How Bastions Work In D&D 2024

Your own personal base of operations

Ever fancied yourself as a local warlord, ruling from your lofty keep? How about a bartender at the local tavern, handing out ale while you listen in on hushed conversations about local legends. Perhaps you fancy yourself as a necromancer, keeping your own ghoulish graveyard or like the idea of building your own dungeon to keep safe your precious trinkets.

Whatever the case may be, D&D 2024 has you covered with a brand new system for bastions, your own personal base of operations run by you, the player.

Based loosely on the rules for strongholds from previous editions, the rules for bastions can be found in the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide. We’ve just been granted a load of details into the upcoming rules for this and I’ve put together this guide to tell you all about how they work.

You can also check out the reveal video for bastions below:

What are bastions?

A bastion in D&D is any location that player characters can own and maintain that works as a base of operations for characters. The definition of what can be a bastion is pretty loose. It could be something typical like a fortress or tavern, or something more unusual like a graveyard, or network of rooms in a sewer. You can even design your own dungeon if you really want to. These bastions are yours to fashion how you like.

Bastions aren’t just big buildings to hang all your adventuring memorabilia in, they’re also a place for engaging in downtime activities like crafting, harvesting and bastion events. They’ll also operate autonomously while you get on with other things like adventuring with the aid of hirelings you can acquire for your bastion. In fact, bastions can even be used to gain perks for the day’s adventuring.

And if your players are getting a bit of an itch for playing DM, bastions make a great way to satisfy that with some minor DM behaviour of their own by building and maintaining their own personal base of operations.

You don’t have to stop at just one bastion either. Each character can have their own, or you can have a single structure for the entire party. It’s really up to you.

How do bastions work?

How do you get a bastion?

The rules for bastions start operating from level 5 onwards so the first step to getting your own bastion is to reach level 5.

Once there, a DM can provide a bastion to a party in a few different ways including:

As a reward
By purchasing it from the current owner
By capturing it
Rebuilding the ruins of a previous structure
Building one from scratch

You may want to lay the groundwork for a party getting a bastion ahead of level 5. For instance, if the party are building/rebuilding a bastion, you may want the finished product available for when they hit level 5, in which case, you could lay the foundations (so to speak) of a bastion ahead of reaching this level.

Players can even choose to combine bastions if they want, though each part can work autonomously at the command of an individual player.

Building and expanding your bastion

There are 2 types of rooms in a bastion; basic facilities and special facilities. Basic facilities don’t have a special function, though you could incorporate a function into them. There are 3 sizes of basic facility rooms:

Cramped – Up to 4 5ft squares – 500gp – 20 days to build
Roomy – Up to 16 5ft squares – 1,000gp – 45 days to build
Vast – Up to 36 5ft squares – 3,000gp – 125 days

Your bastion will start with a cramped and a roomy basic facility and you can add more by spending gold and spending time on them. You can choose from the following types of rooms (and can have more than one of each):

Bedroom
Courtyard
Dining room
Kitchen
Parlor
Storage
Washroom

If you want to make a basic facility bigger, you can by spending 500gp and 25 days to make a cramped room roomy or 2,000gp and 80 days to make a roomy room vast.

Special facilities

These facilities are used to provide specific, mechanical benefits to the players, like the ability to craft magical items. A bastion starts with 2 special facilities with more being added to your bastion as you go up in levels. You gain these at the following levels:

Level 5 – 2 special facilities
Level 9 – +2 special facilities
Level 13 – +1 special facility
Level 17 – +1 special facility

Special facilities do not cost any gold and don’t take any time to build, you simply choose them at the appropriate level and they’re added to your bastion. You can even change 1 special facility each time you level up too.

The Dungeon Master’s Guide details all the special facilities available to players as well as their mechanical benefits. It also details level and class restrictions for the special facilities as, for example, a demi-plane can’t be acquired until you hit level 17. Similarly, a reliquary is only available at level 13 to classes that use a holy symbol or druidic focus (so clerics, druids, paladins and rangers).

Below I’ve detailed out what we know about these special facilities so far. At the time of writing, the Dungeon Master’s Guide hasn’t been released, but we do have some information released by Wizards of the Coast as well as the Unearthed Arcana playtest for bastions, of which, we’ve been told there have just been some tweaks to how bastions work.

Facility type	Level	Requirements	Benefits
Arcane study	5	Uses arcane focus	Craft an arcane focus, book or magic item
Armory	5	None	Makes bastion defenders harder to kill
Barracks	5	None	Recruit up to 12 bastion defenders
Garden	5	None	Harvest for rations, potions of healing, antitoxins or basic poison. Can also sell produce for gold.
Library	5	None	Research to acquire information
Sanctuary	5	Uses holy symbol or druidic focus	Craft a sacred focus and cast healing word
Smithy	5	Has fighting style or unarmored defense	Craft weapons, armorand equipment, including magic armaments
Storehouse	5	None	Buy and sell items at a profit
Workshop	5	Expertise in a skill	Gain heroic inspiration or craft adventuring gear and magic items
Gaming hall	9	None	Earn gold from gambling winnings
Greenhouse	9	None	Eat fruits that provide lesser restoration or create potions of greater healing or poisons
Laboratory	9	None	Craft potions, poisons and concoctions
Sacristy	9	Uses holy symbol or druidic focus	Regain a spell slot on a short rest here and produce holy water or a temporary sacred item
Scriptorium	9	None	Copy a book, multiple sheets or create a scroll
Stable	9	None	House horses, mules and similar beasts. Gain advantage handling these beasts and buy and sell similar beasts
Teleportation circle	9	None	Invite mages to stay and cast a spell in the bastion
Theater	9	None	Stage performances to receive theater dice. These can be used like bardic inspiration with a longer duration
Training area	9	Has fighting style, unarmored defense or expertise in a skill	Gain an expert training benefit for 7 days like damage reduction or skill proficiency
Trophy room	9	None	Learn lore about a legend, monster or famous item. Discover magical trinkets
Archive	13	None	Gain effects of legend lore and a listed, rare book
Meditation chamber	13	None	Roll twice for bastion events and pick one, advantage on 2 saving throws
Menagerie	13	None	House and acquire creatures that can defend your bastion
Observatory	13	Uses a spellcasting focus	Random chance of having a boon bestowed by an unknown power
Pub	13	None	Research local events. Create magical beverages for enlarge, spider climb, necrotic resistance, frightened immunity or darkvision
Reliquary	13	Uses holy symbol or druidic focus	Allows casting of greater restoration and create an amulet that can ignore material components of a spell up to 1,000gp
Demiplane	17	Uses arcane focus	Gain 5 x level of temporary hit points, create basic, non-magical object
Guildhall	17	Expertise in a skill	Guild members perform special assignments
Sanctum	17	Uses holy symbol or druidic focus	Gain temporary hit points equal to level and cast heal and use sanctum as destination of word of recall (which you have prepared)
War room	17	Has fighting style or unarmored defense	Reduces numbers of lost defenders when bastion is attacked and amass additional guards

During bastion turns, players can activate various benefits associated with the facilities in their bastion, as can be seen above in the benefits column.

Hirelings for your bastion

Hirelings are the NPCs that maintain your bastion. They live and work there, allowing the special benefits of your facilities to function. Each special facility comes with its own hirelings with defenders available to recruit through certain special facilities. Defenders can be used to defend your bastion when it’s attacked. Having no more defenders when an enemy attacks your bastion will lead to an extra facility being shut down for the next bastion turn which is why having a contingent of defenders for your bastion is important.

You’re encouraged to give your hirelings names and backgrounds to give a little more life and personality to your bastion.

How do bastion turns work?

Bastion turns are declared by the DM and occur roughly every 7 days. This might occur following a long journey, during downtime between adventures when resting at your bastion, or following multiple adventures taken within a short distance of your bastion.

During a bastion turn, players will give certain orders to their individual facilities to perform certain activities. These orders include:

Craft
Empower
Harvest
Maintain
Recruit
Research
Trade

The effects of these orders are detailed in each special facility’s listing and the order types available are listed there as well.

The maintain order is used as an order to all facilities in the bastion when the players are away from the bastion. When a bastion is being maintained, the DM will roll for a bastion event.

Bastion events are randomly generated and include the following possible events:

1D100	Event	What happens
1-50	All is well	Nothing of significance
51-55	Attack	Roll to see how many defenders are killed. If there are no defenders, then a special facility is temporarily shutdown
56-58	Criminal hirelings	Retain the criminal hireling for a price or lose function of a facility for a turn
59-63	Extraordinary opportunity	Pay 500gp for the opportunity to roll again on the bastion event table
64-72	Friendly visitors	Visitors pay to use one of your facilities
73-76	Guest	Gain a perk from a friendly guest like an extra defender, gold or a letter of recommendation
77-79	Lost hirelings	The lost hireling means one of your facilities is shut down for a bastion turn
80-83	Magical discovery	Hirelings create an uncommon potion or scroll
84-91	Refugees	Refugees pay to use your bastion
92-98	Request for aid	Aid someone for a reward in gold
99-100	Treasure	Receive a random treasure

Bastion events can be resolved either as a roleplay opportunity between players and DM, or as a cut scene like in a video game.

That’s everything we know about bastions so far. What do you think? Do you have any exciting ideas for future bastions? Let me know in the comments below.