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Now, as another poster started a thread about how the PCs could rebuild a ruined castle, the concept of long term/short term 'bases' for any group of PCs has slowly been ticking in my head.
At low levels, not much more the PCs can do than find an abandoned building or cave and fortify it, but at higher levels they can build their own tower or castle (or town, given enough craft/profession skills, materials, spells and NPC minions) faster than just about anybody else.
What sort of bases, short or long term, have your Players / Your PCs created? How did they do it, how much did they pay for it and how much of it was done by their own two (or more!) hands?
Just quickly putting this out before I go to work (T-T) but I fondly remember a 'base' one group of PCs used, deep in the wilds at around 4th-7th level (some of the PCs had been killed and only recently ressurected) and had found a cave with a spring running through it in a small box canyon. The Ranger managed to find some vines, transplanted them to the narrow opening and with a bit of ingenity from the Wizard, rigged up an irrigation system to keep the vines alive on top of the canyon walls so the entrance was screened.
Inside, the Barbarian and the Rogue had been working their magic, the Barbarian creating some basic earth walls and a pair of pit-traps, and the Rogue had been going Arnold Schwartenegger on us by sharpening lengths of wood to embed in the walls and the pit-traps so A) the enemies that were hunting us couldn't climb over the walls and B) so the Pit-Traps would hurt more.
Their Cleric was burning Sending spells trying to rouse their allies to the threat of the Hob-led Goblin Invasion and not having much luck, given the local Powers-that-Be were convinced after the last trouncing the Goblins wouldn't be back for a generation.
PCs and their hidden cave-base ended up becoming a vital assault-point for the Human/Halfling communities when the Goblins did come and, embarrasingly enough, nearly one-shot the uppity Paladin-Classed Nobles in charge with a couple of explosive-enchanted Catapult shot. >_> . By 6-8th level (Formerly Dead PCs were now catching up quite a lot given the sheer level of enemies they were fighting, both in numbers and skill), PCs had managed to wrangle the Nobles into putting a Teleport Circle in their Noble's stronghold and in the back of the PCs cave, while still doing their damndest to maintain the natural cover of the base.
By this stage, Shape Stone, Transmute Rock to Mud, Transmute Mud to ROck and Disintergrate were used to make larger exits about 100 feet further along the cliffs, connected to the valley but also loaded with outward-facing traps and Wall of Stone Ramparts had been added to the inside of the valley for archers and a handful of combat-mages to use to rain down hell in potential attackers.
Overall, the PCs had used precious little gold to achieve a reasonably defendable location, using interactive skills such as Diplomacy, Sense Motive and Bluff to get the more powerful NPCs to foot the bills for the big expensive items, in this case the Teleportation Circle which allowed a nearly uninterrupted flow of supplies and recruits from the Nobles themselves, but they had also turned to their iconic skills and abilities to make it work, such as the Ranger using his knowledge of the natural world to transplant native fauna to keep the valley from being discovered by a lucky Goblin patrol, the Rogue creating traps to foil the enemy, the Wizard using spells to fortify and expand the defences.
And at the end of the day? PCs could walk away from the valley and finally didn't have to deal with the tradition-bound Paladin-classed Nobles who were insisting on turning the valley into a proper fort, complete with external walls, siege engines and large numbers of noisy, easily detectable troops. They'd done a lot of work to build it up, but precious little in actual expendable resources had been used to create their little base.
I'll post some actual crunch (hopefulyl along with the rest of you!) after I get home from work. Blaaaargh (T_T).
I never got a chance to do it, but i remember designing a fortress using the Stronghold builders guidebook.(3.0 book i think) It would have been a fortress that flew, traveled between planes, had teleport capacity to send me and my troops anywhere in the world in an instant.
It had self operating ballistas loaded with magic ammo to rain death on my foes, and could raise a prismatic wall effect around itself for protection.
Needless to say, that was an evil campaign...
(I was a Mystic theurge lich, so i was planning on doing a lot of the magic design work myself)
The total cost of said fortress was around 6 million gp. Building it would have been a campaign in itself.
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The best base I have been a part of was created by another player. He was a cleric of Ichabod, the god or parties and alcohol. The cleric REALLY focused in on the alcohol aspect of the deity.
At mid-high levels he decided to build a church to Ichabod. He checked with the GM to find out how much the church would cost, including some spells, such as Wall of Stone, and others. He got a price and the party was a bit short so we had a Sober-a-thon. For each hour he stayed sober he would earn XXgp. He managed to go for 23 hours. A new record for him and one NO ONE expected he would come close to.
He even drew up a layout of the church.
The church was, essentially a bar. The center of the bar was a fountain of beer. The good stuff cost extra. The entire place was covered with Comprehend Languages so everyone could understand each other regardless of race or country of origins.
It was a great base! LOVED IT! lol
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Endless beer sounds like every Adventurer's wet dream come true. All you need is a Succubi, an Eyrines, a Lilend and a Nymph wrestling in the fountain and it would have been golden.
Never grabbed the Builder's manual, which seems to be a mixed blessing given how some people can be quoted as hating the gold vs result mechanics.
Going by the D&D 3.5 DM Manual and going 1/2 price if the PCs can do it themselves, and possibly adjusting the price depending upon local resources and/or in game problems such as taxes, bribes, legions of fans etc etc, the PCs could have a much easier time building their based.
One campaign the PCs ninjaed the Zepplin from the 3.0 Arms and Equipment Guide as a mobile fortress, cost them a pretty penny too since the only cultures advanced enough to build such a device were the Faith of Gond or the Gnomes. 60,000 gold for the Zepplin and a further 40,000 for a pair of +1 Seeking Balista mounted on the undersides of the Zepplin, 6 tons of cargo converted into private quarters for the PCs, three sets of Fharlanghn's Lines and a permanent Wind Wallset directly behind the Zepplin attached to a long, sturdy pole made of Mithril and bolted into the very guts of the Zepplin so we always had a nice, strong breeze to push us along.
Another campaign I had the high honor of watching the PCs turn aside from basically one hundred thousand gold coins a piece, offered by a greedy Baron who wanted to tear up a freehold community of Kobolds and Goblins and instead walked into the community, disarmed and unarmored, told the 'monsters' what was going to happen and voluntarily offered to help beef up the defenses of this N-aligned community to the best of their ability.
By the time the Baron had gotten his army of mercenaries together and marching, the PCs had called in some favours, got the Community to sign a mutual defence treaty with the local Gnome kingdom (Gods bless Io! Neutral Dragon God even Kobolds can love!) and the Dwarves were also sort-of keen to see if they could convince more Goblins and Kobolds to adopt a somewhat less 'kill everything that's not us' outlook on life (the Party got a fair belting of XP for their persuasive arguements, even going so far as to take full responsibility if the Goblins and Kobolds broke their side of the bargain, but also threatening to do their damndest to ensure everyone else kept their sides as well.)
Wizard almost burst a blood-vessel using every earth/stone spell he knew making a 10-foot thick wall of packed earth, soaking it with water and then transmuting the mud to stone, then using Wall of Stone to create walk-ways and choke points, the Cleric and Druid double-teamed the food and water problems, creating four Decanters of Endless Water and via summon monster/nature's ally spells managed to hollow out a 1-mile diameter cavern under the small village complete with huge stone pillars to support the weight of the village and filled it with Deep Rothe, bats, edible mushrooms and fast-growing lichens to feed the Deep Rothe as well as 'encouraging' several dozen species of insects to live inside the cavern to feed the bats. Fighter and Rogue set about training the Goblins and Kobolds how to defend themselves, spending close to a full 20,000 gold between them to buy masterwork chain shirts, large shields, short spears, long spears and short bows for the Gobs and Kobs.
Together the PCs built a keep at the heart of the village using Dwarf-quarried stone and with the aid of the Gobs and Kobs, some Dwarven Stone-Masons to oversee the whole thing and a handful of Gnome Experts to make sure the calculations were correct, built a 'Mansion' level structure designed to accomodate Small Humanoids, costing the full 100,000 gold plus a further 30,000 for the Greater Fire Resistance Spells woven into the wooden upper storey and the wooden support beams so it couldn't be set fire to, so that the Gobs and Kobs could send their elderly and their children to safety during the fight, and also to house the temples to Io and Yondalla (apparently a wandering Halfling Guru had found and converted a small tribe of Goblins to her faith, and thus the town had sprung up on the fertile region, eventually being joined by a group of exiled 'heretical' Kobolds).
When the fight came, the PCs thought they were going to take massive casualties (5 upper-teen-level PCs and 40 level 1 Warrior Gobs, 15 level 1 Warrior Kobs and a handful of low-level clerics and adepts vs 60 mid-level Fighters, a pair of Hexetoran Clerics of upper-teen levels and the Baron himself, a Fighter/Blackguard at level 19) only to find that all their diplomacy had finally paid off and in came the Dwarven Battle-ragers and Gnomish Heavy Cavalry on dire-badgers.
Woof that was a hard battle. I recall cheering with the Players as the Fighter disarmed the Baron, the Rogue slapped a pair of anti-magic manacles on him and they frog-marched him back into town to be tried by a 5-judge court (PC Cleric, Dwarven Commander, Gnome Commander, leaders of the Gob and Kobs), get sentenced to life imprisonment breaking big rocks into small rocks in the Dwarven Mines and his mercenaries spared execution so they could help repair the damage they had caused to the town.
PCs were well behind their wealth curve after all their efforts, but the Dwarves and Gnomes helped out by giving the PCs a whopping great share of the Baron's treasure and smoothing out the ruffled feathers of the Human King, who up until that stage had no idea his Uncle was an Evil Demon-Loving Fiend-wannabe.
*extremely cool stuff*
Instead of words, here's my reaction:
\m/ >.< \m/
Hell yeah!
Back to topic:
One of my PCs was an exiled dwarven king and just recently got his throne back from the usurper posing as him up there.
So, now, everything's fine, except the usurper got away, took the dwarves sister with him, nobody is any the wiser and royal tasks are piling up for the PC slowly but surely.
*extremely cool stuff*Instead of words, here's my reaction:
\m/ >.< \m/
Hell yeah!
Back to topic:
One of my PCs was an exiled dwarven king and just recently got his throne back from the usurper posing as him up there.
So, now, everything's fine, except the usurper got away, took the dwarves sister with him, nobody is any the wiser and royal tasks are piling up for the PC slowly but surely.
Sounds awesome. Look out for your PC's sister coming back preggers, however. Nothing like a child with the Royal Line to cement your position on the throne... eep.
I find when I have a Non-Magical Character and am looking for a home, if I'm not a caster, I tend to find a building, preferably one made of stone or primarily of stone, that's quite defensible and either wall off an area to try and make a few secret rooms, nominally one 'treasure vault' and one 'prisoner room', both with secret doors and the prisoner room lined with lead, well ventilated but otherwise sealed from the outside world, generally with a permanent Gust spell tied to a grill or vent casing to prevent the prisoner(s) escaping via gaseous form or similar rubish. With such a character I tend to avoid magical shenanigans unless I am trying to block a specific escape path my character has already encountered or used himself.
When playing a Caster, nominally a Wizard or a Sorcerer, as the other Gamers in my group say, my inner mole comes to the surface and I go underground in a big way. Anything that can bore holes into the ground is normally within my arsenal, and I almost always head for rocky terrain where there is little dirt and the home base can be litterally carved out of the rock and then reinforced, rather than the tiresome and dangerous job of building tunnels in loose sand or clay, which can come crashing down unless you build the walls up with bricks and mortar and copious amounts of timber frames to support everything.
I have also noticed that PCs tend to look for homes that have room enough that everyone can have their own personal spaces, more than just a single room if they can manage it. Casters tend to want libraries and laboritories (a few Wizards I've known enjoy keeping magically transmuted or enhanced hot-houses and are botanically inclined!) and shrines nearby, melee-types like the Fighter and Barbarian tend to want to be near the armory and the 'fun' places like the kitchen and the wine cellar, Rogues and other stealthy types prefer spaces where they can enter and leave relatively quietly without alerting their comrades or where they can practice crafts or arts other, more morally upright characters might shun, so on and so forth.
Idealy, PCs should have a main base of operations, even if it amounts to nothing more than a 20 foot cube of layered Wall of Stone/Wall of Iron/Wall of Force/Wall of Fire/repeat with a 5-foot-thick door of anti-magic-radiating Adamantite with fifteen different locks so the players can keep their loot safe while adventuring. In some campaigns the PCs litterally do not live together, instead meet up periodically at their favourite watering hole to plan their next mission or scavenger hunt, living in their own homes (or Grand Houses or hell, a Tower if they're the typical 'Wizard' stereotype, although again I tend to make 'anti-Towers' that go Underground. Bleh. I blame it on the nosy Clerics trying to interrupt my plans for breeding a legion of nymphomaniac Lilend-descended Aasimars to conquer the Evil forces of the world with boobie snuggles!) and dealing with their own families or businesses. It's a rare PC I run that doesn't have at least a minor share in a business or three. Casters, again, make great business partners, and who wouldn't be proud to say "See that guy making the wheel for that cart? He can kill a Ogre with one strike, and he works for me! Amazing, isn't it?"
Currently the PC's in my campaign have a small airship. (Merchant size, so about your typical merchant wagon.) They plan on building on the idea until they have the equivelant size of a cruise liner. They sort of ran with the airship idea and even plan on trying to make it into space.
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After clearing a slaver ring from a warehouse in tow we purchased it from the city for a good bargin and renovated it into a mini fort and office for our group. Freed slaves and skilled streetfolk made up the begiing of our staff, as well as our official wagon drive/campmaster so we have a roving center of activity too. And our DM expected us to run for the dungeon crawl.....
Look out for your PC's sister coming back preggers, however. Nothing like a child with the Royal Line to cement your position on the throne... eep.
Seeing as I am the GM of the group and the dwarf belongs to one of my players, this won't become a problem ... for me. ]:->
*...my plans for breeding a legion of nymphomaniac Lilend-descended Aasimars to conquer the Evil forces of the world with boobie snuggles!*
I simply have to be one of the minor recurring villains in your world once you're done with the breeding. Conversely, I'll lend my Paladin for the process beforehand. o.O
And when he dies of exhaustion, the minor villain will be a hobgoblin Ranger with the Diehard feat. Nothing more awesome than death by a horde of sexy doom - and taking the very loooooooong way to do so.Ahem.
Alright.
Back to topic. ^^
I've always kind of wanted one of my characters to have his own floating island. A few trees, a little cottage, garden and maybe family and so on from where he could go eldritch-a-blasting his way to herodom. Or something like that.
Lucky me has the Stronghold Builders Guidebook, so I'll give that another read sometime...
:-)
Most the time in 3.x/PF, most players prefer to purchase magic items rather than build a castle.
I like Airships as bases of operations, it provides transportation and defense...plus they're just cool!
We once had a wagoon with forge and alchemy lab packed into it, making money by crafting weird gizmos while travelling around.
This topic is really quite inspiring - one of the next compaigns is going to involve a huge castle and PCs living in it... or and inhabited castle and PCs living in a forgotten system of secret rooms and passages to be more precise ^^
Right now I am playing in a PF game and we are playing in an emerging metropolitan city so there is alot of money flowing into the city, anyways due to the DM deciding that he wanted to throw a lot of wyverns at us cause he liked the new poison rules we started selling wyvern poison for a good penny. We ended up building a nappa inspired wine vynard. just outside of the city. We plan on hosting wine tastings to have RP encounters with the higher nobility and city council.
Also I am playing a Half Orc Paladin of St Cuthbert so I am about to set up and build a Citadel next to a small town that has built up around one of the many way stations that the party invested in.
The party monk opened up a fighting school across the road from the city gladatorial pits. Recently picking up about 30 street children and a bug bear Monk to help teach while he is off adventuring.
The party sorc just founded a sorc's guild in the city that he decided to invite an evil Sorc group into so he will probably have some internal conflict there soon. Also he is building a traditional spire and gentlemens club.
The Ranger opened up pony express and Sheriffs to start patroling the roads to help bring some peace and security to the partys 20 way stations.
Cleric of Odin started by slowly (slowly is a key word) building a temple to his god. he was aiming very low and over all being a poor party compas. We had to beg the player to actually play a good character and rp. Anyways When I was playing my Rogue I took 20 on a linguistics check and wrote a letter impersonating him (i had plenty of copies of his hand writing and a maxed out linguistics check) and sent a letter requesting funding and assistance in building his temple. The DM took this as a chance to push the cleric into actually roleplaying his class and religion which he hasnt been.
The party as also took some money that came our way into investing in the following : a large inn just outside a major mountain pass that is plagued with unnatural cold and is a new major trade route, some minor buisness, including a sorc run dry cleaning, expanding the now crowded market space with new stalls, a cheap tavern, a 6 floor inn (there is a shortage of housing as the city is still less then 3 years old, and a monopoly on alcohol distribution (the monk swung that).
Overall every one in the aprty is trying to build more and create things to roleplay off of later rather then just buy equipment for combat, the exception being the Barbarian and Bard.
I really enjoy building things that i know will last in this campaign. We use a home brewed world thats been in use for about 20 years. the city that we are playing in was founded by a group that played this world about 5 years ago and was a follow up trip to a group that played 10 years ago. this is just half of a continent.
*...my plans for breeding a legion of nymphomaniac Lilend-descended Aasimars to conquer the Evil forces of the world with boobie snuggles!*I simply have to be one of the minor recurring villains in your world once you're done with the breeding. Conversely, I'll lend my Paladin for the process beforehand. o.O
And when he dies of exhaustion, the minor villain will be a hobgoblin Ranger with the Diehard feat. Nothing more awesome than death by a horde of sexy doom - and taking the very loooooooong way to do so.Ahem.
Alright.
Back to topic. ^^
*gives you a bro-fist*
I've always kind of wanted one of my characters to have his own floating island. A few trees, a little cottage, garden and maybe family and so on from where he could go eldritch-a-blasting his way to herodom. Or something like that.
Lucky me has the Stronghold Builders Guidebook, so I'll give that another read sometime...
:-)
Something you might want to consider is several platforms about the size of a wagon embedded in the underside of a suitably large chunk of land, large enough for a cow, some chickens and a vegetable garden. Remember Levitate can handle 100 pounds per level, and it's what, 2000 pounds to the ton, so a House and 20 feet radius of ground around it, plus about 10 feet of rock underneath that, would cost perhaps three tons?
Levitation Pad (Wondrous Item)
Caster Level 15, 120,000 gold to make, 240,000 gold to buy.
This 10-foot-wide disk of golden metal can support up to 1,500 pounds of pressure before it begins to fail. Otherwise opperates like the normal Levitate Spell.
Conversion works out to roughly 1 Kilo = 2.2046 Pounds. 1000 kilos equal a ton (I think) so the Levitation Pad can support 3,311 kilos, or just over 3 tons. I'd put two pads under the house, just to make certain the thing never sinks, and perhaps an Overland Flight spell Pad (Caster Level 15, 150,000 to make, 300,000 to buy) to push your little farmstead around at 30 feet per round. Overall, not including the cost of the house, land, livestock, furnishings, crops etc, you'd be looking at a base of 390,000 to make this happen. Expensive, but just think, if the neighbours start to piss you off, you can just move on and leave 'em behind.
My current group (playing RotRL) bought the house from the city of Sandpoint that the Goblin ate the husbands face off...
They paid a total of 800gp (half for the home, and half for new furnishings), but they have no idea their about to gett a fort... and I have shiny new kingdom building rules for that one if they want to expand.
As a player I once turned an abandoned dwarven mine to a settlement to rival the dwarven cities. It was the basis of many adventures, I personally think my DM loved the fact that he didn't have to hook us the adventures. The city thrived for several games (I made the PCs following this one "legacy" PCs from that bloodline), until one of my PCs PO'd a God... The mountain became a volcano...
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Non-traditional rewards for adventures early on can provide a base of operations. It may as simple as the rich creditor in a small village giving an abandoned house for uncovering the goblin slavery ring. Not worth much on the open market, but might be nice, after a long series of adventures, to head there, send an Unseen Servant to dust the floor off, and toss some firewood in the hearth.
Could, at higher levels, be something more unusual, like a flying keep that has crashed to earth. Through subsequent adventures, party might fix it up and find out the ancient secret to making the thing fly again. (maybe not so big as Dragonlance's Flying Citadels though...)
Could be custodianship of an old "watch tower" on the frontier, abandoned for costs but open for the brave soul who wants to setup a presence and keep the gnolls at bay.
We once had a magical map that had an image of a forest with a large home drawn on it. With a keyword, the map would come to life and there would be a forest with house and everything. When we were done with it, it was just another keyword to put it back on paper.
However, it was haunted.
...
Something you might want to consider is several platforms about the size of a wagon embedded in the underside of a suitably large chunk of land, large enough for a cow, some chickens and a vegetable garden. Remember Levitate can handle 100 pounds per level, and it's what, 2000 pounds to the ton, so a House and 20 feet radius of ground around it, plus about 10 feet of rock underneath that, would cost perhaps three tons?
Levitation Pad (Wondrous Item)
Caster Level 15, 120,000 gold to make, 240,000 gold to buy.This 10-foot-wide disk of golden metal can support up to 1,500 pounds of pressure before it begins to fail. Otherwise opperates like the normal Levitate Spell.
Conversion works out to roughly 1 Kilo = 2.2046 Pounds. 1000 kilos equal a ton (I think) so the Levitation Pad can support 3,311 kilos, or just over 3 tons. I'd put two pads under the house, just to make certain the thing never sinks, and perhaps an Overland Flight spell Pad (Caster Level 15, 150,000 to make, 300,000 to buy) to push your little farmstead around at 30 feet per round. Overall, not including the cost of the house, land, livestock, furnishings, crops etc, you'd be looking at a base of 390,000 to make this happen. Expensive, but just think, if the neighbours start to piss you off, you can just move on and leave 'em behind.
:-)
I think you got the math wrong when calculating what the disc can suport.
1 pound = 0.45359237 kg, so the disc can hold a little over 680 kg (0,68 t)
A cow weights something around 500 kg, a car weighs something around 1500 kg (I took Ford Fiesta for a reference). For a house you'd need a bit more I'm affraid :)
I think you got the math wrong when calculating what the disc can suport.
1 pound = 0.45359237 kg, so the disc can hold a little over 680 kg (0,68 t)
A cow weights something around 500 kg, a car weighs something around 1500 kg (I took Ford Fiesta for a reference). For a house you'd need a bit more I'm affraid :)
Damn, you are correct. Blargh I hate converting pounds and kilos, so hard to find the correct information without bugging a senior citizen for the info.
Edit: Wait, are you sure? At caster level 15, that works out, with 100lb or pounds per level, at 1 minute per level, and using the Spell Effect part of the table 15-29 on page 550 of the Pathfinder Core Rule Book, wouldn't the maths-fu work out to this?:
Weight supportable by the Levitation Pad would be 1,500 pounds, as per a 15th level caster using Levitate.
Spell level is 2 x Caster level of 15 x 2,000 gold x by 2 for the 1 minute/level duration, which makes it 120,000 gold coins to create? Or have I used the wrong damn calculations again?
Edit Edit: No I'm a screaming retard here. I Divided 1,500 pounds by 0.4535. FFFFFFFFF. Actual weight of the Caster Level 15 Levitation Pad would be 680.25 kilos. So the PC would need approximately 8 Levitation Pads to pull this off. Which is hideously expensive. Argh. Now I'm wondering if I'm pricing the item as a Crafted which is 120,000, or if that 120,000 is the 'Made by someone else and sold to you0 cost. FFFFFFFFFF my brain is melting and running out my ears.
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I can assure you that it's the same on the other side of the ocean ;)
It might actually work, but in cojunction with some other spells and items. You could have one or two discs to manipulate whole islet, but to hold it aloft you might try to create a weight equilibrum by applying permanent reverse gravity somewhere inside of the island. Making part of the rock push up canceling the gravity. Lodestones may be useful to help to pull this off as the part affected by gravity would probably be a little larger.
Alternatively you may try to Wish for a thing like flying house (Please note that this is NOT proper wording!!! ;) ).
Aside from that the levitation pad is good enough to transport a 4 member party and perhaps a mule, but I thing you'd need more than 8 discs for a house. Typical american houses are rather light with walls made of wood planks (or something similary thick) and empty space between, but for a typical house in a fantasy setting I'd probably try something more like the old European buildings, which use stone or bricks for both outer and inner walls and beams of massive wood. walled cellar and probably slated roof. Another option would be solid log walls, but still I think that whole thing would be heavier than what 8 discs could support and that's not taking into account that the house stands upon something (I mean the pice of ground you are levitating with the house).
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Premise #1: Eberron rules, Savage Tide campaign. The party has pretty much unlimited access to the Spell Compentdium, Eberron specific spells, and dragon-marks (noone took that one, thank you...).
Premise #2: Player is an uber-optimizer, especially when it involves item crafting and the like.
The Player's main PC was a tank, but his cohort, Lerris, was a Conjurer/Master Specialist (I think, he may have been straight Conjurer) with all the crafting feats, all the easy/fast/cheap crafting feats as well. Combine the spells Crafter Horde which puts out large numbers of unseen servant like creatures who have your craft skill on 1 check. This lasts for days per level, or one craft check, and no real limit on how many you can have on hand at a time.
Since they are all making their own craft checks, one man could create a boat, dock, small building by himself, very very quickly. I think his craft check was around +100 or so, what with all the skill adds, aid-another, and the like.
Fort Lerris sprung up at Farshore, outside Sasserine, and on several small islands around the Olman Seas. They also custom built a shipping fleet, with the 150' long armored warship took the party into the Abyss, armed to the teeth and crewed by tailored (leadership on 3 PC's led to highly skilled sailors) NPC's.
Same group, me dm'ing:
Encountering an old, half-ruined fort with some Ogres in it, the party rapidly takes it, finding half a dozen inert Warforged stashed within. With the NPC Warforged in the party, it was a simple matter to reactivate them, tell them their identities and tasks, and set to hand rebuilding.
That one ended up being completely redesigned, for optimum cross-fire angles and crafting efficiency. The ready access for granite rubble from a nearby (within the walls) dungeon exit meant plenty of building materials, and the dungeon itself occupied the PC's long enough that the team finished the fort. For the duration of the game, stuff kept getting sent there, added on, or upgrades installed.
Then there was Nu Haven, the town which grew up around a school for Psionic learning. Again, having secured an old haunted manor, the PC's looted it from top to bottom, and finding it structurally sound, moved in. Again, the wizard, this time aided by the kineticist, engineered and crafted most of the improvements.
Plenty more, just have to remember some better details...and i'm sure i have a map for a flying, sailing, space vehicle somewhere.
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Our best 'mobile base' was in ye olde days, when Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion was shiny and new. We cast it inside our traveling wagon, so that we had a portable palace on wheels. (Inspired by an ancient TSR game called Divine Right, which had a group of sorcerer's who came from an 'Invisible College of Thaumaturgy' and travelled around in a wagon that was bigger on the inside than on the outside.)
Later on, I used the idea for Gnomes in the Scarred Lands (the setting, in it's initial release, didn't have any, so I refluffed the core Gnome as a vistani / gypsy mashup) and had them travel in brightly painted wagons, always talking about their distant gnomish lands, but never providing any information on them, since they were completely made up. Their wizards all trained in their mobile 'invisible college,' which had illusory tutors and figment spellbooks, all that remains of their original libraries of lore (since burned and lost), inside the equivalent of a Magnificent Mansion.
The notion of the school of illusion being a shadowy echo of a long-lost reality, and new generations of illusionists being taught by permanant / programmed images left behind by elder generations just tickled my fancy.
In our longest running GURPS Fantasy game (starting at 100 cp, advancing to 250 ish, over several years), we acquired a castle, which was a teetering monster-infested ruin when we rescued it, but one of our two mages was a specialist in earth and stone spells, and spent months rebuilding and shoring up the walls. The other was a necromancy specialist, and spent those same months manning the catacombs beneath the castle with some scary reserve troops, while the other characters concentrated on social issues and recruiting living staff and soldiery... We had it all worked out, how much we had to pay each soldier, how much food the lands had to produce (the necromancer was a generalist, with over 100 spells, so he was also in charge of making the grass grow and providing water and pretty much anything that didn't involve earth and stone, since the specialist was much less flexible in his options).
Thanks to being able to cast Enchant spells, the 'necro' even managed to equip the entire garrison with +1 armor, using the cheap piecemeal armor rules (one piece at a time ends up being cheaper than trying to enchant an entire suit, due to the way costs begin rising non-linearly at a certain point), although he also had to fork over a lot of money in raw supplies...
One of the artistically inclined players commemorated our finishing the castle with a picture of the castle, that was embellished by a scene of the earth mage atop one of the walls, causing one of the towers to surge forward, turning into a ridiculously huge earth elemental. (A bit out of our range, but a freaking awesome picture, nonetheless!)
@HalfOrcHeavyMetal and Zmar:
Guess I'll just have to have a PC of mine research that epic spell "Flying Mountaintop" (or somesuch) and go Mountaintop-a-shopping.
Basically, the spell shears off a mountain's top (surprise!), turns it upside-down so the flat side is up, and lets it float as you wish - if I recall correctly. Might be even less costly, what with the NPC casting costs, all in all... o.O
Thanks for the Math, you two. Being german, I know exactly how tedious it can be to recalculate everything from pounds/limberstones/feet/inches to proper kilos/gramms/meters/centimeters and so on. Just so my group can understand. >.<
@HalfOrcHeavyMetal and Zmar:
Guess I'll just have to have a PC of mine research that epic spell "Flying Mountaintop" (or somesuch) and go Mountaintop-a-shopping.
Basically, the spell shears off a mountain's top (surprise!), turns it upside-down so the flat side is up, and lets it float as you wish - if I recall correctly. Might be even less costly, what with the NPC casting costs, all in all... o.OThanks for the Math, you two. Being german, I know exactly how tedious it can be to recalculate everything from pounds/limberstones/feet/inches to proper kilos/gramms/meters/centimeters and so on. Just so my group can understand. >.<
That spell is Proctiv's Move Mountain from the Player's Guide to Faerun (p. 137) - it's the spell used by the Netherese to build their fabled flying cities. I tried to think of something that would be within reach of the non-epic characters.
Perhaps you could try to acquire some of the solid clouds the genies use in the plane of air to build their castles.
Might be somewhat old and from the 3.0 Arms and Equipment Guide (Chapter 4: Hirelings and Creatures) but there were some flying animals that could be used as cargo transportations, such as the Soarwhale (think colossal-sized Baleen whales) and there was that giant-maggot-thing with the two tentacles from one of the beastiary books that could also probably be used as a small, portable fortress.
Currently statting up a stone version of the Grand House (10,000 gold price) animated as a Golem. Thinking of using the Stone Golemn as a base, but losing all attacks and instead functioning as the four 'legs' of the House, being a 5-room house, built round with a domed roof and a brick-and-mortar construction. Can move at a maximum of 10 feet per round and am currently trying to see how much it should cost to have the Golem-House (Currently dubbed Mugwort's Mobile Mansion) come with in-built permanent heating and a Hero's Feast once per day. Toss in the ability to cast 1 Persistent Image so the M3 can remain relatively hidden.
Alternatively, a Wondrous Item based off the Secure Shelter with 1 charge per day and the structure remains until the command word is spoken, for 12,800 gold it's a handy little mobile shelter for an adventuring group tired of sleeping in the rain under the dubious cover of a tent.
Used the 'Use Activated or Continuous' method, spell level (4) x caster level (8) x 2,000 gold which comes to 64,000 gold. Since it can only be used once every 24 hours, however, effectively having 1 renewable charge every day, 64,000 divided by 5 = 12,800 gold coins.
a three gnome party. A druid (with a level dip in psionicist that he regretted) a conjourer, and a bard/monk cross breed all set up house in the woods.
Effectively the whole shebang consisted of:
a Folding boat, unfolded in the boughs of a tree, continual flames to light it up. regular carpentry to erect scaffolding for entrance/egress, with the three of them 'living' in the boats cabin'
Judicious use of stone shape, as well as regular carpentry meant that they just expanded outwards. a small shed at the tree's base for an alchemical laboratory, whic was replaced when they got their hands on the instant fortress (they buried the fortress, and stoneshaped an underground tunnel to the entrance).
batts
Hummm... You two give me ideas.
Now I'll just have to create some character who kidnaps a soarwhale to travel to the Elemental Plane of Air and rob some noble genies of their fortress base. Hilarity ensues as the thief escapes through the gate and the genie sultan gives chase.
Add the "Benny Hill" soundtrack for optimal visualization... ^^
Genies are able to grant wishes to non-genies only. That's how the pros do it:
*After two years of heavy toil in Genie induced slavery*
Genie: "Mortal! I feel generous today! I'll let you go, if you wish for a flying island made of clouds to be mine!"
Slave: *surprised* "Yes master! I wish for that!"
G: "Wish Granted! You can go now!"
S: realizes that he's standing on an island with nowhere to go, as it's by far te only piece of solid ground around. "Can you help me get home, If I wish fo another island?"
G: "But of course!" grins...
Dang, I'd have done exactly that.
Genie: "...if you wish for flying island made of clouds to be mine!"
Slave: *surprised* "Yes master! I wish for a flying island made of clouds to be mine!"
Genie: "Wish granted! You can ... Waidaminit..."
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Dang, I'd have done exactly that.
Genie: "...if you wish for flying island made of clouds to be mine!"
Slave: *surprised* "Yes master! I wish for a flying island made of clouds to be mine!"
Genie: "Wish granted! You can ... Waidaminit..."
Heh, hopefully the genie will wise up and not grant wishes that don't exactly follow the written text he's handed the mortal schmuck, after making that mistake a time or two. :)
"I wish to be free."
"Not granted. It reads the paper exactly or it gets the whip again."
Oh well, I've got a dirty mind, I admit it. -.-'
Your comment reminded me of That One Movie with the well and the lambs in it and ... stuff. You know which one I'm referring to. ;-)
Building upon that idea and HalfOrcH's plan on how to subjugate all the evil creatures in the world, I have a Paladin interested in building himself a home base where he can hold prisoner the models for the kyton, the succubus, the erinye, and similar baddies for "reprogramming".
Slow, but very thorough reprogramming.
Should include a summoning circle with ample space for leisurely activities (so the evil gurrrrls don't feel uncomfortable) and a bed with satin sheets, some magic music apparatus and an endless supply of chocolate treats.
And, for those of them who don't understand any other language but violence, maybe a +1 merciful cat-o-nine-tails to teach them their place.
Ahem. All in the name of Goodness, of course.
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Your comment reminded me of That One Movie with the well and the lambs in it and ... stuff. You know which one I'm referring to. ;-)
Yeah, that's where I was going with that. :)
Building upon that idea and HalfOrcH's plan on how to subjugate all the evil creatures in the world, I have a Paladin interested in building himself a home base where he can hold prisoner the models for the kyton, the succubus, the erinye, and similar baddies for "reprogramming".
Any of these creatures could be called up and bound to study the arts of the Adept (or Sorcerer), and required to take protection from evil or summon monster I as spell choices. By casting these spells (the SM1 to call up celestial creatures), the [Good] nature of these spells will slowly erode away the evil of the compelled creature, just as a good creature can turn evil by casting protection from good too much.
It may take a few years to train the Succubus in the arts of the Adept, or Sorceress, but once she's learned protection from evil, or summon monster I, she'll be well on her way to being purged of evil and, eventually, transformed to good.
(A cleric with Imbue with Spell Ability could simply *grant* the Succubus a protection from evil spell, and then she could be compelled to cast it, although this process requires a mid-level cleric and a lot of Imbue-ing on their part...)
With the bard spell, Modify Memory, one could also go the behavioral conditioning route, and alter every memory the creature has of doing wicked things to have ended in horrible punishment, while every good deed (all, like, two of them) resulted in glorious rewards (as well as making the fiend throw up whenever it hears Beethoven). By compelling it to perform good deeds with it's abilities, and then giving it all sorts of pleasurable rewards, you could 'condition' a fiend into being good. If you are yourself morally grey, you could also allow it to occasionally do something evil, and then brutally punish the creature.
Doing this sort of thing to creatures with an actual Evil subtype would probably be harder, but it should be a super-easy way to rehabilitate 'merely' evil creatures like aboleths and goblins.
"It will cast Protection from Evil again or I shall apply the lotion to my hairy chest. With pleasure."
>.<