The Most Profitable Special Facilities For DnD Bastions

Bastions in Dungeons & Dragons are a way for players to invest their hard-earned money in a cozy home, filled with facilities that can aid them on their adventures. These facilities, however, can also be used to make even more money, since there isn’t such a thing as enough gold.

If you want to know how to turn your bastion into a merchant’s empire, or you’re just looking to create a hoard for your dragonborn, then this guide is for you. We’ll cover what facilities work best for making money, the investment you’ll have to make, and how your party members can help you.

Bastion Level Five

Bastions are unlocked at level five, letting you choose two basic and two special facilities. Basic facilities don’t do anything, and while you can spend money to make more of them, we won’t cover them here; we want to make more gold, not spend it.

You also have to consider how to keep your investment safe, and we recommend having a different player focus their bastion on defense, and the two of you joining your bastions. That way, they can focus on hiring defenders while you make the profit.

Special Facilities

The main facility you will focus on is the storehouse, one of the few special facilities that gets upgraded each time you expand your bastion. When you issue the trade order to the storehouse, you can either give it up to 500 gold and the hireling will spend seven days buying that much worth of goods. Once you have those goods, you can make another trade order to have the hireling sell them, making a ten percent profit when seven days pass.

You need to issue the trade order yourself, but once you put the initial 500 gold, all the following orders essentially pay for themselves. Assuming that you make every single trade order you can during a month, you’ll be making around 00 gold per month; and that’s a roleplay month, not a real life one.

For your second facility, it depends on what you want to focus on. Facilities that create items are a possible source of income, as long as you can sell the items they make. That will be completely reliant on the setting of the campaign and if your character can take the time off to do the sales.

This is all assuming that you focus all your efforts into making money. If you need to protect your bastion, you may consider choosing the barracks as your second facility, being able to hire bastion defenders to keep your gold safe.

Recommended Spells

A bastion can only be attacked in two ways: due to narrative reasons decided by your Dungeon Master, which should rarely happen if at all, and due to a roll on the bastion event table. The bastion event table is only used when you don’t issue orders to your bastion, so if you keep the orders coming, the chances of attack are basically none.

If the campaign happens near your bastion, then this isn’t an issue, but there are certain spells that can help you keep in touch when you aren’t around. The Sending spell in particular is fantastic for this purpose, and one that you can use for the entire duration of the campaign since it also works for extraplanar communication.

The Sending spell is available to bards, clerics, wizards, and aberrant sorcerers.

If you are only a few towns away from your bastion, other spells like Animal Messenger can work, or even paying a literal messenger to get the order across. Having all the party’s bastions near one another can help make the messages more cost-effective.

Bastion Level Nine

Level nine is a big boost for money-making bastions, since you get the second facility solely dedicated to making money. A lot of previously available crafting facilities now gain the ability to make magic items of common and uncommon rarities, giving you access to rarer goods to sell.

Special Facilities

Your storehouse now lets you spend up to 2,000 gold and earn 20 percent back, making the possible monthly profits go up to 800. You are now making enough money that building walls around your bastion is a feasible endeavor, but only if you have bastion protectors to protect.

The cheapest way to wall off your bastion is to have all rooms stacked on top of one another, with none being bigger than 4×4 squares. Walling off such a tower would cost you 3,000 gold.

A must-have at this point is the gaming hall, since you can turn it into a gambling hall for seven days at no cost. It can make from ten to 600 gold per week; not exactly a reliable margin, but since it costs you nothing, everything earned here is a net positive.

Since you can add two facilities at level nine, the option of adding another crafting facility and selling what they produce is still there. Exactly how you will sell it is up to you, since facilities like the laboratory can make expensive poisons for free, but those can be difficult to sell.

If you are already using a smithy or a workshop, you can now craft uncommon magic items and sell them, so you can consider it a free upgrade. If you had the garden, you should replace it with a greenhouse since it is basically the same but better.

Should you consider that you are already making enough money, then the teleportation circle facility is ideal for you, letting you go back to your bastion and cash in the profit. This circle doesn’t need to be in your bastion, but it should be in its vicinity.

The Teleportation Circle spell can be learned by bards, sorcerers, warlocks, and wizards.

Bastion Level 13

Level 13 is much less dramatic in terms of what your bastion earns, at least when it comes to earning money. You can now gain one additional special facility, but if you want more money-making ones, you should look at the ones available at earlier levels.

Special Facilities

The storehouse gets upgraded once again, letting you invest up to 5,000 gold and earning half of it in profit, making the monthly earnings go up to 5,000. If you ever have a time skip in your bastion, you’ll end up with enough money to buy nearly any item.

There are two new facilities unlocked at level 13 that can help you protect your earnings in unforeseen ways. The meditation chamber lets you roll twice on bastion events and choose the result, while the pub lets you keep tabs on everything going on around your bastion.

Recommended Spells

At this stage, your adventures will take you far away from your bastion, so having spells to go back quickly is a must. Druids with their Transport via Plants and clerics with their Word of Recall can cover travel in the material plane, while Plane Shift (available to several classes) can aid you when you are adventuring outside the material plane.

Bastion Level 17

It is about time to stop making money and start spending it, but there might not be enough equipment on the planes to make you empty your coffers. Believe it or not, even at this stage the storehouse continues to upgrade.

Special Facilities

The storehouse now makes back 100 percent of the money you invest, although the limit continues to be 5,000. If you want to get into black market trading, then building a thieves’ guild with the guildhall special facility might be the way to do it, although you will need to have expertise in a skill to do so.

The best way to spend your money, at least as far as your bastion is concerned, is in the war room. You need to have a fighting style or unarmored defense feature to unlock it, but once you have it, you can spend your vast wealth on building an army to conquer the realms.