Some Characters may find the hustle and bustle of city life not to their liking, preferring to live on the fringes of the DT safe zone in roughly built structures where they can be alone, avoid any unwanted attention or maybe just feel closer to nature.
These types of shelters, due to their isolation, will always be classed as Squalid for the purpose of managing your characters lifestyle and all associated costs of that lifestyle still apply, as you will no doubt need to occasionally buy supplies in the nearby town or make repairs and improvements to your shelter to ensure it remains functional.
By their very nature, these structures are temporary and as such will need to be rebuilt on occasion. How often this will require to be done will depend on how successful your character was in building their shelter.
With DTDM agreement, Building a Shelter can be done anywhere except highly built-up environments.
A shelter can be built using 1 Taxing DTA slot and is carried out in two steps. The first step in building your shelter will be finding the necessary materials to build it. This should be flavoured according to the location you are building in but essence simply requires your character search for the materials they need.
To find materials, your character must make a Wisdom (Survival) check to find materials, the result of which will determine what quality of materials you are able to find. The quality of materials found will impact the potential success of the shelter being constructed as specified in the Shelter Materials table.
Shelter Materials
Check Total | Quality of Materials | Modifier |
1-10 | Poor Quality | -2 |
11-17 | Average Quality | 0 |
18+ | High Quality | +2 |
Once you have found the materials, the next step is to actually construct your shelter using those materials. Players have some artistic license with describing how they wish their shelter to look but it should still be thematically consistent with the location, materials used and the fact it is still a shelter. You cannot, for example, describe an 18th century Manor house in the middle of a swamp, constructed from nothing but leaves and mud ...
To construct your shelter, you must make an Intelligence check to see if you can successfully combine the materials to form a suitable shelter. If you have Carpenters tools and are proficient with them, you may add your proficiency with those tools to this check. The DMs may allow an alternative tool as an exception if thematically relevant.
Once done, you will need to apply the relevant modifier based on the quality of Materials you managed to find before comparing your results to the Shelter Quality table to establish how successful your shelter is.
Shelter Quality
Check Total | Shelter |
1-5 | Your shelter is barely able to stand and almost immediately collapses. You will need to try again next week! |
6-15 | Your shelter is pretty rough and moves a little more than you’d like, but still stands reasonably well. It will need to be rebuilt in 3 weeks time. |
16-20 | You have built a decent shelter that keeps out most of the weather and seems pretty sturdy. It will need to be rebuilt in 5 weeks time. |
21+ | As temporary shelters go, this is likely the most permanent you can get. It will need to be rebuilt in 8 weeks time. |
Characters carrying out this DTA with a trained pet might gain extra benefits. See the commands descriptions in the Pet Training section for details.
Each time you build a shelter, you must go through the entire process of finding materials and building the shelter each time, from scratch.