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My group's Duchess is a Gnome Oracle whose obsession is growing apples. So they went looking for a name which meant 'orchard' and ended up with 'Boomgaard', and a capital city called 'Boom'. Which I will make them regret some day.
They already regret one of the other towns. The person running the Kingdom sheets said 'we really should give this settlement a name', to which everyone else replied 'yup'. So Yup it became.

Whereas I wanted them to feel independent from Brevoy as soon as possible, so made it clear that border negotiations were the colonies' own responsibility. Which of course encouraged them to be more proactive about trying to gain the advantage, so I should have been ready for it.

IIRC all the Spriggans' treasure (apart from the centaur bow) has been taken from the town, and one chest of Vordakai's contains the valuable possessions of everyone he captured. Everything else should be fair game.

Also, as a more general thing, WBL is pretty irrelevant in Kingmaker. Some groups use crafting and the Kingdom's wealth to put themselves way over; other groups (like mine) donate everything they can't immediately use to the treasury in order to build the Kingdom quicker. It's really your DM's responsibility to tweak later books accordingly.

I thought I was all Kickstartered out after Bones II, but I'm liking the look of this Kickstarter for modular, laser-cut MDF dungeon elements.

I'm hesitant to call it a terrain Kickstarter because I don't see it being used for full layouts so much as to add cover and height elements to battlemaps (at least, that's what I have in mind for it).

It's already funded, there are just under three days to go, and the next stretch goal will pay for a second laser cutter and add free elements to everyone's pledge.

Nyrissa is aware of the PCs quite early, sure, but there's no reason for her to care at that point.

Remember that her plan to capture the Stolen Lands doesn't care who's in charge. Indeed, she has gone out of her way to sponsor people who might unite the area (The Stag Lord, Hargulka, Irovetti) and it's a nice irony if her plan relies on a tamed Stolen Lands, and the PCs unwittingly provide that for her.

The only time Nyrissa starts to consider the PCs as a threat to her is when they get Briar, and that happens late in the AP deliberately. She can probably only be sure that they have it when they use it to slay the Jabberwock, by which time everything's already underway.

It's a good one to modify because 100gp each is a ridiculous reward for some mushrooms to make tea with. I was expecting them to need her help casting mending on the sword from the tomb, since she's the only character around who's high enough level to fix such an item, but they ran into her before finding the tomb so I instead made it a test she gave them before agreeing to become Magister ("I'll think about it - but I could think better over a nice pot of Black Rattlecap tea").

Have they met the Swamp Witch yet? In my campaign I rewrote her as an actual witch, and she's reluctantly become Magister.

As a witch, she'd be high enough level to have several castings of Remove Disease each day. She can ask for the Black Rattlecaps as an ingredient for a general cure, and use her own magic to keep things under control in the meantime (and maybe ask for something else for helping at all, depending on how much they manage to change her attitude).

I feel quite the opposite - it works as a standalone adventure while still fitting into the setting, and takes out one of the PCs' rivals without them having to go to war. It's a nice bridge between thinking of themselves as a party of explorers, and thinking of themselves as a nation.

However, it doesn't hurt to play up Nyrissa's involvement. If you read the module carefully, there is a link there but it's not one the PCs are likely to pick up on. So you have to work a bit to make that more obvious, and it might also be an idea to give either the centaurs or the spriggans a bit of knowledge about Nyrissa that the party could discover. Even Vordakai, being so old, may have something among his possessions that ties back to the First World's presence in the area.

Have I missed something, or do we never find out what happened to the Iron Wraiths? Presumably the assumption is that they failed against the Tiger Lords, wandered into Thousand Voices or made the mistake of trying to negotiate with Irovetti before they were strong enough.

If I'm right that it's never mentioned, I wonder whether to change Ilora Nuski's backstory to make her the last survivor of the Iron Wraiths. It would give her more in common with the PCs and tie up a loose end with the plot.

I'm preparing to run Kingmaker for my group later in the year. I'm making quite a lot of changes - it will be a 5-player group, for a start, and I'm using some of the ideas people have posted here for modifying the kingdom building rules.

But one thing I have spotted is the repetition of a trope over the first three books, and I don't think it's intended to be thematic.

In Stolen Lands, the Sootscale Kobolds are tricked into being warlike and worshipping a false god by Tartuk.

In RRR, the Lizardfolk are tricked into being warlike and worshipping a false god by an advanced Will-O-Wisp

In VV, the Boggards are tricked into being warlike and worshipping a false god by a Spirit Naga.

What I'm thinking of doing is dropping the Lizardfolk from RRR altogether (move Tig Tannersen to Candlemere, caught in the Haunt and tormented by the wisps but otherwise unhurt), and changing the Boggard tribe in VV to Lizardfolk.

If Tartuk survived past the first book, I'll have him levelled up and running the Lizardfolk in place of the Spirit Naga (which is one of the reasons I want to change them to Lizardfolk, they work better with a Kobold than Boggards would. I also find it a lot easier to give a variety of class levels to Lizardfolk).

It does mean that Garuum's arc doesn't go anywhere after Stolen Lands, but it reduces the repetition and possibly brings an old opponent back after a long absence. What do other people think?