The Best DnD Bastion Special Facilities For A Barbarian Character

Bastions are bases of operations for players in Dungeons & Dragons, making them the ones in control of everything that happens within it. While random events can still put the denizens of the bastion in danger, the facilities within it can help players be better prepared for their adventures.

As a barbarian, you don’t need to be on the road all the time; sometimes, staying at home and resting can make the next time you rage all the better. If you want to build the perfect bastion for your barbarian, keep the following special facilities in mind.

Bastion Level Five

Level five is when you finally gain your bastion, the small piece of land that you can call your own. You can design the bastion however you want, and add as many simple facilities as you can afford, but since they add no gameplay changes, we won’t cover them.

Your bastion could be just a house, or it could be a place that reflects the desires and goals of your character. A path of the world tree barbarian might have a viking-style house with decorative runes, while a path of the zealot barbarian might be living in a temple dedicated to their deity.

In terms of gameplay functions, the most important areas of your bastion are the special facilities. You can add two at level five, chosen from a limited pool of facilities; these options expand at levels nine, 13 and 17.

Special Facilities

One of the most useful facilities at this stage of play is the garden, giving you a free way of earning rations, poisons or potions of healing. The garden makes one item every seven days, and you need to be there to pick it up, but it is still for free.

As a barbarian, however, you might value having your own personal smith more. The smithy is the facility for you then, letting you craft items made with smith’s tools, although you still have to pay the crafting costs (usually half the item’s price).

Finally, the barracks is another facility to consider, since it is the only source of bastion defenders. If you aren’t at your bastion to issue orders, then there is a chance that the place will be attacked, and having bastion defenders is the only way to ensure that your facilities remain functional.

Bastion Level Nine

At level nine, not only can you add two more special facilities to your bastions, you also gain new options as well as old ones gaining new features. The smithy, for example, can now make magical armaments of common and uncommon rarity, giving you a simple and cheap way to earn all sorts of magical weapons.

Special Facilities

If you have both the barracks and the smithy, then the armory is a great fit. It lets you use gold to arm your bastion defenders, making them better prepared the next time your bastion is attacked, and the smithy makes the gold you need to spend be reduced by half.

The workshop is a facility that was available since level five, but it wasn’t all that useful for barbarians at that stage. At level nine, though, the facility lets you craft common and uncommon magical implements, something you can combine with the smithy to be very well equipped.

If most of the campaign happens in the vicinity of your bastion, then investing in a training area can make your character more effective in various scenarios. You need to spend a week in your bastion for the benefits to manifest, and they only do so for seven days, but you can gain abilities like reducing damage from attacks or gaining proficiency in skills you may lack.

On the other hand, if you’re spending most of your time away from your bastion, then investing in ways to better travel back to it would be to your benefit. The teleportation circle can work if the setting you are playing in utilizes them, otherwise, the stable is a safer choice.

Replacing Facilities

If you regret one of your facility choices, you can swap them each time you gain a level. This opens up experimentation, since you may want a workshop for only a short while until all the items you need are crafted, then swap it for whatever else you desire.

If you choose to have a garden at level five, then this is an ideal moment to replace it with a greenhouse. If you used the garden mostly to gain potions of healing, then now you can use the greenhouse to gain the same benefit but with potions of greater healing.

Bastion Level 13

A few more facilities get unlocked at level 13, but you can only add one of them instead of two. You may also consider replacing some old facilities with new ones, depending on what might catch your eye among the new options.

Special Facilities

One of the better level 13 facilities is the meditation chamber, since it lets you roll twice when choosing a bastion event, making the odds of an attack quite low. It also lets you meditate for a week to earn advantage on two kinds of saving throws, something you can stack with the benefit of the training area.

You may also consider having a pub, a great place to gather information about the surroundings of your bastion. You can also drink from a special brewing recipe to gain all kinds of benefits for 24 hours, like darkvision or spider climb.

Bastion Level 17

If your campaign is still going at this stage of the game, then you’ll earn access to a series of facilities made to bring it to a close. They all have a series of prerequisites, with all character classes allowing you to at least access one of them, if not more.

Special Facilities

The final facility meant for barbarians is the war room, a place where you can hire lieutenants and form armies. The lieutenants are loyal to you, sharing your alignment, and while they don’t count as bastion defenders, they do reduce how many are lost when the bastion is attacked.

The real use of your lieutenants is for them to raise an army in your name. While you need to pay for their food, this makes for a great storytelling device when it is time to face the army of the BBEG; you no longer need to beg for the aid of a kingdom, you can just face the evil yourself.

If you are in charge of defending several bastions, then the war room is a must-have even if you never use the feature for forming an army.

The other interesting facility at this stage is the guildhall, although you need to have expertise in a skill for this option to be available. There are several feats that allow you to gain this expertise though, so you can easily work towards gaining the feature before level 17.

The point of the guildhall is to send a group of specialized individuals to serve a specific purpose. This can be an adventurer’s guild that tackles simple yet important missions for you, or a mason’s guild that makes protective walls in your name free of charge.