How long would it take?
30 minutes of playing is equal to the work of 100 humans laboring for 3 days. So that's 300 work days. Each work day is 8 hours. So each half hour equals 2400 worker hours.
The PCs have befriended a lillend azata (+16 stringed instrument), and have access to lots of spells to boost her skills and lesser restorations to make the DC 18 check for a lot of hours.
The question is how long will it take them to rebuild Menador Gap's Keep?
It's not just the Keep that needs rebuilding. The narrowest part of the pass itself was destroyed - probably hundreds of yards of rock collapsing in on itself. That rock needs to be removed. The walls of the pass need to be reinforced. And to be honest, the keep probably should be rebuilt on the other (Kintargo) side of the pass - let Cheliax rebuild their own keep to act as a trade outpost of sorts.
The best way to determine how long it would take is to look at real-life landslides and how long it takes to clear those, and then acknowledge that the construction equipment used for those tasks accounts for thousands of hours of labor by dozens of laborers.
Magic itself is undoubtedly the best solution. Recruiting some Earth Elementals to deal with the fallen rock can help reduce how long it takes to repair the pass itself.
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So, in case others go down this path, I thought I'd share what happened. Long story short? It's pretty easy to accomplish: 37.5 hours or so with the instrument at my table. Basically, it's a logistics challenge that doesn't take much time at the table once the DM's figured out the math behind all of this. It was a nice little accomplishment acknowledging what high level PCs can do and a bit of kingdom building fun.
First of all, you can use the Kingmaker rule set, which seriously under-estimates the value of this item, or the downtime rules, which don't account for this item at all.
As you can see above, each half hour of playing is 2400 worker-hours. That's 4800 worker-hours per hour. Skilled laborers get 3 sp per 8-hour day. Unskilled laborers get 1 sp per 8-hour day. So, if the successful check is for skilled laborers, it generates 1400 gp worth of labor per hour of playing. If it's for unskilled, it's 480 gp worth of labor per hour of playing. I had the lillend make an engineering check each time to determine whether the half hour of playing was skilled or unskilled.
Using BPs, a castle is 54 BP. I ruled that a keep was 27 BP, plus 3 BP in military materials that couldn't be made by the lyre (which were provided by Kintargo's vault).
I translated the BPs into gold: 4000 gp per BP or 2000 gp of labor under the ruleset. (My table was replicating the dwarven aesthetic of using stone for as much as possible, so the goods part wasn't all that necessary except for the surcharge of 3 BP for military grade materials.)
So, going with the 2000 gp of labor per BP, a keep would be 54,000 gp of labor. That's 37.5 hours of skilled labor or 112.5 hours of unskilled labor. If it's possible for your lyre player to fail the check, just keep track of gp labor created. So long as my players kept fatigue from the lyre-player or the people casting spells and aiding another to boost her stats, she couldn't fail the check. They got the hint that ANY interruption in her playing meant waiting a week before they could continue.
I had Tannessen and Jarvis collaborate on the blueprints.
I agree that earth elementals or even more playing of the lyre would be needed to clear the pass--recall that the lyre can make mines, which suggests the lyre can clear the pass pretty easily. You can add that work to the duration of lyre-playing or have your casters dealing with that while the keep's being built.
I had workers in Old Kintargo protesting the fact that they didn't get to work on this job, losing vital income to feed their families with. That pressure convinced the Town Council to restrict the use of the lyre of building to only work required for emergencies or national security and preferably both.