Our first evil campaign, castle building, undead workers advice


Advice


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So for some back story here, our group is doing it's first evil campaign and all of the PC's are undead, modified lich with the phylactery but not that abilities or stat bonuses is how we decided to play it. Now we were going to go with a dungeon keeper type game where they make a stronghold and attack villages and fight off good parties of adventurers with their own characters and raised undead.

Now this all sounded great, but I'm having real trouble figuring out how to handle these guys so I need some advice on a few points.

1st they want to find an onyx mine. The idea is that two of the characters have craft (gem cutting) and appraise as skills and want to find an onyx mine so they can mine their own stones and cut them according to value so they can start raising undead minions. They want to raise skeleton miners and use them as workers to mine the gems for them.

All of that sounds pretty solid to me but can they actually do this rules wise? Can animated skeletons mine things? How do I figure how much they mine? Can they cut their own gems? Should I even let them find an onyx mine because they seem intent on wandering till they find one and I don't know how to handle this if I say no.

They also want to use the workers to build a castle. Some of the players have engineering and architect as professions so they are arguing that it should let them direct the skeleton workers since their characters know how to build structures if they can find materials, but once again there aren't many rules for castle building that I can find and I don't know if that would even work as far as using the skeletons to do the labor and how I'd do the progress.

I really don't want to squash their creativity but I've never done an evil game before and I don't really know how to handle all this and I can't find a good resource on castle building or the PC's managing things like a mine or a work force when said work force is undead skeletons.


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On the one hand, zombies and skeletons are supposed to be pretty darn mindless. On the other hand, Paizo firmly believes them capable of being farm field-workers. So I'd go ahead and let them be miners and construction workers as long as they have intelligent foremen with a few ranks in the appropriate Profession skill (which specifies that you can direct underlings). Fine work like gem-cutting seems over the line, though; that takes real skill.

I see no reason not to let them find an existing onyx mine to take over, especially if they have high ranks in Knowledge(geography). Or they could find an onyx merchant, make them tell where they get their stuff, and follow the chain back until they get to a mine.


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They want to cut the gems themselves to a specific gold value so they can reanimate anything they want without wasting gems. Three of the four players have access to reanimate dead so they want to build an army of undead laborers since they are dead themselves time is no object.

Any ideas on castle building? Like is there something to go off of here how would I handle that?


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I believe you want either the kingdom building rules or the Downtime rules from Ultimate Campaign. I'm pretty sure either will allow you to do castle-building, and the former at least should be able to handle mining. Haven't used either of them myself, though, so that's basically all I know about them.


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Most of what you are saying sounds reasonable as an idea. Unless you were planning some other type of campaign and they just want to sit around mining and raising undead, to mine some more, to raise more undead, then that seems like a good starting point.

Let them find an onyx mine. Obviously it should be occupied. Instead of letting themm drive off the miners, they come in from a back entrance and have to work their way upwards (or it's an underground facility, like a dwarven or gnome outpost outpost and they have to reach the central forge/control center.) They start out scaring a few miners, then some mine guards show up, with patrols. Then the local adventurers and some priests with holy water to destroy the undead that they're making... and finally they kill/drive everyone off and have the mine.

Undead should be fine for mining, but like mentioned, you'll want some intelligent people to sift the ore and rocks. A skeleton is fine for mining at picking at the wall and even hauling mine carts, but expecting them to find the valuable rocks amongst the the ordinary rocks is only possible if the items are blatantly obvious, (a lot of even shiny stone look just like rocks until cut), expecting Appraise is out of the question, so you need someone on site constantly or you'll lose a lot of onyx beneath piles of dirt and stone.

As for castle building... well, the labor's probably free. You've supposedly got the Engineers and architects amongst you. Just basically have them start small. Don't just say castle, not even keep. Start with a room or two, give it a reasonable price and just make weekly rolls like Crafting (though I am sure there's rules for building castles somewhere.) Still have to pay 1/3rd for materials. You need wood, mortar, tools, even sitting on an onyx mine (that stone may not be right for construction.)

Or make it easier on them. When they take over the outpost everything was destroyed (in the fight or by the owners to try and stop the undead) and there's just one solid building or cavern (if underground) remaining and that would make a logical starting hhub to build off of or improve (into a keep, then a fort, then a castle.)


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About crafting the gems - somewhere, I believe in the crating rules, there's rules on how long it takes to craft a item per gp value. Better skill rolls, shorter time.

Some one on their team is going to need profession miner to run the mine.


Dot.


Just because they find an onyx mine, doesn't mean they suddenly get heaps of free onyxes. Shouldn't focus on the fact that it's onyx, though, yes it's directly useful for animating dead, but for gameplay purposes, it's no different than finding any other means of production and using it to produce wealth to then buy onyx (finding a gold mine, for example, or getting a lumber camp).

Mining takes time and resources. Getting it operational should require capital and skilled (sentient) labor. Should take a while to start getting raw resources out, and then to process it into usable forms.

Also, don't forget that undead labor is... actually fairly expensive labor. 25gp per skeleton, up front. Being mindless, I'd expect more accidents to happen with this kind of labor, and especially since they don't heal, you'll need to renew the force regularly. And that's excluding any adventurers who might take an offense to your operations. Normal labor, for example, is 1sp per day. A single skeleton costs about a year's worth of salary. On top of this would come the salaries for the trained foremen and managers.

So balance-wise, sure, let them get some benefits from such a mine, but make sure to tack on some costs on it to keep it from breaking the game.

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