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Bastions in Dungeons & Dragons are a way for players to have their base of operations, where they can craft items, gather allies, and research all kinds of information. These structures can be attacked, either through random events or whenever the Dungeon Master deems it necessary for the plot.
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Since players can combine their bastions to form a singular, massive structure, one of said players could craft their own base to become a bulwark of defense, protecting the bastions of the entire party. Several facilities serve some form of defensive purpose, letting you create the fortress of your dreams.
Why Make A Defensive Bastion?
If you read the description of bastions in the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide carefully, you’ll see that it is rather difficult for the bastion to be attacked. For starters, the bastion can only be attacked if you don’t issue an order in a given week, something easy to solve with spells like Sending no matter where you are in the multiverse.
There is also the fact that your bastion being attacked isn’t that big of a deal. If you lack any defenders, one of your facilities gets destroyed, but it fixes itself after a week; if you weren’t issuing orders anyway, you could forgo taking bastion turns for a month and not see too many repercussions.
Roleplay
Your bastion is your character’s home, and the NPCs you fill it with might have deep ties to them, their personality and desires. If you make one of your hirelings your character’s spouse, then you would certainly want to keep them safe, since a bastion attack could prove lethal to them.
House Rules
Your Dungeon Master might not use bastions exactly as described in the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide chapter, making attacks more frequent and troublesome than the rules as written. They might also target your bastion with an attack outside the random events table, particularly if it fits the narrative.
That last example will happen more often than you think, especially at higher tiers of play, since your party will likely be made up of renowned heroes of the land. Evildoers wanting to hinder the party will often look to sabotage their base of operations through several nefarious means.
Bastion Level Five
When you finally unlock your bastion, you should decide who among your party members will build the defensive bastion. It doesn’t make sense for more than one of you to do it unless your Dungeon Master rules that defenders of one bastion can’t protect a different one.
You might be tempted to build walls all around your bastion, but unless you build a very thin, very tall tower, the cost of enclosing a bastion with walls is far more expensive than simply replacing any defenders that die. This is without mentioning how big bastions get when players join them, making the cost of walking everything up only possible at the higher tiers of play.
Special Facilities
The main facility that you’ll base your entire bastion on is the barrack, the only way of getting defenders at level five. Whenever you take a bastion turn, you can recruit four new defenders, and the basic barrack can hold up to 12.
You don’t have to feed or pay them in any way, and they automatically defend your bastion against any threats. You can expand your barrack at any point for 2,000 gold pieces, at which point it can hold up to 25 defenders.
Since you can have more than one barrack, it is a good idea to get two barracks at level five, instantly gaining eight bastion defenders from the get-go. This is a particularly good idea if your Dungeon Master establishes the campaign as a treacherous land where you’ll often be attacked.
You could add an armory instead of two barracks, but the point of the armory is to equip your defenders (for a gold cost) so they don’t easily die. It doesn’t guarantee that they’ll survive an attack, making it a rather costly addition when you can just have more free defenders.
Bastion Level Nine
You can add two more special facilities at this level, with several new options being unlocked. Most of them don’t offer new ways to defend your bastion, though, so you could consider adding even more barracks to your bastion, possibly forming a small army to protect your lodgings.
Special Facilities
While the armory was costly before, at level nine you can add both it and the smithy, making equipping your defenders something not so demanding. This is because having a smithy reduces by half the cost of the armory services, and at level nine, the smithy can even craft magical weapons for you.
The only other interesting option at this level is the teleportation circle, mostly because only one bastion needs to have it for everyone to benefit from it. If you’re building a bastion focused on defense, you can let everyone else deal with research or money making, and having a teleportation circle in your bastion can help them save a facility slot.
Bastion Level 13
By this level, you’ll know if your investment in defense is working, if you need to double down on it, or if you’ve gone too far. If you want to shift the focus of your bastion, you can change one of your special facilities each time you level up, making it a great way to experiment with different combinations of facilities.
Special Facilities
The meditation chamber is an indirect way to protect your bastion since it lowers the chances of it ever being attacked. By having your hirelings meditate there, you’ll be able to roll twice whenever a bastion event happens and choose the result that most benefits you.
This, of course, can’t prevent your Dungeon Master from forcing an attack on your bastion, but it is ideal if you expect to take some time away from your bastion in the following adventures. You might be tempted to have a menagerie as well since you can recruit animals there that work as defenders, but they aren’t free and don’t have any special abilities over a regular defender, so it is a waste of space.
Bastion Level 17
The special facilities unlocked at this point depend highly on what your character can do, some needing a spellcasting focus while others asking for some sort of expertise. While there aren’t that many new ways to defend your bastion here, the options on offer are still the most interesting thus far.
Special Facilities
The easiest facility to qualify for is the guild hall since you only need to have expertise in one skill, something attainable through several feats. From the examples given by the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide, the ideal one for defensive bastions is the Masons’ guild, letting you build walls around a bastion (either yours or one of your party members) for free.
If you want an army that can follow you into battle, then the war room is better suited for you, assuming you have a fighting style or the unarmored defense feature. You can have an army in the hundreds ready to fight for you, and while you can have just as many free bastion defenders by this point, your Dungeon Master might not let them leave the bastion at all.
