The best loot I ever received in a game of Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t a magical weapon or suit of armor that would make my character more effective. It was a derelict haunted tavern deeded to my party by a feckless noble in the Waterdeep: Dragon Heist campaign.
Trollskull Manor was a money sink, but it was our money sink. Owning it created a lot of problems like a new rivalry with the tavern keeper across the street and a nasty rodent infestation caused by wererats. But it also allowed us to flesh out our characters with goals that had nothing to do with the campaign’s quests. Our Druid used the cellar to grow mushrooms and make cheese, the Rogue started up a chamber of commerce with other local businesses, and my drow Warlock gathered information from some of the city’s shadier residents over drinks and games of Sava. The tavern got everyone invested in the setting, even those with no previous attachments to the Forgotten Realms and its place amongst the best tabletop RPGs.
My love of that ramshackle pub is why I was so excited to see Wizards of the Coast offer up rules for bastions in the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide, encouraging Dungeon Masters to give their players somewhere to call home between adventures to make them feel like they have a real stake in the game world. It’s a new spin on an old idea for the game — the earliest versions of D&D offered rules for players to build strongholds and attract followers as they grew in power, but the concept hasn’t been officially supported since 4th Edition.
Mod-cons
The new DMG rules draw on the mechanics for downtime activities published in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. Rather than trying to gather contacts, craft, or gamble on their own when they have a week free between adventures, bastions give players the chance to build structures and hire NPCs to help them gain knowledge, items, and money. There are some great ideas in the rules, but I wish they were friendlier to lower level characters, better balanced, and offered more roleplaying hooks based on how the party is actually using their space.
Players can’t gain a bastion until level 5, well after the level 1-5 adventure Dragon Heist turns over control of Trollskull Manor. The reason is because bastions start with two special facilities which can provide bonus mundane and magic loot. A sanctuary offers a charm that allows a character to cast Healing Word without using a spell slot, while spending a short rest in a workshop can provide heroic inspiration.
But the bastion also starts with mundane facilities like a kitchen or bedroom that don’t provide any game effects beyond giving PCs a place to hang out. Why not encourage the DMs to introduce the bastion at level 2 or whenever appropriate to the story and just provide these basic features, allowing characters to upgrade them when they hit level 5 to introduce their mechanically relevant versions? Bastion upgrades are a great way of providing a sense of progress in the campaign beyond conventional loot and leveling, and getting that going earlier seems like it would be satisfying without any impact on game balance.
A place to call home
The special facilities are far from created equal both in terms of flavor or mechanical impact. I love the archive, a level 13 feature that can be used to grant PCs advantage on knowledge checks when they spend time between sessions studying the books in the collection — which can be expanded by spending more gold. The garden offers the same mix of flavor and utility, allowing characters to grow healing herbs for potions, food for rations, and flowers for perfume or bouquets.
In contrast, using the theater to put on a production takes three times as long as any of the other facilities and only provides the benefit of a single application of bardic inspiration. That’s an especially underwhelming reward since a Bard is the character class most likely to be interested in building the facility in the first place. The level 13 pub provides a bounty of magical drinks, but it’s baffling that there isn’t a lower level version that just provides the information-gathering benefit. DMs often want to give players rumors about plots going on, so having them come from your bartender or barista would actually help them with the game regardless of how powerful the PCs are.
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A small table of bastion events provides a lot of potential hooks like refugees or even friendly monsters showing up or an opportunity to host a festival. I’d love to have seen an expanded version of this that goes beyond generic events that could happen at any bastion to be tailored to specific facilities like pilgrims arriving to visit your reliquary or the animals in your menagerie breeding. Tables could also be different based on where your bastion is, whether in the heart of a bustling city like Waterdeep or tucked away in the wilderness.
Hopefully the DMG is just the start to Wizards of the Coast’s exploration of bastions. Going out on adventures is the heart of D&D, but after a long day of slaying monsters and disabling traps it’s nice to have a place to come home to.
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