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Thanks for the heads-up DM...
Hey everyone!
So, you might remember that waaaay back when this campaign first started, there were two people I knew from outside the game who were pre-accepted, Guthruc and an arcane caster.
To give a bit more background, the main reason I decided to GM this campaign was to do a play-by-post with said arcane caster. (Well, with the player, that is.) We'd been in a play-by-post before, but the party was too small to survive player turnover. I thought we might have better luck on Paizo's site, so I opened a recruitment thread there. (Here.)
Unfortunately, life happened and they were unable to join us when the campaign was scheduled to start, and there was already a large party of awesome players and characters that I didn't want to disappoint and I didn't know when they'd be able to post regularly, so I decided to start the thing without them.
They're now at a point where they'll be able to post regularly, and the party is close to a point where we can introduce a new character fairly easily (the end of the first book) so we were thinking that they could join us for Rivers Run Red.
Thoughts?
Sounds great! As long as they mesh well with our highly chaotic party, I think some fresh meat would be a fun addition!
Sounds great! As long as they mesh well with our highly chaotic party, I think some fresh meat would be a fun addition!
Ditto. We could really use an arcane caster. Any idea what kind (Wiz, Sorc, Bard, specialization, etc.)? Ozzy was never intended to be the main caster in a party.
In addition to the need to mesh with the alignments of the current party members, I'll point out that we all currently have darkvision, and we're just starting to really take advantage of that fact. Something to keep in mind when selecting a race.
They’re playing a tiefling Arcanist, with a focus on utility and crowd control, looking at their spellbook. So, darkvision and primary spell casting are covered.
The character’s alignment is “CN”, but alignment isn’t a great way of telling how characters will get on. Only time will tell how they work with the party’s freewheeling glorious chaos, but my guess is that they’ll do alright.
That all sounds perfect so far!
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Hey DM- can I clarify something really quick?
Falgrim Sneeg, a wizard, lives on the subterranean floor of the fort. No one really knows what he does down there, and no one wants to find out. Once, when he was interrupted, he burned the intruder to death with acid.
People stay out of that area unless they're there for healing from the freaky old man locked in a cage (though most would rather let their injuries heal naturally and risk infection). The old man also brews potions for them, which are sometimes poisoned. When someone drinks a potion and gets sick from it or dies, the Stag Lord goes down there and knocks the old man around.
When you say "out of that area" are you referring to "the subterranean floor of the basement?" Because, if so, our strike force mission just got a lot more precarious.
I like it! Though, I will say, with two eat- murderer's (Iorskan, Guthruc), Ozzy the maniacal, Bright Awn slowly tuning into death incarnate (I'm on to you, Groot!), and a CN Tiefling, Abaos' "Let's not kill people (unless we have to)!" attitude is going to get quickly outnumbered.
Ozzy agrees in principle with the idea of not killing people when you could have them join you instead, she just usually needs someone else to propose ways to do it. The idea of locking people in rooms or away from their weapons, or making people flee, allows us to take out the leaders, then later give them someone else to follow (us).
I'm happy to have more chaos added to the crew.
Hey DM- can I clarify something really quick?
When you say "out of that area" are you referring to "the subterranean floor of the basement?" Because, if so, our strike force mission just got a lot more precarious.Falgrim Sneeg, a wizard, lives on the subterranean floor of the fort. No one really knows what he does down there, and no one wants to find out. Once, when he was interrupted, he burned the intruder to death with acid.
People stay out of that area unless they're there for healing from the freaky old man locked in a cage (though most would rather let their injuries heal naturally and risk infection). The old man also brews potions for them, which are sometimes poisoned. When someone drinks a potion and gets sick from it or dies, the Stag Lord goes down there and knocks the old man around.
Yes.
Taking the Fort is a good time to bring in another person. From the Stag Lord’s dungeons perhaps? Seeing as how this attack is taking a very long time, we could get the caster in by having the kobolds/sprites dig into said dungeon by accident and releases the prisoner. The tiefling naturally joins us in overthrowing the Fort, thus joining the party as well.
I posed the idea to the player!
It’d introduce them to the party *before* the party divies up kingdom roles, too, so it gives them a good reason to get one.
That's a good idea, if the player can be ready in time. In fact, though I'm really itching to get going, I'd be willing to delay a couple of days to make it happen.
Even with this elaborate plan, I've been a little concerned about the crowd control aspect, given the number of characters we're going up against, since none of us really have a way to deal with more than one enemy at a time. With so many low-level NPCs in the fight (on both sides), we're probably looking at a lot of losses by attrition alone. This is why I've been looking for ways to focus everyone on taking out their heavy-hitters, but we'll potentially be dealing with a flood of bodies so dense that there's no way for our heavy-hitters to reach theirs.
Hopefully once their heavy-hitters are down, their underlings will see that they can't win surrender before they can kill too many of ours. If this new player has some way to help keep their low-level guys out of the fight for a while, that should help us a lot.
Btw, they should have a ballista waiting about 100ft to the north, already loaded and hidden among the sticks of the burned forest, so that if they have to retreat, Ozzy can take the controls and try to put one through whoever tries to follow (or even stands at the gate to gloat about making us retreat). Might give us one more chance to take out the stag lord, if it comes to retreating. There should probably be some flammable oil or a big rock or something at the far end of the tunnel, which they can use to prevent anyone from following them through it if they have to retreat that direction.
I know I'm getting ahead of myself, but in this player downtime, I've been thinking about a cohort to take when we get access to Leadership. I want to make a character that can craft stuff for us and our nation, both magic items and mechanical stuff (think steampunk). I'm thinking of making a wizard, but having an arcanist PC in the party frees that character up to go more full-bore into crafting. I'm thinking of aiming for construct crafting, mostly stuff like animated objects at first, but eventually getting into clockwork constructs (those all seem to require a minimum caster level of 12, so we'll be level 14 before that becomes available). This character probably terribly useful in combat (not with full caster PC two levels ahead of him, anyway), but could make stuff that would be. Eventually, it would probably make more sense for him to stay home and build stuff for us while we're off galavanting, rather than coming along. I expect this character to be a good one to fill the Magister role, leading the technological development of our nation.
Race-wise, I'm thinking Wayang (sticking with my shadow theme), and I also want him to be trained in Perform: shadow puppets (purely for flavor reasons, obviously).
Anyone else have cohort ideas yet? Something to keep in mind for whoever is going to take the ruler role (Abaos?) is that if the ruler is married, you can add both characters' charisma modifiers, so it would be advantageous for that character to have a high-charisma cohort as a spouse. If you're looking for class suggestions, I bet a mesmerist would make a good cohort...
Guthruc is planning for shadow-paw from his backstory to join him as a cohort. Worg bloodrager(abyssal), probable will end up being marshal.
So, to consolidate what people have said about kingdom rules so far:
Guthruc: war king (general)
Abaos:ruler
Iorskan:senshneal...shenshneal...you know what I mean
Ozzy: spymaster
Ozzy cohort: magister
Guthruc cohort: marshal
Abaos cohort: co-ruler
Is there a diplomat role? I can only think of that for Awn.
Yeah, the grand diplomat uses charisma or intelligence as their kingdom stat. Also, the worg isn't the marshal, they're the warden, my bad.
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I'm kinda letting the story dictate how cohorts go in terms of leadership. Which, as of right now, is probably Happs Bydon- and that would be one really awkward marriage! I don't know- we can't take Leadership until 7th level, and we're only level 3, so we've got plenty of time before this becomes a thing.
Awn, there's a list here: https://pkingmaker.obsidianportal.com/wikis/leadership-roles
Since wisdom is your highest stat, you would be most beneficial in one of the roles that uses it, that would be Councilor, High Priest, Marshal or Treasurer.
I'm kinda letting the story dictate how cohorts go in terms of leadership. Which, as of right now, is probably Happs Bydon- and that would be one really awkward marriage! I don't know- we can't take Leadership until 7th level, and we're only level 3, so we've got plenty of time before this becomes a thing.
Well, maybe there will be an opportunity for a political marriage? I just thought it would be a good opportunity to get someone suitable into that position. Leadership allows you to bring in a character to fill a role that nobody available is a good fit for. Since Happs is already available to us, making him a cohort just seems like a bit of a missed opportunity.
We'll have to keep an eye out for high-charisma NPCs to set Abaos up with. We can make a minigame out of it. I assume from your comment about Happs that this will need to be a female NPC? Happs wouldn't do any good in that role anyway, since his charisma modifier is 0.
Of course, Ozzy is a female with pretty high charisma, but that would be complicated in a lot of ways, not the least of which is that she's a little young...
Iorskan:senshneal...shenshneal...you know what I mean
Seneschal isn't actually on the list, and it's basically a servant (though the most honored position among servants), so I don't think that's what you had in mind. Did you mean councilor?
Iorskan's highest ability modifier is in CON, which would indicate that he should be the warden.
Iorskan is LORD. Of all that he sees, smells, and tastes. He is the god-emperor of the kobold people, to be worshipped and served. He is no servant! He is no warden! He! Is! King!
No. But in all seriousness Warden works.
"The Warden leads the kingdom’s defense and city guards."
So if you attack us, our dragon will eat you. That works.
Gosh darn these delays. :(
I sent the player an email this morning; they haven’t responded (last I told them they’d be joining in ~a week, so I’m not surprised that they aren’t refreshing their inbox every five seconds waiting for me to email them.) so I’ll give them a day to get back to me.
*sigh* Just when we were about to start, too.
Re: Kingdom Roles: pick whatever roles you think best suit the character, from what I’ve read the kingdom building minigame isn’t exactly hard. I don’t think it’s necessary to eke our every possible +1 to the kingdom attributes. And it’s not like anyone would feel like their character is underperforming if they don’t add their highest modifier, no individual character is rolling any dice during the kingdom turns, so it only matters that your kingdom isn’t an utter train wreck. But even if someone wanted to apply a negative ability score to a role, it’d be washed out by the other players and NPCs.
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So...this isn’t my only kingmaker. I’m in another one (albeit an apparently modified one). Have two very intelligent elves (magus/witch) and two high wisdom humans (warpriest/hunter).
This group recently attacked the Stag Lord...did 0 planning. Did no diplomacy. Walked right into the zombies, alerting the fortress. With no allies at all we charged the Fort...with no siege equipment. Scaled the wall at different places, and proceeded to murder everything. My elf magus went down to negative HP and the warpriest almost did the same. They now have a “kingdom” in name only as they have no people and didn’t care about taking prisoners. In my defense, my elf is bladebound. The sword has sapped away nearly all of his emotions, so even impaled by a sword he couldn’t bring himself to truly care. That...that’s a defense, right?
On the flip side this group has raised an actual army, made an actual siege, conducted diplomacy, and is making a planned assault. Should we win, we will have an actual basis for a kingdom as we already have subjects and a plan to get more.
I personally find this all to be very amusing.
I think this kingmaker is modified, probably to make up for a (slightly) larger party at first, then to account for the fact that we had raised an army. 40 people in this fort? It barely has enough floor space for that many people to lie down at once. If it rains, and everyone tries to get a space under a roof, it there is exactly one 5ft square per person, assuming there are no interior walls or furniture taking up space. If it was written this way and we hadn't raised an army, we would be toast.
Well, the map isn’t to scale then. ;)
I’d assume with army combats, our map would be a small part of the conflict, with the rest being narrative.
Iorskan:senshneal...shenshneal...you know what I meanSeneschal isn't actually on the list, and it's basically a servant (though the most honored position among servants), so I don't think that's what you had in mind. Did you mean councilor?
I was referring to something iorskan said a while back, not 100% paying attention to the kingdom roles:
isn’t there a seneschal? Or someone who handles matters relating to your guilds? You do ha w guilds, don’t you?”
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led to Iorskan’s lair.
So, it seems iorskan has claimed warden.
Guthruc's cohort will probably go for "Royal Enforcer" now. And due to the lack of a vacancy penalty, he can still fight in wars as my lieutenant general of needed.Also who all thinks we should have Anura, the moloch-worshiping bogard, be our high priest?
So, where we currently stand, we have:
Our new PC is and Int-based class, so his best fit will probably be Treasurer (or Diplomat, if Awn decides to switch to something that will use his Wis modifier, which is any of the currently open positions).
People we currently have who might fill these slots (this list may very well change after this fight), along with their most relevant ability modifiers:
I left out Garess and Co., because I assume they won't be sticking around. Clearly, we need more people with Wis and Cha. Sadly, among our assorted forces, the highest Wis scores are 13 (the mites are tied with the horses).
We also don't have Bokken's stats, but I assume his Wis is at least a +2.
Sootscale be a good fit for Marshal, and Tatzy would make a good interim enforcer (at least until the cohorts come along). Dharak would probably make our best interim Magister/Treasurer (whichever one our new PC doesn't take). Dragonfly can take one of the Wis/Cha spots (Councilor or High Priest) until we find someone better, but we don't have a good candidate for the other (except maybe Bokken) unless Awn wants to switch. If Awn switches, we might be able to use Int instead, but aside from Garess's people, Dharak is our highest Int follower at a score of 12 (again, Bokken should be decent in at least one of the mental stats, so we'll have to get his stats to see how this shakes out).
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I do just want to echo the sentiment that if there's something ya'll want to play, we don't need to have the most optimized Kingdom, in terms of stats. As long as everyone's having fun, that's what matters.
I mean, hey, we can always invent new roles if we have to (I've got ideas), and leave others blank.
We can invent titles, certainly, but they probably won't have a mechanical effect (unless we can convince our DM that they should). Most of the defined roles have vacancy penalties, so we should have someone nominally filling that role, thought we can skin them to fit out setting and our kingdom. For example, if we want to have secular kingdom, we would still want a "minister of religion" ("minister" in the parliamentary sense) charged with keeping peace among the various religious factions. I consider the titles above to be rough guidelines for what any given role entails, but I do think we should fill all of them.
A major bugbear of mine is kingmaker making PCs into people who can’t realistically adventure.
“My king! The people are rioting due to taxes.”
“Bring me the treasurer!”
“No can-do. He’s out wresting giants.”
“Ok, bring me my councilor.”
“Uhm...he’s out battling demons.”
“Fine! Just bring me the grand diplomat. The Duke of Neighboristan is here and we need to explain this unrest.”
“Sorry! Really, I am. But the Grand Diplomat is in the sewers.”
“Why...why is my diplomat in the sewers?”
“He heard that there was treasure down there.”
———-
In my mind, PCs should only be:
Warden, Magister, Assassin, Spymaster, Marshal, High Priest
All of them could reasonably be expected to adventure. They keep the peace, in and out of the city. They remove problems as they rise up. They explore leads on magical discoveries and battle the undead/demonic. In other words, they can be adventurers.
Everything else? Is just feels to me to be too intrinsically important to a nation to gallavant around by themselves.
That makes a certain kind of sense. On the other hand, we don't want to appoint an NPC to be ruler over us. Not the best AP design, in that sense.
Some kings go hunting or dabble in a sport when they have free time, ours goes adventuring and slays the restless undead.
It does seem like a bad idea for the people in ALL of the named roles to be off together at once. Somebody needs to be left in charge, and if some tragedy befalls that group, there should be a designated survivor.
It’s looking like my friend won’t be ready on such short notice, so we’ll start this conflict without them. I’ll roll initiative for everyone early tomorrow morning.
A major bugbear of mine is kingmaker making PCs into people who can’t realistically adventure.
It is kind of strange, I’ll grant. Of course, things are different for a kingdom just starting out than they’d be for an established kingdom.
Since your kingdom is just starting out, I imagine it’s an all hands on deck sort of affair. The PCs are just about the most all-around competent people in their kingdom. The bloke sitting on the Dragonscale throne is an aristocrat with a character level in the single digits. If a band of robbers attacked a small village and are now holding thirty people hostage unless Brevoy paid them in platinum, the Dragonscale Regent would send professional adventurers or special operatives. Who would your party send in a similar scenario? Happs Bydon? Hiring adventurers higher level than you would drain the nascent empire’s coffers faster than I can type on this blasted touch screen. So it’d be up to the most all-around competent individuals in the kingdom to save the day. Since your subjects will generally be lower level than you guys, it’ll likely stay that way for the whole campaign. You’re the best rulers (or, at least the rulers that you trust most with authority), and you’re also the best fighters and investigators and adventurers, so you’ve got to do both jobs if you want the kingdom to be a success.
We could implament a "second in command" type thing where different named NPCs temporarily take our roles while we're off doing what adventurers do. They could potentially have restricted power/authority, causing a reduced benefit from the role. Only a certain amount of roles may be using their second in command at a given time.
You would get a "reduced benefit from the role" just from them having a lower ability score.
I just made over a hundred tokens to represent the humans in this conflict, and I want to beat my brains out with a brick. :tired_face:
I'll be back later today to do the kobolds and mites. And then we'll start.
Good news! The caster’ll be joining us in time for the attack on the fort.
I’m thinking y’all just tunneled into their cell-type-thing, so you can meet right off the bat. But we might not start the fight until tomorrow, as I need to hash out with them how their character wound up where they’re at.
Yeah, I can see how that would be tricky. It would be easy to make them someone who's been in the area for a while and got on the wrong side of the bandits, but then they should have more information about the area than the rest of us. The player, however, knows even less about the setting than we do. Finding a reason to explain their presence AND lack of knowledge of the area is significantly more difficult.
The character is a tiefling, so maybe Nugrah was trying to summon some sort of demon and, I don't know, wasn't specific enough?
Hello, 'tis I, the untimely friend. I've previously gone as "CatGoddess" on forums but as I understand it Paizo lets you use aliases? Hopefully this gets posted with my character name...
If it doesn't, I'm playing Jen Undrell the tiefling arcanist. For years she has been a harbinger of terrible luck and feels rather disgruntled by the whole situation, so when I last left her (backstory) she had decided to take up adventuring. I suppose it's rather par for course that she'd wind up in a bandit's prison, though.
I'm not exactly sure yet how Jen is to be introduced yet so I'll hold off on that until I convene with my... informants. Yes. My informants. I have numerous; the idea that I'm getting all my news from the DM is a libelous lie spread by enemies of freedom.
In any case, though, I'll talk about it with him and (maybe?) see you guys tomorrow? Probably Saturday, though.
Goshdurn enemies of freedom.
Greetings "CatGoddess". Looking forward to my character meeting yours!
Hello CatGoddess/Jen Undrell! Guthruc will probably cause our meeting your character uncomfortable, awkward and/or physically painful...
Also, A harbinger of terrible luck allied with a luckbringer... don't they cancel out? Do we actually just have two level 3 commoners now?
Let's hope she brings more bad luck to our enemies than she does to us...