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In the D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, your Bastion isn't just an Airbnb, it can be Gardens, Teleportation Circles, and Demiplanes

by: Randy - posted: 10/3/2024 9:43:00 PM
More On: Dungeons & Dragons

The D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide has got me. One thing I've always wanted to do in Dungeons & Dragons is build a castle. Yes, attack the darkness, plunder the dungeon, slay the dragon, and gear up to do it all again. But I'm using that cold, hard coinage to build a bastion.

Bastions are a new addition to 5th Edition and/or 2024 D&D. The care and feeding of your castle, tower, or perhaps druidic hanging gardens (?) gets its own chapter in the new DM's Guide. I'm with Todd Kenreck, the interviewer in the video below. Turning a fort or a spire into an extension of ourselves was one of our greatest ambitions. It didn't matter if I was playing in Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Al-Qadim, Spelljammer, or Planescape. The moment I was done rolling ability scores, I was grabbing a sheet of graph paper and sketching out my humble abode.

The intent of bastions, per lead designer Chris Perkins, is to invest players further into the setting. To leave their mark. To build something that will outlast themselves. 

D&D understands that bastions take time. Far more time than crafting takes, and crafting already interrupts gameplay too much to implement easily. So that's why bastions are meant to operate off-stage. You, the player, should be off on continent-spanning, world-hopping adventures—and have a headquarters to come home to and hang your hat.

Aside from the obvious, however, there are reasons why you'd want to, perhaps, build a theater or a pub, even if everyone was expecting your sorcerer to build a stony cylinder into the sky. 

A "bastion turn" happens roughly every seven days, though there's wiggle room between the Dungeon Master and player. If a player is in their bastion, they will issue an order to each of their bastion's facilities: 

  • Craft
  • Empower
  • Harvest
  • Maintain
  • Recruit
  • Research
  • Trade

If a player is not in their bastion and can't communicate with hirelings, the whole bastion takes the Maintain order. A roll is made to see if an event happens. An event gives the player a chance to tell a story about their bastion. Even if all is well, there are still opportunities for storytelling. Bastion turns can happen at the table, or they can be homework for players, who will return the next session able to update everyone on what happened during their bastion turn. 

And bastions don't have to be a solo endeavor. If you never want to split the party, you can build a compound together. Each player would have control over their specific facilities and sections, but not necessarily have to head off to separate corners of the kingdom when visiting their bastion.

Bastions are one answer to players wondering "What am I supposed to do with my money?" Although their are also special facilities that you acquire as you level up, at no added cost to you. It's these special facilities that are giving players in-game benefits.

There are 29 special facilities. At level 5 you can start work on a bastion. You are given two special facilities right off the bat. It goes up to four special facilities at level 9. Five at level 13. And six at level 17. So, from that list of 29 special facilities, no one bastion will have more than six. (Unless you build that multiplayer compound, I suppose.) All 29 are:

  • Arcane Study
  • Armory
  • Barrack
  • Garden
  • Library
  • Sanctuary
  • Smithy
  • Storehouse
  • Workshop
  • Game Hall
  • Greenhouse
  • Laboratory
  • Sacristy
  • Scriptorium
  • Stable
  • Teleportation Circle
  • Theater
  • Training Room
  • Trophy
  • Archive
  • Meditation Chamber
  • Menagerie
  • Observatory
  • Pub
  • Reliquary
  • Demiplane (Demiplane?!)
  • Guild Hall
  • Sanctum
  • War Room

There's artwork of all these special facilities. There are level prerequisites too, of course, since I'm going to safely assume that your Baby's First Bastion won't be getting a demiplane right at level 5.

You can even start guilds. Thieves guilds, bakers guilds, shipbuilders guilds. 

My favorite DLC in Skyrim is Hearthfire—the one that lets you build a bastion right there on Skyrim's map. A place to come home to. A little piece of Skyrim that I permanently changed and made my own. I'm happy that I can start building that in D&D.

Or have my bastion fall by "mucking around with the Deck of Many Things," as Chris Perkins states. If you draw the Ruin card? Bye bye bastion. But that's another story.