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(This is mainly a conversion, but does contain a bit of suggestions/houserules)
I've got a character in our current campaign who is becoming increasingly construction focused.
Initially, it was simply upgrading an estate and expanding it to include an orphanage and school, along with some secret labs for the party alchemist. All this got me into the downtime construction ruleset, which worked really well for that sort of thing.
But now the party's gone up four or five levels, and both our wealth and ambitions have too. Now our builder is thinking more about building a mighty fortress a couple days journey outside of town, and the alchemist is looking to build a full university. Not the little university outlined in the examples section of the downtime guide which would handle, tops, about 50 students. Maybe 100 if you really cram them in or assume they only spend a few hours a day there and you can get multiple batches in per day. No, he wants a big university that can handle about five hundred full time students, along with a permanent research staff. And fortified to boot. Our lead engineer decided to combine the two into a fairly massive fortress-university.
Unfortunately, at this point the downtime rules kind of start faltering a bit. The university side still holds up fairly well - between the rooms list and the teams, it can handle scaling up to a full university fairly nicely, actually. The problem is on the defensive side.
The Downtime rule set only has options for two kinds of walls - wood and stone. In both cases, the description makes them both sound more like the sort of thin palisades you'd find around a mansion in town. More than enough to hold off a riot, or even a small horde of soldiers, so long as they don't have anything in the way of siege weaponry (or equivalent spells).
So the question is - what resources are there (player-wise) for building a real stronghold? Something that one could realistically use to build something that could hold off a fairly large, well equipped army with siege weaponry for months or even years?
Given the lack of any alternatives that I could see, I've been working on converting the Stronghold Builder's Handbook into the downtime system. My primary focus is on the rooms and the walls, as that is the meat of the issue. Of particular interest was bringing in all the options for wall materials. The "Extras" are also interesting, but given that they are all magical stuff, I figure that one can simply halve the price and have them cost an appropriate amount of magical capital. Fairly simple and straight forward.
The link to my spreadsheet of room and wall conversions can be found here I'd rather like to get some feedback on this to see if it is reasonable.
Also, if anyone else has any material for using the SBH in pathfinder, particularly for including it into the downtime system, I'd like to know about it.
I love the Stronghold Builder's Guide and will review your work this week!
As far as using the Downtime System, however, just adding the Fortification Augmentation once to stone walls adds +2 Hardness, making it basically the Hardness of iron.
If you just wanted to use the Downtime System as is, apply Fortification multiple times; six applications of Fortification would be Hardness 20 now, the Hardness of adamantine. You would have to figure a good price though. I would do Hardness bonus squared x 75 gp.
I do want to review your work however! I loved the SBG and used it a lot in 3.5 campaigns.
Hmmm... I hadn't thought of using fortification as a stackable upgrade.
According to the downtime system, a 100-200' stretch of stone wall costs 420gp. (that's 20' tall, climb DC 20, and includes a basic gate with a simple lock) It doesn't actually give a hardness, hp, or break DC, but assuming that it is masonry (which matches what you mentioned) it would be hardness 8, 90 hp per 5' section, and break DC 35. Which actually lines up with the "Superior Masonry" from the SBH.
(the only difference between masonry and superior masonry being the extra 5 on the climb DC, representing close fitting bricks and smoothed surfaces. Which would be what a noble would want on their mansion. Which fits, since the general feel of the Downtime system seems geared more towards building in-city properties of all kinds.)
Anyway, as per the Downtime rules, a Defensive Wall is a room that one can simply upgrade with the Fortification augmentation, which costs 300, and adds +2 to the hardness.
Which would effectively give us an iron wall as you said, at the cost of 720 gp per 100-200' stretch. It would even have the same hp as the iron wall. (albeit spread out over 1' thick wall instead of 3"). The only benefit that actually building in iron would be a) less space used, and b)Iron has a higher climb DC.
Thanks for pointing that out. That is by the rules, but I think it fails the sanity check, in multiples ways. :/ I think I'm going to have to look at that some more. 720gp seems far too cheap to get a wall 100' wide and 20' tall that is as hard as iron. Much less a 200' wall 20' high.
I won't even go into boosting it up for Adamantine until I get a grip on the iron equivalence. I think one might simply have to say that the Fortification augmentation can't be applied to stronghold walls, only to actual *rooms.* But I'll go dig around it a bit first.
((As far as that goes, that's one of my few problems with the Downtime system - the excessive variation in sizes. Seems rather odd that you can build anywhere from 100' of wall to 200' of wall for the same cost. There's a few of the larger rooms that suffer the same problem, too. I like SBH's method a lot more - Here's the basic size, if you want bigger, build multiple and describe it as all one room))
I was reading the Downtime constructions just yesterday and wondering how fiddly it would be to try and integrate the SBH, but, lo and behold, it seems that someone's already got there way before me. :D
Well, they actually integrate fairly well. The room list, for instance, merges quite nicely, although there are exceptions.
My merged spreadsheet has where I am at the moment with combining the two.
As far as rooms go, the downtime (DT) rooms are really close to the basic stronghold builder's handbook (SBH) versions in cost, although the descriptions don't exactly match. DT describes basic rooms as simple, decent quality but nothing noteworthy. The SBH versions generally sound like they're low quality and cheapest available stuff sort of thing. Which makes the transition to the "fancy" and "luxury" versions even harsher.
Given that
a) most players and heroes don't really want to live at the bottom end of things, and
b) pathfinder rules take precedence when they actually exist
I took the DT version as the updated form of the basic room, then added in the fancy and luxury versions, and figured out capital costs/benefits along the same lines as the DT version of the room. All in all, this worked quite well.
The only place where I had to create something out of whole cloth was with the libraries / book repositories. SBH has an interesting system of a library room holding X number of book lots. You then buy lots of books to put in them. Different qualities of lots provide different bonuses and take up different numbers of lots. It is a pretty complicated system, just to handle books. Since DT takes priority, I used its "book repositories", which give a flat bonus to one particular subject, and the "Magic repositories" which are magic libraries (same thing, just to Arcana and spellcraft), then added a "Book upgrade" augmentation that increases the size of the bonus. To get the full functionality of the SBH libraries I'll probably also add a "generalist collection" augmentation, that halves the bonus but allows it to be used for *any* knowledge check instead of a single one.
The one other change to rooms is with the super-variable size rooms. Like auditoriums. Which have a size range that essentially lets you double the size (and capacity) of the room without changing the price. I think the SBH version makes a lot more sense. It gives the price for the standard size, and if you want a bigger one, buy multiple. The cost you're saving on the multiple inner walls that aren't there is made up for in the increased cost of the structural supports for the ceiling. (arches and vaults and the like)
Walls:
Honestly, walls are the reason I went back to the SBH from the DT in the first place. Everything else I could have lived with just what is in the DT. But the "defensive wall" that the DT has is, frankly, unsuitable to be a wall for anything other than a mansion or inner-city property. It'll hold off a mob, or a riot, or even opportunistic bandits or raiders. But as soon as you have any kind of siege weaponry (or spellcasting) I think it is safe to say that wall would be breached within the hour, if not within minutes.
To determine the prices in the chart, I took the base price of walls from the SBH at the 1ss size. Which is where 100% of the walls are external walls (and thus built to be defensive structures taking siege weapons). Since 1ss is essentially a 20'x20' square, that means it has 80' of wall, or 16 5' sections. Divide the price for 1ss worth of wall of that material by 16 to get the price for a single 5' section of it. These are the values that I used.
Unfortunately, there's a problem here. You can do the same calculation for any of the sizes in the table, simply adding in the reduction in price based on what percentage of the external wall is of the material you wish to use. When I did this, however, I got an extremely wide range of prices per 5' section. Some were a bit cheaper than the price I worked out from the 1ss size, but most were more expensive. Some are extremely expensive. Currently, I can't think of any reason why building 500' of wall should be more expensive per 5' than building 50' of wall (other than the market dynamics of finding that much material).
Two other things I should note:
1) Construction costs: I determined the Capital costs as such: Take the price for the wall, divide in half, then assign an amount of capital that equals the price in earned cost. Generally speaking, they are almost entirely "Goods" and "Labour", although a few of the odder materials require some "Influence" (bone, glass, and hedge), and the magical ones require "Magic". The Wall of Force option, of course, breaks the trend, as it requires pure magic capital.
2) Currently I only have prices for the structural walls. I haven't done the free standing ones. In interest of simplicity, I am tempted to simply have one price for walls. They have the same characteristics either way, so it seems unnecessarily complex to have two prices simply depending on whether or not they're backing a structure. Wouldn't be too hard to add, though.
3) Inner walls. Given that I switched the pricing for walls over to "price per 5' " instead of basing it on the area of the structure, the formula for pricing internal walls got thrown out the window too. So something needs to be worked out for this.
4) On the walls chart I use decimal values for capital costs. Due to the really low costs for some of these wall types, it was either that or give percentages, and tell people to just calculate the build cost, then have them calculate what percentage of that amount needs to be paid in which kind of capital. Or assign very lopsided capital costs. Like making Dirt walls cost purely labour capital. Which come to think of it, wouldn't actually be unreasonable.
To-do list:
1) Add the most recent rooms that just got added to the OGL (from Heroes of the Wild)
2) Figure out some way to calculate inner wall cost.
3)Convert the list of additions that one can add to the walls and/or structure. Most of these are magical, though, so should be fairly straight forward: Minor changes where rules have changed, tweaking the cost, and assigning a capital cost. Which is probably going to be almost exclusively Magic capital.
3) Decision: Does the Fortification augmentation (+2 hardness, ER 5 vs fire, doors improve to being "Strong wooden doors") apply purely to rooms, or can it be applied to walls? The DT lists "defensive walls" as being a room, so strictly speaking it does apply. That being said, it fails what I'd term to be a sanity check: A basic stone defensive wall with the fortification augmentation (purely using the DT rules here) would cost 820gp, and give you a 200' wall 20' tall that is just as hard and tough as an iron wall (hardness 10, hp 90 per 5' section). Whereas actually building it out of iron would cost 15200gp using my SBH based calculations.
4) Decision: How much technical accuracy is important to have in doing material cost calculations? For instance, the cost of building an iron wall seems extremely low: doing some rough calculations, a 200' wall 20' tall, 3" thick (standard thickness of an iron wall) would use 491558 lb of iron. Which, if bought individually as trade goods (cost 1 sp per lb) would total 49155.8 gp. Even if you halve that to 24577.9 gp to account for the fact that it is being handled in-house instead of purchased ready to go, that's still a fairly huge discrepancy). Although I suppose one could simply hand-wave it away with the justification that in building a wall, one isn't using pure iron, but rather an alloy of some kind. Likewise, in such a bulk project, one would be using lower grade iron, not purified trade bars.
5) Figure out what is OGL and can be posted freely, and what is not. On the DT side, I'm using paizo's online content and the d20pfsrd for convenience, and if I recall correctly, all of that is OGL. On the SBH side, however, I don't think any of it is explicitly OGL, other than the physical statistics for various materials, which are found in quite a few OGL sources. Given that I'm not reposting descriptions, images, or anything that can only be found in the SBH, I don't think there's any concern there. The closest I come is the wall numbers and while those are *derived* from SBH numbers, they aren't the same ones. And I think derivations are generally permissible. That being said, I don't want to step on anyone's toes.