Building a city with Leadership?

[Curelomosaurus]

There's been some pretty crazy things created by GitP, from using Nailed to the Sky to launch satellites to the Tippyverse teleportation economy. Yet my google-fu has been unable to find any threads about a player using Leadership to build a city. So how would one go about it? Ideally, this city should be self-sustaining, perhaps using Tippy-esque traps to feed everyone, and have decent defenses to keep your followers safe.

My thoughts so far:
Obviously, maximizing Leadership is key to this. 18 charisma, Unseelie Fey, venerable age, and Magic-Blooded give a Charisma of 25, for a total +7 to Leadership right off the bat. For race, Dragonwrought Kobold seems best, as (assuming DWK = true dragon) you can take Epic Leadership as soon as your Leadership score hits 25.

Getting Leadership is possible as soon as level 2 if you take two flaws for Skill Focus (Diplomacy) and the Eberron feat Nymm Ascendant (https://www.scribd.com/document/14856349/Eberron-Article-Moons-Lunar-Feats) at level one, then take Marshal at level two so you can swap out your bonus Skill Focus (Diplomacy) for Leadership. At level 3, you can double your followers with Extra Followers (Heroes of Battle). Great Renown and Fairness and Generosity shouldn't be too hard to get if you can set up a city with a high quality of life, do Lawful Good things, and pour most of your funds into making your city a nice place to live. Get Special Power, too, maybe by taking all that DWK cheese and being crazy powerful for your level. As soon as you qualify for 6th-level followers, you can have them take Leadership as well, to further maximize your followers. Heavy taint can give you 4 more feats, so you can get things to boost leadership. Also, I think Complete Scoundrel had something that doubles leadership for the purpose of attracting bard and rogue followers...

Altogether, your Leadership score will be (level) + 7 (Charisma) +1 (or +2 for 1 month of the year, Nymm Ascendant) + 2 (Great Renown) +2 (Fairness and Generosity/Special Power) + whatever else you get.

As for the city, using Stronghold Builder's Guide rules, locate your city in warm, lawless plains 17 miles from a small city, surrounded by features that aid in attacking, for a 30% discount on everything. Buy 3 dark faezress-infused warbeast quorbred mineral warrior chameleon paragon rats (12.5 gp, CR 20) to gain another 20% discount, and get another 30% discount from your followers providing free labor. It's unclear to me how these percentages stack, but that should make building a city much cheaper.

Besides this, how would one go about building a city, populating it, defending it, and providing for its inhabitants?

[CIDE]

https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?321319-Leadership-to-build-a-city

Some ideas from a similar thread I started a while back.

[the_tick_rules]

you get a bonus if you have a stronghold for them. where is the chart that shows how much it is to build a castle, mansion etc?

[Malphegor]

Lyre of Building is always worth considering when building a city. Assuming money is not an object, for a relatively cheap 13,000 gold, one person can in 30 minutes can do the labour of 100 men in 3 hours.

That’s an INSANE construction speed increase if every man woman and child gets their own lyre, even with the DC18 check to do it.

And with leadership you have a lot of men to now teach the proper chords.

<We Built This City starts playing but it’s a full orchestra of people rocking out>

For defending your city, I’m personally partial to reinforcing it with adamantine or even better riverine plating and making it fly using the rules from stronghold builder’s guide, fast enough the DM would grant your city a slam attack. It is clearly a masterwork city so you can probably enhance it with an weapon or armour ability in different section too. City of Healing on the battlements, City of Profane Burst And Holy Burst in seperate wings of the place. Its flight speed should puree anything that comes its way physically.

This of course would cost a ridiculous amount but c’est la Stronghold Builder Book!

[Maat Mons]

I don't know, maybe building a flying city would actually be super cheep. Everything in that book is so poorly written.

I mean, a city is a bunch of land surrounded by walls. That's a courtyard. A courtyard is 1 stronghold space, and has no defined size. So your whole city is one really big courtyard, and thus 1 stronghold space in size. Making a stronghold fly is 15,000 gp per stronghold space, so 15,000 gp for the entire city, regardless of size.

Or, you could do like things like the example stronghold in the book, and not actually pay for the courtyard. That encloses a quarter-acre of land in free-standing walls, but doesn't count it as a stronghold space of any sort. So, score, build walls around the city, it's now a stronghold with a size of 0 stronghold spaces. All the flight stuff costs an amount proportional to the number of stronghold spaces, so it's free.

Or maybe your stronghold doesn't enclose any area at all. It's just a straight, freestanding wall, 5 miles long, and 5 miles thick. Still not even one stronghold space, so it's free to make it fly, and you've got 25 square miles of space on top of the wall to build your city.



If the city doesn't need to fly, the spell Undermaster (Spell Compendium, p227) is your friend. It gives you Wall of Stone and Stone Shape as at-will spell-like abilities for the duration. If you apply the Persistent Spell metamagic feat, the duration is 24 hours. Archivist with a dip for Turn Undead can do it with divine Metamagic. Artificer can do it with Metamagic Spell Completion. Wizard can do it if he takes Incantatrix.

[Curelomosaurus]

I don't know, maybe building a flying city would actually be super cheep. Everything in that book is so poorly written.

I mean, a city is a bunch of land surrounded by walls. That's a courtyard. A courtyard is 1 stronghold space, and has no defined size. So your whole city is one really big courtyard, and thus 1 stronghold space in size. Making a stronghold fly is 15,000 gp per stronghold space, so 15,000 gp for the entire city, regardless of size.

Or, you could do like things like the example stronghold in the book, and not actually pay for the courtyard. That encloses a quarter-acre of land in free-standing walls, but doesn't count it as a stronghold space of any sort. So, score, build walls around the city, it's now a stronghold with a size of 0 stronghold spaces. All the flight stuff costs an amount proportional to the number of stronghold spaces, so it's free.

Or maybe your stronghold doesn't enclose any area at all. It's just a straight, freestanding wall, 5 miles long, and 5 miles thick. Still not even one stronghold space, so it's free to make it fly, and you've got 25 square miles of space on top of the wall to build your city.



If the city doesn't need to fly, the spell Undermaster (Spell Compendium, p227) is your friend. It gives you Wall of Stone and Stone Shape as at-will spell-like abilities for the duration. If you apply the Persistent Spell metamagic feat, the duration is 24 hours. Archivist with a dip for Turn Undead can do it with divine Metamagic. Artificer can do it with Metamagic Spell Completion. Wizard can do it if he takes Incantatrix.

I like how you think, sir. Actually, I was planning to abuse the cost reducers and template-stack onto a warbeast battletitan (for the "monster lair nearby" discount) until it hit a high enough CR that my stronghold would cost 0% of the original price, so I could have a stronghold of any size for free.

[AvatarVecna]

A proper Crystal Cult would make a nice basis for this kinda thing, and could get started at lvl 6 (although for obvious reasons, it gets much better the high level you are when you start). The primary downside to the crystal cult approach ("downside") is that there's no epic thrallherd progression, so no matter how large the cult grows, it's always going to be smaller than some theoretical epic character/cheating kobold could get via Epic Leadership.

Second the Lyre Of Building suggestion from earlier, there's a reason it's popular in Kingmaker games. Although a lot depends on exactly how you think it works - and that sounds like it's being facetious, but it's not.


The lyre is also useful with respect to building. Once a week its strings can be strummed so as to produce chords that magically construct buildings, mines, tunnels, ditches, or whatever. The effect produced in but 30 minutes of playing is equal to the work of 100 humans laboring for three days. Each hour after the first, a character playing the lyre must make a DC 18 Perform (string instruments) check. If it fails, she must stop and cannot play the lyre again for this purpose until a week has passed.

1) "Or whatever". It's clear what kind of stuff you're meant to be able to build with the LoB, but RAW the door is kinda left open.

2) "100 humans laboring for three days". Okay so there's a bit of an issue here: this is an item about Building Stuff, and the Building Stuff skill can't be used untrained. Generally how I've seen this ruled is that it's actually based on the Profession skill, and the 100 humans count as untrained labor. Untrained labor earns 1sp/day on average, so 100 workers working for 3 days would earn 30 gp worth. Since that's what you get every 30 minutes, that makes the Lyre really simple: 1gp worth of construction per minute spent playing. And while that's convenient and easy, it's not the right skill for building things. So if 100 untrained humans can't even Craft, the 100 humans worth of labor you're getting must be trained. So how trained is your magically-created labor? There's no guidelines on that.

I see three solutions here, more or less. First, they effectively have +0, and just count as trained. Second, they have what a lvl 1 commoner built for it would have - which is to say, 4 ranks, maybe Skill Focus, maybe +1 from Int, but most likely just +4. Third, their bonus is equal to the Perform (Strings) Bonus of the player. All of these kinda make sense from a "how should the magic work", but the last one is definitely the most broken, so probably best to go with the flat +0 or +4.

3) It's unclear whether the lyre requires you to spend money/time acquiring the base resources the Craft skill would require, or if the material is essentially just summoned out of nowhere just like the labor required to put it all together. If you solved 2 by saying it's Profession, then I'd say no base materials required. If you solved 2 by saying Craft, I'd say they're definitely required.

EDIT: Oh and if you're willing to consider epic kobold shenanigans as valid, you should consider a RAW reading of Orc Warlord too.

[Curelomosaurus]

I did try to figure out how to make a kobold count as an orc, although I couldn't find anything. :smallfrown: Abusing Orc Warlord and Epic Leadership would've been fun.

[AvatarVecna]

I did try to figure out how to make a kobold count as an orc, although I couldn't find anything. :smallfrown: Abusing Orc Warlord and Epic Leadership would've been fun.

The abuse with Orc Warlord amounts to that it says to multiply by the listed number, and the table lists "x150%" and "x200%" respectively. x200% is...not x2. Even though that's painfully obviously what they meant, and the listed example proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt. Buuuut that's not how it's written.

Crystal Cult is literally just using thrallherd and psycrystals to make a pyramid scheme where every person in it is a thrallherd with undead leadership.

[Curelomosaurus]

A proper Crystal Cult would make a nice basis for this kinda thing, and could get started at lvl 6 (although for obvious reasons, it gets much better the high level you are when you start). The primary downside to the crystal cult approach ("downside") is that there's no epic thrallherd progression, so no matter how large the cult grows, it's always going to be smaller than some theoretical epic character/cheating kobold could get via Epic Leadership

I agree that Thrallherd has a lot of perks, but I'm not trying to get a bunch of mindless slaves so much as start a society people would want to live in.

[AvatarVecna]

I agree that Thrallherd has a lot of perks, but I'm not trying to get a bunch of mindless slaves so much as start a society people would want to live in.

Half of the crystal cult is Undead Leadership (which dont have to actually be undead you just take a penalty), so only a majority of the society is literally brainwashed. :smalltongueout:

But I get what you mean

[Tvtyrant]

I would look into boosting charisma. AFAIK the record without infinite shenanigans is a little over 100, which gives you thousands of followers. Once you have thousands of people others tend to move in, especially since your crime rate is likely 0 (since they all follow you.)

For building the city, just remember that magic tends to not do very big things but it does very powerful ones. Persisted Undermaster doesn't make as much in a day as you would think, there aren't any spells that make huge numbers of workers, etc. Plague of Undead makes a total of 80 without CL abuse, although if you are abusing leadership you might as well abuse circle magic and make 160 undead. Hardly a city raising force.

For really big construction spells you have to go back to 10th level spells (Psionic Enchantments?) from Dark Sun, and those required double 9ths in psionics and spells to cast.

[Maat Mons]

I just did the math on Persistent Undermaster.

Each CL-20 casting of Wall of Stone gives 20 5-foot by 5-foot sections 20 inches thick. A 5x5x20/12 block is 41.6 cubic feet. and 20 of them is 833.3 cubic feet.

If you spend 8 hours a day casting Wall of Stone over and over, you'll get 8*60*10 castings, so 4,000,000 cubic feet.

Wikipedia says the Hoover dam contains 3,250,000 cubic yards of concrete, which is 87,750,000 cubic feet. So, working 5 days a week, one high-level caster could build the entire Hoover dam in a little over a month.

That seems like a lot to me.

[Tvtyrant]

I just did the math on Persistent Undermaster.

Each CL-20 casting of Wall of Stone gives 20 5-foot by 5-foot sections 20 inches thick. A 5x5x20/12 block is 41.6 cubic feet. and 20 of them is 833.3 cubic feet.

If you spend 8 hours a day casting Wall of Stone over and over, you'll get 8*60*10 castings, so 4,000,000 cubic feet.

Wikipedia says the Hoover dam contains 3,250,000 cubic yards of concrete, which is 87,750,000 cubic feet. So, working 5 days a week, one high-level caster could build the entire Hoover dam in a little over a month.

That seems like a lot to me.

Yeah but a level 20 character has 760000 GP and hirelings cost 2 silver. The wizard can easily make 10k gold a day selling spells or items or adventuring and hire 50k workers on his wage to make the dam worth of buildings in a few months, or a million workers for a week and make it faster.

I think a level 20 character should be able to make a reasonably large castle in a day is all.

[Curelomosaurus]

I would look into boosting charisma. AFAIK the record without infinite shenanigans is a little over 100, which gives you thousands of followers. Once you have thousands of people others tend to move in, especially since your crime rate is likely 0 (since they all follow you.)

Where might I find this, and what would be used to attain it? With the stuff in my original post plus ability increases at every 4th level, a Cloak of Charisma +6, and a Tome of Leadership and Influence +5, I'd only be at a 43. Of course, there is the tauric/symbiont template-stacking abuse route, but that delays getting leadership until ECL 3... hmmm.

[AvatarVecna]

I think a level 20 character should be able to make a reasonably large castle in a day is all.

idk what your standard is for "reasonably large castle".

[Asmotherion]

You're thinking small. With leadership Chains you can effectivelly have a continent under your direct or indirect control.

If you go for both Leadership and Undead Leadership, you could practically have the worlds population be under your indirect command.


Yeah but a level 20 character has 760000 GP and hirelings cost 2 silver. The wizard can easily make 10k gold a day selling spells or items or adventuring and hire 50k workers on his wage to make the dam worth of buildings in a few months, or a million workers for a week and make it faster.

I think a level 20 character should be able to make a reasonably large castle in a day is all.

Wall of stone and Percisted Undermaster point towards "A Very large castle and a large city around it" in a Day's Worth of work IMO.

[Tvtyrant]

Where might I find this, and what would be used to attain it? With the stuff in my original post plus ability increases at every 4th level, a Cloak of Charisma +6, and a Tome of Leadership and Influence +5, I'd only be at a 43. Of course, there is the tauric/symbiont template-stacking abuse route, but that delays getting leadership until ECL 3... hmmm.

Some (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?125732-3-x-X-stat-to-Y-bonus)guides (https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/79962/how-to-achieve-the-highest-possible-charisma-at-20th-level).


idk what your standard is for "reasonably large castle".

Here's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_de_Coucy)a good one.

[AvatarVecna]

Here's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_de_Coucy)a good one.


The donjon was the largest in Europe, measuring 35 meters wide and 55 meters tall. The smaller towers surrounding the court were as big as the donjons being built at that time by the French monarchy.

Ah yes, DeCeNtLy LaRgE.

[Seerow]

I don't know, maybe building a flying city would actually be super cheep. Everything in that book is so poorly written.

I mean, a city is a bunch of land surrounded by walls. That's a courtyard. A courtyard is 1 stronghold space, and has no defined size. So your whole city is one really big courtyard, and thus 1 stronghold space in size. Making a stronghold fly is 15,000 gp per stronghold space, so 15,000 gp for the entire city, regardless of size.

Or, you could do like things like the example stronghold in the book, and not actually pay for the courtyard. That encloses a quarter-acre of land in free-standing walls, but doesn't count it as a stronghold space of any sort. So, score, build walls around the city, it's now a stronghold with a size of 0 stronghold spaces. All the flight stuff costs an amount proportional to the number of stronghold spaces, so it's free.

Or maybe your stronghold doesn't enclose any area at all. It's just a straight, freestanding wall, 5 miles long, and 5 miles thick. Still not even one stronghold space, so it's free to make it fly, and you've got 25 square miles of space on top of the wall to build your city.



If the city doesn't need to fly, the spell Undermaster (Spell Compendium, p227) is your friend. It gives you Wall of Stone and Stone Shape as at-will spell-like abilities for the duration. If you apply the Persistent Spell metamagic feat, the duration is 24 hours. Archivist with a dip for Turn Undead can do it with divine Metamagic. Artificer can do it with Metamagic Spell Completion. Wizard can do it if he takes Incantatrix.

Stronghold Builder's guide defines one SS space as roughly a 20x20 area. You want a city worth of flying courtyard, you're going to be paying billions of gold pieces. There's gotta be a more efficient way.

[Curelomosaurus]

1) locate your city in lawless, disputed warm hills, easy to attack from all sides and 17-48 miles from a small city (35% discount)

2) stack templates and NPC traits (DMG 2) on a warbeast battletitan (costs 2,800 gp) until it hits CR 67. (This isn't actually that hard if you have access to Uncle Kitty's Guide to Template Based Shenanigans).

3) Make sure you're far enough away that it can't reach you in 1 round, and deliberately fail a Diplomacy check to make it hostile. Because you have a hostile CR 67 monster near your build site, you get a 65% discount on your stronghold, which stacks additively onto your previous 35% discount, for a total discount of 100%.

4) Hire a 5th-level diplomacy specialist (costs 4 gp, +23 modifier) and give them glamerweave clothing (100 gp, +1 diplomacy), a black fan talisman (150 gp, one-use +10 diplomacy), Guidance of the Avatar (level 2 spell, +20 to one skill check), and Speak with Animals to change the battletitan's attitude towards you from hostile to helpful in one round (before it reaches you and kills you).

5) For barely over 3,000 gp, you get a CR 67 dinosaur that's helpful towards you and a free stronghold of any size, design, and cost.

6) Profit! :smallbiggrin:

[Tvtyrant]

Ah yes, DeCeNtLy LaRgE.

In RL where people didn't have so much as wheelbarrows and had crappily made iron implements? As compared to the modern level metallurgy and magi-tech of D&D? Yeah that's just decently large.

On the flying city one: Permanent Walls of Force will hold a city up and can be made for free with SLAs and some optimization. Wrap the WoF in brick so they can't be targeted and it won't be able to be dispelled.

Another option was the trans-dimensional tower from years back. If a ghost manifests their spells work in both the Material and Ethereal Planes, so you can make a city where the city is in both planes but the base is only in the ethereal so it floats in the material.

A third option is to use Invisible Spell and just make the base of the city invisible using Invisible Wall of Stones. It looks like it is flying but isn't.

Number four is to use one of the permanent planar portal items and dangle chains down from it to hold the city up, or put pillars coming out if you don't like the chain look. This is more fragile but cooler IMO, especially if you use the Rift spell to make it come out of a hole in the sky.

[AvatarVecna]

In RL where people didn't have so much as wheelbarrows and had crappily made iron implements? As compared to the modern level metallurgy and magi-tech of D&D? Yeah that's just decently large.

Ah yes the 13th century when wheelbarrows hadn't been invented yet. That is a correct fact and definitely not making light of the technological capabilities of the people who built the actual castle in question. *rolls eyes*

Persistent "Undermaster" used to cast Wall Of Stone over and over will give (3600 x CL x [CL/4 round down]) cubic inches per casting. Presuming no action economy shenanigans, you're going to get 14400 castings over the course of 24 hours. We probably aren't casting that many times in a row, but that's the maximum we have to work with.

The walls are 257m long in total, ~20m tall (guess based on drawings), and ~7m thick (guess based on drawings, but also an additional source that claims the thickest the walls got was 7.5m, although that might've been a reference to the donjon itself, and I'm not sure how much this accounts for empty space for people to walk inside the walls).

The four secondary towers (at initial construction) were cylinders 20m in diameter and 40m in height.

The donjon was a cylinder 35m in diameter and 55 meters in height.


Walls: 35980 cubic meters
4 Towers: ~50265 cubic meters
Donjon: ~52916 cubic meters

These are the volumes assuming all these structures are totally solid stone all the way through. Now I'm no architect, but I feel like that's a poor assumption to make about buildings, even castles - they're not just giant piles of stone meant to serve as cover against seige weapons, they're also meant to have people inside them. But flip side...I'm no architect, so I have no idea how much empty space is generally in a building. Certainly the building I'm in right now seems to have way more not-walls than it has walls, but I haven't exactly measured it to be sure.

The buildings that serve the same purpose as castles (protection for important people to fall back to when in danger) is generally served by bunkers these days, which probably aren't going to be as spacious as castles just because castles are also a show of wealth and it's hard to show off your wealth in a cramped room. But more to the point a bunker is built super-differently from a castle because while the general purpose is the same, how it's executed is very different. What we'd need for a proper comparison is something that is structurally similar attempting to fulfill a similar purpose. The closest approximation, then, is prisons. You've got equivalents to the donjon, the walls, the towers - except instead of being designed to keep people out, it's designed to keep people in.

Second-best option would probably be larger schools, which are steadily becoming more designed like castles/prisons for the purposes of protecting from invasion from malicious individuals. This isn't going to be quite as good a fit, at least partially because school don't tend to have towers the way a castle might even if their square footage is comparable. Wait, is it? Yeah okay time to start actually searching.

Windsor Castle (https://www.propertyinvestmentproject.co.uk/blog/biggest-house-in-the-world) is ~484000 square footage, and is (at least at time of that article) the largest house there is. I would hazard a guess that the castle being kept up over the course of centuries is larger than most castles that no longer serve as houses, too - certainly the way the walls are laid out for Coucy Castle put it just the walls and the area within the walls isn't more than ~100k square footage. For comparison, the median High School (https://spaces4learning.com/Articles/2015/07/01/School-Costs.aspx) is ~173727 square footage, or approximately 1/3 a Windsor.

Unfortunately, part of prison/school design is that there's not exactly a wealth of architectural information just floating out there...for obvious reasons. Closest I could find fairly quickly was this Quora Question (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-ratio-of-empty-space-to-solid-space-in-the-volume-of-a-building) about empty space in various kinds of buildings, with just two answers. Lowest estimate in either of those answers is 75% empty space, and that's basically for a lone room. More realistic answers for what we're looking at are probably 8:1 (~89% empty space) or 15:1 (~94% empty space) on the low ends, depending on whether you think castle rooms tend to be closer to "home" rooms or "class" rooms. Let's split the difference and say it's 9:1 to make the math easier, so 90% empty space.

Okay, so the actual volume we need to generate is ~13916 cubic meters, or ~850 million cubic inches. This is ~2400 castings of Wall Of Stone at CL 20. That's 4 hours of casting. Granted, we probably need to follow up using Stone Shape to actually make it a castle rather than "a series of haphazard walls arranged to vaguely resemble a castle if you squint at it", and while you don't need to use Stone Shape on every single cubic foot of stone you created, you probably need to use it on enough that that'll actually make up way more of the effort going into this.

[Tvtyrant]

Ah yes the 13th century when wheelbarrows hadn't been invented yet. That is a correct fact and definitely not making light of the technological capabilities of the people who built the actual castle in question. *rolls eyes*

Persistent "Undermaster" used to cast Wall Of Stone over and over will give (3600 x CL x [CL/4 round down]) cubic inches per casting. Presuming no action economy shenanigans, you're going to get 14400 castings over the course of 24 hours. We probably aren't casting that many times in a row, but that's the maximum we have to work with.

The walls are 257m long in total, ~20m tall (guess based on drawings), and ~7m thick (guess based on drawings, but also an additional source that claims the thickest the walls got was 7.5m, although that might've been a reference to the donjon itself, and I'm not sure how much this accounts for empty space for people to walk inside the walls).

The four secondary towers (at initial construction) were cylinders 20m in diameter and 40m in height.

The donjon was a cylinder 35m in diameter and 55 meters in height.


Walls: 35980 cubic meters
4 Towers: ~50265 cubic meters
Donjon: ~52916 cubic meters

These are the volumes assuming all these structures are totally solid stone all the way through. Now I'm no architect, but I feel like that's a poor assumption to make about buildings, even castles - they're not just giant piles of stone meant to serve as cover against seige weapons, they're also meant to have people inside them. But flip side...I'm no architect, so I have no idea how much empty space is generally in a building. Certainly the building I'm in right now seems to have way more not-walls than it has walls, but I haven't exactly measured it to be sure.

The buildings that serve the same purpose as castles (protection for important people to fall back to when in danger) is generally served by bunkers these days, which probably aren't going to be as spacious as castles just because castles are also a show of wealth and it's hard to show off your wealth in a cramped room. But more to the point a bunker is built super-differently from a castle because while the general purpose is the same, how it's executed is very different. What we'd need for a proper comparison is something that is structurally similar attempting to fulfill a similar purpose. The closest approximation, then, is prisons. You've got equivalents to the donjon, the walls, the towers - except instead of being designed to keep people out, it's designed to keep people in.

Second-best option would probably be larger schools, which are steadily becoming more designed like castles/prisons for the purposes of protecting from invasion from malicious individuals. This isn't going to be quite as good a fit, at least partially because school don't tend to have towers the way a castle might even if their square footage is comparable. Wait, is it? Yeah okay time to start actually searching.

Windsor Castle (https://www.propertyinvestmentproject.co.uk/blog/biggest-house-in-the-world) is ~484000 square footage, and is (at least at time of that article) the largest house there is. I would hazard a guess that the castle being kept up over the course of centuries is larger than most castles that no longer serve as houses, too - certainly the way the walls are laid out for Coucy Castle put it just the walls and the area within the walls isn't more than ~100k square footage. For comparison, the median High School (https://spaces4learning.com/Articles/2015/07/01/School-Costs.aspx) is ~173727 square footage, or approximately 1/3 a Windsor.

Unfortunately, part of prison/school design is that there's not exactly a wealth of architectural information just floating out there...for obvious reasons. Closest I could find fairly quickly was this Quora Question (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-ratio-of-empty-space-to-solid-space-in-the-volume-of-a-building) about empty space in various kinds of buildings, with just two answers. Lowest estimate in either of those answers is 75% empty space, and that's basically for a lone room. More realistic answers for what we're looking at are probably 8:1 (~89% empty space) or 15:1 (~94% empty space) on the low ends, depending on whether you think castle rooms tend to be closer to "home" rooms or "class" rooms. Let's split the difference and say it's 9:1 to make the math easier, so 90% empty space.

Okay, so the actual volume we need to generate is ~13916 cubic meters, or ~850 million cubic inches. This is ~2400 castings of Wall Of Stone at CL 20. That's 4 hours of casting. Granted, we probably need to follow up using Stone Shape to actually make it a castle rather than "a series of haphazard walls arranged to vaguely resemble a castle if you squint at it", and while you don't need to use Stone Shape on every single cubic foot of stone you created, you probably need to use it on enough that that'll actually make up way more of the effort going into this.
These are good points, and I concede that this is an effective way to make a castle. Objection retracted.

[AvatarVecna]

These are good points, and I concede that this is an effective way to make a castle. Objection retracted.

There's also a lvl 7 spell that makes a complete ice castle in 10 minutes by spending 2000 gp on a focus, but also that spell only lasts 24 hours...and the resulting castle is made of ice, which isn't exactly top-tier durability even for the parts made of slightly tougher ice. Still, if you dedicate a spell slot to it each day, you could maintain your ice castle indefinitely-ish. But...yeah, that's probably not a great way to build a castle. >.>

Oh and also, Wish can't be used to summon a castle - at least, not without consequences. It's too expensive. And genies being able to dodge the XP component via SLA rules doesn't get around that, because the castle isn't a magic item. Maybe if SBG provides rules for making your castle a magic item, genies could be used to get around it fairly easily, but also at the same time "I abuse NI Wishes to get a castle" isn't quite the same as one metamagic + one spell.

[Tvtyrant]

There's also a lvl 7 spell that makes a complete ice castle in 10 minutes by spending 2000 gp on a focus, but also that spell only lasts 24 hours...and the resulting castle is made of ice, which isn't exactly top-tier durability even for the parts made of slightly tougher ice. Still, if you dedicate a spell slot to it each day, you could maintain your ice castle indefinitely-ish. But...yeah, that's probably not a great way to build a castle. >.>

Oh and also, Wish can't be used to summon a castle - at least, not without consequences. It's too expensive. And genies being able to dodge the XP component via SLA rules doesn't get around that, because the castle isn't a magic item. Maybe if SBG provides rules for making your castle a magic item, genies could be used to get around it fairly easily, but also at the same time "I abuse NI Wishes to get a castle" isn't quite the same as one metamagic + one spell.

Well you can Wish for an Instant Fortress, but that's not a fortress so much as a small tower (20 ft wide by 30 ft tall.) You could abuse a Genie into making a lot of Instant Fortresses, but as you say that's not exactly acceptable.

[Jack_Simth]

I mean, a city is a bunch of land surrounded by walls. That's a courtyard. A courtyard is 1 stronghold space, and has no defined size. So your whole city is one really big courtyard, and thus 1 stronghold space in size. Making a stronghold fly is 15,000 gp per stronghold space, so 15,000 gp for the entire city, regardless of size. Stonghold Builder's guide actually does define a stronghold space's size. It's at the top of page 8, left column:

D&D measures the size of your fortress in “stronghold spaces” (ss). A stronghold space isn’t rigidly defined in terms of square footage, but most stronghold spaces take up a 20-foot-by-20-foot-by-10-foot space

[Curelomosaurus]

Oh and also, Wish can't be used to summon a castle - at least, not without consequences. It's too expensive. And genies being able to dodge the XP component via SLA rules doesn't get around that, because the castle isn't a magic item. Maybe if SBG provides rules for making your castle a magic item, genies could be used to get around it fairly easily, but also at the same time "I abuse NI Wishes to get a castle" isn't quite the same as one metamagic + one spell.

There are tons of ways in SBG to make your stronghold magic. Walls of force, floating floors, wondrous architecture...

[AvatarVecna]

There are tons of ways in SBG to make your stronghold magic. Walls of force, floating floors, wondrous architecture...

there's a difference between objects that are magical and Magic Items, generally, and I think it'd be pretty easy to say that magic buildings aren't the kind of thing you can Wish for without consequence. Granted, I think it's kinda stupid that you can Genie-Wish for a magic ring of literally-infinite value but can't wish for nonmagical jewelry worth more than 25k, but that's beside the point.

[Maat Mons]

Why does everyone keep claiming that stronghold spaces have a defined size, and then citing a passage that explicitly says "a stronghold space isn’t rigidly defined in terms of square footage?" It even says the rough approximation it's giving doesn't apply to all stronghold spaces. Only "most" of them.

Seriously, saying "things may or may not be about this big" is giving literally no information. It's like when a car insurance commercial says "save up to X, or more!" (https://xkcd.com/870/) That combination of words is doesn't mean anything.

[Tvtyrant]

Why does everyone keep claiming that stronghold spaces have a defined size, and then citing a passage that explicitly says "a stronghold space isn’t rigidly defined in terms of square footage?" It even says the rough approximation it's giving doesn't apply to all stronghold spaces. Only "most" of them.

Seriously, saying "things may or may not be about this big" is giving literally no information. It's like when a car insurance commercial says "save up to X, or more!" (https://xkcd.com/870/) That combination of words is doesn't mean anything.

Probably because they give a general definition which aligns with a common sense definition, and the alternative given is to violate both the example and common sense definition entirely?

Imagine if I said "a Pizza is usually defined by layering bread, sauce, cheese and meat" and the other person immediately says "a hotdog is a pizza" so they can utilize a tax break on pizza sales because the "usually" can be stretched to mean anything. I could define the stronghold as being the sky and ground and the stronghold space everything between if we want to play that game. Why have an example if it meets nothing?

[Toliudar]

Functionally, what's the difference between having followers from Leadership, and having devoted followers from a series of good diplomacy checks? I would have thought that you would have analogous levels of control. Followers aren't thralls, after all - they still have autonomy.

[Doctor Despair]

Functionally, what's the difference between having followers from Leadership, and having devoted followers from a series of good diplomacy checks? I would have thought that you would have analogous levels of control. Followers aren't thralls, after all - they still have autonomy.

I'd think it's in the fact that Leadership specifies you have X followers for your leadership score, right? After the initial -1 tick for having caused the death of other followers, folks who die or cease to be your followers would be replaced, right?

[Blue Jay]

Why does everyone keep claiming that stronghold spaces have a defined size, and then citing a passage that explicitly says "a stronghold space isn’t rigidly defined in terms of square footage?" It even says the rough approximation it's giving doesn't apply to all stronghold spaces. Only "most" of them.

You're deliberately reading the rules in bad faith, and you're surprised that nobody wants to go along with you on it?

[AvatarVecna]

A stronghold space isn’t rigidly defined in terms of square footage, but most stronghold spaces take up a 20-foot-by-20-foot-by-10-foot space; a simple one-room cottage takes up one stronghold space.


Stronghold Space: An abstract measure of volume within a building. While stronghold spaces don’t have a fixed size, an average stronghold space is equivalent to a 20-foot-by-20-foot room with a 10-foot-hugh ceiling.


Forbiddance
This spell is great for characters who have powerful enemies—and what character worth his salt doesn’t? Once cast upon an area, it prevents anyone with a different alignment from the caster’s from entering the area. It also seals the area against all planar travel into it, preventing people or monsters from making a surprise visit. Finally, it’s huge. You get a shapeable 60-foot cube per level—and each such cube is enough to cover fifty stronghold spaces.

"Most stronghold spaces are X" and "average stronghold space is X" aren't quite the same statement. The latter is about averages, the former is about frequency. To have an actual majority means 20x20x10 needs to be more common than all other possible volumes put together - that is to say, make up more than 50% of all cases.

If you had 10001 stronghold spaces, 5001 or more would have a volume of 4000 cubic ft. If 4998 of them have a volume of 1 cubic ft, 1 of them has a volume of 2 cubic ft, and 1 of them has a volume of 19995000 cubic ft, that would technically have "4000 cubic ft" as both the average and the clear majority, but at the same time you're purporting the idea that a 1x1x1 room, a 1x1x2 room, a 20x20x10 room, and a 310x430x150 are all equally valid "stronghold spaces" for the purpose of determining how much it should cost to build a "stronghold space" with this or that effect.

The point of saying "most" or "average" isn't to say that literally any volume is valid, it's more just to say that "stronghold spaces" don't have to be exactly precisely 20x20x10 as long as they're close (21x21x9 has similar total volume, but if SBG said "all stronghold spaces are 20x20x10", there's nitpicky chuckle****s in this community who would insist that such a volume takes up three stronghold spaces.

But more to the point, that kind of reading of the rules is kinda pointless. If you're willing to stretch definitions and "the rules don't say I can't" just to get a cheap stronghold, you could've just as easily gotten the equivalent of infinite money to build whatever kind of stronghold you want with all the bells and whistles you want, rather than tying yourself to a single city-sized courtyard with no additional buildings for the massive discount. Dying on this "you can get 99.9999999% off" hill is harder than dying on a different hill that gets you a 100% discount, so if you're going to be disingenuous anyway, why not go big?

EDIT: Oh and the Forbiddance quote was pulled mostly because, if we're gonna be persnickety and say that "most" doesn't mean all and therefore a space could be anything...the Forbiddance quote lays out that the spell grants [CL] volumes of 216000 cubic ft each, which are shapeable as you desire, but that this 216000 volume should cover 50 stronghold spaces. So even if you wanna be disingenuous, 216000 cubic ft is the maximum volume for a space - since going beyond that means you can't fit another 49 stronghold spaces of any size into that area.