Restore it. Then make sure all the people involved in the restoration have 'accidents'. Bring in their own, loyal people. Reinforce it with magical defenses of their own devising. Build traps. Treat the trapbuilders like the people in the restoration. Quietly plot and scheme. Make the occasional foray into the countryside on some 'adventure' to delude the neighbors into thinking that the party is still wholesome and good. You know, 'dealing' with those bandits, 'exterminating' that monster. Enlist the aid of those bandits and monsters. Then, one day, when the local lord comes to visit, kill him. Blame it on those monsters and bandits. Seize control in the power vacuum. All the while the party can make connections with other local rulers, form a network of alliances, play one side off against another, and slowly grow ever more powerful....
Theres also some kind of rebellion movement that might want to use the fort as their base, but our party decided not to get ourselves involved in kingdom politics.
Then there are bound to be fugitives. Take them in, use the cave, set up hunting partys and try to pick reliable security for the fort and the dimensional rift. I´d also ward the place and install some serious traps. Turn the thing into a battle-maze BOTH ways, in case an evil outsider comes through the rift.
Use the Kingdom Building system from Pathfinder #32 to found your own domain with the fort as the center of a new town and the surrounding jungle as your first claimed hex. Begin recruiting settlers and soliciting patronage (i.e. BPs) from interested neighbor states, churches and guilds (funding a colony is an investment!) and expand outwards from there as time, finances and the dictates of the campaign will allow.
Push the self-destruct rune and leave Hollywood style?
Ask your players. If they're interested in a more static 'hub-based' adventure, they can refurbish the fort. Maybe allow the Leadership feat so they can have loyal followers manning the fort. Even if they aren't interested, they can still have their Leadership mooks take care of the fort while they're away- use it as a secondary source of income. If they choose that option, returning to defend it in its hour of need is also a really easy plot hook. Of course, if your players really aren't into that kind of thing, you really can just let them level the place and forget it ever existed.
A mountain fortress in the middle of a jungle?
Well, since your players aren't joining the rebellion, then it's time for them to join the colonial masters and start a plantation!
Alternately, now that they have this fortress, it's probably time to have someone try and take it from them. It does sound like the area might be good for a plantation, or and opium growing operation, so having some local bandits, minor nobility, or members of the Aspis Consortium show up and try to "claim" the fortress isn't unlikely.
But to get a plantation going we need a valuable resource to exploit right?
Not neccessarily, a clearing to grow coffee would propably be enough for starters.
I suggested fugitives, because they´re the most obvious people you can get discretly and you´ll need people, security and staff.Unless you keep this very small scale and your GM is generous, you´ll need a way to pay for the upkeep. I doubt you´ll want to spent a good portion of your hard earned loot.
Problem: What is your group set-up ? Can you leave the cave/rift open to access in good conscience ? Do you have a caster with stone-wall/shape and/or warding-spells ?
And most importantly: Does your group WANT a base there at ALL ?
Set up shop in the cave complex, start churning out arms and armor. Start an arms trade. Evolve to a military industrial complex with health facilities, training and mercenary brokering. Sell to rebels=profit.
Our party recently discovered and cleared out a dilipated fort. Its pretty large, but its also pretty remote, about a week's travel from the city, though this would decrease if we were to make a proper road. What can we use it for, besides a place to store stuff?
It depends on the GM.
In one D&D 3.5 campaign, our party cleared out a troll-infested keep. The local duchess, 100 miles away, heard about it and offered to man it with a small garrison at our command if we would keep that section of the border safe. It was amusing for my cleric to use his spells to rebuild the damaged parts.
After an adventure that involved a journey a thousand miles away (some players had retired their characters, so we claimed that those missing characters were protecting the keep), we returned to discover that war refugees had set up a camp under the protection of our keep and were rapidly turning that camp into a town. As rulers of the keep, we became rulers of the town.
And that attracted the attention of the orcs in the neighboring kingdom. We fought battles against small armies.
In another campaign this spring, the GM sent us penniless to the only colony on a small unexplored continent. That metal-poor colony was a feudal system established by the original settlers. Being stuck in a system that did not care about progress drove my alchemist crazy, because he was gung ho about preaching the wonders of alchemy. So he used his alchemy to assay mineral samples that he gathered upriver, discovered tin, and found investors to fund a tin mine and a nearby farming village to feed it. And then we had to protect it from the dangers of the wilderness, including the lost civilization that had stopped other attempts to expand the colony.
A home base can attract adventure in which you have the home-territory advantage--if the GM goes long with the plan.
Honestly, I think the question should be "What can't a party do with a Fort?"
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Step 1: Hire no less than three independent mining crews to carve dozens of levels into the earth beneath your fortress. In sum total, there should be at least 50 levels of dungeon beneath your fortress.
Step 2: Hire one more mining crew to carve a few interconnections between some of the different levels.
Step 3: Hire some wizards and engineers to fill the dungeon with magical traps, puzzles, riddles, and the like. As a consultant, I recommend the infamous troll Grimtooth.
Step 4: Start throwing all kinds of monsters into the dungeon. The more and the weirder, the better. In general, try to put the more powerful ones in the lower levels.
Step 5: Wait a few decades, for the dungeon life to develop it's own intra-dungeon societies.
Step 6: Start charging knuckle-headed adventurers 100 gp a head to go search for the infamous/famous artifact of whatchamacallit.
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Train peons, direct them to chop wood and mine gold.
Train peons, direct them to chop wood and mine gold.
But first you must BUILD MORE BURROWS!
Train peons, direct them to chop wood and mine gold.But first you must BUILD MORE BURROWS!
Nonsense! We just need 2000 more Stone to advnace to the Industrial Age!
Trade for some Wood and Brick and get busy building that road into town.