I have been seeing some rather good posts on centaurs in Kingmaker. When I played KM, they weren't such a big deal, or a problem or competitors. We didn't take their land or bother them (we didn't expand much at all). The dm ran things a bit differently with fey more central, other problems larger, we didn't spread far, opting to personally kill all threats via the party, and establish a peaceful community.
With centaurs being truly great competitors, I'm planning to put two types of them in as major antagonist forces in a kingmaker like game I am going to run. More on this later, but before that, I have some questions for you all:
1) How did the centaurs come across in your games?
2) Did your dm (or you if you are the dm) change anything about them?
3) How did the players respond to the centaurs?
4) Did the centaur war start and why? I see that is a possibility in the adventure path.
5) Got any other stories about centaur clans in your games?
That is quite a lot. While I personally dislike the chase and challenge scene (risking death to impress a suspicious tribe seems very reckless, but has a tradition in paizo going back to the Korvosa adventure path, and the girallons in shackles--it is not something our party likes at all, dancing and near dying to please clans), I did like the idea of certain creatures being sacred spirits. Killing them is truly offensive, so adventures can't destroy every threat in the land without greatly offending the centaurs; and your mechanics around crime and weighing of certain acts were very good.
The burial mound is very cool tiny dungeon, and really gives off a Scythian feel.
Yeah, has anyone gone hostile to the centaurs?
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Our group is currently playing Kingmaker with an evil party (Tyrantmaker!)
We are aggressively expansionist, so we sold the souls of the citizens of Varnhold and moved our own people in. This made the process of expanding into Varnhold take about two months.
Our GM statted up the centaurs as an army. We'd had reports that small bands of centaur had begun patrolling Varnhold and the rest of the western Nomen Heights, and when our first group of settlers arrived the centaur army quickly descended on the village. Luckily, our alchemist and our antipaladin, who is one of our primary martial characters, had decided to provide escort. While the army approached we quickly barricaded our citizens in the fort and the antipaladin met the centaur leader, who basically gave us a "leave and never settle these lands, we've already had enough conflict with the other humans who lived here" ultimatum. We naturally refused, so the alchemist did a plague-bomb run while the antipaladin managed to slaughter their leader, the second in command, the third in command, and about 30 centaurs in what was definitely one of the most impressive combats we've had in our six years of gaming.
After that we raised our own army and marched them east to drive the centaur out. Our scouts discovered that the centaur were in such poor shape after two weeks of being ravaged by leprosy from the alchemist's plague bombs that they were packing up and getting ready to abandon their territory. Their army was still active, however, and we discovered that they had allied themselves with a bunch of fey and several sympathetic azatas that Erastil had sent to aid them (we've been really brutal to anything nature too; we've built a pretty strong anti-nature discourse and our citizens hate Erastil). The azatas met us in a small copse of trees and gave us yet another "leave or die" ultimatum, which we refused yet again. They attacked, but as we fought we found out they were just trying to buy time - a small army of treants was hidden in the trees and began bombarding our army. We rolled well though and managed to fight them off. The centaur army arrived shortly after we finished off the treants, and we summarily decimated them, thus securing the eastern portion of the Nomen Heights.
That's our story about the Centaur Wars!
My group was not much impressed by the Varns and are only in Varnhold because their sponsors told them to go investigate. Furthermore, they were utterly horrified when they got to investigating the empty Varnhold and found the skinned remains of tribal warriors in the Tannery; they took some of the skins as evidence and burned the rest along with the Tannery itself, and are planning to prosecute Maegar Varn (or his daughter Miriam, since Maegar gets his brain eaten by Vordakai and she's the heir) for war crimes after this is all said and done. (Honestly, their sponsors would probably agree with the Varnholders and say the tribal beasts don't count as people and therefore skinning them doesn't violate war crimes laws, but by the time VV is over their mother country will be in full-on war, so they'll have to hold the trial themselves, and Iomrall's laws are far broader in regards to allowing more kinds of creatures these rights.)
In comparison they love the tribe (though they're a bit frustrated about the tests, they understand the need for them, and why the tribe isn't very trusting of them) and OOCly are eager to be on good terms or even an official alliance with them.
Furthermore they left Varnhold in the hands of the Thornjacks (see Dudemeister's link) after driving the Spriggans out, and aren't interested in removing them - they were sent to find out why the colony had gone silent, not wrangle fey.
Honestly I imagine Varnhold territory will be left in the hands of the tribe and the fey, and any surviving humanoids will be allowed to either come back to the PC's kingdom (if they agree to play nice with the other races, Iomrall is full of weird stuff with an only slight and quickly-diminishing human majority) or forcefully asked to go back to their mother country (if they won't). This might include making the people in Varnhold's other two towns - I moved Nivakta's Crossing into Varnhold, as well as importing Harse from A History of Ashes - pack up and leave the territory if they remain hostile to the tribe. They've lost any sympathy for the Varnholders and aren't interested in playing nice.