ZomB made a guide to Kingdom Building awhile ago using the old Kingmaker rule set here. Is there any guide to kingdom building using the new Ultimate campaign rules set?
If not would anyone care to try and make one. I might make it myself if people can give me good tips here.
What are you looking for exactly ?
A guide which tells you what to build to get the most of your kingdom? (optimizing/min-maxing)
For me I would handle my Kingdom like my character: Build a concept, lay out the basics and then play it and look where it's going :)
The Ultimate Campaign book is a mess. It's a whole lot of nonsensical crap that takes way to much time and effort just so you're GM can make a roll on a chart.
Not to mention it is a very poorly written and edited rule book.
For some reason population does not matter. Even though a Kingdom's citizens are what make a kingdom work. Paizo has no rule for keeping track of population and how it effects important things like, the economy, labor force, resource requirements (IE FOOD), the size of an army, and much more.
Also as the rules will tell you, a business can only make x amount of money, if the player character hires a person to run the business, their salary is far above what the rules say the business can make.
To be honest you are best to just lay out your kingdom like any other setting. Any thing involved in growing, maintaining, or defending it, should all be roll playing story elements.
If you would like to learn how small medieval countries work then I suggest going to your local library and finding a ew books on the subject. You then would have spent the time reading that crap tastick slpat book and used it to read books directly related to your subject. You will also learn some thing about history.
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I gotta say I haven't had Hawriel's experience with the U-camp. For instance manager salaries seem well balanced with businesses - 3 gp or so is easily covered by the profit check of your typical business.
Population is represented through territory (in the form of hexes) and settlements, both of which affect consumption (IE FOOD). Personally I'm glad they abstracted the actual population number, since I'd rather not have to deal with incremental population growth per hex claimed on a monthly basis - the kingdom rules are complicated enough as it is.
As far as I know there isn't any guides to kingdom building - the only thing I can suggest is don't expand too fast or the kingdom DC will bite you in the ass, set up in hilly country if you can (since you can build both farms and mines everywhere), and make damn sure you have a councilor, a high priest, and a spymaster. They don't have to be brilliant at their jobs, but you really don't want to leave those positions unfilled.
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The lack of population-related mechanics rather surprised me as well. It's as if people meekly appear wherever you decide to build something.
I think there was some good design space there that was left unused. I wouldn't want to run population on a per-hex basis (too detailed), but maybe on a "the countryside" and per-city basis.
* Attract (or scare away) pioneers by offering them good (bad) terms of land ownership.
* Worry about depopulation if monsters terrorize the countryside or if the economy slumps.
* Worry about overpopulation if the kingdom has no room to expand...
* Population affects the amount of armies you can mobilize.
* Large populations may demand rights.
* Large populations demand respect from other countries.
The Kingdom Building rules are abstract (think of an expanded version of "Settlers of Catan") and should be fast/wasy playable.
Also always remember rule 1 of P&P RPG: Never try to duplicate real world mechanics/theories/principles to the game!
If you try to add things like population the kingdom turns will take years not month.
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Might I suggest people who want a more detailed approach to population check out Ultimate Rulership from Legendary Games? It provides a more detailed population calculation based on terrain and settlement size, and also includes a recruitment edict and manpower rules for calculating available army sizes.
And since it was written by Jason Nelson (who wrote the UCam kingdom rules) it ties very neatly in with them.
Having recently added Kingdom building to my Thornkeep campaign I'm looking for a guide too. Less optimization guide. More idiot's guide. Something I can show my players that isn't as intimidating.
Points for including Ultimate Ruler material.
One of those handy graphical flow charts would be great too :)
(With two APs utilizing kingdom building I'm surprised I haven't found that much)
Having recently added Kingdom building to my Thornkeep campaign I'm looking for a guide too. Less optimization guide. More idiot's guide. Something I can show my players that isn't as intimidating.
Points for including Ultimate Ruler material.
One of those handy graphical flow charts would be great too :)
(With two APs utilizing kingdom building I'm surprised I haven't found that much)
Yeah an idiots guide would be nice. Like starting with the founding the 1st settlement. A from scratch guide if you would.