Kingmaker: Recruiting Armies & Helping Rookies

[The Doomkitten]

Hey all,

I'll be starting a Kingmaker campaign this Saturday. I completely fallen in love with the campaign's concept; however, I may have waded into the adult pool a little too early, as all of my players are complete rookies at Pathfinder. As a matter of fact, they haven't played any tabletop whatsoever before.

My process for figuring out what kind of characters they want to play led up to this party makeup (one member is currently debating over witch, cleric, or druid):

1. Half-orc Invulnerable Rager barbarian.
2. (Most likely) Elf slayer.
3. Human Brutal sorcerer.
4. Pending.

I'll be using Dudemeister's Party Origins (good alignments only) to help ease them in with some simple encounters as well as help them develop roleplaying skills. However, beyond that I'm a bit of a loss on how to help my players (one of whom is extremely indecisive) play Kingmaker.

I've got UCAMP (I've been told that the rules in the appendices of the adventures are rather shoddy), and once we get into RRR I'll be using Hargulka's Monster Kingdom. Which leads me to my next question:

How does a kingdom raise armies? More specifically, armies of specific classes, etc.? I've gone through all of UCAMP and find no mention on how long it takes to raise armies, how many BP you have to expend, etc. I'm very interested in this, because the Barbarian player is of a very militant bent and will be interested in raising some sort of army ASAP once we start the kingdom, and I want to give him concrete rules for that.

[pennywit]

I've skimmed Legendary Games' Ultimate Battle. At times, it references rules that didn't make it into the final edition. I actually have a list of those references somewhere. For my campaign, I adopted these house rules:

The kingdom is assumed to have some ordinary guardsmen. Typically, these would be first or second-level warriors who defend cities, perform patrols, and so forth.

Armies must be recruited in a settlement that has a related building. To recruit fighters or warriors, you need a garrison or barracks. To recruit paladins or clerics, you'll want a temple. And so forth.

Armies must be a reasonable sized, compared to the population of the settlement where they're recruited. You can't recruit a thousand-strong army from a settlement with 50 people living in it.

When you recruit an army, you pay a month of Consumption for training. Afterward, if you put them in reserve, you pay the one-week consumption cost, per the Reserve Army rules.

No troops above 5th level. Beyond that, they want to be commanders and such. And if you want the 5th level troops, you need an appropriate building to train elite troops (i.e., a miltiary academy, a bardic academy, a magical academy, and so forth).

[Queen Moragan]

Raising an Army using UCamp starts in the Edict Phase, steps 5 & 6.
Instead of creating a new settlement, your kingdom may create a new army unit.

Army Statistics (pg.234 UCamp) where it says "Type" think "Class & Race".

There is no building time for building armies unless you want to consider the month you create it in.

There is no BP cost to actually create an army unit, there are costs to Equip an Army, and the ever present cost to Maintain an Army.

Equipping an Army is covered in Army Resources, pg. 241.
Maintaining an Army is covered in Army Statistics, Consumption, pg. 236.

There might be additional modifiers under Army Tactics, Boons, and Special Abilities, depending on the Unit in question.

The Optional Mass Combat Rules being used can also affect the cost.

If you really want to get into Armies, Navies, and Air Forces then get Legendary Games Ultimate Rulership, Ultimate Battle, and Ultimate War.

They are all produced by the same designer that wrote the Mass Combat Rules in Kingmaker and then Ultimate Campaign, Jason Nelson (I apologize for not including anyone else who contributed to said rules).

That being said, IMO the additional rules from Legendary Games makes the whole process much less generic and opens up a whole host of options.

But back to your original questions, when starting KM, don't worry about building armies until years of game time have passed. Think about it sure, but even the smallest Army in UCamp will cost you 4BP's every month, 1BP a week, just to sit there and exist until any other Army comes along and kills it. Using just the plain vanilla Mass Combat Rules.

[Lee Hanna]

The above have your answers.

An additional note: be aware that armies smaller than Large are really fragile. Since the attack rolls are d20-based and the result is army hp lost, a high or even a moderate roll can wipe out an army in one shot. Good for getting battles over with quickly, not good if you've invested in it and your kingdom is taking stat hits for dead armies.

I'd suggest reducing the die size if all the armies involved are not at least Large.