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Long time in the making, finally ready for the public. First the links, then the background behind the whole thing.
Obvious Spoiler Warning for the Age of Ashes Adventure Path
Link to the rules: PF2E Scribe Stronghold Rules by Montis aka RussischerZar
Link to Downtime Tracker Template Spreadsheet: Google Spreadsheet Template (make a copy for your own use)
This is the current version of rules that I'm using for my two on-going Age of Ashes games. When I ran my first group through the rebuilding of the Citadel using the official rules from the AP, I noticed that there was a lot of micromanagement and bookkeeping. It was tedious, somewhat boring and didn't have much payoff.
Trying to keep things easier to do and engage my players a bit more, I devised a downtime system that uses weeks instead of days (since I'm assuming about 2 months of downtime between each book) and has a much better incentive for the players to engage with it: they get stuff for their characters! I took a page out of the Strength of Thousands playbook and put these bonuses up as something to achieve by upgrading the Citadel between each book (see page 10).
These rules are yet to be fully tested - my more advanced group is currently between books 2 and 3 - but I believe I struck a good balance of cost vs effect; due to the characters later being able to gain extra money from selling items through the Trading Post I believe this will offset the cost of upgrading the Citadel for the most part. There is also an implementation of a version of the Gardens of Wonder through the Aiudara Keys (page 12) which should give a party access to a good amount of extra consumables for comparatively little cost. I hid this page from my players until they made the discovery about the keys, so while the rules are technically supposed to be shared to the players (as there is some other GM information missing), you might want to make your own copy or something. If you would like me to send you the source text, let me know.
I would welcome any feedback, both positive and negative, be it oh so minor as pointing out some odd grammar or typos (English isn't my first language) or improvement suggestions or if you just think this is plain stupid. Or if you have any questions why I designed something one way or another.
In any case I really hope some of you find this useful as I put at least 30 hours into all of this. :) I'm also contemplating on putting it on Infinite, but that might not be worth it. I'm also putting a link here to the Reddit Thread as I'll likely be much more responsive on reddit than here, especially a couple of months from now.