Best Rules to Raid for Stronghold or Town/Small Fiefdom Building and Management?

[Coidzor]

Especially when it comes to supplementing 5e's aesthetics.

So my group is playing a game right now where we've decided to take over and fix up the ruins of an abandoned town and start it back up again before eventually taking over the equivalent of the "county" or "parish" since there's no local authority unifying or protecting the local hamlets or even the largest village in the area, especially after we killed the last group that was trying to take over the area.

The DM is on board with the idea, but we haven't settled on rules to use once we get to the point where we can start in on that phase of the game, and I was curious about what the options we might have for cribbing at least something from elsewhere.

Kingmaker/PF's kingdom building rules don't seem like they'd quite scale down that well to the more narrow focus of what we're doing, which is more on the micro-level than the macro-level, but still would be a bit abstracted from directly interacting with our characters, at least in certain respects.

I remember hearing some mention of BECMI having some rules on stronghold building and management in one of the threads about money (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?397844-Money-in-5e/) that might be of interest, though maybe a retroclone has redone them and improved upon them in addition to making them potentially more accessible to those of us who don't have access to what is essentially a historical artifact at this point?

[Daishain]

3.5E has a Stronghold Builder's guide that was actually pretty well done. The focus is more on architecture/building than management, but it does cover the latter topic as well.

[Madfellow]

It seems I am once again in the awkward position of recommending ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King System) to someone. I'm not a fan personally, but it does have exactly what you're looking for: stronghold and domain rules for basically any scale (from one tiny fort on up to empire). You can nab those rules and port them over into your 5e game.

[SharkForce]

you might also want to do some research into birthright. I think I heard a while back someone was doing work on converting it to 5e on the birthright.net forums. in any event, if I was going to ask any group of D&D fans about this sort of question, that would be where I would want to ask.

[Mcdt2]

It seems I am once again in the awkward position of recommending ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King System) to someone. I'm not a fan personally, but it does have exactly what you're looking for: stronghold and domain rules for basically any scale (from one tiny fort on up to empire). You can nab those rules and port them over into your 5e game.

I am likewise loathe to recommend the awkward mess that is ACKS, but it does have exactly what you are looking for, as long as you don't mind losing too much of 5e's simple elegance.

As an addendum to that, there's a homebrew thread focusing on adapting Dragonmarks to 5e. Not really relevant here, except they also wrote an essay and rules for hirelings in a way that ties them to strongholds. Won't help you find rules to build them, but it's potentially good inspiration for what comes after that.



As you may have noticed, some of the Dragonmark rules interact with hirelings and strongholds. While strongholds get some coverage in the DMG, hirelings get a price per day listing in the PHB and little to no guidance beyond that. This is a problem.

Suppose the party is going to fight a group of bandits. One of the players asks to recruit some hirelings to help fight them. They have 50 gold leftover from the last time loot was divided up, and now they want to hire 25 mercenaries for the battle. Suddenly there are an extra 25 NPC turns being taken each round of the fight, with 25 attacks and 25 movements needing to be resolved. Combats drag on and the players start wondering why they were needed in the first place, when the person sending them to defeat the bandits could have hired these mercenaries directly and skipped the middleman. Some DMs take this line of reasoning to the conclusion that players simply shouldn't be allowed to recruit mercenaries.

On the other hand: hirelings clearly exist in the setting, and it will often make perfect sense for a character to want to hire someone else to do some work on their behalf, whether that comes in the form of hiring a smith to forge you a sword or recruiting a mercenary to wield it on your behalf. Refusing to allow players access to the same economy that the NPCs interact with makes the DM seem tyrannical and the world scripted or gamey. This is true even if the players understand why they're not being allowed to recruit hirelings. Balancing these competing desires can be difficult, but we hope to present a solution here.

Our fix is to associate hirelings with strongholds: If you control a stronghold and regularly pay its maintenance costs, it attracts one untrained hireling for every 500 gold the stronghold originally cost to construct. You don't need to do anything in particular to recruit these hirelings. They represent ordinary, unskilled workers showing up at your stronghold and asking for work. You can fill out your entire allotment of untrained hirelings in one month, regardless of how large your stronghold is, as larger strongholds draw people in faster. These untrained hirelings may be upgraded to skilled hirelings over the course of 250 days per skill they are to learn, at a cost of 1 gold per day in training. A stronghold can support one skilled hireling per 1000 gold in construction cost, and this same process is used to replace any hirelings who die, retire or abandon you.

Any hirelings you attract beyond those required for maintenance costs can be assigned to projects as you see fit. For example: a Keep costs 50000 gold to construct and therefore can attract up to 100 untrained hirelings. It can support, but does not initially come with, 50 skilled hirelings. Finally, it requires 50 skilled and 50 unskilled hirelings for its maintenance. Thus, to build a new keep and get it to be self-sustaining, you'll need a land grant, 50000 gold for construction, 400 days for the construction to take place, 50 skilled hirelings loaned to you from elsewhere to oversee the construction, and, at minimum, a further 12500 gold and 250 days to train half the untrained hirelings you attract as staff and garrison. Once this process is completed, your keep will attract an extra 50 untrained hirelings in excess of those required for the stronghold's maintenance. These workers can be assigned to manual labour in and around your new keep as you see fit for as long as your continue to pay their wages.

If you don't own a stronghold, you may still be able to recruit hirelings. Rather than negotiate with individuals, you negotiate with the owner of a stronghold who has hirelings to spare. Unless a substantial reward is offered, or the owner of the stronghold has a duty to their title to support you, skilled soldiers will not be assigned directly to an adventuring party's command or send dungeon delving on adventurer's behalf. Besides the obvious ethical issues with sending their loyal servants to their deaths, replacing skilled hirelings is expensive and time consuming. Further, most stronghold owners will not send their hirelings more than a week's travel (200 miles) away from home, nor onto the property of another stronghold owner without first obtaining permission from either the Crown or the owner of the lands they wish to enter.

[PracticalM]

I recommend A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe Second Edition by Expeditious Retreat Press. I have the first edition and I find it very useful to running small villages to creating towns/kingdoms.

http://www.xrpshop.citymax.com/catalog/item/3906392/6232094.htm

[druid91]

I rather like the mass combat rules in Unearthed Arcana: When Armies clash. Seems a simple and effective way to reduce the tedium of rolling for large groups of units.

[napoleon_in_rag]

So my group is playing a game right now where we've decided to take over and fix up the ruins of an abandoned town and start it back up again before eventually taking over the equivalent of the "county" or "parish" since there's no local authority unifying or protecting the local hamlets or even the largest village in the area, especially after we killed the last group that was trying to take over the area.



Use Feudalism!!!!

Get the local hamlets to swear allegiance to you in exchange for your protection. You get taxes but have to manage the whole affair. Use taxes to hire mercenaries to repel goblin invasions. Stand in judgement at court. Get the local religion to say that the peasant obeisance to you is God's will. Accept bribes from the thieves guild to overlook certain valuable objects "disappearing".

Of course, you would probably have to swear allegiance to some distant King/Queen to prevent getting invaded.

It could be fun but managing a "parish" would keep your character from doing D&D type stuff, like exploring dungeons and what not. Definitely a different type of game.

As I recall, AD&D 2e and D&D had fighters getting an army at 10th level so you could do just this sort of thing. Never worked out that way though, at least in any campaign I ever played.

[TheOOB]

I recommend A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe Second Edition by Expeditious Retreat Press. I have the first edition and I find it very useful to running small villages to creating towns/kingdoms.

http://www.xrpshop.citymax.com/catalog/item/3906392/6232094.htm

Pretty much this, any DM looking to add a little bit of realistic feudalism to their world can do a heck of a lot worse.

[Totema]

Pathfinder's Ultimate Campaign book also has resources for this sort of thing. (Kinda odd to me that no one here's mentioned it yet?)

[Coidzor]

It seems I am once again in the awkward position of recommending ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King System) to someone. I'm not a fan personally, but it does have exactly what you're looking for: stronghold and domain rules for basically any scale (from one tiny fort on up to empire). You can nab those rules and port them over into your 5e game.

Oh, I didn't realize it scaled that much. That's nifty. What's so messy about ACKS though? This is the first time I've heard anyone say anything negative about it, other than that it wasn't their cup of tea due to being a retroclone or because they liked becoming gods at high level.


I am likewise loathe to recommend the awkward mess that is ACKS, but it does have exactly what you are looking for, as long as you don't mind losing too much of 5e's simple elegance.

A lot of table rolling awkwardness, or...?


you might also want to do some research into birthright. I think I heard a while back someone was doing work on converting it to 5e on the birthright.net forums. in any event, if I was going to ask any group of D&D fans about this sort of question, that would be where I would want to ask.

For as much as I like things like Xorvintaal and rulership scenarios, I have not actually looked at Birthright. I'll definitely check that place out and see if there's anything there, thank you.


I recommend A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe Second Edition by Expeditious Retreat Press. I have the first edition and I find it very useful to running small villages to creating towns/kingdoms.

http://www.xrpshop.citymax.com/catalog/item/3906392/6232094.htm

Oh, neat. I think this is one I haven't heard mention of before. Thank you. :smallsmile:


I rather like the mass combat rules in Unearthed Arcana: When Armies clash. Seems a simple and effective way to reduce the tedium of rolling for large groups of units.

I just discovered those while trying to see if there was anything useful to do with my Bearbarian's ritual spells and thought it was pretty neat that they did that so soon, yeah. :smallsmile: I'll definitely point them out to the DM once we have anything in the way of minions.


As an addendum to that, there's a homebrew thread focusing on adapting Dragonmarks to 5e. Not really relevant here, except they also wrote an essay and rules for hirelings in a way that ties them to strongholds. Won't help you find rules to build them, but it's potentially good inspiration for what comes after that.

Nice Essay! Thanks for sharing it. :smallbiggrin::smallbiggrin: Definitely a nice idea for auto-attraction and for how just having power can attract lackeys without having to do a huge campaign of putting out want ads, too.


Use Feudalism!!!!

As in the form of government or an actual rules set/rules supplement called that?


Get the local hamlets to swear allegiance to you in exchange for your protection. You get taxes but have to manage the whole affair. Use taxes to hire mercenaries to repel goblin invasions. Stand in judgement at court. Get the local religion to say that the peasant obeisance to you is God's will. Accept bribes from the thieves guild to overlook certain valuable objects "disappearing".

That's the general idea, yeah.


Of course, you would probably have to swear allegiance to some distant King/Queen to prevent getting invaded.

We're already working for the local high lord, so that's pretty much taken care of. We're hoping to sweeten the pot by negotiating a peace treaty with a dragon that'd set up shop a couple days away from his city, in addition to pacifying the area and reopening up a trade route that had been plagued with bandit and goblinoid activity.


It could be fun but managing a "parish" would keep your character from doing D&D type stuff, like exploring dungeons and what not. Definitely a different type of game.

The DM's already on board with this mostly being a Downtime/timeskip occupying minigame, or basically what will occupy our characters inbetween adventures, but, yeah, not just going to be a bunch of dungeoncrawling fools.


Pathfinder's Ultimate Campaign book also has resources for this sort of thing. (Kinda odd to me that no one here's mentioned it yet?)

I know they have stuff for building teams out of NPC minions and setting them to work doing various things for an organization and that they have the kingdom stuff that they developed/tweaked since Kingmaker, but it didn't seem like those rules really scaled down all that well last I looked at them.

Although, come to think of it, I suppose the whole NO MAGIC ECONOMY! stuff from the revision/errata or how broken manufacturing magic items could be for generating wealth would both fit in well with 5e. :smallamused:

[Madfellow]

Oh, I didn't realize it scaled that much. That's nifty. What's so messy about ACKS though? This is the first time I've heard anyone say anything negative about it, other than that it wasn't their cup of tea due to being a retroclone or because they liked becoming gods at high level.

I've already discussed this a little on another thread, so I'm just going to quote myself:


I'm personally not interested in the stronghold-building, city managing aspect of the game. The adventuring RPG aspect is still there, but there are a number of things about it that I dislike. Randomly generated stats, limited class selection (unless you buy splatbooks), limited customization options within classes, and the deadliness of the system, to name a few. The general assumption seems to be that your character is going to die at some point, so you're going to need to be able to randomly roll up a replacement on short notice to hop back into the game quickly. There's very little that can distinguish two characters of the same class from a mechanical standpoint.