Exzachtly's page

I'm currently running Chapter 8 (War of the River Kings), albeit with several modifications farmed from these forums. We started in late December 2022 and took a six-month hiatus this time last year, as one player became a new parent. Some general thoughts:

1. I find some of the monster stat blocks a bit bland in comparison to their PF2 counterparts, but I think that's as much a symptom of 5E monster design as anything else. They're still a good starting point for my own modifications, though.

2. For DCs, my general rule is to leave DCs below 20 untouched. For DCs higher than 20, I take half the Pathfinder DC and add 5 or 7, depending on what feels right.

3. We used the Kingdom Rules largely RAW (with the exception of giving Untrained skills a boost to keep them somewhat viable), but after Chapter 4 and running one in-game year, the players felt they had placed a good foundation and didn't need to micromanage things. We've switched to "Kingdom in the Background" and left most of it to roleplay.

4. I haven't used the mass combat rules, opting instead for a homebrew system with the army unit rules in the book as a rough guide. It's a marriage of Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Unicorn Overlord, and the players have enjoyed it more than I expected!

I'm in the midst of running a "Choral returns(?)" plot alongside War of the River Kings. For full disclosure, I'm using the 5E version.

My Choral had a blood disease that could be held at bay when he took human form. His niece, Voldara, [Edit: This is a full-blown OC, IIRC Choral has no canon niece or nephew] a necromancer dragon, devised a ritual to do what amounts to a mass blood transfusion, but the ritual works best when using the blood of direct descendants.

To set all that up, Choral needed a line of descendants untainted by the dragon plague. Enter House Rogarvia, a dynasty to further Choral's bloodline. While his descendants multiplied, Choral was placed in stasis under Candlemere Isle. When the time was right, Choral's niece transported House Rogarvia to Candlemere and began the transfusion process (one that would prove lethal to the Rogarvians). Choral's niece and nephew then took on human forms to better manipulate House Surtova while this years-long transfusion ritual took place.

With the PCs' kingdom growing in opposition to House Surtova and their slaughter of Voldara's brother (who had a personal connection to the party Paladin), Voldara felt the need to accelerate her plans to return Choral to life, teaming up with Irovetti to distract the party while she finds a way to speed the ritual up. The prophecies of the Firespeakers (as seen in the PFS scenario "On the Border of War") offered one solution: open war in Brevoy.

To muddy the waters further, I've introduced a wrinkle from my Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign: The Crown of Fangs has made its way to the Stolen Lands, and it could prove useful for Voldara's plans.

The rest is up to the players: are they going to stop Voldara before she finds a way to bring Choral back faster, or is this going to culminate in a fight against an Ancient Red Dragon, bolstered by the Crown of Fangs? No idea yet!

I'm sure I'm too late for this, but my Kingmaker 5E players are within spitting distance of obtaining Briar, so here's what I've got.

For context, I have it in three phases, inspired by Critical Role's Vestiges of Divergence and their Dormant, Awakened, and Exalted states.

Briar (Dormant)
+2 Longsword that can cast Barkskin on its wielder 3x/day. Briar Awakens when it acquires 8 Sharpness Points.

Briar (Awakened)
+3 Longsword that can cast Barkskin on its wielder 3x/day. Once per month, when its wielder dies, Briar casts Revivfy on its wielder. Awakened Briar is a Chaotic Neutral sentient weapon with INT 18, WIS 18, and CHA 24. It speaks Common and Sylvan, it can speak verbally and telepathically, and it can hear up to 120 ft.

Sapping Strike. As a reaction, when you hit a creature with Briar, you can spend your Reaction to force it to make a CON save of 19 or taken 5d10 necrotic damage (or 1/2 on a successful save) as Briar saps the life from its target.

Briar becomes Exalted when it acquires 16 Sharpness points or comes within 30 ft of [Redacted for spoilers].

Briar (Exalted)
+3 Vorpal Longsword that can cast Barkskin on its wielder 3x/day. Once per month, when its wielder dies, Briar resurrects the wielder with full hit points and whatever unspent spell slots or abilities the wielder still had when they died.

Sapping Strike upgrades to 7d10.

Convergence. The first time Briar's wielder strikes [Redacted for spoilers], they must make a DC 30 CON save or become Slowed until the end of their turn. Regardless of whether [Redacted] makes the save, the wielder gains Advantage against [Redacted]'s spells until the end of [Redacted's] turn.

If they're far enough in Crimson Throne that the Grey Maidens have been introduced, you could say they're a contingent sent by Ileosa to investigate ruins related to Runelord Sorshen. The Shard of Lust would probably be a good addition to Ileosa's arsenal.

You could even have some messages the Crimson Throne party can find about how Ileosa's research into the Lady's Light has proven fruitless, or how there was an issue there that Ileosa can't deal with now because of stuff the Crimson Throne party is doing.

I second Tridus' recommendation. Regardless of how the actual turns go, it's more work for you as the GM. There's already a TON of stuff to manage in this campaign, and if the Kingdom rules aren't your group's cup of tea, there's no reason for kingdom management to be anything more than roleplay moments.

My players continue to have fun playing as the rulers of the kingdom even though that section of the game has become all roleplay (We're about halfway through Chapter 7, for reference).

There's a "Kingdom in the Background" sidebar near the start of each chapter that details the approximate size of the kingdom and major acquisitions that have occurred around the start of the chapter.

You don't have to do any Kingdom management either if you don't want to!

Personally, I have a world map in my game, and all I do re: kingdom management is update the borders based on the sidebar.

Exzachtly wrote:

Tridus wrote:

I'm playing Kingmaker right now, and I'm of two minds of it. Narratively I quite like it. Some of my group is having a harder time with it being more open ended...

For my group, we ran Chapter 4 (Rivers Run Red) with the kingdom rules largely as written, and then we switched to the "kingdom in the background" sidebars. I think this struck a decent balance of not bogging the campaign down too much with the kingdom rules while also giving my players the feeling that they built the foundation of their kingdom themselves.

For our next turn, I'm doing it with the GM between games after the other players gave suggestions on the direction they want. Then we can focus the actual game time on the adventuring part, which people generally are more interested in.

Like, people enjoy setting the direction of the kingdom and seeing things happen, but the minutae of doing it not so much because its a lot of rules/time/rolling and those rules have some significant issues (which we have largely house ruled out now). So we'll try this, and maybe kingdom in the background is a fallback if it doesn't really address the issue.

That sounds like a pretty solid compromise to me. Are you doing the default "1 turn = 1 month" timeframe, or are you adjusting the pace to match where you are in the main adventure?

I'm playing Kingmaker right now, and I'm of two minds of it. Narratively I quite like it. Some of my group is having a harder time with it being more open ended...

For my group, we ran Chapter 4 (Rivers Run Red) with the kingdom rules largely as written, and then we switched to the "kingdom in the background" sidebars. I think this struck a decent balance of not bogging the campaign down too much with the kingdom rules while also giving my players the feeling that they built the foundation of their kingdom themselves.

I very much yada-yada'd the traveling.

The players' PCs were half-elf, half-orc sisters, and I tweaked the orcs outside Scarwall to be extended family of theirs as a moment of levity before the (shortened) dungeon crawl.

How did you scale things for a party of two?

Over the holiday weekend, I finished up a heavily abridged version of Crimson Throne while our Kingmaker game has been on hiatus. My intent was to distill the major beats of Crimson Throne into about 15 sessions, for a fast-paced, relatively linear campaign.

In the end, it took us about 20 sessions and four and a half months.

But, with this done, I figured I'd post my campaign outline for possible inspiration (if only in a "learn from my mistakes!" sense).

Disclaimers:

1. I ran this in D&D 5E. While I'd like to convert the players involved to Pathfinder, this was not the game to do it. Their familiarity with 5E is a big reason this game went as quickly as it did.
2. I cut a LOT of stuff. It's mostly just Books 1-3, with things cherry-picked from Books 4-6.
3. The party consisted of two players, each controlling their PC and one companion character. This likewise contributed to the speed of the game.

The Structure:

This campaign was split into a few batches of missions, most of which were given by Cressida Croft. While the batches themselves were largely set in stone, the order in which the players could complete the missions in each batch was up to them. Occasionally, the order in which they completed missions affected other missions in the batch. Usually the first and last missions in a batch were locked in.

Each mission was designed to be completed in one or two sessions, depending on how slap-happy the players got.

Batch 1:
-The Mobster. The opening of the campaign played out largely as-written: the party found and slayed Gaedren Lamm, delivered Ileosa's brooch, and met Cressida.
-The Missing Body. The party explores the Dead Warrens to recover the body of Thousand Bones' grandson.
-The Ambassador. The party travels to Eel's End to seek dirt on a politician.
-The Deserters. The party is sent to retrieve Verik Vancaskerkin and his fellow guards.
-The Suspect. When Trinia Sabor is accused of regicide, the party must protect her from Red Mantis Assassins and the Queen's new Grey Maiden force.

Batch 2:
-The Duelist. Vencarlo Orisini has gone missing, and the party must infiltrate the quarantined Old Korvosa for signs of where he went.
-The Emperor. The party investigates Pilts Swastel for information on the missing artist, Salvatore Scream, who may know where the Seneschal has diseappeared to.
-The Crime Lord. The party seeks an audience with Glorio Arkona for help in finding Vencarlo and the Seneschal.

Batch 3:
-The Manor. Carowyn Manor has fallen eerily silent since the Blood Veil began, and the party is asked to investigate a musician who never came back from the manor.
-The Ship. The party investigates the Direption for clues about the plague's origin.
-The Hospice. The party finally investigates the Queen's Physicians by infiltrating the Hospice of the Blind Maiden.
-The Temple. The party explores the temple underneath the Hospice and seeks the plague's origin.

Batch 4:
-The Castle. The party seeks the sacred sword Serithial from the haunted castle of Scarwall.
-The Academae. The party enters the Breaching Festival to win the favor of the Academae wizards (I imported Academy of Secrets for this one).
-The Maidens. The party infiltrates the Longacre Building to eliminate prominent figures in the Red Mantis and Grey Maidens.
-The Rebellion. With the Grey Maidens thrown off-guard, the party and their allies storm Castle Korvosa.
-The Everdawn Pool. The party descends into the Grand Mustaba to confront Queen Ileosa.

All in all, it was a fun way to breeze through this AP, and there was enough stuff on the cutting room floor that I could run the full campaign one day in the future and give those same players a very different experience.

I decided to homebrew in my own system for the armies, using the ones in the book as a template. Disclaimer, I'm using the 5E conversion; it could work with PF2 but I'm sure it would need tweaks.

The system is very much inspired by Fire Emblem: Three Houses' battalions, which gave some boosts and maneuvers for units while adding to the illusion of Fire Emblem being large-scale conflicts and not just 12 teens running around killing 20 soldiers.

Every PC with an army equipped gets an extra action on their turn, dubbed an Army Action. This action can be used to make an attack or use a maneuver as described in the Army rules.

Both the army and its leader can be targeted by attacks or spells. However, while a PC has an army active, they get a boost to their Armor Class (I think a +5, it's been a while). Enemy units can get the same benefit, which gives some incentive to not just blast the leader of a unit. When an enemy unit leader is downed, the unit disbands if it hasn't already.

Armies can be damaged by PCs, but they effectively have a damage threshold of 10; every 10 points of damage will reduce the army's HP by 1. If you don't deal at least 10 damage, you effectively deal zero.

So far I've used these rules for a couple skirmishes, and they seem to work well enough to be playable.

Maybe the ritual could be changed to contact Father Tobin? He hasn't been dead a whole lot longer in the grand scheme of things, and his treatment of Nualia caused the town a bunch of problems.

Maybe Tobin's been trying to reach out from beyond the grave to warn Sandpoint as his own way of atoning for his hand in its troubles. Zantus has picked up on these vague hints, and he wants to conduct the ritual to see what Tobin's trying to say. The ritual can be less "forgive Tobin," and more "help Tobin manifest long enough for him to relay the message."

If Nualia is alive, you could even present it as "help Nualia and her father reconcile."