The cost of Dwellings

[Rockwolf66]

I have most of the Palladium fantasy books and most of the Rifters that cover Palladium Fantasy. One thing that I haven't found is the cost to have a dwelling made. Now if you have the skill of Carpentry and you live out in the wilderness a snug log cabin is essentially free. But how much would say a simple hut cost in a civilized area? Or a townhouse, heck how about a Castle for a Knight of sufficient power and influence?

I can find various traditional medieval houses but not how much they would cost in Palladium fantasy. I know it would also vary by region.


Example one

Example two

[Natasha]

We typically do six months of low-ranking military pay as the starting point and then work out the modifiers to the cost to buy. We do not bother with monthly upkeep costs, too much book work. The attention to detail all depends from how essential is the house to the character and the story. If not at all, then it is quite simple. If it is important, then it needs to be worked out.

[pblackcrow]

Of course, how fancy are you wanting it?

[kiralon]

I used to use an old basic dnd version for costing of forts and buildings as it was more comprehensive, now i get my players to make whatever it is they want in minecraft and cost it block for block. I get something that shows what the building looks like, and they get an easy to tally build list.

Minecraft is also handy for quick dungeon representations in 3d.

[Goliath Strongarm]

Two main ways I do it.

1) there is a book made for 3.5 that I will use as a guideline, especially for modifiers for all sorts of conditions: terrain, geography, distance to nearby settlements, etc. Great for building from scratch

2) I will go to websites listing various mansions for sale, multiply the price by 1.5 and use that in gold pieces.

[Hotrod]

Two novels could help you with this. The Pillars of the Earth and World Without End, both by Ken Follet, are excellent books that, among other things, go into detail about construction methods, architecture, and cost associated with construction in the middle ages.

Overall, cost will be a function of
Size: In general, the bigger the project, the more expensive it will be.
Design: Fancy buildings cost more and take more skill (possibly more time). Special components like secret rooms/passages, plumbing, cellars, glass windows, crenelations (battlements), drawbridges, et cetera will, in general, increase the price.
Materials: Are they available locally in sufficient quantity and quality? If not, price and shipping costs will go up fast.
Expertise: The bigger/fancier the place, the more skill you'll need (and the more it will cost). Without the key skills in the right places at the right times, mistakes can ruin a building.
Labor: The more you hire (or buy, if slavery is an option), the pricier it gets.
Timing: How long will it take to build? Can you build year-round? The local climate, culture, or political situation may say say otherwise.
Location: Some spots are easier (not necessarily cheaper) to build in than others for a huge variety of reasons.

Since this is a fantasy setting, there are other factors to consider:

Magic could be a tremendous saver for time, work, and materials. An Earth warlock with the right spells would be a valuable asset to any construction team.
Exotic species could help build faster or better. A 12-foot tall Ogre, for example, wouldn't need scaffolding to reach a second story (human-sized). Of course, big and strong species aren't always compliant or careful in their work. Spriggans could be tremendous assets, if their efforts could be channeled the way you want.
Exotic Materials. Fernwood buildings last a long time. Hardwoods are very resilient. Stonewoods provide about the same resilience as a stone wall. Of course, all of these woods are native to the Hinterlands, and may be expensive or difficult to acquire in large quantities. Wormwood doorway will keep out goblins and worms of taut (per Rifts: England. Wormwood may or may not exist in Palladium Fantasy). You could also use exotic animal hides, exotic stones... shoot, you could conceivably have a collection of stone golems that interlock their bodies to form a dwelling (unlocking themselves by command).
Exotic Design With a vast history of multiple cultures and species, the world of Palladium will have a huge range of architectural techniques and styles to draw from. A civilized subterranean race like Dwarves or Kobolds might build extensive underground mansions, while Kankoran will prefer simpler forest homes. You could tap into a vast array of styles from real life and fantasy.

Getting a big building built could be a small (or big) campaign all in itself.

[Cybermancer]

Personally I loved the Strongholds book for 3.5. It gave you a way to build homes both great and small. It also offered suggestions on how to earn income from the properties owned.

It would certainly make a good Rifter article for someone to write. Especially since Paladins, Knights, Nobles and Squires should all probably be land owners and might be making an income off that land.

Prices for homes can be a funny thing. I was talking to my mother the other day and she remembers when the cost of a home was about a years pay. These days it's closer to four or five years pay. Now in the middle ages, only the rich owned land but they usually owned a lot of it.

Here's some thoughts about wealth, what a knight or minor land owner might possess.

Usually land is granted by a lord. That grant can either be for the life of the recipient or it can be hereditary. Occasionally such fief's can be bought.

Here's what a typical knight's fief might include:
1,000-2000 acres of land
This would include farms and farmlands (with the farmers as tenets)
Pasture land
Forest (with exclusive hunting rights for the lord; some small game might be allowed for peasants, the swine would also graze here)
A village
A church
A mill (that all peasants/serfs must use and pay to use)
Manor house.

The Manor generally had a hall (or great hall), kitchen, servants quarters and of course the masters quarters.

Bear in mind that this is not an especially rich knight, just an average one. This land was required to maintain the knight's arms, armor, stable, family and yearly taxes and upkeep. And very little of it would be in hard coin. This was also going to provide that knight with an income for that knight's entire life (and possibly their heirs as well).

Income from this should be enough to feed and clothe the knight, his squire, his family, his horses as well as maintain his arms and armor as well as that of his squire. Beyond that and after all other upkeep taxes should provide the knight with 1D4X1000 gold every year (collected once per year-it should always fluctuate).

If the individual is purchasing such a fief then I would start the cost for a lifelong fief (not hereditary) at 80,000+ gold. It is after all going to provide decades of income. On the very rare circumstance where a lord is willing to sell a hereditary title and land, the cost should be ten times as much. Land ain't cheap.

If all you want is a cottage and small farm then you'll get a small probably single room farmhouse with a loft where the animals will live with you. This will probably provide you with enough income to feed and clothe yourself and your family. Hard currency after these basic expenses might be as much as 300 gold a year (of which 1/3 to 1/2 will be paid out in taxes). On the bright side you're probably only going to have to pay 10,000 gold, ten times as much if it's hereditary land.

If you want to be a land owner that has a few tenet farmers but still in service to a knight, you'll probably get 100-200 acres of land and 10-20 tenet farmer families working for you. After paying taxes and the upkeep of you and your family you could see 2D6X100 gold a year (and remember this is after taxes). You probably have a house and a barn/stable and probably your own workhorse and a couple of mules. You're probably paying 20,000-40,000 gold for this land. Ten times as much if its hereditary land.

Owning a home in a village is probably cheaper but would be a minimum of 1,200 gold for a run down hole in the wall and could quickly scale upwards by an order of magnitude. Owning a home in a city is likely to start out costing ten times as much for the same hole in the wall and again will quickly scale upwards by an order of magnitude or two. Rent is probably going to be a 1-5% the cost of ownership paid out monthly (and no, you can't rent to own and mortgages are rare).

Oh, and Elves should always be considered hereditary purchasers or else have a grant of 60-100 years after which they have to pay again.

[arouetta]

Owning a home in a village is probably cheaper but would be a minimum of 1,200 gold for a run down hole in the wall and could quickly scale upwards by an order of magnitude. Owning a home in a city is likely to start out costing ten times as much for the same hole in the wall and again will quickly scale upwards by an order of magnitude or two. Rent is probably going to be a 1-5% the cost of ownership paid out monthly (and no, you can't rent to own and mortgages are rare).

When you say "by an order of magnitude", what would the end price be multiplied by? How much for a 2 room home that's not in the hole-in-the-wall district but is still working poor? A shop with the living quarters attached? A nice 3 bedroom house? A mansion in the temple district? Wood construction vs stone construction?

Everything else was good and clearcut, I can't wait to work them into my game. Thanks.

[Cybermancer]

Owning a home in a village is probably cheaper but would be a minimum of 1,200 gold for a run down hole in the wall and could quickly scale upwards by an order of magnitude. Owning a home in a city is likely to start out costing ten times as much for the same hole in the wall and again will quickly scale upwards by an order of magnitude or two. Rent is probably going to be a 1-5% the cost of ownership paid out monthly (and no, you can't rent to own and mortgages are rare).

When you say "by an order of magnitude", what would the end price be multiplied by? How much for a 2 room home that's not in the hole-in-the-wall district but is still working poor? A shop with the living quarters attached? A nice 3 bedroom house? A mansion in the temple district? Wood construction vs stone construction?

Everything else was good and clearcut, I can't wait to work them into my game. Thanks.

An order of magnitude is a multiple of ten. So I was saying that the cost could easily get to be ten times as much. So that nice stone constructed mansion in the temple district in a city is probably going to be the high end of the spectrum at 1.2 million gold. A two room home in a working poor area is probably going to run you 2 or 3 times as much. A nice 3 bedroom is probably going to be at least ten times as much as the base cost. Generally stone should probably cost 3 or 5 times as much.

Now, I'll readily admit these figures were all just pulled out of the air with no research backing them up and going how I 'feel' they should cost. My research was based mostly on rural knights and the city figures were added as an after thought. Bear in mind that different kingdoms and even different cities within the same kingdom are going to have widely differing values. Whether a place is booming and growing or busted and shrinking will also heavily influence cost.

[Zamion138]

Use real world price style i suppose. In a big city like newyork or sanfransisco a house with land that would cost 150k in most places in the country would run you 1.5 million. No new housing lands are available. The cost of removing debris and rebuilding is much higher in a big city as well.

Same would hold true for a walled city state or kingdom. If you want to be in the walls its going to run higher than the same in the country. Besides the fact your paying to live behind a wall that keeps warfare at least at arms distence you got think its an extermly finite amount of homes in the walled area.
In marches and farm land it would be 10 to 100 times less for the same property.

[Hotrod]

There's one other piece to this that should be mentioned: maintenance. All buildings need it, or they eventually crumble. You'll need people watching the place. Unless you're loaded, you'll need some sort of income. The bigger the place, the more cash flow it will need to keep it in top shape.

[Zamion138]

There's one other piece to this that should be mentioned: maintenance. All buildings need it, or they eventually crumble. You'll need people watching the place. Unless you're loaded, you'll need some sort of income. The bigger the place, the more cash flow it will need to keep it in top shape.

For none city dwellings a side house that a family of farmers get for free is an exalent option....they give you a % of the crops and maintain the property for you....you get food and a maintained house.

[kiralon]

Inns are also good as well, for when you retire you can be the old guy in the corner

[Rockwolf66]

Inns are also good as well, for when you retire you can be the old guy in the corner

I have an adventurer who owned an Inn. She took her earnings from Adventuring and put it into the place. At the end of that campaign the Inn was stronger than the local Castle on the hill. It was funny when the local mob tried to muscle in on the place. Their firebomb didn't even scorch the whitewash.

[The Immortal ME]

To come up with a workable, rough estimate of the cost to have a building made, I would make a system of determining the number of man-days of labor the construction would require, and multiply by a few coefficients to estimate other factors that would influence the price.

Let's try. (Warning, probably not short.)

Google isn't as helpful as I would like but it looks like a mason ("with the right help") can lay between a few hundred to a thousand bricks a day. We'll call it 750 bricks a day with a crew of three: one person laying, one person mixing and carrying mortar, one person carrying bricks. Bricks (and blocks, and cobbles, and dressed stone) come in all different shapes and sizes. Roman bricks came in an enormous variety of shapes and sizes--boy did they love bricks--but were generally shorter and fatter than modern bricks. Say... 4x12x2, mostly because it makes nice math. In fact, for a small building, let's ignore the depth entirely and call it "deep enough the wall wont fall over" and just look at the face dimensions of 12x2. (For a large building, the wall would need to be multiple wythes deep, which makes things complicated. Basically multiple the number of bricks needed by 2 or 3, and reduce the number of bricks per day per team of masons because of the extra work tying the wythes together. Castles are a pain.) This would allow us to estimate the number of bricks in a building. For the sake of simplicity, the time saved not laying the brick in the openings is taken up with the extra work required to dress the bricks around those openings. Arches and transoms and whatnot, to boot.

To go from "walls" to "complete building" requires a lot of work, and it depends on how fancy you want to be with your finish work. Let us call it the fancy factor, F. I would estimate a "normal finish" as a baseline of F = 2. Old buildings really didn't have much in them other than a roof and floors, but it is still a lot of work. More if you want to get fancy. Potentially WAY more. On the other hand, any less than F=1.5 and you are probably going to have a pretty leaky roof.

So, the number of bricks in a building, N = height the walls in feet x length of the walls in feet x 6

A rule of thumb for modern construction is that the labor costs twice as much as the materials. But that is because materials now-a-days are machine made and cheap. It used to be a lot more labor intensive. For the sake of argument, let's pretend that labor and materials cost the same, which means our material factor is M=2.

So far we have been talking about bricks. What about other construction methods, like, cobbles, or dressed stone, wattle and daub, or... ? Make it easy. Pick a coefficient to represent a rough more-or-less-than-brick factor. Wattle and daub as half the cost of brick (chosen more or less randomly); dressed stone twice the cost (because quarrying and dressing the stone is stupid expensive); cobble is probably the same as brick (you can pick them up off the ground, but you have to figure out how to fit them together); beam and batten a little more than wattle and daub, say 0.7 or so. Pick something. Who is going to argue with you? We'll call this the construct type factor, T.

What about location? Location, location, location! Well, we already used L, sooo... place factor, P. We will assume P=1 is a well provisioned rural/town location. That is, there is a lumber mill or a brick kiln nearby or a thatcher or a ... whatever nearby. Not so rural that you have a drag raw materials and the people to put them together prohibitive distances, but not so well developed that you are paying a premium for goods and services. Generally, the further materials have to be dragged, the higher this will be. There is also the local-economy consideration: when people are starving, they are usually pretty motivated to work for bottom dollar; on the other hand, does "housing market bubble" sound familiar? You can probably ignore the local economy under most circumstances and just consider how far the materials have to travel.

To summarize,

Total cost = ( N / 250 ) x F x M x T x P x day's wage

Where,
N = height the walls in feet x length of the walls in feet x 6
F = Fancy factor (generally 2 or more (some research would help with accuracy))
M = Material cost factor (Generally 2)
T = Construction type factor (Generally 0.5 to 2 (admittedly arbitrary, you can do research if you want))
P = Place factor (Generally 1 except in strange economic conditions or where provisions are not available locally)

Pick numbers for the factors that everyone can agree on for the building in question and call it a day.