Louis-Philippe Desroches's page

This is another aspect of Kingmaker that did not get foreshadowed enough in the original adventures. I want PCs to worry about Nyrissa and her fey from the start of the campaign, not just on the last adventure.

It was not something I had in mind at the start of the campaign; it rather came from a PC’s actions. When they encountered Tyg-Tatter-Tut’s nest, a player asked me what he knew about this nest, and I half-improvised that fey don’t like people noticing and approaching their nest. Each of the next mornings, there was always some kind of circle visible near their camp (a twig sculpture in a tree, or ring of leaves on the ground, etc.) A Nature check allowed the same character to know that it was invitation from a fey to make a gift, so the fey will not play tricks on them. On the following days, the fey was invisibly following, but the party didn’t make any gift to it. So, it began playing tricks on them. As one of them was getting tired of these stupid tricks, the fey received a quite insulting gift (which I will not describe here).

So, I decided that this fey (Tyg-Tatter-Tyt) was insulted by the gift and pursued the characters during their adventures. Eventually, I determined that Tyg was a high-ranking member of the Unseen Court, the Court over which Nyrissa presides. At this point in the game, Nyrissa is only evaluating the party and their kingdom, but Tyg has been named as the de-facto leader of the fey who opposes the character for the moment. Of course, Tyg will not be the same fey species that it was supposed to be: I described him as a quickling. (Anyway, there will not be a quickling in the Forgotten Keep in my game, see Numeria spoiler below)
Many other fey the party encountered (Tyressia, Perlivash, Melianse, etc.) have allied with them, at least nominally. They told the party that the Unseen Court is not taking care of them and is letting them fend for themselves against the trolls and other menaces (such as the scythe tree).

Eventually, I plan on having the Unseen Court retaliate against the fey allied with the kingdom, forcing another front, maybe when they are fighting Armag (which I plan on invading the PCs’ kingdom too). Tyg-Tatter-Tut’s last stand will probably happen at this time.
Finally, the characters have asked for help from the fey to help free Anton Lebeda’s family from the Swordlords in order to get help from the Lebedas in the coming civil war.

As was the case in many other campaigns, the PCs in my game have allied to the Sootscales.

It happened after the characters captured one of the kobolds from the radish patch. I named this kobold Kalekatotusa and she became the face of the revolution against Tartuk and Chief Sootscale. The characters decided that Tartuk had to be killed or captured, but also that the Chief was not fit to lead the kobolds anymore.

On one hand, the characters helped Kalekatotusa rally kobolds to her cause while Tartuk was trying to capture them through his warriors. On the other, after Tartuk had fled deeper in the caves and the Chief had stated that the characters had to leave if they didn’t want to get killed, the PCs decided to confront the Chief and exile him, naming Kalekatotusa in his stead. As you can guess, I really expanded on the Sootscales’ lair, because I wanted it to be the lair of many hundreds of kobolds, not a mere 20ish.

As for Tartuk, I changed his motives for leading the kobolds to their doom against the mites. He was in fact still a gnome, using illusions to pass for a kobold, and working for Tyg-Tatter-Tut and the Unseen Court (see Unseen Court spoiler above). Look at the Gogunta spoiler below for explanations on what he was planning to do with the statue.
Now, the kobolds even have one of them representing them on the Council of the kingdom, a warrior-diplomat named Malemiak, Kalekatotusa’s lieutenant. He was the kobold leading the other kobold warriors when the PCs asked them to prove their allegiance to the kingdom by fighting against the Stag Lord.

One of the biggest additions to my campaign, it all started with the Sootscales’ sacred statue. I decided that it would be coolest to have this statue mean something more than just being a tool for Tartuk to control and manipulate the Sootscales.

So, in this campaign, the statue is in fact the Statue of Gogunta, the Demon Lord. A herald of the Lord has been imprisoned somewhere in the Stolen Lands and this Statue is the only remaining link to the herald. It serves a single purpose: as this herald is a mad and wretched thing only interested in decay and bloodshed, it allows it to be fed and thus kept in dormancy, to prevent it from raising and breaking its cage. All fights, battles and confrontations around the statue serve this purpose. So, Tartuk’s mission from the Unseen Court was to encourage fights between kobolds and mites (and eventually other tribes if necessary), to maintain the monster’s prison.

So, by wiping the mites and rallying the kobolds to their cause, the party unknowingly risked everyone’s lives in the Stolen Land. After interrogating Tartuk and understanding what was at stake, they decided to keep the statue with themselves. This way, they could keep it in a constant state of strife and conflict.

That was without taking into account the fact that the herald was slowly waking up since the time the Statue was stolen and the characters just stored it without exposing it to conflict. So, when their mage decided to keep it at all times, he was exposing himself to voices from the Statue. The herald was cajoling him, manipulating him to use its powers (you see where it is going). Eventually, after using the Statue’s power (at minor artefact level, nothing less) to save himself and for varying things during hard fights, the group decided to keep the Statue hidden in their town hall, until they knew what to do of it.

They’re afraid that destroying it would just release the herald, but they fear that it could be stolen by one of their enemies, either to release it or to use its power. In fact, it’s eventually going to be stolen in their capital anyway (see Unification spoiler).

First, as I have six to seven players on a regular basis, I had to use the 6-player conversion made by the Paizo community and compiled by Alexander Kilcoyne, in the link below. Moreover, we use the Poof! rule (PCs of absent players are just absent, without need for an explanation, and come back on next session when the player is back) because it’s impossible to predict who will be there on each session. This conversion allowed me to balance fights for a larger group, going back to the book with a smaller group.

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2m26n?Community-Created-6-Player-Kingmaker

Also, I used all the notes from Dudemeister about “Hargulka’s Monster Kingdom”, from the link below. This guy’s work, as many people already said before me, changes the second adventure for the better and brings a lot more to a villain that is not foreshadowed at all in the book.

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2ljy6?My-Changes-to-RRR-Hargulkas-Monster-Kingd om#1

I also want to state that I have read the messageboards for some time now, even more about Kingmaker. I may have borrowed ideas from others posters that don’t come to mind right now, or from other books. If you notice the work or the idea of somebody else, please tell it that this person may get its due.

One of the first problems I had when reading the second adventure (and my players thought the same), was that the Swordlords give the PCs 40,000 gp-worth of BPs and basically say : “Do your best” and it’s done. There is no follow-up, no intervention from the Swordlords, no basic overwatching of what the PCs are doing with their money and men. The only possible explanation is the looming shadow of civil war, but it doesn’t play any part in the scenarios and PCs never hear any more of it.

My first change was to add a simple NPC (at first), Anton Lebeda. He is a minor noble which was indebted to the Swordlords and which was sent to my PCs’ kingdom to “help them develop and rule the kingdom in the name of the Swordlords”. Everybody understood from the start that he was an official spy that was to send regular feedback on what is happening in their kingdom.

He is an arrogant man, sent to a backwater station to repay his debt, so he treats the PCs for what he sees them: barbarian/brigand/wannabe rulers. He counts on the Swordlords backing to protect him from the PCs’ wrath.

During play, I eventually added the fact that he was forced to act this way by the Swordlords who have his family “as their guests” in one of their country houses, to “protect them until he comes back after this little service” (read: they’re detained as hostages to insure his loyalty). This way, they can count on him, even if the PCs eventually want to buy his silence. Yes, in my game, the Swordlords are real a**holes, because I wanted the players to be scared of them, at least at the start.

The first impacts of this change are starting to appear in my game. Anton is sending regular updates by courier to the Swordlords. When the PCs started to do certain things (recruiting a redeemed werewolf in the group, for example), they began worrying “What is Restov going to think of that”. In fact, they became so paranoid about Anton (who I play as being opportunistic and selfish) that they had an “interrogatory session” with him, trying to force him into a pledge of loyalty to their baron. They just learned in what kind of situation he finds himself. He explained that his first son has already been killed (for what he may know) when the Swordlords learned that he was trying to hide certain things from them. (Yes, Restov has some men slipping into their kingdom, mostly merchants and the like, who get paid some gp to give them information).

The other think I’m changing is this whole “civil war” story, which never gets used in the books. I’m actually making this civil war come to life in this campaign, mainly by having the first skirmish between Restov and the Issians (mostly Surtovas) on the PCs’ kingdom. (See the next spoiler about that).

One of the PCs in my campaign (the baron himself) is the third son of Noleski Surtova. He never quite adhered to the religious convictions of his family (they are secretly Asmodean cultists in my game), being a paladin and all. So he was disowned and was sent in the world to fend for himself. He still does not know why the Swordlords chose him to go in the Stolen Lands.

As we are in the middle of the second book, the PCs begin thinking they have too much on their shoulders right now: Pitax and/or Drelev seems to have something against them (learned through Grigori), the Unseen Court opposes them since the start (see Unseen Court spoiler below), there’s a herald of Gogunta imprisoned on their land (see Gogunta spoiler below), they are beset by Gyronna cultists (see Gyronna spoiler below), and Hargulka is stirring his troops south. So, the baron had the great idea to call on his father… twice!

The first time, his father sent him some men, an architect and some stone for building (i.ex. some BPs), while asking him to take care of his cousin Andretti Surtova, bringing him to his land south and make a man out of him. No one in the group knows precisely for what I sent him with them, as I worked a lot to make him seem like a real nobody. He is in fact a priest of Asmodeus in disguise (see Unification spoiler below).

The second time, the baron sent a letter to his father asking for help against the trolls. Some weeks later, a small elite contingent of Surtova house troops, led by a Surtova vassal, was sent south to help them. These guys are real crack troops and they entered Olegburg (my players weren’t in the mood to start naming things) in full stride, stating they were here to defend Olegburg in their absence, while they go south hunting for trolls and taming the wilds. My players are now really worried that they attracted the wrong kind of attention from the Surtovas (and they’re right!)

My intention here is to have the troops take control of the town guards in the PCs’ absence, supposedly to “restore order” after a small protest against the PCs going in the wilds while they defend the town against the coming troll army. The warden (Akiros Ismort, which they recruited to lead the guards in town) has been imprisoned and martial law is established.

Following this event, if the players retake control of Olegburg by force (and that’s what I think they’ll do), the Surtovas will send another (bigger) regiment down south, to hold the baron accountable for this loss of their troops and demanding compensation. This will eventually come to the ears of the Swordlords, who will send their own troops. Thus, the first battle of the coming civil war will be fought on their nascent kingdom.

During this time, the Unifiers’ plot will unravel (see Unification spoiler below).