Building a Church

[Kennyboyraven1]

How long would it take to build a church in a large city in a fantasy setting? Its a high magic setting although I don't think much magic will be used for the building. Its not a city know for its magical powers, so it will be a mundane affair.

This is not a massive Cathedral, this is the first church in a newly formed and fast growing religion. The religion is one of Law and Goodness in a fairly neutral city. Currently I figure there are around 800 followers in all, with 50 'movers'. 15 are actual priests, the rest of the movers are highly devout followers. The bulk are simple peasants who also worship other members of the pantheon.

Thanks in advance all 😁

[Dualight]

If magic is not a factor, look at historical precedent for the period and area(construction techniques and styles are extremely locally specific) that most resembles the setting you have. Usually, construction projects of any scale take years, so you could have a full campaign take place with the church being under construction for the entire duration of the campaign.

EDIT: Assuming that magic is available to the suppliers, it might cut a few months of if the materials available can be transported faster and are more malleable with non-magical techniques, but it might also have no effect at all.

Second EDIT: I really should stop posting half-remembered things that turn out to not actually apply. The advice to do a bit of historical research stands, though.

[PhoenixPhyre]

If you can accept a pretty simple log building, days at most. Look at barn raisings. If you want a slightly more complex or stone building, a motivated group can raise one fairly fast (weeks). For a grand cathedral, you may be looking at decades.

In a rural, simple area, a simple log/half-timbered, thatched roof building can go up really fast. One room, rectangular format, wood floor.

[Reach Weapon]

How long would it take to build a church in a large city in a fantasy setting?

Plot speed. Seriously.

Basic things like cantrips, Darkvision and fantastical strength, speed and the like, simply make certain aspects of construction much easier, unless you use authorial power to mute them. Most likely a functional structure could be hashed out rather quickly (and young religions often repurposed existing ones); the long phase would be rituals consecrating the church, and artisans beautifying (pun intended) it.

What is the narrative goal here?

[Kennyboyraven1]

Plot speed. Seriously.

Basic things like cantrips, Darkvision and fantastical strength, speed and the like, simply make certain aspects of construction much easier, unless you use authorial power to mute them. Most likely a functional structure could be hashed out rather quickly (and young religions often repurposed existing ones); the long phase would be rituals consecrating the church, and artisans beautifying (pun intended) it.

What is the narrative goal here?

It's background development. The new church is the start of the rise of a new religion which will potentially spread across the land. The religion is good, however it is actually a cover for a more sinister evil cult, worshiping an evil artefact that has recently resurfaced thanks to the actions of a group of adventurers. I'm aware i can make the build speed of said church anything I want, depending how much magic or resources are thrown at it. I was after people's thoughts to make an educated guess for what fits in my mind. I was also hoping to avoid long research into church building and get something I feel comfortable with.

The players are not involved in this at all, yet. However it is a larger campaign arching story which is running alongside their adventures, so I want to keep it relatively realistic time wise as this religion builds their first church and then expands. At some point the players (of which there are 3 seperate groups) will intersect with this story. The different groups may interact at different times in the future. If they don't die ofc. 🤣

Cheers.

[Chronos]

Most new churches I see buy an already existing building, and then maybe add a few religious symbols to it over the course of a few days. And if you're in the middle of an existing city and want to build a new building, that usually still means buying an existing building, and then spending time and money tearing it down to make room.

[Zhorn]

If you are looking for a by-the-books time scale, DMG p128 has a section on building a stronghold with costs and time for differently sized structures.

[Unoriginal]

How long would it take to build a church in a large city in a fantasy setting? Its a high magic setting although I don't think much magic will be used for the building. Its not a city know for its magical powers, so it will be a mundane affair.

This is not a massive Cathedral, this is the first church in a newly formed and fast growing religion. The religion is one of Law and Goodness in a fairly neutral city. Currently I figure there are around 800 followers in all, with 50 'movers'. 15 are actual priests, the rest of the movers are highly devout followers. The bulk are simple peasants who also worship other members of the pantheon.

Thanks in advance all 😁

DMG lists the time to construct various buildings. Abbey and Temple are both listed as taking 400 days to build.

[windgate]

Even more important than methods (magical or mundane), I suspect the time would largely be gated by funding and motivation. If the entire city is actively assisting the construction effort it would go up insanely fast......

Edit: You stated 800 followers, how many of these can quit their jobs long enough to make the building?
Edit2: Historically, during the middle ages. Peasants had multiple months when they were essentially unemployed. By some estimates they were "on vacation" for half of the year. Is this construction taking place during the harvest season for the region?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...97S0KU20130829

[Kennyboyraven1]

Thanks for all the pointers and tips, you've all been very helpful. 😁

[windgate]

The question was interesting so I kept looking.

Some of the larger medieval cathedral took hundreds of years to construct (with an average of 250-300 years). I suspect that was due to all the stone and a lack of funding?

A pure wooden structure built by peasants could probably go up in a couple weeks though (Maybe a single week depending on time of year). It is more complex than a typical barn raising done by the Amish but the labor and technology utilized are the same.

[Reach Weapon]

I want to keep it relatively realistic time wise as this religion builds their first church and then expands.

Sounds cool! Something you might want to factor in is how the nature of this specific sect deviates from what would be normal.

"I kept telling them not to use a wooden foundation, sure it was quicker, but in 10-20 years that spire will be in their crypt for sure."

"Nice people, but oddly touchy at times. Construction kept halting over spats they got in with the local guilds; blocking members from working the apse, screaming at porters for touching shipments..."

"I swear I've never hauled so much debris from a building site! It was ridiculous. I don't think I've run so many wagons since we had the contract to re-dig the entire sewer system for all of High Gate."

[Incorrect]

The book Strongholds and Followers have rules for building stuff like this. It is divided into 5 Levels of buildings.
Building the level 1 church (temple) will take 120 days, and 8000 gp.

[Chronos]

It's easy to get the wrong impression about those cathedrals that took centuries to build. Most of them were already "complete", in the sense of being functional buildings with everything they needed in order to be used as places of worship, within a year. The centuries to "finish" them consisted of incremental improvements: Adding wings to increase space, raising ceilings, adding more steeples or other decorative features (or replacing existing ones with more up-to-date styles), reinforcing walls when they started to sag or otherwise age, etc. Even with our modern, rapid construction techniques, this sort of incremental improvement still goes on: A building probably isn't constantly in a state of being worked on, but you'll get one improvement that takes a few months, then a few years later another improvement, and so on.

[Sigreid]

If it starts with a simple one room wood and stone church, with enough of a following of a following to fill the church and the materials available and on site, a 1 day build is entirely reasonable. If they have to go through guild carpenters, it'll probably take a week or 2. It may take a few days or weeks to get the materials.

[Angelalex242]

The High Magic setting mostly means the building, when finished, can expect to be protected by the appropriate Hallow spell. It's important to get that Hallow spell up, because it's 'not a real church' till it's been properly Hallowed.

[Chronos]

And if you don't, you get swordfights breaking out all the time. Immortal blood is a pain to clean up, and nobody wants a head to roll down their pew when they're trying to pray.

[Martin Greywolf]

This is one of those questions that you won't answer properly by just googling - you tend to find ridiculous things, like hundreds of years for a cethedral and six months for a village house because all the people are on vacation.

Assumptions

I'll assume that the period and tech level is late medieval, no magic is involved and that the followers of this religion are more or less a representative sample of all of the city's residents. We're also assuming that this city is in France-like terrain, with easy access to lumber and fairly easy acces to stone.

Who will build this?

For the most part, not the followers of the religion - lack of expertise aside, it's illegal and city guilds (masons and carpenters, most likely) would get involved. So it almost doesn't matter how many followers you have or what their vacation time looks like, because they will barely get involved.

All the work on site will be done by the hired craftsmen, so the only place where you could use your cheap labor is transportation. If one of your followers is an owner of a forest or quarry, you may get the stine and lumber at cost or for free, otherwise you have to buy them from someone.

That all said, there will be a stock of materials already in the city, new houses are built farily regularly, and old ones need repairs, so you will not have to travel to some distant quarry, you'll just have to shell out some cash. If you were building an entire castle or a fortified tower, it would be a different story.

Vacation times

Technically, there were a lot of free days in actual middle ages, but 1) people did work during them as well, just not as much (if you own cattle, it still needs seeing to) and 2) working on said days, like on building a building, was illegal. You'd get fined at the very least.

As for paesants being out of work in winter, yeah, no. There are still things you need to do, just not as much as during sowing or harvesting seasons. And even if that was the case, it doesn't apply to towns and cities, farmers live in villages. City life carries on uninterrupted during the winter.

Building strategy 1

First way to build this is to purchase a building or two and start to alter them. At this point, you only need to tear down some walls (make sure they aren't structural, or tear down walls but keep pillars that were in them in place) and do some interior decorating. If you manage to get your hands on some building that was already menat for public use, like a bathhouse, pub or some such, you will be done extremely quickly.

Building strategy 2

Okay, so you don't have a building, you bought a plot of land with a recently burned down houses and have to start over. What you need to do is make this a two-stage project, first erect a timber, straw and clay house, and then start to rebuild sections of it into stone. This was fairly common thing to do, so you should have little trouble finding people skilled at this work.

The initial structure will take about a week or two. A bare minimum if you pay extra is something like 3 days, but that will require 18 hour shifts and may be illegal because of that. If you have some sort of standardization in your city buildings, it can be even faster than that, Venetian arsenal could build a house-sized warship in a day, but needed to have pre-cut timbers in stock to do that.

The stone rebuilding, well. It really depends on how much stone shaping you want, how big the area is and how busy your local stonemasons are - and also whether or how they pre-shape stones. There are records of multiple houses beig rebuilt into stone structures in a single year, and I'd ballpark bare minimum at about a month. But that would involve paying harsh premiums to stonemasons and being their only customer, so you're probably looking at doing this the usual way, piecemeal and over a year or two, when time, scheduling and funds allow.

What about the magic, though?

It probably won't matter much, unless you get into spells that can create ready-made stones or timbers from nothing. The greatest possible time save is if you have something that can easily shape stone, because that one will more or less make it possible to use strategy 2's first step to straight up make a stone building in a week. How much that will cost... well, that depends too much on how expensive are the services of wizards in your setting. Probably quite a lot.