Building Strongholds

[scc]

OK those whop played D&D 3/3.5 may have owned or used and should have at least heard of a book called the Stronghold Builder's Guide, which contained rules for building buildings, so if you wanted your character to own a pub or keep you could.

Now whilst GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics has rules for buildings, that only covers the shell that the building is, it doesn't cover furnishing my new building or really anything else. Say I wanted to build a barracks to house a company (100 men). I'll need a bunkhouse, a kitchen and dining hall, and an armory would probably be a good idea. So how big should each of those things be? And how much would it cost to furnish them?

And what if I wanted to add a blacksmith's shop to make/fix weapons? I'll need to know how big it needs to be to fit the forge (I'm pretty sure there is a costing for one somewhere, I just can't think where).

And something else that the Stronghold Builder's Guide had was how much casting spells could cut the cost of your building, a fly spell is pretty useful if building a tall building, and ones that move earth a useful for site preparation and building moats, but how much effect would they have in GURPS?

[Colarmel]

Originally Posted by scc

OK those whop played D&D 3/3.5 may have owned or used and should have at least heard of a book called the Stronghold Builder's Guide, which contained rules for building buildings, so if you wanted your character to own a pub or keep you could.

Now whilst GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics has rules for buildings, that only covers the shell that the building is, it doesn't cover furnishing my new building or really anything else. Say I wanted to build a barracks to house a company (100 men). I'll need a bunkhouse, a kitchen and dining hall, and an armory would probably be a good idea. So how big should each of those things be? And how much would it cost to furnish them?

And what if I wanted to add a blacksmith's shop to make/fix weapons? I'll need to know how big it needs to be to fit the forge (I'm pretty sure there is a costing for one somewhere, I just can't think where).

And something else that the Stronghold Builder's Guide had was how much casting spells could cut the cost of your building, a fly spell is pretty useful if building a tall building, and ones that move earth a useful for site preparation and building moats, but how much effect would they have in GURPS?

I'm just here to be useless: Someone had a pretty great homebrew attempt at this in 3rd Ed. I don't remember where it is, or how useful it'd be for 4th.

EDIT: Slightly less useless http://www.mindspring.com/~wombat3/archt.html Less of the detail you were looking for than I remembered it having.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by scc

Say I wanted to build a barracks to house a company (100 men). I'll need a bunkhouse, a kitchen and dining hall, and an armory would probably be a good idea. So how big should each of those things be? And how much would it cost to furnish them?

And what if I wanted to add a blacksmith's shop to make/fix weapons? I'll need to know how big it needs to be to fit the forge (I'm pretty sure there is a costing for one somewhere, I just can't think where).

Assume each bunk is about 3' wide, 6' long, and you want about 2' of space on each side to move through, then you need 70 sqft per bunk. If you can double-stack bunks, that goes down to 35 sqft, and 25 sqft if you triple stack. If you go for a two story bunk hall with double stack bunks, you're looking at 7 bunks on each side of the long walls, which are 49' long, and the short wall are 20'. So that's 1000' sqft ft. I'd add another 200 sqft for overhead, entry foyers, and the stairs - though I might put the stairs in the place of the 14th bunk on each floor.

Each person's share of a table and bench/chair is probably 2.5' wide and 4' deep, with another 2' of walk space behind them. Say you put 20 soldiers to a table, with another 4' at each end of walk space. That puts the foot print for each table at 33' by 12'. 3 parallel tables bracketed by two tables at right angles to them puts your floor space at 81' (2x24 + 33) by 36' (3x12). You could also consider feeding in shifts: 2 tables is a 33' by 24' building. Add a 300-400 square feet for the kitchen.

I'm less sure about how big an armory should be. As an estimate, let's say we want to give each soldier a 3' wide, 2' deep locker (or equivalent space for an armor stand or whatever), 2' to stand in front of it, and 2' past that to move through. So each soldier needs 18 sqft or 1800 sqft for the building. I'm visualizing this as an outer wall of 13 lockers, three sets of two rows of lockers back to back, and another outer row, so 39' by 48' but that's just a guess.

The smithy is comparatively small. Poking around on the web, 15' by 15' should be adequate for a single smith, but you can just keep adding space for more smiths and more storage.

Originally Posted by scc

ones that move earth a useful for site preparation and building moats, but how much effect would they have in GURPS?

3 guys with wooden tools, working in average soil, can excavate 3 cubic yards of dirt in 1 hour. One spellcaster with Shape Earth can do the same with one casting and recover all the FP spent in 1 hour. More skilled wizards do better - with Recover Energy-15, the mage is twice as fast as the mundanes. Probably not worth it.

One guy with metal tools can cut enough stone to build a cubic yard of ashlar (LTC3 p 34) every 157 days. (The math here is ashlar weighs 15.5 lbs per sqft-inch, there are 324 sqft-inches in a cubic yard, and the production rate for shaped stone is 32 lbs/day). A wizard with Earth to Stone can turn 1 cubic yard of dirt into hard stone for 3 FP - or 2 cubic yards of ashlar per hour at a minimum. Move Earth can also move unworked stone at double cost, so you can also just excavate stone and move it to form your walls at at the rate of at least 3 cubic yards every 2 hours. Totally, totally worth it.

The 600' by 12' by 8' curtain wall from the construction example on LTC3 p 34 takes about 6000 man-months to excavate and build. A wizard can do it with 2134 castings of Move Earth and 2134 castings of Earth to Stone. Assuming no FP reduction due to skill and no Recover Energy, it takes the wizard 223 days to create the same wall - about 10 man-months - but the wizard's wall is ashlar, not rubble. If the wizard starts on a site covered in rubble, he can do it in 2134 castings of Move Stone, which takes 355 days.

Without estimating the cost of the wizard, I suspect it is most efficient to hire a labor gang of 12-15 guys who go around digging up dirt and piling it into wooden forms and then have the wizard cast Earth to Stone. Without having to move the earth himself, the wizard only has to cast Earth to Stone 2134 times, at 16 castings/day. That takes 134 days or about 6 months. If you can get a skilled wizard who gets an FP reduction on Earth to Stone and can recover 12 FP an hour, he can cast Earth to Stone 6 times an hour and does it in 45 days - 2 months.

Under the standard magic system, a wand of Earth to Stone, Power 2 takes 1300 energy to create and sells for $39,000. It is not a mage only item and entire replaces the wizard in the above example. Assuming a 15 man crew of masons who are doing their own digging, that wand lets you build a $2.9M castle for $66,000, including buying the wand.

Standard magic breaks medieval economies.

[Dalillama]

In a world where those wands can be bought, the foreman might well already have one. A skilled, established work gang could likely get one on credit

[mlangsdorf]

Penultimate construction wand (PUCW): Move Stone (500 energy); Earth to Stone (300 energy); Power 3 (2000 energy). $84000.

Work crew:
1 Architect ($4,000/month)
6 Guards ($750/month)

Payroll is $9,500 per month.

With the PUCW, the architect can cast Earth to Stone or Move Earth on 1 cubic yard for 0 FP. Once per minute is a slow rate. One out of every 50 castings is a critical failure; one of every 216 critical failures summons a demon, which the guards dispatch. 1 in 72 critical failures depowers the PUCW for a week or more.

A reasonable castle's curtain wall might be 3' of rubble, 15' of packed earth, and 3' of rubble for a cost of ~$500 per square foot of frontage. Make the walls 30' tall and the price goes up to $15K per linear foot. A reasonably sized castle might be a square 600' by 150', for 1500' of walls that cost $22.5M. 800 normal workers can build those castle walls in about 5 years.

With the PUCW, we're looking at 2x10x500 or 10,000 cubic yards for the stone facing and another 25,000 cubic yards for the fill. At 2 castings per cubic yard for the stone (one to move the earth, another to turn it into stone) and 1 for the packed earth fill, the castle requires 45,000 casts. At 450 casting per day, that's 100 days or about 5 months of work, plus another 12.5 weeks of downtime when the wand is misbehaving after a critical failure. Call it 9 months to be safe.

$85.5 for the payroll for 9 months, plus the amortized cost of the wand. Another $32K would mean the architect can repay a loan with 100% net interest over 5 years in 5 years, which seems like a worse case scenario. So $120K buys a castle that would otherwise cost $22.5M, and the architect with the wand can make 5 castles in the same time a mundane work crew makes one castle.

He's also excavating enough dirt for a moat that is about 20' wide and 20' deep around the perimeter of the wall.

Part of me wants to replace the castings of Move Earth with a work crew, but once you're casting Earth to Stone for free, you might was well cast Move Earth because it only takes a minute. Though that saves 35,000 castings, and thus 7 weeks of downtime due to critical failures and another 11 weeks of Move Earth spells. I don't think it's worth it because that saves you $38,000 which only pays for 95 man-months of construction labor. And 95-man months of construction isn't enough to keep up with the pace of the Earth to Stone spells.

Dropping the Power enchantment on the PUCW to Power 2 saves $30K in the wand cost, but drops the casting rate on Earth to Stone to ~45/day, and that's clearly a failure because you're spending 10x in payroll to save a third of your capital expense.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

One out of every 50 castings is a critical failure; one of every 216 critical failures summons a demon, which the guards dispatch.

It's probably worth enchanting at skill 16 instead of 15. Enchant itself has a success chance capped at 15, but enchantments do not.

[(E)]

For equipping quarters and residences, what about taking the cost of living for the status of the people who dwell or work there and multiply it by 6 (A number I just made up, research may produce a better figure)

So the fixtures and fittings for a barracks would cost (cost of living soldier) x (number of soldiers) x $6

Alternatively use income for workspaces
A smithy would cost (blacksmiths income) x 6

[mlangsdorf]

PUCW2: Same as above, but with Move Earth and Earth to Stone spells enchanted at skill-16 for $40/point. Cost goes up to $98K.

Critical failure rate goes down to 1 in 216 castings, so only 1 demon is summoned and only 3 weeks are lost when the wand forgets the spell. That saves 2 months of downtime and $19K in labor costs, but the effective cost of the wand goes up by about $6K.

So now the PUCW2 team costs about $110K for 7 months work which builds $22.5M of castle walls. Except the PUCW2 team builds a slightly nicer castle, with ashlar wall facings instead of rubble. Given that the rubble walls already have DR 432 and the ashlar facings only improve to 468, that feature is a nice to have, not a requirement.

One more advantage the PUCW2 team has is that they can cheaply add more ashlar to the wall face: another 10,000 castings of Earth to Stone only takes a month (ie, $9500) and means the walls are face with 6' of hard stone. The mundane crew requires another $17.6M and the best part of 4 years.

[Railstar]

Depends on the trickery and ceremonial magic. Pyramid 3/25 has the quartermaster mage, who essentially exploits ceremonial magic and the “1 energy per unskilled assistant” with 100 unskilled assistants to produce massive effects. Examples listed are Shape Earth moving 100 cubic yards of earth, or 50 cubic yards of stone. Casting time 10 seconds. Earth to Stone transforms 33 cubic yards of earth into stone.

It takes 10 minutes IIRC of rest to recover 1 fatigue. So the wizard can do the same thing every 10 minutes and get a pretty massive wall.

Architect-wizards would be popular. I’m a big fan of the idea of magical terraformers, but I think the main worry is people not wanting to rely too much on Earth to Stone or Create Earth because a Dispel Magic could destroy such a fortress.

[scc]

Originally Posted by (E)

For equipping quarters and residences, what about taking the cost of living for the status of the people who dwell or work there and multiply it by 6 (A number I just made up, research may produce a better figure)

So the fixtures and fittings for a barracks would cost (cost of living soldier) x (number of soldiers) x $6

Alternatively use income for workspaces
A smithy would cost (blacksmiths income) x 6

Actually for the cost of a smithy I'd use the cost of equipment, however that is never defined to my knowledge.