mysterious keyhole appears in it that the blacksmiths didn't put there, so ow they need to find the key - that sort of thing. It's also less done than "have this abandoned keep" or "have this old castle".
If they just want to have their own place to decorate then give them an empty guildhall or some such which is fit for purpose but otherwise empty.
If they want to have somewhere for the sake of it then give them a small manor with several servants already, fully furnished, and a basic gold cost for upkeep.
From there you can add all manner of secrets, intrigue, jealous former owners, ghosts, portals to other dimensions, dungeons, strange hermits, and plots from the royalty to have them killed, to add oodles of flavour!
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Keep in mind that the "Base" is a place that is safe and lets them keep stuff safe while they are not currently using it. It also provides a place for long rests and downtime. The common device is a keep or tavern or guild hall that have been mentioned.
You could also use a ship, airship, large coach, or Horizonback Tortoise to give the party a base of operations and still be mobile. You could use your imagination for other large moving objects/creatures.
NPC interactions can still occur with captains, pilots, drivers, and tenders. These paid folks provide the party with someone to look after the base while the party deals with dungeons and monsters. They can be delegated to for minor tasks and can also be plot hooks and allies.
The mobile base still needs maintenance, repair, and upkeep so it still functions as a GP sink. Customization is always an option as well. If the party tires of it, it can be sold, stolen, or destroyed for plot reasons.
If you have a few bucks to throw around, Matt Colville's Strongholds and Followers book has a lot of great ideas of base mechanics and such.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
I’ve got it and the Acquisition Inc rules are a lot smaller and easier.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
I think you should talk to your players and determine the wants for the base to determine the game/mechanical needs for you "running" the base as a feature of the game.
There's a spectrum. Some players just want some cool place to hang out with that keeps their hoard of loot secure (because most robbers can't get away with your gold if you turned your gold into a platinum staircase ... most robbers). i don't Crit Role that well, but I'm thinking the sort of Castle Vox Machina gets as depicted in the cartoon. Maybe in actual play they went into a detailed stronghold maintenance accounting, but my admittedly loose familiarity with CR has me thinking the players don't have time for that. In that sense the base/stronghold simply serves as a place for role playing, maybe a "danger room" to try out new magic or skills, but isn't really a thing attended to unless the story has a "scene" there. It can also be a plot device, narrative hand wavium describes a heist of the plantinum staircase and now the players are on a quest to figure out "who would do that?"
On the other side, there are folks who see a stronghold/base as an opportunity to play "Sim Castle" within D&D. Some tables find this tedious, but others really double down on this more crunchy form of world building. Prior editions had more official support, Stronghold and Followers is the most coherrent version of this "thorough" mode, though it's by far a not perfect system and should serve more as inspiration as to how one could go about grinding a castle than strict instruction.
Basically this will likely come down to somewhere between "cool fort as set piece" to "cool fort mini game" and the best gauge for that is your own DM knowledge of your player's interests.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.