Hey all,
I'll be starting up a Kingmaker campaign in a month or two, and I'm looking for any advice/modifications I should make to the modules. Here's the type of game I'll be running:
1. A Core Rulebook+APG campaign. I have a bunch of rookie players, so I figured it would be best to keep things simple.
2. Unchained classes and stamina rules.
3. One of my players is definitely playing a rogue, one of my players is definitely playing a sorcerer, and one of my players is definitely playing a druid. With this sort of party makeup, I think I'll DMPC an Unchained monk.
So... advice? For 3/4 of the group (myself included), this'll be our very first long term campaign, so I want to make it special.
Cool, thanks for the advice! UCAM is already on order, and I've been reading through the Venture Capital ideas (I like those) and Hargulka's Monster Kingdom.
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Everything Pennywit said above, plus:
- Read any material you can find on Brevoy, Numeria, The River Kingdoms, Iobaria, and Galt. Unlike other games where you can control the players movement by sliding the adventure goals to where you want the party, in KM, the party has more say in who and where they involve themselves. It helps to know a good deal about the other kingdoms the party may have alliances, treaties, wars, skirmishes, etc with up front and decide how their leaders might feel about the party (and perhaps their likely actions). The party will engage many of these kingdoms as they grow into a peer (or more) and it can drive a lot of your story and player engagement if you handle these relationships well. Even if you want to run a non-political game, kingdom mechanics-wise, you may want to involve some trade agreements, mass combat opponents, etc.
- Make sure you do something with the obvious roughed in places/encounters in the Stolen Lands that leave nice empty canvases for the GM to paint on. If you need guidance as to what these might me, look for the areas most of the GMs here modify for their own games. Or you can PM me, since I don't want to spoil things for PCs...
- It worked well for me to come up with a bunch (at least 50 I would say) simple story threads of many a sentence of two, and toss them liberally into the game as rumors, hints, loose ends stumbled across, etc. Then expand the ones that your players pursue the most. This gives you a better idea of what gets their attention and interest for the future campaign. The rest you can re-tool, drop completely, let them find out the end result of "paths not taken", or have them recur again in the future, perhaps bigger than before.
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Another thing to keep in mind is that the Stolen Lands, by their very nature, are a very dangerous place. As such, the random encounter tables do not always yield "fair" or level appropriate results. Don't assume that just because a monster appears on the random encounter table that it will be easily handled by the party.
There's not really anything wrong with this per se, but it may mean that for some results on the table, you'll want to show said monster "off in the distance". In other words, give the party an opportunity to simply bypass the encounter as opposed to having the monster show up right on top of them. This can actually work quite well as it can reinforce just how dangerous the Stolen Lands are, and help explain why they are still so untamed.
Also, on an unrelated note, think about randomly generating weather ahead of time for each day so that you can easily present it in game. While weather doesn't necessarily have to have a major effect on the game, it is something that will help to make the world seem alive, particularly considering that much of the campaign is outdoors and that it is a campaign that encompasses years, if not decades, in game time. What's particularly cool about this is that you can potentially allow your players to make nature or survival checks to try to predict the weather. It will make it easy for you since you already know what the weather will be and it might make for some good roleplay as the party decides whether to head back out, stay holed up at Oleg's, or what kind of provisions they should acquire.
Also, read up on the Ride rules. Horses are not just vehicles, and your characters may need to make skill rolls to control them.
By the rules, riding horses are a pretty big penalty when you get into a battle. So much so that the wizard in my group has sworn off riding at various points in the campaign. Eventually the party will be able to afford war horses, or train the mounts themselves, but until then...
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Make it a multigenerational campaign that takes decades. As written the entire campaign is done, start to finish, in less than 10 years. Each CHAPTER could represent 20 years. Their children investigate Chapter 2 or 3. Their grandchildren investigate Chapter 4. Their great-grandchildren conclude Chapter 6.
Monthly kingdom turns (when not waging war) are far, far, FAR too fast.
Build your own kingdom according to the chapter-by-chapter guidelines with the rules set you go with and you'll see just how fast it spirals into "we crush all the enemies with our armies and hordes of staves of power".
REALLY play up the fey background and story elements. Pillage liberally from Alice in Wonderland and anything similarly weird/cool/unusual.
If Lovecraftian stuff is up your alley, Candlemere offers a prime venue to introduce as much or little of that facet of gameplay into your campaign. 'Candlemere Cultist' is a starting point.
The brewing civil war 'back home' in Brevoy begs for massive expansion.
Weave in the BBEG's involvement from the get go. Chapter 1 has a hint or two ... but Chapters 2-5 have next to nothing, resulting in Chapter 6 effectively coming out of nowhere like an anvil falling from the sky.
Other things have been mentioned above that will also greatly aid in fleshing out and expanding on the very bare skeletal framework that Kingmaker presents.
While I'm normally unconcerned about detailed, in-depth character backgrounds, this is the one campaign that I've seen from Paizo that warrants slathering background detail on like it's going out of style. Use anything your players provide in some form or fashion if at all plausible. If you're thinking a particular detail won't quite work, give that feedback to the player to tie their characters and characters' descendants into the interwoven plotlines you've elected to incorporate.
Make it uniquely yours! This is one AP that running it as-is results in but a shadow of what might have been.
As you can see, there are a Great Many things you can do to enhance a Kingmaker run. I'll be the one to add in a word of cautious advice however.
Since it is your First long running campaign, pick one or two of the suggestions, and try to avoid the pitfall of biting off more additional work then you are comfortable with. You will know your limits better then we posters however, so i also encourage you to pad things out to some degree.
Myself with kingmaker: i happily picked up some of the messageboards shared works mentioned above, overhauled how i was going to do kingdom turns and make them more immersive, and also did something similar to the 'face cards' to bring more folk to life. I also added more forshadowing of N in book 6, and yoinked Realm of the Fellnight Queen as another subplot drop-in.
Hope your Campaign proves to be enjoyable for both you and your players!
One thing to keep in mind about the Kingmaker campaign is that, especially in the first book, the players will often only fight one encounter per day. This can make the fights a lot easier than they would be in a dungeon crawl campaign. You could start out with just the party of three and only add the monk if the game seems too dangerous; if you don't need the DMPC, then that frees up more time for you to concentrate on all the other endless fun stuff that a Kingmaker GM gets to think about.
(But make sure to sometimes give them multiple encounters a day, to keep them on their toes.)
I would second Pennywit's advice to make sure your random encounters aren't all just "monster attacks party." I would prepare a list of about 20 different ways you could meet a monster -- come across it while it is eating, find its tracks, find it sleeping in its lair, see it from across water, find it fighting another monster, find its corpse, etc. -- and roll or choose from it whenever I rolled up a random encounter. And when the monsters are attacking, be sure to have them attack in different ways at different times. I fell into a bad rut in my campaign of most of the monsters attacking the players' camp during the night; it became very predictable after a while but I had a hard time thinking of alternate scenarios on the fly.
Pregenerated weather is great. There is a very handy tool in this thread here. Whenever the party is taking downtime, smile and tell them how there are now only n months left until winter....
Very specific piece of advice: If running Stolen Land over again, I would ignore the book's suggestion to have the two fey perform one prank each every day. With the multiple days it can take to explore each hex, the pranks become far too dense and predictable. Instead, I would spread the pranks out and have the pranks occur whenever the players least expect them. Get them to suspect everything they see is an illusion until it has dealt damage to them.
Also: check out the Clawbat monster described in the back of The Varnhold Vanishing. It's a CR 1 monster that can provide endless fun whenever your players start dragging around the blood-drenched carcass of a giant boar or something.
I'll third the, not all random encounters are 'fair'. My wizard ran across a troll on his own... he won, but still. Those shambling mounds though... euhhh *shivers*.
Also, I'd emphasize to your players the need for certain skills. I know the players guide does that, but, suggest it again. Knowledge Nature, Survival, diplomacy, bluff and such all come in handy quite often.
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I ran Kingmaker a few years back, had a great time. I'm going to give you two links. The first one is to a party-role system I worked up. We went slow at first and played up the exploration aspect, so everyone needed some way to contribute, some reason for being part of the exploration party. It worked nicely because it foreshadowed the kingdom roles that PC would later take on.
The second was a general reflection/advice thread we worked on a couple of yers ago. Lots of great ideas. My big suggestion would be to read all 6 books and start foreshadowing as soon as possible. Drop in a few references to Zuddiger's Picnic early, like PCs finding a page here or there. Won't meaning anything now... but someday! Have a couple of chance meetings with Meager Varn, Drelev, and the Iron Wraiths, even Irrovetti, before they come up as plot points so that they are more meaningful when they do. You want to avoid "oh, how sad, a guy I never met died" reactions. And think about a way to start dropping hints about the Big Bad and her involvement as soon as you can. I had a number of the sub-villains tied together by possessing magic rings of one sort or another made of green hair. PCs figured out they were related, but they still wore them, which made scrying on them much easier for the Big Bad at the end. Other than that, I also emphasized more than the written adventures that fey creatures, even the "friendly" ones were uneasy and that something was building.
Good luck and have fun with it.
EDIT: One more - Here's a thread with some amazing art for Zuddiger's Picnic. Use it.
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EDIT: One more - Here's a thread with some amazing art for Zuddiger's Picnic. Use it.
I suggest dropping a page here and there in treasure. It'd make for an interesting "What is going on?" moment for the PCs. Plus, KM is lousy with chances to do collecting quests but doesn't do much with the opportunity.
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Our GM mounted the full hex map for the campaign between a sheet of plywood and a sheet of clear plastic. He sacrificed a couple of dry-erase markers to black out the entire map, except for the small portion of Brevoy at the far north. As we explored each hex, we wiped the dry-erase ink off of it. Seeing our little cleared space grow into the unexplored lands was very satisfying. Later, when we began developing our hexes, we drew roads, farms, etc. onto the clear plastic sheet.
Making the map took our GM some time, but it was an excellent prop.
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Personally I am planning to roll out my random encounters in advance, and group several together into clusters and figure out a way to tie them all together.
Anything you can do to make "random" encounters part of something larger is good. But a couple of dead-ends and red herrings can be good to. Not EVERYTHING has to be part of a larger plot. Think "X Files" ... there were mythology episodes, smaller arcs, and a few random ones. And for the players, the trick in the beginning is trying to figure out which are which.
Same with false rumors...
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Also, when you get to book 2 and the troll fort, there's a great thread out there building it into Harkgulka's Kingdom, but even if you don't go that far, beef it up some. I added a troll druid with potion making and ring crafting who had brewed up potions of Fire Resistance for all the trolls and made Rings of Fire Resistance for the boss and lieutenants. If you're a troll, how is this not your first go-to magic item?!
EDIT: Harkgulka's Kingdom link
dotted for later