SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today we're making our own humble way from home, Bastion.

SPEAKER_03 0:23

That was still your best left-handed hole.

SPEAKER_02 0:30

Questioning my whole life, like, wait a minute. I always hold with my right hand. Maybe that's a problem.

SPEAKER_03 0:35

It's a hundred percent your problem. How many beers have you had?

SPEAKER_01 0:43

What percentage have you been rolling to the game? I feel like I have to keep a firm grasp on the can. So I must use my dominant hand to hold the can. I've been doing it wrong.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Now you know. The more you know. Like 14 years. Welcome, welcome, everybody. Uh, this is gonna be a fun one. We are covering something brand new tonight coming out of the 2024 handbook.

SPEAKER_03 1:09

Are you rolling your bees now?

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Brand new. Guys, brand new. We're going fancy tonight, and we are building our own bastions. Or it's not from the players' handbook, it's from the dungeon masters handbook.

SPEAKER_03 1:22

But yeah, it's one of those new books. Yes. Dungeon, yes, you're right. Dungeon Masters Guide.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

Uh so Ross, tell us what is this? Uh, what is this thing? A bastion.

SPEAKER_03 1:31

Uh, so basically, a bastion is an opportunity for you at level five to create a place where not only could you live, but you can automate some things completely optionally. You do not have to do this. Uh, but basically, you would have facilities within your bastion and hirelings where you could have them make potions, they could build magical items, uh, it's a place for you to stay that could be protected. There's people there to do all those things. So it's just this really unique way to create yes, it's a really unique way to create a headquarters essentially for yourself.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

What I think is interesting about it too, though, is it's not just like headquarters for your party, like each individual character, if they want to or have the means to, could build their own bastion.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

And then it can reflect their individual character too. It doesn't have to be just like a an abandoned mansion on a hill, like it could be an underground cave or or something, or like a tree house for some sort of druid or something.

SPEAKER_03 2:32

Oh, tree house would be cool. That would be cool. I mean, you can make it whatever you want, so that makes perfect sense. I love that. Uh, I think it's interesting that the book points out that it's really for adventurers who have the opportunity to return back to it. Like it's it's like you have to go back to issue orders or pick up things that they're making. So it's probably not something that's well well, obviously, it's not well suited for a one-shot, even if you are past the level five, just because you're you're not gonna have time to use it. If you're in a shorter campaign, probably not something that that's worth doing. It may be depending on certain circumstances, but these are really built for like long-running campaigns in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Long-running campaigns that center or come back to a setting, like a specific setting. It's like if you're on a Lord of the Rings type journey, like across blah blah blah blah blah, taking the ring to whatever place, probably not a great use for a bastion. Sure. Because you're not going to be routinely coming back to it.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

Agree. That's fair.

unknown 3:31

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Would fit really well. Excuse me. Would fit really well in some sort of like a um patron style of a campaign, right? Like you're always coming back to receive orders from a patron in a specific place or something like that. That would work well.

SPEAKER_03 3:45

Yeah, I think that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

And that one of the that kind of leads to one of the cool things is to start a bastion, it can require money, but it doesn't necessarily have to. You could get it granted to you by your patron, or you could get it as some sort of victory token by like if you save a village or something like that, they could give you a land or in some old mansion.

SPEAKER_03 4:08

So I I think the one of the coolest things about this, and it's kind of like going back, you know, when we very st first started doing these episodes, how we pointed out there was the line that said, like, the rules are guidelines, right? It's like you do whatever you want. There's a line within the Bastions chapter, in which is chapter eight, in the new uh dungeon masters guide that says, and I'll read this verbatim because I think it's worthwhile to know. It says, Most importantly, a bastion is a creative playground for a player and a shared storytelling space in the campaign. Be as permissive as you can with the stories players tell in their bastions, but players should know that control might be limited by the campaign's larger story, which you strive to make fun for everyone. So basically, what Wizards of the Coast is saying is to a DM is let them do whatever they want that's within means and within the story, because this is their place that they can do whatever they want with.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

And then the one of the fun things with bastions is even though you're not always going to be at the bastion, it continues.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Oh, yeah, it has turns, which I thought was kind of cool.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

Yeah. That's that is a fun new mechanic that they they've added in for this one.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

And it gives you the option too, where basically, like, if you're away from your bastion, right, and you can't give an active order, um, you in essence it maintains. Well, you think of maintain as like status quo, kind of, right? And it's not just that. So if you have the maintain order because you can't get back to your bastion, or maybe you're not able to like use a sending spell to communicate with your hirelings. Uh, basically the DM like rolls on the side to see what's actually happening at your bastion while you're away. On a D100, they're not all good things. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:50

Well, and the funny thing is, is like, even though they're not all good things, even the bad things resolve okay. It just production could take a hit, is essentially what they're hurting the most.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Which is so it goes from everything of all is well to your bastion gets attacked, to you find um you have friendly visitors or a guest, or you lose some of your higher hirelings, or uh somebody else comes through and requests aid, all sorts of different things that could just randomly happen while you're away.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

I love the one that was like law enforcement basically comes to your door and says that one of your hirelings is a thief. Yep. Right. Like, oh shit.

SPEAKER_03 6:28

Okay. And then it gives you an option to like bribe them and keep them. It's like, okay, interesting. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

You know that's gonna happen to Phil's because he's gonna hire all rogues, which is a dumb move, but whatever.

SPEAKER_03 6:40

You're just gonna be paying a lot of money to keep all your people. I think he disagrees. Dog the Bounty Hunter.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

It's like what is money to rogues?

SPEAKER_03 6:49

If it's bad enough that Dog the Bounty Hunter shows up in Fey Rune to catch some guys at your place, that's when you know it's like, eh, maybe we should tone it back a little bit. You can be the world's greatest brogue. Maybe you shouldn't hire them.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

There's your new character inspiration. Dog the Dog the Bounty Hunter.

SPEAKER_03 7:06

Barbarian. Yeah, we could we could work on that.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

Oh, yeah, we can work on that one. Uh, but as you um traverse your world and start leveling up, you're also going to start leveling up your bastion. And so that's when it really gets fun because you can start to add more than just like a bedroom, you can start to add special features or special rooms in your um in your bastion.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

That's what I think is cool, right? Is like your in-game play impacts your bastion, and your bastion can be doing things that can help your in-game play as well. You could be creating healing potions, right? That you're gonna use when you're actually in battle, or potentially growing herbs that you need to create poisons. Like there are all sorts of things that you can do in those special facilities, and then as you grow as a character, well, you gotta have the gold too, but it you can continue to build those things out.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

And the nice thing is it levels up pretty pretty consistently. So starting at level five, you get two of those special facilities. Level nine, you get four, level 13, you get up to five special facilities, and then you cap out at level 17 of your player character um with six special facilities. And so you can get quite a few things rolling inside of your bastion just over the course of time. But then all while you're doing that, you can continue to add expansions to your current facility with extra bedrooms, more space for um like guards to be able to patrol your bastion or hire links, that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Well, and even in some of those facilities, too, what I thought was interesting is they added this size component. So, like some of them might be considered a roomy kind of a facility, and you could increase the size of that space. And if it is a special facility, sometimes you can increase like the production that happens there, right? If it's a garden, you can basically double production or something like that, or build two different types of gardens to collect different herbs, so it gives you some ways expand ways to expand without just necessarily building brand new facilities, which is a cool mechanic.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

One of the maybe not balanced super well things that I noticed was if you're um trying to defend your bastion and you have to build a wall, it is really expensive.

SPEAKER_03 9:26

It is, it's what 250 gold per 10 feet, 10 10 foot wide by 20 foot tall section.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

So if it's and then it takes time to build a two days, 10 days per section per section. That's gonna be like a year doing so.

SPEAKER_03 9:40

You should probably hope you're inheriting the uh hold with uh some pre-built wall.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

I was thinking like how how do we convince like uh city folk to um put their name on a brick in your wall and money man over here.

SPEAKER_03 9:58

I need to build a library, donate five gold, five gold today is all I need.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

Uh but I love how open it gives you uh as gives the player the ability to make it their own, and like they encourage you to draw this out on a piece of paper. But I think that's one great way to do it is to like write it out on a piece of paper on grid paper, but you could do so many other different things too. You could do it in a virtual tabletop and have your own bastion built in there. You could there's Coopendog. Uh you could make make it in Minecraft, you could make it in Lego, you could do all sorts of fun things to bring your bastion to life.

SPEAKER_03 10:40

That's a really cool idea.

unknown 10:42

I love that.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

I feel like multiple times throughout this chapter, too, it continues to come back to that of like give the players creative freedom, like get them to draw out the floor plans. Like, what does this look like? Describe the personalities of their hirelings, right? Too give your hirelings personalities.

SPEAKER_03 10:57

Yeah, and I think that goes back to that that kind of opening piece where it was like, you know, let them do whatever they want here as long as they have the ability. Right. Um, the cool thing is too, is like, you know, if you're imagining like a tower, so it's like if you're if you do the the roomy or the vast one. So the vast one, I think it was like 16 five foot squares, right? Or something like that. 36. 36 five foot squares. So those 36 five five foot squares can be arranged in whatever way you want. So it could be one room or they can be stacked too, so in the form of a tower. So if you only want your tower to be you know 20 feet wide, 20 by 20, and then stack it, so you have then enough to do a floor plus a another piece of a floor, and then you just stack it up however you want, which is a really cool way to do it too. There's just lots of options.

SPEAKER_01 11:42

I like the pictures in the book too, that it actually had it showed like progression of a bastion. It had four images. Yep. And even what was cool about it too, I thought, is outside of the bastion. If you kind of look at the pictures, the first one almost shows just like almost nothing outside of it. And by the time you get to the fourth one, there's like a sprawling city in the background as well, of like how it impacts what's around it.

SPEAKER_03 12:06

So that's something I didn't really think of. That would be a really cool way to do it. So like your bastion is like the center point of that. Think of like Minas Tirith from from Lord of the Rings. So like the castle part of Minas Tirith is only like the very inner ring, but then there's like oops sorry, the rings of cities around that. Right. So it's like, you know, if your DM is cool with it and we need to pop a new city into Fey Rune, why not? That's a fantastic way to just add to the the the lore of the realm. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

But also in these pictures, the seasons change. That's over time. So because you're you're going to be using this over multiple years potentially in game time. It's gonna have different functions throughout even the different seasons. Um, one of the things I was a little bit questioning, which we'll pose to you guys, is um to be transparent, we have not played with a bastion yet. We're looking at doing it in our main campaign, uh talking through some different possibilities. But how would you guys balance it if uh if you have a table of four or five different people and two of them are really into developing their bastions and then another character does not care? How would you balance that as a DM?

SPEAKER_01 13:19

So, what I love is that it actually talks about this in the chapter, even it says that not every character needs to have a bastion, but multiple characters can. So I think if you have some people that are really into it and they want to do it, those people you give that creative license to. Like, absolutely you can set this up. We're going to have bastion turns, and I think it's almost like a hey, we're gonna have a session 0.5, right? Because we're introducing bastions. Hey, this is what it's gonna be. You know, are you interested in creating one? If you're not, like I need you to know this is a new mechanic we're introducing to the game. So every seven days or whatever we decide our time period's gonna be, there's gonna be a bastion turn. And if you don't have a bastion, that's fine. Your character just kind of isn't necessarily involved in that process, or they could accompany another character to their bastion. But yeah, I I would probably do the accompany version and just say, like, let's say that Astris decides he doesn't want to have a bastion, but he goes with Thorne back to Thorne's bastion, and Thorne has a room that could grant them both a boon. I would allow something like that as a DM.

SPEAKER_03 14:26

That's a that's a cool way. I didn't really think about that, but I like that.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Or in the scheme of things, this is just downtime activities, right? So you could do pretty much any other downtime activity that that character wants to do, but not tied to a bastion.

SPEAKER_03 14:42

Correct. And that's the nice thing about bastions is like it it happens parallel to everything else going on. So is the fact that it exists and runs separately, it could be built outside of a session. It doesn't have to take up session time to build it.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

Yeah, you could just type this out uh uh uh with with your DM on Discord in between sessions, not even taking up time. Correct.

SPEAKER_03 15:05

Yeah, this is not something that that that needs to take uh take uh time away from the story. Now it doesn't mean story things couldn't happen at a bastion, but it doesn't need to take up time, especially in your example if people aren't interested in being part of it.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

I do think bastion's like represent a unique uh like role-playing opportunity though. But like to have interactions between multiple characters in a bastion, or like what is your relationship with your hirelings? Are they gonna be required to wear uniforms?

SPEAKER_02 15:34

You know, like what is that gonna look like?

SPEAKER_03 15:36

Well, and it's like if you show up at somebody else's bastion, like they have relationships and they've hired people for specific reasons. So like introducing them to other players as an NPC that then creates other interactions could be really interesting too.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

Yeah, and you as the player character get to potentially, if you want, roleplay multiple characters in your own bastion, and the DM just gets to kind of sit back and watch it all happen. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. In officiate when they need to, but that's I mostly even stay out of it.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

I love that. Yeah, I can see the excitement on your face.

SPEAKER_02 16:07

I'm a little worried about it.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Uh so this is a a fun new feature that it's actually been around for a really long time. It just wasn't in the 2014 rules, uh, but it goes all the way back to like I think ADA, AD, A D.

SPEAKER_03 16:22

Yeah, it's one of those things that's like been there in theory, but they've never actually built any actual mechanics to make it happen. Players just do it. So now they've actually have mechanics to play with now. So people have a framework for it.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

Yeah, in those special facilities, right? Like there are specific like orders you can give in those facilities, and that's how they take action. So whether it be crafting, empowering, harvesting, recruiting, researching, trading, you know, there's a specific, in essence, you know, resource that you're collecting of some sort based on the order that you give for a specific facility. Like they really formalized it, I feel like.

SPEAKER_00 17:00

I I would counter that though, by saying, yes, there's a lot of formality with what they've set out, but I think there is a ton of room for homebrew. Oh yeah, in this area, like so much possibility for extra room types, room classes, or room special ability rooms, uh, even potentially leveling up your ability to add more special facilities if you really get rolling on it.

SPEAKER_02 17:25

I as I looked at this, I'm like, why cut it off at 17? Like that was my other thought. I'm like, why not keep building that out?

SPEAKER_03 17:31

Right. And it's like I even so so backstory for everybody out there listening, like, we have separate Discord channels. Like, I just messaged you about like I feel like everybody should have something for free because there's like other things going on in our world that they will have and can take with them. So it's like you should not have to pay for this because it's going to exist anyway, wherever you're at, potentially. So it's like just to your point of homebrewing and things existing because of the story surrounding it anyway. Uh also side note, I didn't realize when I read through this the first time that there's a sub table. So, like when the the uh the uh bastion events, when you roll the D100, if you get the all is well, there's a sub table that you roll a D8, and then so there's like all is well, so like somebody you know who lost their spectacles again. One of the one of your hirelings adopted a stray dog.

SPEAKER_02 18:23

Why someone I someone thought they saw a ghost, and now you're naming a dog and a ghost and a ghost.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Okay, love it, but it's not necessarily on the on the DM. You can pass it on to the ghost.

SPEAKER_03 18:38

The DM rolled now, you got to come up with it. Yep. I I love that, I think that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

Uh, so a lot of fun possibilities with this one. Any final thoughts on Bastions?

SPEAKER_03 18:48

I I think this is a really cool uh it's been around forever. I think this is a really cool mechanic that they've officially added for people to play with. And and I think one of the best parts is is not only did they give you the mechanics, but they even gave you a PDF for like tracking all of this stuff. So they didn't just leave it out there like keep your own notes and all that. Like they gave you like a specific sheet so you know what pieces your bastion has, and then obviously you have some you could take some grid paper and lay out your floor plan that way, or however you want to do it, or in Minecraft. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

I love that they've given this basically as a variant way of doing downtime. I think that this is a beautiful way to do this, and I understand that it's existed before, but I'm glad they've added it back into the rule set, like for 2024, given us some guidelines. Yep, like let's reintroduce this, and uh I'm excited to get it introduced into our campaign.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

It's gonna be fun and interesting to see how much this gets used. Yeah, I would think. Uh it's it's the type of thing that a lot of campaigns it doesn't make sense for. Like if you're doing a one-shot or if you're doing a short campaign, or even if you're doing a a written module, yeah, it probably doesn't fit. But if you're doing a home custom a homebrew one-off like on your own campaign, it's a nice change of pace.

SPEAKER_03 20:10

Yep, I agree.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

Well, that is gonna do it for this episode of Bards and Barrels. You can listen to past episodes of the show anywhere podcasts can be found. You can also follow us on on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky Social, and YouTube at Bards and Barrels. We'll see you soon.