Leinathan/mdt's Kingmaker (Inactive)

Game Master leinathan

Really sorry I hate when something sudden comes up.

I will say that when I finally get the free time I will hopefully be able to run a Kingmaker, &/or Rise of the Runelords, of my own, with some tweaks, and some Shadowrun Games.

Well, good luck w/your stuff Masa.

About downtime. Aside from improving my armor and probably crossbow, and making a good supply of holy water, my character has little reason to do downtime.

Can't put a big enough team together to pay for a manager of that team. Can't leave teams untended for more than a week. Don't want to be tied that closely to the team. We may have to be in the field for a long time at some point.
They are too expensive a resource to just lose that way.

With the high cost of living expenses, there is no reason to use downtime, unless you are working on a project of high value.

Due to being starved for skill points, my cleric has no crafting skills, so has no reason to use the downtime.

My character would be far better served by adventuring. She would be hopefully make some money, instead of bleeding it out to no gain.

I also feel that more exploration would be best for the kingdoms overall health. There are undead to be dealt with as well.

Is anyone else interested in adventuring rather than doing downtime?

Sad to see you go Masamura, good luck with whatever it is that needs time.

Well Anastacia, I'd be up for some more adventuring myself unless they'd need my diplomatic skills at Oleg's. Don't have craft or profession either.

I can see Lanya being important when meeting new inhabitants of the Greenbelt as well as the matters of state diplomacy.

Good luck Masa!

***

I don't know if I have a saying in the matter, but I kind of like our current team size - 10 people makes for 2 good and balanced parties. That being said, Kingmaker lends itself very well to new characters coming in.

***

I can be serviced by two-three days of downtime then adventuring as well as by two to six weeks of downtime.
I would just like to discuss this in advance OOC because downtime requires a few calculations and I'd like to start planning.

Also, Anastacia, you don't need Craft or Profession. Let's say you plan on building a Temple or a Shrine - you'd need capital (Goods, Influence, Magic, Labor). Gaining this type of capital can be done with skills other than Craft of Profession.

***

last but not least, GM Kertuffle: restoring the Stag Lord's fort is something to be done with Kingdom Building rules spending BP, or with Downtime rules spending Labor and hiring Teams? As a future Warden, Bej would very much like to hire craftsmen and laborers and march south to restore the thing, but if we plan on spending BP on it, I'd like to know.

Regarding downtime:

Capital suffer attrition every 7th day you are away from the settlement - reduced to every 14th day by the presence of a manager.

Teams & businesses only try to leave after 30 days without contact. A simple letter or messenger back home resets this. The visit of an authorized representative resets this.

So in essence, if one returns atleast once a month - which we need to do anyway to run the kingdom - Teams & Businesses are going to last forever :)

Capital is going to suffer, but considering that only 1 of each unit spoils each period - it isn't that dangerous.

Using Spellcraft/Diplomacy to craft magic and then handing it to the Magic Item Crafters (Dareon, Me & Rowan) lets you have a nice discount, should you be interested in that stuff : )

Also - there is always spells to be researched ^^

And various ways to gather information, both with Knowledge & Diplomacy

Ok, so, selling everything but the staff and the armor (nobody indicated any interest in the rest of it), we get a grand total of 15080 gold (see sheet). Add in the 1315 for Sanita's armor, and that's a loot total of 16395. Divided by 10 people, that's 1,640 gp per (roughly). 1,315 of Sanita's will be the armor, with the other 280 in gp. If we take the cost of the tome off the top, we'd have 16395 - 2635 = 13760. So basically, Sanita's armor is her share, we buy the tome as a kingdom treasury item, and everyone else get's 1,376 coins (with Sanita getting 60 gp). Anyone object to that?

Once again, a quick question for the party : ) Note that we only calculated what we managed to steal from the pirates - not the other loot!

I for one wouldn't have much to do during dwon time and would be happy to join a group for further exploring during what down time others may need.

If influence can be used to attract armies then I could do that in downtime, if one must by armies than I will do that instead, seeing as how I could use Pofession.

Ok, so, selling everything but the staff and the armor (nobody indicated any interest in the rest of it), we get a grand total of 15080 gold (see sheet). Add in the 1315 for Sanita's armor, and that's a loot total of 16395. Divided by 10 people, that's 1,640 gp per (roughly). 1,315 of Sanita's will be the armor, with the other 280 in gp. If we take the cost of the tome off the top, we'd have 16395 - 2635 = 13760. So basically, Sanita's armor is her share, we buy the tome as a kingdom treasury item, and everyone else get's 1,376 coins (with Sanita getting 60 gp). Anyone object to that?

As far as this goes, I think we'll probably want to have you just bring the gold back, to be divided after we account for all the other gear as well. For example, if I take the horseshoes of speed, I should get a smaller take of the gold. Basically we shouldn't divide the pirate gold on its own. I'm fine with you selling all of the pirate loot, but everyone should take a look and chime in if they want something.

As for downtime, the reason I was suggesting that we take some downtime for everyone is that it's not really fair to our crafters to ask them to spend a long time crafting neat things for everyone while the rest of us go have adventures. It's also something that I think we should be able to fast forward through, generally speaking.

As for downtime, the reason I was suggesting that we take some downtime for everyone is that it's not really fair to our crafters to ask them to spend a long time crafting neat things for everyone while the rest of us go have adventures. It's also something that I think we should be able to fast forward through, generally speaking.

This is a good point. We piled up commissions on Fharn and other crafters, if we expect them to do some work we should provide them with time.

***

I really need Keetuffle to elaborate on this:

last but not least, GM Kertuffle: restoring the Stag Lord's fort is something to be done with Kingdom Building rules spending BP, or with Downtime rules spending Labor and hiring Teams? As a future Warden, Bej would very much like to hire craftsmen and laborers and march south to restore the thing, but if we plan on spending BP on it, I'd like to know.

If through downtime rules I, Bej, build a Jail (spending 40 Goods, 5 Influence, 33 Labor), then we as a group end up having a Jail in our kingdom without having to spend the 14 BP, right? Or at least spending less than that.

I took a look at the crafting that needs to be done and, based on what is requisitioned right now, we'll need at least a full week of downtime once Fhârn gets back. I'd hazard a guess that there will be more crafting requisitioned (as we divide loot up from all of our adventures since the stag lord's fort.) I'd be tempted to say we want at least 3 weeks of downtime. That would give sufficient time for Fharn, Rowan and the others to manage all of the needed crafting (including any crafting we have yet to requisition). It also gives our crafters at least a week (estimated) to do their own downtime activities including (presumably) copying spells into spellbooks and that sort of thing.

Edit: I broke down the crafting by person in the Mage Guild spreadsheet, if you want to take a look.

Sorry, yesterday was busy and I was unable to post as detailed posts as I would have liked, so Bej's question went unanswered. Sorry about that. If Bej builds a jail (1610gp at full cost) then Bej enjoys all the normal benefits associated with having that building. If a Jail is purchased in that city district (normally 14 BP) and those purchasing the building are willing to say that it represents Bej's Jail then there is a discount of (1610/1000 round up) 2 BP on the kingdom buying the jail. The jail gives a benefit to both Bej and the Kingdom as normal. It also means that Bej can point to icon representing the jail on the city map and claim 'That's my Jail' :)
As for The Stag Lord Fort, you already get a discount on a Castle due to the ruined Fort, but if someone wants to 'build a castle' there I will allow it and I will allow the additional discounted price for the kingdom, but I think Wilhelm will frown if someone other than him tries to claim the castle.

Dante, as Anastacia has pointed out, I had the whole team thing slightly wrong. You can certainly start to hire soldiers.

Let me go on record by saying that I really appreciate the little things that everyone does to help me run this game. Spreadsheets, Maps, the whole nine yards. Thank you.

Tomorrow, a friend of mine is running a game and I'm not going to be able to hit home before heading over to his house after work. So Sunday will be the next time I can post. Nothing else to do on Sunday though so I'm going to work on items available in New Stetvan (theres also a magical school here) and try to determine a fair starting wealth for the new characters.

@New starting wealth - We should probably divide the shares of the loot and let people make a plan of what to buy/craft first. If we decide to take a longer downtime, we might be able to stretch our funds further.

@Crafting - Will we be limited to one item/day? Will we be able to spend the rest of the day doing other downtime activities like scribing into our spellbook or recruiting teams?

Currently Fhârn is commissioned for 5 items -

It will take 6 days to complete the orders (if 1 item / day is the limit!)

Or a total of (6450/2000)*8=~26 hours of work (rounded up!) assuming Fhârn can complete other tasks with the time left over.

When we start crafting, I would also require to know if Commissioners supply the cost in Magic (A quarter of base prise [approx, rounding may apply!] but you need to take some time to craft it) or Gold (half of base prise). It one chooses the later, Fhârn might be able - time permitting - to craft some magic himself and give you a discount regardless (customer permitting, he might also be able to pocket some of the savings in order to fund his armour!).

Assuming taking rolls of 10 and the help of Munin with his Valet features, Fhârn can produce 4 magic each day.

To produce enough magic to craft all the currently commissioned work, Fhârn would require (3200/100)/4= 8 days extra.

For a total of about three weeks, in slowest case scenario (5 days/ week work & a total of 14 days to go!). This is excluding writing down spells in his book and/or recruiting teams and/or spending wealth and/or the extra stuff people no doubt will want : )

TL:DR This is just a quick overview, a lay of the land so to speak, about our current and planned crafting. Crafting Magical Items goes relatively fast, producing the Magic so we can stretch our means further is slow. But almost anyone can help produce the goods required - Magic.

Edit: A quick note - The Appraise skill can be used to gather Magic - and require no training. Taking ten (with no ranks and atleast 10 Int - which I think everyone has!) results in one Magic each day. One needs five magic for every thousand in the Base Price of the item sought.

Just food for thought if anyone wants something crafted and feel like they don't have anything to do on their downtime. Go thrift-shopping - you'll never know that you might find! : P

For the mood

Sanita will do some crafting while travelling. She has her alchemy kit, no bonus, but counts for tools for crafting, so no penalty either. She should be able to do a full day of crafting while riding on the boat (given she has nothing else to do), and 4 hours in camp at night while travelling.

Craft(Alchemy) Day 1: 1d20 + 14 ⇒ (3) + 14 = 17 On Boat, Day after Pirate Attack
Craft(Alchemy) Day 2: 1d20 + 14 ⇒ (7) + 14 = 21 Silverhall
Craft(Alchemy) Day 3: 1d20 + 14 ⇒ (16) + 14 = 30 Silverhall
Craft(Alchemy) Day 4: 1d20 + 14 ⇒ (7) + 14 = 21 On Boat
Craft(Alchemy) Day 5: 1d20 + 14 ⇒ (11) + 14 = 25 On Boat
Craft(Alchemy) Day 6: 1d20 + 14 ⇒ (15) + 14 = 29 New Stetvan
Craft(Alchemy) Day 7: 1d20 + 14 ⇒ (14) + 14 = 28 New Stetvan

((17*20*2)/5) = (680/5) = 136 (896 sp total)
((21*20*2)/10) = 840/10 = 84 sp (980 sp total)
((30*20*2)/10) = 1200/10 = 120 sp (1100 sp total)
((21*20*2)/5) = 840/5 = 84 sp (1184 sp total)
((25*20*2)/5) = 1000/5 = 200 sp (1384 sp total)
((29*20*2)/10) = 1160/10 = 116 sp (1500 sp total)
((28*20*2)/10) = 580/5 = 112 sp (1612 sp total)

After the next seven days on the road, she's created 161.2 gp worth of alchemy products. 11.2 gp toward another alchemist's fire. It's cost her 57.73 gp worth of material.

5 Alchemist's Fires (100gp)
5 Acid (50gp)

Dareon needs just a bit of time to scribe his scrolls, craft his wand and the wand commissioned of him, and scribe spells into his spellbook. He would gladly use the remainder of his time to help Fharn craft Magic to get a discount on the magic items that Fharn is creating - and would gladly give half of the amount saved over to Fharn for the purpose of his own magical items.

What skills are used to create Magic?

Worth repeating is - Appraise can be used untrained and to produce magic. That should let anyone willing to burn some time get that sweet cost saving : )

Also, I'm not sure if I feel comfortable pocketing your gold if you bring proper Magic to the crafting. That was more if say Wil gives me 2000 gold pieces for the headband - and I take my Magic and craft it (for effectively only 1000gp!). Then I would refund some of his gold - say 500 gp + his Headband and pocket the leftover only if I actually spent my time on Magic production.

I mean, yeah, I've already given you gold. I suppose if you give me any discounts that I get for you with my Magic production, that would be cool.

I can get a 27 on Know: Arcana with a take 10. How much Magic is that?

At least in my case, I believe you have bought Magic to use to craft my gear already. Specifically I think you used part of my share of the sell off of goods to buy Magic using Sanita's discount. I'll have to dig around and find the post where we outline that. Basically it should end up that I have around 272 gp leftover once all of my gear is purchased. So there's not a lot of room to improve that. :)

One idea that spring to my mind. If you wanted to adjust us closer to WBL, Kertuffle, is to have us take enough downtime for that to be realistic. Using crafting and downtime rules, I assume we'd be able to do that within roughly a year. That would let us fast forward through quite a bit of kingdom building and also make it easy to bring our newcomer's in. It also would be easy to add in a new and convenient hook to start us exploring again. :)

@Dareon: Magic is [skill result]/10 and then rounded down (like everything in Pathfinder!).

Fhârn multiplies that by two with Cooperative Crafting (from Munin's archetype).

@Wil I know, you gave me gold. Our shares was about ~3300 gp, and the things you ordered has a cost of 3200 - which is about what I remember you giving Fhârn. The point is, if someone were to craft magic - one could get 3200gp worth of crafting supplies for 1600gp. Which is plenty of savings :P

And we haven't really bought anything specific yet. I kinda assumed everyone had a short conversation about the future before we left. Since there wasn't any obvious trouble on the horizon, Fhârn probably assumed he had time to make the proper reagents himself given good materials to work with.

@Longer break & Wealth by Level

Wealth by level is 16000gp for 6, and 23500gp for 7. If we were to take a longer break, and not ruin ourselves from the cost of living (yey party!), we would probably end up somewhere in that neighbourhood. Probably overshoot it by a bit. Might not necessarily be a bad thing - one could view it a bit as future proofing ourselves.

(Fhârn will end up in the neighbourhood of 6000 coins after this. Given time, Fhârn will turn that into 24000 worth of gear - assuming he manages to spend all. Some will probably end up in teams and scribed spells, making the 'combat wealth' a bit less. On the other hand, there is a really nice armour worth 25000 gp ... and given time...)

Costs in gp to create capital:

Goods-10
Influence-15
Labor-10
Magic-50

Those prices are for earned capital. It's double if you just want to buy capital.

So a flow of gp remains critical. Of course teams and buildings can be used to generate gold as well.

A character with no professional or crafting skills can still earn .5 gp/day.

Any character without a trained money earning skill is going to need to have a ton of teams and buildings to be profitable. Actually, even those who do have craft or professional skills will still need to have a substantial organization.

I have doubt as to whether the WBl that Fhârn gave us above is even remotely reachable using the downtime.

With 3 labor teams and 1 team of cutpurses my other character was getting numbers like these:

So, for that 10 day period Griar (my character) earned 23.1 gp. Because he was trying to grow his organization, Griar created 2 Labor capital, 2 goods capital, and 2 influence capital. Totaled up for 70gp cost.

So Griar spent more money than he made during that time. Once his cash reserve was depleted, he would have had to spend time strictly on gold piece earning, before he can continue with his expansion.

Doing nothing but downtime does earn somewhat more. Time acquiring XP could have been spent earning gp. Your teams will want some days off, though, so it's not so far off from what can be actually earned.

Once you organization reaches a certain size it can sustain its own growth, but getting there is slow.

Also, I think Anastacia would need a hook to keep her from adventuring. Is she going to leave those undead there? Not likely. And how about the Green Lady? Should we just leave her to plot against us for a year? Leaving vast tracts of land unexplored, also seems to be ill advised.

Some enforced downtime for the sake of fairness seems reasonable, but I'm not sure about a whole year.

I agree with you Anastacia - long breaks doesn't make sense when there are things to be done. While I don't know which path to pursue for information about the Green Lady, there isn't really any good excuse to not end the undead menace.

I reckon as soon as we have a library or tavern we might be able to research into information about her or ask around for local gossip.
If we meet more fae, Lanya could always ask them if they would tell her more about her.

@Fhârn: I see what you're getting at now. I'll add some thoughts on this below.

@Anastacia: My experience with Kingmaker is that at some point we'll need to take at least 6 months of downtime if not more to meaningfully advance our kingdom. Since you can only claim one hex at a time (if you can afford it) for quite a while, you can imagine that there will be many months of kingdom advancement. We'd hit level 20 long before we took over even the Narlmarches/Greenlands if we only take short breaks and adventure in between.

That said, you have a solid point that we have immediate concerns to be dealt with. I think our best bet, at this point, is to try and take minimal downtime (Roughly 3 weeks? 1 week to run our kingdom through its first month, 1 week to let the crafters craft and 1 week to let the crafters have some downtime too). I'd then suggest we move on and explore the routes I have highlighted on the map. That will take care of the undead, but we only have rumors about this Green Lady. We can ask around, but if we weren't warned about her already by people at outpost, then I'm not sure they'll have a lot more to say. We can talk about all this IC too, but it's good to have some outline so we don't spend 2 weeks making a decision. :)

Magic and downtime: One thing I'm not in love with as far as downtime goes is the possibility of effectively doubling our money using the Magic creation rules. As we divided loot last time, it will shortchange people who took items (since we based their shares on sell value and not value for crafting goods). For example, Lanya took the bangles (worth 11000 gp with sell value 5500gp) and effectively no gold. If we compare that to my share (fully gold totalling 3900 gp), I could have devoted all of that to being turned into Magic (3900/50 = 78 Magic = 7800 gp worth of Magic). Turning that into items, I could end up with 15600 gp worth of gear. It would have taken me (on my own taking 10 on Diplomacy) a total of 39 days to do the conversion. Just some thoughts.

@Magic and Downtime: Indeed - it makes raw gold very valuable. Ideally, we should be able to make items four times our acquired gold. But, as you said, it might (it will!) upset the intra party balance. And it takes forever unless one dedicates some resources to it.

Pros:
* We get more stuff. Simple!

Cons:
* Our shares will become more and more unbalanced
* It will take forever and a day to do the conversion

The pro is simple. We are a bit behind the curve, and this might slingshot ourselves right back on top again! From what I've heard, Kingmaker is sparsely populated with loot - especially since we are so many. Kertuffles input would be greatly appreciated on this, I mean, if the AP assumes we are a bit behind the curve it might upset the encounters.

In response to the first con, I suggest we tally (or at least approximate!) our wealth (excluding consumables?) OOC right after the downtime session and make sure we fill the gaps where we see them next time we divide the loot.

This is one thing teams can be useful for. An expert should be able to hit atleast 10 on his roll, and you usually get five of those in each team. That is a Magic production of 5/day. But on the other hand, we might say that the NPCs can't help with this and use time as a balancing factor.

@Long downtime: I've been thinking a bit more about this - and the more I look the less does now feel like a good time. We have plenty of exploration left right around our kingdom, and the undead remains to be dealt with.

So when would a long period of time fit? Assuming we don't encounter anything earth shattering while exploring Wil's path and slaying the undead, I would suggest right after that. With any luck, we can hit level 7 before or during the longer downtime period. That will give us ample opportunity to introduce cohorts and such, and letting them get to know everyone.

In short, we turn our long downtime into a RP session with focus on kingdom building and new people (inhabitants, cohorts, familiars, teams ect ect). Then we would have plenty to write about IC while we argue strategies and plans OOC : )

I think one issue with WBL is that not only are we behind it, but some characters (like Sanita) use a ton of disposable gold. That is, in combat, she uses a ton of disposable alchemical items. We saw that in the fights.

Now, she can keep that reasonable because she can create them at 1/3rd cost at twice the rate.

Kertuffle needs to know what our WBL is anyway for new players, I think after we regroup and finish enchanting, we should all calculate our WBL and post it so we have an idea of not only how off WBL we are, but how off we are across the party, as I suspect we are actually off equality within the party by as much as 10%.

Hello all, this is the player Dareon suggested (Aardvark DM).

This profile is the premise, and I have some tweaking to do to it, to say the least. He is primarily a dwarven cleric of Brigh, obsessed with constructs and all things mechanical. He may dabble in roguery (the class, not the acts), just for how well it meshes with what I envision as his focus.

Hello!

Also - Yey Brigh! :P

While looking over the loot sheet, I noticed that Remish's (The Dragon Sorcerer Pirate) Staff is not present. I thought I had let you identify it but maybe not. In either case it is

Talking Stick
+1 Quarterstaff (both heads)
Gives the feat Nimble Moves to its wielder
Counts as a Magic Staff (currently 7 charges)
Message (1ch - cannot be used to recharge staff)
Magic Mouth (1ch)
Whispering Winds (2ch)
Tongues (3ch)
Value 20800gp

It was listed as (+1) Staff (talking), two steps above the butterfly swords : )

Ah yes, I see it now. It it where a snake it would bite me. Now you have an appraised value for it.

If it were a snake we wouldn't have claimed it as loot. Well, Rowan perhaps :P

Magic and downtime: One thing I'm not in love with as far as downtime goes is the possibility of effectively doubling our money using the Magic creation rules. As we divided loot last time, it will shortchange people who took items (since we based their shares on sell value and not value for crafting goods). For example, Lanya took the bangles (worth 11000 gp with sell value 5500gp) and effectively no gold. If we compare that to my share (fully gold totalling 3900 gp), I could have devoted all of that to being turned into Magic (3900/50 = 78 Magic = 7800 gp worth of Magic). Turning that into items, I could end up with 15600 gp worth of gear. It would have taken me (on my own taking 10 on Diplomacy) a total of 39 days to do the conversion.

Well... yes and no. It's true that gp have more value, but it is also true that they require downtime to be profited of, and also, our Crafters offer services to the whole party, not just themselves. As long as we don't abuse the system (and since we are roughly at half the wealth-by-level system, that's not going to be problem for a while) I think we are fine.

***

I'm kind of getting lost in the downtime rules, I'm starting to forget about the kingdom building. I saw Wilhelm and Fharn talking about it, but... do we want to wait until level 7 to actually start claiming hexes and all that? Or are we waiting to explore some more regardless of the level?

I think we should establish a goal (whether party level, number of hexes explored and cleared, wealth, etc...) after which we take a long dowtime to properly start up the kingdom.
I think we can start it right now, but seems most of you don't agree. What is your proposal?

While I'm not sure if there's actually any mechanical representation of this in Kingmaker, one thing that may be worth consideration is making sure to fill up areas that have been cleared. After all, nature hates a void, and if the party doesn't claim a hex after they clear it of whatever nastiness is there, who's to say that something else won't move in? Clearing out a horde of undead may clear the undead, but there could be something else that just comes in and squats on its former territory since it's no longer being kept away by the undead presence.

Again, this is presuming that the mechanics in Kingmaker actually assume any of that, and for all intents and purposes, this kind of thinking may be totally useless. In character, I'd probably push for this line of thinking, if just to get the party out of Oleg's trading post and into a more... secure location by his mark. That said, no one will probably take the word of an uncharismatic new guy that seriously, and there does seem to be some dangers that may well attack the party, even if the party leaves them alone out there. These probably deserve taking care of too.

Okay, all is ready in the profile. I'm not sure how you want him to be worked in, I'm still not fully familiar with each of the PC's to know who he might previously associate with.

I'm actually in favor of starting the kingdom building now. You can do this by spending 7 days out of the month working on it. Does spending more than 7 days a month allow more edicts per month?

@ Roan. It seems like monsters do occupy hexes that have been explored. We found the worgs in a hex that we had previously cleared a spider out of.

As far as I understand the kingdom building rules, you need to spend at least 7 days a month in the kngdom. Any more than that provides no more benefit mechanically. That's not to say things can't happen in your city while you're away. Also, for some reason I think an edict is a yearly thing, but I may be wrong. Maybe it's just some edicts only happen once/year. Clearing/exploring a hex doesn't occupy it (which costs upkeep to do), so you just may still encounter random (or not so random) encounters.

The kingdom building can become a long slow process, as you also can only build one building/month, and there are some requirements before you can make others. Like you need a housing block before you can have an inn (or something, of the sort). Also, between upkeep and the cost of building, some months you may need to just build income before you can afford to add a new component.

Edicts are a constant thing. The kingdom's rulers set them when the kingdom is created and then they provide a constant bonus for as long as they are set like that.

For example, Taxation edicts. There are different levels of the taxation edict, and each provides a scaling bonus to Economy and a scaling penalty to Loyalty.

Normal taxation provides a +2 bonus to Economy and a -2 penalty to Loyalty, which is simply constant.

In terms of doing things, dependent on the size of the kingdom, there is a set amount of the number of things one can build. At a low size, it's something like one house and one other building each month.

I recommend we take a large block of downtime now to start building our kingdom, exploring as we must as it expands. It may be a bit before we ever add new hexes to our kingdom, as new hexes mean a higher kingdom DC, and a higher kingdom DC before we have the kingdom bonuses to support it is a terribly, terribly bad idea.

Welcome to the game Holbrecht and Roan. I'm looking forward to playing with both of you. It sounds like there's some serious potential with Fhârn, Holbrecht and Sanita to set ourselves up as a center of non-magical learning. It might be an interesting tie-in if you are working with/for the Rickerts. It would be a neat tie-in with them. Also, I want our own paddle boat. :)

I'm fine taking a long downtime for kingdom building, I just had the impression people wanted to deal with a few known issues first. That's why I had suggested we spend ~ 3 weeks in downtime (time to craft gear, give the crafter's time to craft and do our first month of kingdom building.) I think Bej's idea has merit, because otherwise we can spend forever debating things. I'm still in favor of my plan as outlined (recounted here to make things easier).

• Wait for Fhârn and Sanita to get back from their trip (should take about a week).
  
• Start the first month of kingdom building (1 week).
  
• Crafters can craft. (I estimate this should take about 7-8 days, which is a week in Golarion as I understand it)
  
• Give the remainder of the week for downtime for the crafters (6 days or so assuming I'm right about the length of a week.)
  
• Go explore along the paths I outlined in the map.

The big things we gain from doing this, as I see it, are:

• We deal with all known issues and give ourselves plenty of expansion room for a long downtime period before we need to explore again.
  
• I suspect we'll hit level 7 from the exploration, which would let us introduce the inevitable flood of cohorts and familiars during downtime.
  
• We get our gear before we go exploring, which will be nice.
  
• We'll get some more loot, so we can hopefully do a bunch of crafting during our long downtime.

I'm pretty sure that Bej/someone else brought up one or two of these points elsewhere, so thank you for your reasoning. I also have some ideas for how we should expand during the first year or so, but that will have to wait.

I have Craft Wondrous Items and Craft Arms & Armor, but sadly primarily because those are required for Craft Construct. That said, I would prefer not to stay home and craft while other things were happening, so doing so during the time of kingdom building is ideal.

Yea, that would be unfair to crafters and I don't want to do that. It should be noted that my bullet points are a sequential order of things that are happening. (E.g. first we wait for Fhârn and Sanita to get back (week 1), then we do our kingdom building for a week (week 2), etc.). I think my bullet points are a little misleading.

Tomorrow I would like to do the first month of kingdom building. I'm pretty sure you did release the news about the mine. I remember it being mentioned but am unable to find it. I'd suggest 1 week of kingdom running, 2 weeks of downtime and then splitting up and exploring again. And yes, even explored hexes are not immune to wandering monsters. Once you have claimed them, you can attempt Stability checks to get rid of the wandering monsters (basicly if I roll a wandering monster in a claimed hex and stability check will negate it) although the random kingdom event can release rampaging hordes of monsters on your kingdom. If we want to follow the guidelines suggested in the adventure path then explore down to the Tuskwater Lake then take an extended break for kingdom building.

Is this the link you're looking for?

For everyone's benefit (mostly mine), I've got a bunch of links in my profile to useful/interesting posts. If we start up kingdom building tomorrow, here's a list of rolls we need and who should roll them. We need to fill our empty seats as a first step. I propose we keep the same seats for now, but Sanita will take over as spymaster and Roan can take over as Councilor. We'll have a week or so for Wilhelm to get somewhat comfortable with Roan before we start kingdom building. The alternative, if it makes more sense from an RP perspective (I'm not convinced it does), is to have Jhod take the role of councilor (temporarily).

I've got an outline of how I think it should go according to the post I linked. Kertuffle can correct me if I'm wrong.

Month 1 turn:
Upkeep phase

• Step 1) Determine stability. Stability check by Bej (Warden).
  
• Step 2) Pay consumption of 0 (no hexes or anything).
  
• Step 3) Fill vacant magic item slots (none).
  
• Step 4) Modify unrest. (If there is unrest, Vors can attempt to reduce it now.)

Edict Phase

• Step 1) Assign leadership (already done).
  
• Step 2) Claim and Abandon Hexes (We automatically claim B6 - Oleg's for free.)
  
• Step 3) Build terrain improvements (I think we want a road and a farm in our first hex in addition to our capital. Agree? That takes us to 53 bp)
  
• Step 4) Create and Improve Settlements (Found our first city for free, then build a house (2 BP) and tavern (free). Turn Oleg's into a free stable? Down to 51 BP.)
  
• Step 5) Create army units. (Nothing here.)
  
• Step 6)Issue Edicts (I'd vote for 1 Holiday per Year, No Taxation and Token Promotion)

Income Phase

• Step 1) Make Withdrawals. (N/a)
  
• Step 2) Make Deposits. (N/A)
  
• Step 3) Sell expensive items for BP. (N/A)
  
• Step 4) Collect Taxes. (Roll by Fhârn as treasurer)

Event Phase

• Step 1) Automatic Economic Boom. (Roll by heir, which we lack, so I guess Fhârn?)

Riffing off of Bej's suggestions, I like the names Zatoksta and Zatokstad for our first city. The free building as we annex Oleg's seems to be between a Stable and a Shop to me. The shop can be upgraded towards a market later, but the stable is more expensive and gives more benefits now. I like Stable personally.

Also, I saved the formatting for this Kingdom Turn post because it was a pain to put together and I don't want to do it again.

Note that Sanita adds 3 to either Economy, Loyalty, or Stability each turn during the Edict phase. This is after Bej's and Vor's checks. So, I suggest Sanita put it into Economy unless our Stability or Loyalty stats go down.

GM Kertuffle, the Kingdom Spreadsheet still shows Masamura and Felix in the picture, it does not have the Kingdom Alignment, Bej's boost to Loyalty is now +3 instead of +2 (for the ranks in Knowledge [eng]), there might be other stuff to update.

You might want to make that document editable, if you don't wish to edit it yourself.

Month 1 turn:
Upkeep phase

• Step 1) Determine stability. Stability check by Bej (Warden).
  
• Step 2) Pay consumption of 0 (no hexes or anything).
  
• Step 3) Fill vacant magic item slots (none).
  
• Step 4) Modify unrest. (If there is unrest, Vors can attempt to reduce it now.)

That's a lot of pressure on my dice-rolling skills. Geez.

Edict Phase

• Step 1) Assign leadership (already done).
  
• Step 2) Claim and Abandon Hexes (We automatically claim B6 - Oleg's for free.)
  
• Step 3) Build terrain improvements (I think we want a road and a farm in our first hex in addition to our capital. Agree? That takes us to 53 bp)
  
• Step 4) Create and Improve Settlements (Found our first city for free, then build a house (2 BP) and tavern (free). Turn Oleg's into a free stable? Down to 51 BP.)
  
• Step 5) Create army units. (Nothing here.)
  
• Step 6)Issue Edicts (I'd vote for 1 Holiday per Year, No Taxation and Token Promotion)

Step 1) I'd say to go with Jhod or Svetlana as Councilor for now. As soon as our new players get themselves part of the group, they can step up. Otherwise we're really throwing role-play out of the window.

I'm ok with everything else.

I didn't realize you can only claim 1 hex at the time until you reach size 10. That's awful.

I've played around with the Mage's Guild and added the spells and books be have acquired so far.

Speaking of, the Transmuters Tome is longer then fifty pages (or else all the spells wouldn't fit!), but I can't find how long!

Also, it contains Hush - a spell that don't officially exist! However, I'm fairly certain it got rules in a blog somewhere which I'll try to track down.

@Holbrecht (& Roan) If you check my status bar (or among the other campaign links) you'll find a link called The Mage's Guild. It is a database over our Arcane spells (not so useful) and Crafters, which I thought you might want to check out/sign up on : )

@Bej I know your (dice luck) feeling ... ^^

Edit: According to my findings, Hush should probably be Forced Quiet. With Kertuffles approval I'll add that to our list : )

Sounds good, thanks Fharn! Though for some reason I seem incapable of interacting with the only thing I see in there, the picture. Do I just add my spells into the columns?

There are multiple different spreadsheet pages that you can move between by selecting different tabs at the bottom of the webpage.

Step 1) I'd say to go with Jhod or Svetlana as Councilor for now. As soon as our new players get themselves part of the group, they can step up. Otherwise we're really throwing role-play out of the window.

I'm fine with this as well. I just didn't think we'd interacted with Jhod much either. As we have a week to acclimate to the new characters, and he is of Wilhelm's blood, I figured it wouldn't be entirely inappropriate.

Sounds good, thanks Fharn! Though for some reason I seem incapable of interacting with the only thing I see in there, the picture. Do I just add my spells into the columns?

The first page is just a pretty picture to set the mood :P The crunchy stuff is sorted under the other tabs.

I'm afraid it is mostly geared towards Prepared Arcane Casters, the tabs called 'First/Second/ect Circle' contains all the (arcane) spells we know (that is in books!) in our party, to facilitate easy exchange between our spellbooks.

What might be interesting for you (as a divine caster without a spellbook!) is the Crafter's Corner should you want to commission an item.

There is also a Research tab, currently not in use, but the plan was to save information on any spells we research there. Should the urge get to you :)

Note also that I've been updating the Wishlist page, marking off spells we got. So the ideal is that all the rows are green in column 1. And that we have both Alchemical and Spell versions. I added two columns to that page, one for Spell and one for Formula, to indicate which ones we have of what.