For any players who fancy themselves an entrepreneur or those who would like to engage in commerce on the side - talk with your DM to see if they allow the following.
What to make: By RAW a bastion order allows the Workshop Special Facility to create "1 item per bastion order... " we'll that's a bit of a downer really as there are not as many items that you can readily make profit from. Say it takes a bastion turn (technically 5 days) for the Workshop to create a heavy crossbow. It all depends on the setting as to how much you can sell it for. Most games I played in allow me to sell the item back (if in good condition) at the price indicated in the PHB - that is 50GP. At other time - half that price (25GP)... but it cost 25GP to make the crossbow in the first place so you'd make 25GP at best or at worst, break even...
To ensure that you turn a decent profit I propose that you arrange to have the Workshop hirelings work on making the "Silk" trade good worth 10 GP per lb (2024 DMG - Chapter 7: Trade Goods). As far as I can tell you're not limited to creating just 1lb of silk but you should discuss with the DM first before going further as the rest assumes that you got the all clear from the DM to do so.
In addition to the 3 hirelings that come with the Workshop Special Facility - hire 4 more hirelings at the expense of (at least) 2 GP per day (2024 PHB - Chapter 6: services-> Hirelings). I'll assume that the wage is 2GP per day for argument sake and you can do the math to match your setting to see if it's worth it. The idea is to have your hirelings make silk for the storehouse special facility to sell. The hirelings should be able to create the silk trade good at half the cost + labour that you can use the Storehouse Special Facility to "sell" at 10% profit at level 5, 20% at level 9 and 50% at level 13. The number of hirelings you should have on contract should be proportionate to the amount stock the storehouse can sell at any given bastion turn - that is to say 500 GP at level 5, 2,000 GP at level 9 and 5,000 GP at level 13.
Given the option of creating just under or over the storehouse limit, pick 1 hireling under as any surplus stock will do you no good. At level 5 you'll be paying 301 GP in costs for labour and material to create 490 GP worth of silk which will sell for 539 GP when sold for a profit of 238 GP - a far cry better than 50GP for each bastion turn.
Things to bear in mind:
This method requires DM approval at multiple stages - good luck in getting the OK for this
You should purchase the initial 500 GP worth of trade goods (doesn't have to be silk) before obtaining the bastion so that your storehouse has something to sell on the first bastion turn
You are using two Special facilities to create a profit of 238 GP a bastion turn between the levels 5-8
The DM may ask that you pay for a weaver's tool per additional hireling beyond the 3 free that comes with the Workshop Special Facility. Work with the DM to see if hirelings can work in shifts. Worse comes to worse the Weaver's tools are only 1 GP each so consider it an initial overhead cost.
DM may rain on your parade by introducing the "over supply argument" but to that I say, "poor form". China's silk industry didn't just keel over and die because other countries produce their own silk.
As a DM I would say that the workshop already has a full staff from the start and that additional Workshop workers can't be hired. The only way to get more workers would be to enlarge the Workshop.
Also, producing woven silk cloth in a pre-industrial setting is extremely labor intensive. Read up on the process. It's fascinating. Allowing the production of a single pound of silk cloth in a single bastion turn is already beyond generous.
DM may rain on your parade by introducing the "over supply argument" but to that I say, "poor form". China's silk industry didn't just keel over and die because other countries produce their own silk.
I believe that it is not poor form as oversupply is an issue. Not sure what time period you are referring to. The supply & market for a country's industry is a huge difference for a Bastion. Making a generic assumption, the Chinese silk industry couldn't supply the world because the market was the world of Billions of people.
Is the Bastion's market world wide? Is the Bastion shipping product world wide? How many people in that world? If you are not a small cog in a world wide shipping endeavor, then the over supply argument is valid.
This all just makes me think, "Why not just play a system that caters to a game that contains these things instead of shoe horning it into 5e?" https://xender.vip/
If you don’t anything else, everything is a homebrew question. I’ve been trying to get my to at least learn pathfinder, because puts so much of 5es problems into perspective, making it easier to explain why I refuse to homebrew certain things.
"In addition to the 3 hirelings that come with the Workshop Special Facility - hire 4 more hirelings at the expense of"
bastions are weird in that you basically ignore all other rules regarding hirelings and whatnot. if you want more hirelings in your bastion facility, you have to pay to expand the special facility
"DM may rain on your parade by introducing the "over supply argument""
If a month of production over-supplies your market, you have to be in a town with a population of a hundred poeple.
as for just avoiding all the possible argumetns against making money, garden gives you all the materials to make a potion of healing every 7 days. 200gold a month.
Storehose lets you buy 2kgp of stuff every 7 days and sell it at a 10% profit. so, 800 gold per month. And the stuff you buy and sell is generic "stuff", so you can't really oversupply your customers on it.
At level 9 its 5kgp of stuff and sell at 20% profit (2k gold / month)
at level 13, its 5kgp of stuff sold at 50% profit (10k gold / month)
at level 17 its 5kgp of stuff sold at 100% profit (20k gold / month)
if you just want money, make all of your special facilities be storehouses.
if you just want money, make all of your special facilities be storehouses.
You are mostly correct. Each Bastion Special Facility can only be chosen once unless their description says otherwise. The Storehouse cannot be chosen more than once. However, you can also make money using the Gaming Hall (averages 73.5 GP per 7 days), Kundarak Vault (Eberron: Forge of the Artificer), and Stable. The Gaming Hall is a bit random, but the other two are basically more Storerooms.
You are mostly correct. Each Bastion Special Facility can only be chosen once
I mean, bastions are extremely underpowered. So if a DM wanted to enforce such a petty rule, I'd suggest finding a different DM. Life is too short to play with stingy DM's. If the player wants the bastions to make money because their DM is stingy with loot, all the more reason to find a different DM. Cause that just means the DM is going to find a way to prevent the player from spending the money anyway.
I've had players build an orphanage, a soup kitchen, a doctors office, and a sailing ship. It's the most can't-break-the-game thing there is.
You are mostly correct. Each Bastion Special Facility can only be chosen once
I mean, bastions are extremely underpowered. So if a DM wanted to enforce such a petty rule, I'd suggest finding a different DM. Life is too short to play with stingy DM's. If the player wants the bastions to make money because their DM is stingy with loot, all the more reason to find a different DM. Cause that just means the DM is going to find a way to prevent the player from spending the money anyway.
I've had players build an orphanage, a soup kitchen, a doctors office, and a sailing ship. It's the most can't-break-the-game thing there is.
"Bastions are a "free", extra on top of normal loot."
Eh. Bastions give players a place to burn their money.
A facility might be free, but a lot of them give slightly better benefits of the player spends a chunk of money to expand their faciltiy
They are extra and can result in a net profit. They are a straight upgrade over not using them as you aren't giving anything up to use them. It's not using a limited resource like a Feat choice, spell known, or attunement slot.
They may be underwhelming, but in terms of balance, they are far from "extremely underpowered" and can be quite the opposite depending on the frequency of Bastion turns in your game.
The operative word there is “expand” as opposed to “acquire”. And basic facilities give you no mechanical benefit and thus have no use to begin with. Ergo, the point that you are in fact getting something for nothing from bastions stands.
A level 5 garden gives you one potion of healing every 7 days.
I stand by the"underwhelming" assessment.
Power gamers arent very interested in bastions. At least not at the lower levels. The folks i see get into them are folks who like the idea of creating a home base for their character, giving themselves some roots in the game, make floor plans, maybe some ai art of the building.
I agree it’s RAW to only have one storehouse. But I’d allow a second one. From level 5-8 a storehouse can net you 50hp/week, so now you get 100. Not a big deal. And there’s the opportunity cost of giving up some other facility.
I realize the numbers go up from 50, but they’re still pretty low for the tier of play involved. And there’s still the fact that gold really isn’t all that meaningful. At least not generally.
Again, however much value you choose to assign to it is immaterial to the point made earlier unless you’re arguing it provides no value at all, in which case you’re simply wrong. It’s a freebie bonus requiring no resources from the player/character to perform its basic functions.
At level 9+, multiple facilities allow crafting Common and Uncomment magic items. Some of them are quite good. Combined with a Storeroom, the cost of the magic items can be partially or completely mitigated by income created by the Bastion.
At level 9, if you are crafting one uncommon magic item per turn, that will cost you 200 GP or 400 GP per two turns, completely covered by the Storehouse. If it's a consumable item other than a Spell Scroll, it will only be 200 GP per two turns.
You not only get free magic items, but reliable access to really good ones, Broom of Flying, Lantern of Revealing, Dust of Disappearance, Potions, etc. There are so many good options. Plus, a Wizard can use it to mill out scrolls to add to their spell book. If you have a Wizard in the group, consider whether it is worth it to have multiple Bastions with Scriptoriums to mill out Wizard scrolls faster and then replace the spares later. Each level 1 Spell Scroll created by Bastion with a Storehouse would be offset by the 25 GP average income per turn from the Storehouse. Level 9 onwards, the income from the Storehouse overtakes the cost of any Spell Scroll that can be created by a Scriptorium.
When you have multiple facilities crafting magic items, the Storehouse mitigates the costs but will struggle to completely cover them until later levels. Once you hit level 13, you cannot craft so many magic items that it exceeds the income provided by a Storehouse due to the restriction on the number of special facilities per Bastions unless one Storehouse is funding multiple Bastions.
For any players who fancy themselves an entrepreneur or those who would like to engage in commerce on the side - talk with your DM to see if they allow the following.
What to make:
By RAW a bastion order allows the Workshop Special Facility to create "1 item per bastion order... " we'll that's a bit of a downer really as there are not as many items that you can readily make profit from. Say it takes a bastion turn (technically 5 days) for the Workshop to create a heavy crossbow. It all depends on the setting as to how much you can sell it for. Most games I played in allow me to sell the item back (if in good condition) at the price indicated in the PHB - that is 50GP. At other time - half that price (25GP)... but it cost 25GP to make the crossbow in the first place so you'd make 25GP at best or at worst, break even...
To ensure that you turn a decent profit I propose that you arrange to have the Workshop hirelings work on making the "Silk" trade good worth 10 GP per lb (2024 DMG - Chapter 7: Trade Goods). As far as I can tell you're not limited to creating just 1lb of silk but you should discuss with the DM first before going further as the rest assumes that you got the all clear from the DM to do so.
In addition to the 3 hirelings that come with the Workshop Special Facility - hire 4 more hirelings at the expense of (at least) 2 GP per day (2024 PHB - Chapter 6: services-> Hirelings). I'll assume that the wage is 2GP per day for argument sake and you can do the math to match your setting to see if it's worth it.
The idea is to have your hirelings make silk for the storehouse special facility to sell.
The hirelings should be able to create the silk trade good at half the cost + labour that you can use the Storehouse Special Facility to "sell" at 10% profit at level 5, 20% at level 9 and 50% at level 13.
The number of hirelings you should have on contract should be proportionate to the amount stock the storehouse can sell at any given bastion turn - that is to say 500 GP at level 5, 2,000 GP at level 9 and 5,000 GP at level 13.
Given the option of creating just under or over the storehouse limit, pick 1 hireling under as any surplus stock will do you no good.
At level 5 you'll be paying 301 GP in costs for labour and material to create 490 GP worth of silk which will sell for 539 GP when sold for a profit of 238 GP - a far cry better than 50GP for each bastion turn.
Things to bear in mind:
As a DM I would say that the workshop already has a full staff from the start and that additional Workshop workers can't be hired. The only way to get more workers would be to enlarge the Workshop.
Also, producing woven silk cloth in a pre-industrial setting is extremely labor intensive. Read up on the process. It's fascinating. Allowing the production of a single pound of silk cloth in a single bastion turn is already beyond generous.
I believe that it is not poor form as oversupply is an issue. Not sure what time period you are referring to. The supply & market for a country's industry is a huge difference for a Bastion. Making a generic assumption, the Chinese silk industry couldn't supply the world because the market was the world of Billions of people.
Is the Bastion's market world wide? Is the Bastion shipping product world wide? How many people in that world? If you are not a small cog in a world wide shipping endeavor, then the over supply argument is valid.
If you don’t anything else, everything is a homebrew question. I’ve been trying to get my to at least learn pathfinder, because puts so much of 5es problems into perspective, making it easier to explain why I refuse to homebrew certain things.
"In addition to the 3 hirelings that come with the Workshop Special Facility - hire 4 more hirelings at the expense of"
bastions are weird in that you basically ignore all other rules regarding hirelings and whatnot. if you want more hirelings in your bastion facility, you have to pay to expand the special facility
"DM may rain on your parade by introducing the "over supply argument""
If a month of production over-supplies your market, you have to be in a town with a population of a hundred poeple.
as for just avoiding all the possible argumetns against making money, garden gives you all the materials to make a potion of healing every 7 days. 200gold a month.
Storehose lets you buy 2kgp of stuff every 7 days and sell it at a 10% profit. so, 800 gold per month. And the stuff you buy and sell is generic "stuff", so you can't really oversupply your customers on it.
At level 9 its 5kgp of stuff and sell at 20% profit (2k gold / month)
at level 13, its 5kgp of stuff sold at 50% profit (10k gold / month)
at level 17 its 5kgp of stuff sold at 100% profit (20k gold / month)
if you just want money, make all of your special facilities be storehouses.
You are mostly correct. Each Bastion Special Facility can only be chosen once unless their description says otherwise. The Storehouse cannot be chosen more than once. However, you can also make money using the Gaming Hall (averages 73.5 GP per 7 days), Kundarak Vault (Eberron: Forge of the Artificer), and Stable. The Gaming Hall is a bit random, but the other two are basically more Storerooms.
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I mean, bastions are extremely underpowered. So if a DM wanted to enforce such a petty rule, I'd suggest finding a different DM. Life is too short to play with stingy DM's. If the player wants the bastions to make money because their DM is stingy with loot, all the more reason to find a different DM. Cause that just means the DM is going to find a way to prevent the player from spending the money anyway.
I've had players build an orphanage, a soup kitchen, a doctors office, and a sailing ship. It's the most can't-break-the-game thing there is.
I mean, bastions are extremely underpowered. So if a DM wanted to enforce such a petty rule, I'd suggest finding a different DM. Life is too short to play with stingy DM's. If the player wants the bastions to make money because their DM is stingy with loot, all the more reason to find a different DM. Cause that just means the DM is going to find a way to prevent the player from spending the money anyway.
I've had players build an orphanage, a soup kitchen, a doctors office, and a sailing ship. It's the most can't-break-the-game thing there is.
Bastions are a "free", extra on top of normal loot.
How to add Tooltips.
My houserulings.
"Bastions are a "free", extra on top of normal loot."
Eh. Bastions give players a place to burn their money.
A facility might be free, but a lot of them give slightly better benefits of the player spends a chunk of money to expand their faciltiy
They are extra and can result in a net profit. They are a straight upgrade over not using them as you aren't giving anything up to use them. It's not using a limited resource like a Feat choice, spell known, or attunement slot.
They may be underwhelming, but in terms of balance, they are far from "extremely underpowered" and can be quite the opposite depending on the frequency of Bastion turns in your game.
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My houserulings.
"They are a straight upgrade over not using them as you aren't giving anything up to use them."
Special facilities cost gold to expand.
Basic facilities cost money to expand or to buy more.
Players can spend gold and expand their bastion into their fortress solitude, bat cave, or whatever.
The operative word there is “expand” as opposed to “acquire”. And basic facilities give you no mechanical benefit and thus have no use to begin with. Ergo, the point that you are in fact getting something for nothing from bastions stands.
A level 5 garden gives you one potion of healing every 7 days.
I stand by the"underwhelming" assessment.
Power gamers arent very interested in bastions. At least not at the lower levels. The folks i see get into them are folks who like the idea of creating a home base for their character, giving themselves some roots in the game, make floor plans, maybe some ai art of the building.
I agree it’s RAW to only have one storehouse. But I’d allow a second one. From level 5-8 a storehouse can net you 50hp/week, so now you get 100. Not a big deal. And there’s the opportunity cost of giving up some other facility.
I realize the numbers go up from 50, but they’re still pretty low for the tier of play involved. And there’s still the fact that gold really isn’t all that meaningful. At least not generally.
No, it’s not spectacular- see again “something for nothing”. However, 1 healing potion a week is objectively an upgrade from 0 healing potions a week.
"No, it’s not spectacular"
One could even say its "underwhelming"
Again, however much value you choose to assign to it is immaterial to the point made earlier unless you’re arguing it provides no value at all, in which case you’re simply wrong. It’s a freebie bonus requiring no resources from the player/character to perform its basic functions.
"unless you’re arguing it provides no value at all, in which case you’re simply wrong"
I said its underwhelming. And it is.
At level 9+, multiple facilities allow crafting Common and Uncomment magic items. Some of them are quite good. Combined with a Storeroom, the cost of the magic items can be partially or completely mitigated by income created by the Bastion.
At level 9, if you are crafting one uncommon magic item per turn, that will cost you 200 GP or 400 GP per two turns, completely covered by the Storehouse. If it's a consumable item other than a Spell Scroll, it will only be 200 GP per two turns.
You not only get free magic items, but reliable access to really good ones, Broom of Flying, Lantern of Revealing, Dust of Disappearance, Potions, etc. There are so many good options. Plus, a Wizard can use it to mill out scrolls to add to their spell book. If you have a Wizard in the group, consider whether it is worth it to have multiple Bastions with Scriptoriums to mill out Wizard scrolls faster and then replace the spares later. Each level 1 Spell Scroll created by Bastion with a Storehouse would be offset by the 25 GP average income per turn from the Storehouse. Level 9 onwards, the income from the Storehouse overtakes the cost of any Spell Scroll that can be created by a Scriptorium.
When you have multiple facilities crafting magic items, the Storehouse mitigates the costs but will struggle to completely cover them until later levels. Once you hit level 13, you cannot craft so many magic items that it exceeds the income provided by a Storehouse due to the restriction on the number of special facilities per Bastions unless one Storehouse is funding multiple Bastions.
Free and reliable access to useful and abusable magic items is pretty awesome.
Edit: Corrected math for level 5 Storehouse.
How to add Tooltips.
My houserulings.