| Kai_G |
If you wanted to build a defensible base of operations on the cheap, what build do you think could do it best? What spells and abilities do you think are the best tips and tricks for creating a safe haven?
Perhaps you've recovered the great wondrous relic from the BBG and want to protect it from being taken back, how would you build a vault?
| avr |
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Hmm. We're going to assume a samsaran wizard or arcanist here; mystic past life is optional and not required. There's a racial spell we're after.
First I think you start with a cave. Lost Passage can't conceal a tower on a mountaintop, but a cave entrance is another matter. Adventurers find these places all the time, you probably have a dozen to choose from. If you need to locate a new one then go to appropriate terrain and spend some days summoning a few earth elementals to go look. Cover the entrance with Lost Passage and spend 10K casting permanency. Some costs are unavoidable.
Also you're going to want to protect it from scrying. A bag of holding worth of lead (500 gp for 250 lbs.) and the Fabricate spell to turn it into wall lining will help. You'll probably want to cover the lead up with some other substance as well. Some work to prevent/divert water from leaking onto and through the lead would be sensible, the knowledge (engineering), craft (stonemasonry) or profession (stonemason) skill and several castings of Stone Shape - before the lead lining - might do. That's probably the longest part.
Protecting the vault when you're not there is going to be difficult against anything close to your level though. Fire Trap and Explosive Runes are obvious, and if you do get mystic past life then Glyph of Warding/Greater GoW (via witch) is possible. Or you could make traps with skills rather than magic, which takes forever but can be effective; e.g. Grimtooth's Traps. If you can contract out protecting the vault to some violent but trustworthy locals that's ideal of course. If you're planning to live there that's a different matter, I haven't assumed so.
The entrance might be closed with Stone Shape again (probably best), or closed with a door with an Arcane Lock spell, or you could go for the showy and use a Symbol of Sealing. A decoy vault might possibly use the Symbol.
The item you're hiding itself could be concealed inside the lead with Fabricate, or made invisible or shrunk with Invisibility or Shrink Item/Permanency.
Most of the above requires no more than CL10 and the Permanency Spell, or 4th level spells so should be well within your level limit. The Symbol of Sealing and Greater Glyph of Warding however are 6th level spells so up against the top of your level limit.
| Coidzor |
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Expeditious Construction is the lowest level spell that will permanently create a wall.
Crafter's Fortune is a level 1 spell that speeds up mundane crafting, and may let someone reliably make a check without any ranks invested in the skill at all by boosting their bonus enough.
Expeditious Excavation is the lowest level spell that will dig you a ditch or allow you to start digging a pit, such as for a basement or to lay a foundation. Admittedly, given you can only do it a few times a day, even at higher levels, mooks with shovels are probably faster.
Incendiary Runes is the lowest level spell that creates a permanent spell trap. Works great along with things like a necklace of fireballs or casks of gunpowder. Weak damage in and of itself, but it has no save, so it's nice against weak things, but does tend to work better as a trigger for even worse things to happen or to light a fuse.
Obsidian Flow can give you basic 1d6 damage spikes at the bottom of a pit trap without having to spend any money. It also lets you create permanent areas of difficult terrain wherever you want, you just have to break line of effect by covering up areas of the ground you don't want to be difficult terrain within the spell's AoE. Or you could just re-smooth the ground in selected areas if you didn't want to leave it all as difficult terrain. Said difficult terrain can combine well with other hazards and traps.
Stone Shape can let you join sections of stone together seamlessly without needing mortar. Given that one of the kinds of walls that Expeditious Construction creates is mortarless stone, you can use Stoneshape to make those walls more solid, or at least one solid piece even if they're not able to bear loads better.
Depending upon how your GM interprets things, Stone Shape may work on obsidian, allowing you to use Obsidian Flow to create something other than the generic loose stone created by Expeditious Construction. If so, you could use it to make some cheap jewelry and the like to potentially use as bait, especially if you used it to pad out some actual treasure or some of those fake shiny coins that kobolds make as lures.
Wood Shape could let you make individual sections of palisade a bit faster, I suppose, or make lattices, grates, and so on and so forth. Can combo with Transfiguring Touch.
Climbing Beanstalk is the lowest level way to make relatively short ladders. Probably better off just making them the old-fashioned way or using Fabricate unless you're going for the aesthetic.
Unseen Engineers will let you make traps very, very quickly. It may also allow you to dig deep, wide pits and trenches in a matter of rounds.
Layering things like compressed earth, stone, and metal will not only make walls more resistant to spells like Disintegrate, as it requires them to punch through multiple layers of material, but it will also limit the number of different kinds of creatures that can get through them, it'll even stymie Earth Glide due to the metal. As would something like wood or something like water, come to think of it, if you could keep them there and intact.
Depending upon how the GM rules things, Anthropomorphic Animal + Permanency can lead to a servitor-race of animal people that are just smart enough to be trained to do various things. If you can hack getting Awaken on top of that, then even better, especially if the benefits are inherited by the offspring without having to recast the spells.
Fabricate may be something where you can cast it on the ground and then have a ditch or trench dug with a commensurate amount of dirt formed into compressed earth wall.
Curse Terrain and its spell line could be used along with Permanency to defend areas or cut off approach to the structure from one or more directions. Although not super reliably, if you combine it with other ways to funnel and delay people, you would maximize the chance of them running into a hazard from the curse.
Rune of Warding and alternating between rarely resisted damage types can be nice for a simple blasting trap that costs a whole lot less than a mechanical trap dealing similar damage, especially since you can use Stone Shape and other magic and mundane means to make a whole mess of doorways and the like.
Of course, if things like Blood Money are on the table or money is no object, you can get real ridiculous and over-engineered.
If you have access to the spell Lissalan Snake Sigil, that can greatly debuff certain levels of people for days if they don't spend the time to dispel it, but it can also give a couple of different debuffs that might just be accepted as annoyances while they press on as well. Sepia Snake Sigil works well if you combine it with active patrols and can muster forces to go around a solitary captured individual in stasis and then release them only to subdue them.
Other trap spells or trap-related spells of potential interest would include:
Improve Trap(Kobold), Explosive Runes, Fire Trap, Alarm and Invisibility Alarm when combined with Permanency and something else like guardian monsters, Sentry Skull, Symbol of Slowing, Symbol of Revelation, Symbol of Mirroring for your guardian monsters, Symbol of Laughter, Symbol of Exsanguination, Phantom Trap, Illusory Wall.
Conjure Deadfall, may be of use depending upon your GM's final call, as it is a way to get some no-save damage, even if it is one-use, you just have to rig up an apparatus to hold it and then drop it when necessary. You'd have to discuss with your GM about whether this would save you any money making the mundane part of the trap to load it with the ammunition you've created magically for free. If it's made on the floor and left there, it can also serve as a blockade for certain areas that could then serve to funnel them into a trap or monster's lair while they dealt with it, unless your GM rules it can only be conjured mid-air.
As far as baiting traps goes, the Create Armaments spell has a loophole for wealth generation by making weapons and armor out of solid gold, especially Chainmail armor and Tower Shields. Solid gold or gold-plated weapons and armor are very shiny and will attract the attention of murder hobos, so it can act as bait.
The Full Pouch spell can be used to cheaply (or for free with False Focus) produce an awful lot of alchemical items such as Acid or Alchemist Fire or even certain kinds of fireworks over time. This can both produce bait by having some alchemical items that appear to be treasure as well as be used to make traps or arm guardian creatures.
Metamagic of interest would include Heighten Spell in order to make the various spell traps have more difficult Save DCs, Disable Device DCs, and Perception DCs.
Planar Binding and getting a Djinn can provide you with all of the plant-based poison you could ever need for your mundane traps, saving you a pretty penny.
Animate Dead can make you a whole mess of Beheaded. If you have an area where they can't get out of it and that enemies will get funneled into, such as by being dropped there by a pit trap, the Beheaded can be made with ranged touch attacks that deal energy damage of various types or even have swarm attacks. At the low, low cost of oodles upon oodles of heads, you could make a room where statistically, most of the monsters in the game would perish from the sheer number of ranged touch attacks they'd be dealing with.
Bloody Skeletons would be another option, as there are only specific ways to kill those. Call Animal could be employed to get animals with a suitably vicious chassis for use as such a guardian creature.
Create Undead can make Juju Zombies which retain their class levels along with a number of other forms of undead. Though with intelligent undead, many of them carry with them some risk of undermining your defenses to escape, though there are also a few things one can make with Create Undead that do obey their creator or will if the creator is high enough level.
Call Animal can also be employed to help gather animals to use for the Anthropomorphic Animal + Awaken + Permanency combo to make a servitor race to guard an area.
In terms of materials, you could use Transfiguring Touch to turn dirt or stone or even ice into Wood or Iron, it's pretty cheap as long as you're not using the higher CL ability to make precious metals.
Transfiguring Touch can combine well with Wood Shape or Stone Shape to get things like grates in the shape you want and then you can make them iron. It's also a way for you to cheaply turn wooden doors into iron doors for your dungeon's security.
Wall of Stone and Wall of Iron naturally deserve a mention for being able to produce materials. Ice Spears and Ice Slick are spells that create ice that sticks around until it melts, unfortunately Snow Shape doesn't seem to allow reshaping ice, only snow or making snow into temporary ice weapons. Still, Ice Spears could be used to form an icy palisade in an appropriately cold environment and Ice Slick in such an environment would also have its uses for making treacherous floors and delaying intruders.
Wall of Fire + Permanency is always fun, not only for creating a curtain of fire somewhere, but you can also try to do kooky things like having a number of them somewhere heating up a bunch of water or sand or the like in order to have a scalding trap or provide heating to an area or what have you.
Telekinetic Assembly would allow you to take the materials to make a siege engine somewhere and then construct it without help.
Mirror Polish can give you strategically placed mirrors for various purposes, especially if you have access to lasers.
Harvest Season causes a plant to go through a full growth cycle. If spammed it could cause something like a tree to overgrow an entrance to a place, helping to hide it.
| Coidzor |
I just remembered something. IIRC, sealing an area completely with lead will prevent anyone from being able to scry there, except for maybe with some of the very highest level spells(?). Transfiguring Touch can also make lead at CL 14.
So you could seal the maguffin or the room it is stored in completely with lead and save on a lot of headaches. The entire dungeon could also get sealed with lead and other substances if you really wanted to take the time.
With Teleport Trap + Permanency, you could certainly make it take a fair amount of time just digging it out or the Wish spell to safely get inside the box containing the dungeon. Although to be honest, I'm not sure how they'd be able to scry enough to get a clear view of the place as long as they weren't able to scry on the maguffin itself and no entities known to them would be in the area enough to let them form a clear idea of the destination.
This thread may also be of interest for making a dungeon ecology from (mostly) scratch.
If you wanted to build a defensible base of operations on the cheap, what build do you think could do it best? What spells and abilities do you think are the best tips and tricks for creating a safe haven?
Perhaps you've recovered the great wondrous relic from the BBG and want to protect it from being taken back, how would you build a vault?
As for builds, most of the good spells seem to be Wizard, Cleric, or Druid, go figure. So your best bet would be to be part of a group that included at least one of each.
If you have to go with only one, then an Unsworn Shaman can get some highlights from the Cleric and Druid lists and cherry pick spells from the Wizard list each day. I ended up using one of those when I was doing the Dungeon Keeper portion of Way of the Wicked where you've got an evil lair and you need to defend it against adventurers.
Wizards can do most of it and if they take Craft Wondrous Item and custom magic items are on the table, then they can do even more. Craft Wondrous Item could also be used to make an at-will item of something like Expeditious Construction or Expeditious Excavation to make those processes go even faster.
For a Wizard the False Focus feat is useful for cutting costs on several spells that you'd cast numerous times.
Craft Construct would be very useful, not only for getting some servitors with SLAs to help build and fortify a place, but also to create guardians for it. What kind of guardians is its own discussion. Or at least, it'd really clutter up this individual post if I went into that, and I fear I've already had enough of a mess made with my first reply to the thread. :V Getting something with At-Will Disintegrate could be very useful as both a guardian and for making the place and tidying up excess materials after completion. If you're going through mostly solid rock it only takes about 800 Disintegrates or about 80 minutes to reach the bottom of Sekamina, for instance.
Beyond Craft Wondrous Item for access to even more spells than normal, Craft Construct for servitor creatures and potentially their spellcasting, and False Focus for Wizards to help cut costs, I can't really think of any feats directly useful to the task of making and fortifying a stronghold or dungeon.
I suppose Leadership makes this better, since it makes everything go better, or at least goes with anything, much like Guile's Theme.
| Mark Hoover 330 |
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
If Ultimate Campaign rule for Downtime is being used, a Shack can be constructed without magic or specialized tools by a single PC using basic skills in a matter of 3 days. Such a structure is described as:
This no-frills wooden shelter contains a simple table, pallet bed, and stool.
Four PCs with reasonable access to a settlement of any size could easily build 4 "shacks" as sections of a 1-room cottage; a very simple cabin with enough interior space for them to occupy while cooking over an open fire outside.
Upgrading one of these to the "Office" room gives that section a locking door. Another section might be upgraded to "Storage" to open the space and provide a bit more security and organization for the property of the group.
Once all of this is in place (roughly about 5 days work) you could start adding in spells. Alarm at level 1, along with just using the wizard's familiar as a lookout. Expeditious Construction and Excavation to add layers of defense around the cabin.
As time (and treasure) increases the "stronghold" could be upgraded with additional storage in the cellar (excavated by spells), an escape tunnel into the dry moat outside, some ladders could be made as portable bridges and climbing aids in case of siege, and eventually down the road more levels added above the first for labs, workrooms, libraries, and defensive towers.
Don't forget that once they hit level 3 there are spells like Arcane Lock, Curse Terrain (Lesser) and (if it's really cold) Snow Shape for outright construction/defense. If you're using skills, especially if you're still using the Downtime rules, consider Guidance (+1 Competence on a Skill check), Enhanced Diplomacy (+2 Competence on a Diplomacy check), Crafter's Fortune (+5 Luck bonus on Craft skill), Visualization of the Mind (+5 Enhancement bonus on checks made with the chosen mental stat) and the applicable stat-enhancing spell.
If for example your Diplomacy person in the party, a PC w/a 16 Cha, 3 ranks and having the skill as a Class Skill, is going to use Diplomacy to earn Goods under the Downtime rules, said PC could in fact hit a +17 Diplomacy check. Since you can take 10 on Downtime skill checks, that results in 2 goods earned for 20 gold.
At the same time the party Wizard using Craft, Aid Another from their familiar, and the spells mentioned above added to a base 18 Int and 3 ranks, delivers a +25; taking 10 gets this wizard to a 35 for 3 Labor.
Now, if you DON'T have access to a settlement or you're not using the Downtime rules, there are still plenty of things you can do right at level 1 with basic equipment and no spells to protect yourself and your party.
Plenty of survival videos on TV or online show that a trained survivalist with a knife or hand axe can manufacture a survival shelter in a matter of hours. Consider asking for GM leeway to use the Survival skill to do the same. Then take that a step further: use shovels to dig ditches for added protection; pile the PCs' gear around the inside of the structure for extra support of the walls; use Craft: Carpentry or Profession: Woodcutter to enhance those walls thickness and HP/Hardness.
Over time you can hunt large game in the area. Use Craft: Leather or Profession: Tanner to generate hide and leather from your prey - use this stretched over your survival shelter to seal/protect the roof or walls. Craft: Pottery and a simple pit oven in the ground can, given enough time, produce clay bricks and roof tiles.
For simple defenses, nothing is cheaper/easier than sharpening sticks. Got lots of branches or saplings around? Cut and sharpen, then embed them in thatch, stick them point-up in the ground, have them hanging overhead, etc. Another way to go would be lining areas with jagged or uneven rocks. Just creating areas of Difficult Terrain slows your enemies, potentially funneling them through choke points you control; if the rocks are sharp enough they might actually take some damage.
Starting with these skills and adding in castings each day of Expeditious Construction/Excavation alone would net you a wilderness redoubt in no time!
| Coidzor |
Let's make an example of what a party of 4 level 2 adventurers might be able to get up to within a single month.
Defining Parameters
At 2nd level you get a 3' tall by 3' wide by 10' long wall per spell slot for Expeditious Construction.
A Wizard 2 with an 18 Intelligence has a total of 3 first level slots. Across 30 days that's a total of 90 spell slots. That could make 900' of 3x3 wall, 450' of 3x6 wall, or 300' of 3x9 wall, and so on.
For Downtime capital we'll assume that the Wizard earns 2 per day and the rest of the party earn 1 per day each for 5 total per day.
On to the Example Scenario
A wooden Shack costs 100 gp to buy outright from someone else or to purchase the materials with which to make it and it takes 3 days, if you upgrade from wooden to brick or stone that increases the price to 160 gp, and if you spend time and skill checks to gather materials by earning capital that halves the cost. For a party of 4, they should be able to earn the capital necessary to make a wooden Shack by adding one day beforehand and a brick/stone Shack by adding two days beforehand, for a final time of 4 or 5 days for a Shack, and this would halve the gp cost to 50 or 80 gp respectively.
Depending upon the GM, one might be able to get the labor capital requirement for a Shack waived by having the party work together on it and may also be able to cut the time down, since 4 party members would be quadruple the expected number of people from the description, but that's getting into a grey area. Similarly, determining how much time and materials it would take for the roof if one has already magicked up walls is up to the GM, though I'd imagine it'd at least halve the required materials.
If you wanted to instead have the equivalent of several Shacks, say 1 per party member, arranged so that they're adjacent and only have exterior walls, that would take 8 days to create 9' tall walls for a 20 by 20 square with Expeditious Construction. 7 days if you'd make one 10' long section of the wall yourselves so that a door could be put in place. Whereas building all 4 of those Shacks through mundane means via Downtime would take around 16 or 20 days without spending extra gp to get extra Labor capital for accelerated building time, or if the party pooled their capital together and then built separately simultaneously that'd be 4 days of gathering capital and 3 days of building for 7 total, .
However, casting spells does not interfere with spending time earning capital in the Downtime system. That takes 8 hours per day, the same way as working at a Craft or Profession skill. So while you're building up capital to make the roof, you can also get to work on the walls.
Alternatively, you could use Expeditious Construction to create a wall around what will be a compound. The largest square you could get with 6' tall walls would be a 110' by 110' square containing 2420 5' squares for building. Going with 9' tall walls you could get a 70' by 70' sqare which would contain 980 squares.
Or after you make a nice 20x20 frame for the start of the core building, you could make a 6' tall wall in an 80' by 80' configuration around it, leaving you ~1200 squares within which to expand the compound before needing to expand the walls or make them the external walls of a building rather than freestanding walls around a compound.
We'll continue on with the 80 by 80 exterior wall and dig a trench around it, save for a 10' wide space which we'll reserve for an entrance.
A shovel allows a standard person to dig 2 cubic feet per minute, so 4 people with shovels can dig out a 5 by 5 by 5 pit in about 15.5 minutes. 6 feet vertical from a wall + 5 feet down from a trench equals an effective 11' wall to non-Large+ creatures. Not going to hold up to a siege or a dedicated force, but a decent start.
So that will take a total of ~5031.25 minutes to dig that trench. That's almost 84 hours, across 30 days, that's about 2.8 hours of work each day, which could potentially be squeezed in between other Downtime activities, but if not that would be about 8 days of 10 hour shifts with no Downtime activities or Craft/Profession checks.
Alternatively, if they have access to hirelings, they could buy untrained ditch-diggers at 1 sp per day of work, depending upon how the GM defines it. Assuming an 8 hour work day, that means that per day each hireling is digging 960 cubic feet of dirt and there's 40250 cubic feet of dirt total, so that's about 42 man-days of labor. So ultimately it should cost about 4.2 gp, which the party can probably recoup with the days saved if they choose to put their skills to work to generate income, depending upon what skills they have invested in.
So let's say that our 4 adventurers have gone ahead and hired 6 hirelings to dig out the trench over the course of a week, paying out 4.2 gp and they've elected to continue on with the 20 by 20 bunch of 4 Shacks with the walls mostly built by Expeditious Construction idea. We'll say for now that they're building those shacks as stone/brick shacks to go with the walls and that using Expeditious Construction halved the required Goods necessary and working themselves waived the Labor requirement, so they spent 80 gp and 2 days earning the capital to do it and then another 3 days building them for 5 total.
(Alternatively we could say it'd halve the Labor capital and they'd pay a total of 160 gp and take 4 days earning it but the work would be done by others over those 3 days so they could earn money or work on earning capital for other projects)
Now they have basic living space for all of them with some shared common indoor space in the center and there's a trench going around their new home along with the start of an exterior wall. They also have 25 days left for them to build up capital, build things, recruit people, or earn money.
If they wanted to make that trench wider and into the beginnings of a moat 10' wide, then that'd be just over 42 man-days, so they could hire the same 6 guys again to work for a week, then hire one person to take a half day doing the last bit of it, or, alternatively, the whole crew an extra day to account for moving the dirt. That'd bring up their total expended gold to 89 gp
Possibly the dirt from digging the trench could be put to use making the walls thicker, or packed into a ledge so that the wall can be looked out over from inside.
At any rate, the next obvious move to make this compound more secure would be to put in some kind of gate or build a gatehouse-like structure to regulate access. An actual Gatehouse would take longer than a month to build, so we'll pass over that for now.
However, a Guard Post serves a similar function, it just can't take as many upgrades and can be upgraded into a Gatehouse later and it's faster to build. It would take them 3 days and 160 gp to earn the capital and it would be done in 20 days.
Instead of having people come in from the nearby settlement to do guard duty for them, especially since they'd be 1st level Commoners or maybe Experts if they were lucky, the adventurers elect to hire a team of Guards to handle manning the Guard Post.
Recruiting the Guards requires at least one of the Adventurers to have a Leadership Score of 1 or higher, but as level 2 characters, this should be a given assuming at least one character didn't heavily dump Charisma. It also takes them 1 day and 50 gp to be able to start recruiting them and a day for them to finish mustering.
They've now spent about 299 gp as a party on this as well as 9 days either earning capital or actively building. The Guard Post will finish up about the end of the month, so until then they can have the Guards work for hire to generate a bit of extra gold or leave that until the end of the month when there will be a guard post for them to man.
If the party just spent their time trying to earn money and Taking 10 on it, we'll assume they average 1.45 gp each per day for 121.8 over the 21 days, putting them about 177.2 gp down from where they started, not counting things like living expenses and food.
They could also decide that they want to work on earning capital and expanding their ranks and building Bunks on site for their men, even if it will still be under construction after the first month ends. 200 gp and 4 days would get them the capital to start building Bunks and another 50 gp and 1 day would get them another team of Guards.
Since Bunks provide housing for 10 people per room, and Guards are typically 5 per team, that's a full room and a full guard rotation.
That puts them at 549 gp spent and 2 weeks of time accounted for.
3 days and 160 gp could gain them a drawbridge if they wanted to complete the trench and make a full moat. Add another 9 gp or so if you want to have hirelings digging for the entire month to dig a 10' wide, 10' deep trench around the place, including under the drawbridge. That'd be 718 gp, just shy of 180 gp per party member, spent with 6 days left unaccounted for on the part of the 4 adventurers.
Those last 6 days can see them earn back about 34.8 gp, plus about 2.4 gp for the 2 days of the first team of Guards and another 25.2 gp for the days of the two teams of Guards working together as one organization based out of your HQ, for a total of 62.4 gp. That makes the party only 655.6 gp down altogether. So that's the equivalent of 1344.4 gp in their pooled wealth.
(Of course, they may be too far away from town for the Guards to be able to work based out of the HQ, which is probable if they just claimed a stretch of wilderness and set up shop.)
From there a Kitchen would probably be a good idea for feeding not only the PCs but their men as well. If they wanted to start having the place generate some income they could put in one each of a Kitchen, Bar, Common Room, and Lodgings rooms. Then from there it could be upgraded with things like a Lavatory, Bath, Storage, Garden, or even a Storefront. They should be able to afford all that within their budget if they take the time to earn the capital for half price.
If they'd set out to make an Inn from the getgo, then it'd take them 21 days and 1065 gp to get the capital to build a stereotypical inn (1 Bar, 1 Bath, 1 Bedroom, 1 Common Room, 1 Kitchen, 1 Lavatory, 1 Lodging, 1 Stall, 1 Storefront) per Downtime, and then the longest thing to build of all that would be the Lodging at 30 days, so that's 51 days total to get the inn functioning, though it could start working as a tavern before then, and they could recoup something like 16%
of the gp they spent on the capital to make the place while waiting.