Costs of city walls

[bczretribution]

does anyone know the prices of walls for various sized cities (as per the dm's guide) or a means of estimating their cost?

[Starglim]

I think a more useful statistic would be man-hours to construct them. There are no columns of thousands of trained stonemasons wandering the land pushing carts of dressed stone, ready for a city council to hire them. They have to take craftsmen out of productive work to build the walls, and what are their neighbours going to do about them gearing up for war over the months or years they're working on it?

If their value in gp becomes relevant for magical reasons, we can then multiply by a typical stonemason's wage.

Having said all that - 1e DMG (you'd probably want to cross-check against the prices of magic items to see if they still fit).

[Nostagar]

bczretribution wrote:

does anyone know the prices of walls for various sized cities (as per the dm's guide) or a means of estimating their cost?

I would suggest looking in the 3rd Ed. book "Stronghold Builder's Guidebook" p37 has a table that lists costs per section & its standard statistics for many different materials.

[Stubs McKenzie]

While it is definitely a good start, "Stronghold Builder's Guidebook"'s costs for... nearly everything... are massively inflated. If you follow their guidelines you will very quickly spend millions upon millions of gold to build a semi decent castle, walls being a major part of that cost. I wish i could tell you where else to look, but i don't have the resources in front of me, I do know there has been discussion of this before, so searching the archives for the SBG will probably prove fruitful.

[Nukruh]

Here are a few book entries for curtain style walls.

Classic Play: Book Of Strongholds & Dynasties
Wall, Fortified 20x20x20
Labour Cost: 400 gp
Materials: 300 gp worked stone, 50 gp raw stone, 100 gp mortar
Total: 850 gp

Stronghold Builders Guide
Masonry 10x10x2 250 gp; 20x20x20 2500 gp
Masonry, Superior 10x10x2 300 gp; 20x20x20 3000 gp
Masonry, Reinforced 10x10x2 450 gp; 20x20x20 4500 gp

For some reason the text offers different numbers such as: Hewn Stone is 600 gp per section (10x10x6) but it has a 10x10x3 costing 40g or a 10x10x12 costing 160. No idea how that math works out.

A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe (Second Edition)
Wall (defensive, stone)
2.5 gp per sq. ft.; 20x20x20 1,000gp
Number of gp equal to one week’s work 6,500 gp; Around 1 day per 1,000 gp.