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Those are some cool resources - thanks for sharing!

I'm planning on adding Crucible of Chaos to my Kingmaker game, some time during VV. The hidden valley can easily be dropped somewhere in the Tors of the Levenies, and the incentives for the party are quite different when they're building a kingdom (who doesn't want a flying city? :)

As well as having the hidden valley waiting to be discovered if/when the PCs explore the Tors, I'm also going to:

In my game a PC stayed to keep the Kankerata distracted, and another cast levitate on a Centaur to get them out. The den is really a morality test.

Ok - that's cool. I hope they earned some bonus Trust Points for stopping and helping their opponents out of a sticky situation :)

In Dudemestier's rework of book 5, he changed Irovetti's motivation. Instead of working for Nyrissa, Irovetti was working to stop her, and believes that the PCs are her unwitting pawns. He acquired Briar not to hand over to Nyrissa, but to prevent any of Nyrissa's agents from getting it, and perhaps to use against her.

So, even if you didn't want to use the rest of the DMD's changes, changing Irovetti's motivation means that he isn't about to hand the sword over to Nyrissa. That could work well with something like your options 3 or 4.

Perhaps Irovetti's research has revealed how Briar can become more powerful by defeating the blooms, so if the blooms are only in the PCs' part of the Stolen Lands, the Pitax King might need to approach the PCs to get access the blooms. He might figure that with the blooms infesting their lands, he can convince the PCs to join him fighting against Nyrissa. Or if the blooms are occurring in Pitax as well, he might sue for peace as the two kingdoms need to ally against the greater threat.

I don't have any of the files from this thread archived, but for what it's worth, I do have some links I've collected over the years.

For the charters, I just took screenshots from the module PDFs.

There's an Auld Grene Belt Mappe thread for a hand-drawn map covering the Greenbelt and parts east, with a still-live link near the bottom. This could be given to a party before heading into the Greenbelt, or could be found somewhere in the Stolen Lands.

Zuddiger's Picnic from AP 36 can be introduced earlier in the AP, and the community came up with many awesome versions: https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l50p?Zuddigers-Picnic-artwork. Of the ones in that thread, I plan to use Blaarg's version for the complete book in my game, but also have the players find scattered pages from the incomplete series by Anthony Ian.

For anyone who has run Dudemeister's Kankerata Run - how did the centaurs manage Kankerata's Den (location 6)?

> 6. *~Kankerata’s Den A) Don’t Wake the Beast (Stealth DC 30) B) Scale the Ceiling (Climb DC 25)

The centaurs have no Stealth skill, so they're not going to be hitting a DC 30 check. Their Climb skill is +6, so they *can* make the DC 25 Climb check, but they're going to be failing a lot before moving out of that location... 90% of the time, they're going to remain on the card and have to roll again next round.

Also, it's one of the locations where Kankerata spring-attacks anyone who fails. A Giant Advanced Bulette's bite is +17 to hit and does 4d6+15/19-20 damage, and a regular centaur has AC 20 and 30 hp - Kankerata can easily one-shot them. Even Danide, with her AC of 21 and 93 hp, is going to be in trouble after a few rounds of failed Climb checks.

Obviously I can change the details of that location in my game, tinkering with the DCs and the skill checks, but I'm wondering how the challenge as originally presented by Dudemeister played at the table.

N.B. The regular centaur statblock in the Bestiary has them wearing breastplate, reducing their movement to 35', so they don't get any bonus on Chase checks from their speed (RAW Paizo's Chase rules say "for every 10 feet faster than the baseline speed he moves, he gains a cumulative +2 bonus on these checks"... that seems like unnecessary rounding off to me, making it +2 per 10 feet rather than +1 per 5 feet. I'm going to change it to +1 per 5 feet, so a move speed of 35' does in fact get +1 relative to a move speed of 30')

In my game, I think the two centaur warriors and Danide will put aside their shields for the run to avoid the heavy shield ACP on their Acrobatics/Climb checks. Danide has the advantage of Barbarian speed, so she's moving at 40' and gets +2 on chase checks even when wearing breastplate. Xamanthe will turn up wearing leather armor, able to move at her full 50' speed and thus get +4 on chase checks, trusting to speed (and thus a better chance of success) instead of AC to protect herself against Kankerata's attacks.

My group still hasn't got to VV. We has several different campaigns running in time-slices (with rotating GMs), playing an "episode" of multiple sessions in each one and then moving on, and sometimes we get stuck on one for longer than planned. Our last Kingmaker session was in 2017.

That said, I'm looking at doing more VV prep, and I wanted to share something which I think will be a nice detail. I've decided that the root cause of the disagreements between the Nomen and Varnhold was how differently the Nomen think of agreements.

The Nomen are not at all legalistic in their negotiations (in that they don't try to pin down precise definitions, and don't care whether the words of the agreement matches their intended spirit). As a result, Nomen agreements usually have a lot of unspoken assumptions, but to accommodate that, they are organic and remain open-ended - the initial negotiations up to a point of agreement only set the starting point, but frequent re-hashing is common. Since they live in a relatively small tribal society, they are in constant contact with one another, and such clarifying of past agreements is a part of their life.

The Nomens also haven’t discovered the great truth of “never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence/ignorance”.

So, the Varnholders made agreements/treaties with the Nomen when they first arrived in their territory, and then did things they thought were legitimate without any re-negotiation, which the Centaurs considered to be breaking the spirit of the agreement. Since the two sides weren’t in constant daily contact, the usual re-hashing didn’t occur, and so the Nomen came to view the two-legs as untrustworthy oath-breakers, while the Varnholders came to believe the Nomen to be belligerent fantasists who kept claiming they'd agreed on things that were never mentioned.

An additional information reward for the PCs reaching a Trust Score of 21 through living with the Nomen is the understanding of how Nomen agreements work, and thus they can start to understand where it all went wrong.

Lots of good suggestions so far. I'd like to throw out some thoughts in no particular order.

The "one encounter per day" issue could be mitigated by giving some GM advice about how wandering monsters should act when they're rolled. Peaceful animals and monsters aside, even hostile monsters don't always attack mindlessly. Assuming they spot the PCs before the PCs spot them, more intelligent monsters might be inclined to spy on the party, following them for a while and learning their abilities and picking a good moment to attack. If the PCs don't notice they're being followed, then the next time they have a fight, they might be ambushed immediately afterwards when they're depleted. If they *do* notice they're being followed, that creates some immediate tension and interest, far more than "a worg bursts out of the trees and attacks." What's following us? Why? How do we deal with it?

Creatures like Mites or Kobolds might spend the night creating traps or suchlike around the players' camp for them to stumble into in the morning.

The wandering monster table could also have a result of "roll twice - the two results are interacting in some way". That can create some interesting situations the PCs can stumble across, and create a bit of GM improv fodder as they try to work out how 1d4 trolls and 1d4 grigs might be interacting as the PCs arrive on the scene.

Another result could be "something from a fixed encounter location", so those locations don't always just passively wait for the players. The advice for the GM could state that they can default to the closest location, but can pick a location further away if more appropriate (which could be a way to have the PCs meet named NPCs from the Stag Lord's fort out and about, as suggested above).

Moving on from the random encounter table, I also want to say that there's a problem with the Stag Lord's Fort as laid out in the first module - the scenario strongly pushes the PCs to approach it before they're ready. They fight Happs and the bandits at the Trading Post, and probably learn of the location of Thorn River Camp. They don't want the bandits to launch reprisals on Oleg's, so there's an incentive to head straight to Thorn River before Happs is missed. If they're victorious there, Oleg's is safe for now, but they learn a password for the Stag Lord's fort, which expires in a week. That pushes them to rush to the fort long before they're ready.

The password should change less frequently - if it actually changed every week, the bandits leaving the Stag Lord's Fort on foot would only get 3 hexes away before they had to turn around and return to get the next password. Alternatively, or in addition, in my game I made it that old passwords didn't actually expire when they changed - the passwords were used to gauge how long you'd been away, and thus how much loot you owed. The older the password you used when you arrived, the more loot you needed to hand over to stay in the good books.

(Despite making these changes in my game, my players still went to the Stag Lord's Fort when they were too low a level. However, they were smart - they just showed up, gave the password, handed over some loot, met the other bandits and sampled Fat Norry's cooking, checked out the layout of the map, one player got punched in the face by the Stag Lord for asking after "his Queen", and then they peacefully left (getting the next password on the way out) and didn't come back for the actual assault until weeks later. Naturally, they were able to re-acquire the gold that they handed over from the first visit when they defeated the bandits the second time.)

Also also, I really liked a suggestion on these boards of making the passwords for the fort come from Zuddiger's Picnic. One of the lieutenants had it read to them as a child, and still remembers most of the words, although they don't have a copy. Nice way to foreshadow that book. (The module should list multiple passwords, since they change.)

EDIT Something that just occurred to me - please make sure you retain the language of "the punishment for unrepentant banditry" on the first module's charter. The wriggle-room of the word "unrepentant" was a major element of how my players dealt with the bandits they captured.

One thing I didn't mention - my browser-based tracking sheet actually has a feature to automatically build improvements in cities each turn. That's in the "Kingdom Turn" section at the bottom, in step 2d.

You give it various parameters, such as the number of BPs that it should not drain your treasury below, and when you click the button it will try to add buildings to your cities, within the limits of your current realm's build limits and the parameters you set. It won't add new districts or found new settlements however - that needs to be done manually.

I mention this because it might make simulating a 10-year time pass somewhat easier... if you get something approximating what they had at the end of book 3, then you can relatively rapidly simulate things growing in a random and unplanned fashion.

(Also, the import/export feature might be handy - it's in the "menu" link on the top right. It allows you to view/edit a plain text dump of the current kingdom details, which means you can copy that off to a text document somewhere and then experiment, and if you don't like how things have gone you can paste back in the older version and revert your changes.)

If I understand you correctly, you're looking to re-create the stats and details of the players' barony from scratch (or from someone else's realm stats), inspired by your recollection of what they had at the end of book 3?

Each module contain a "Kingdom in the background" blurb somewhere in the early pages which outlines the details of the realm they'd have if a group wants to hand-wave the RRR realm-building rules. So, if you find that in book 4, it should give you an idea of what the module expects in terms of realm size. It won't give you the actual stats, but IIRC it says how large their territory should be, the number of settlements they have and the population size of their capital.

I have a browser-based kingdom tracking sheet which I wrote, which might make it easier for you to quickly stat up their barony. It works for the RRR rules, but I make no guarantees about the UC mode, which had a lot of TODOs still in it at the point I gave up on that ruleset and made my own Fate-based realm building rules.

The prologue in Restov definitely sets the scene better than starting at Oleg's, and gives the players a chance to meet some of the significant NPCs of the campaign. You wouldn't have to have the whole assassin attack thing, but a map of Jamandi's mansion in the book and some interesting things to do there would be great (and you could suggest some ideas for adventures at the mansion without providing huge amounts of details, including something like the assassin attack. Unlike a CRPG, human GMs can fill in the details themselves).

As others have said, the foreshadowing of all the major antagonists in the CRPG was much better than the original AP, and would be something to add to the book. As part of that, the CRPG did a much better job of exposing you to the back-stories of these antagonists without "you find Tartuk's diary, and it turns out that..." sort of info-dumps. I really loved what Owlcat did with Tartuk, involving the player in his genesis.

Some of the CRPG's foreshadowing might be trickier with an entire party of players rather than the CRPG's single protagonist though - Nyrissa can't really adopt "her hound" from amongst the PCs without giving that one player a lot more spotlight than the rest. You might include several options for ways that Nyrissa might adopt different PCs, with multiple guises she could adopt so they may not immediately know it's the same individual, which would also work for versatility to match the specific party your players make.

Having existing neutral settlements in the Stolen Lands, like the CRPG's Siverstep Village, would be very good. It gives the bandits someone to prey on, justifying their existence before the PCs came along. It makes for some lower-stakes politicking for the players, as they try to woo these neutral settlements into their new realm. It also gives plenty of hooks for adventuring if the settlements have their own problems.

Speaking of which, more adventure hooks for urban adventures within the players' realm would be great. These don't need to be super detailed or take up lots of pages of the book - just a paragraph for each hook, outlining some sort of adventure or problem, like the CRPG artisan and companion quests, could give plenty of material for a keen GM without taking up lots of space.

I liked the way various ruins in the CRPG were tied together thematically. Rather than the original AP's many isolated ruins with their own history (which the players really never had a chance to discover), the CRPG made most ruins either from the Cyclops civilisation (foreshadowing Vordakai), the Dwarven Shield Road (tying into Hargulka's stronghold and Harrim) or the Taldans.

In the CRPG, I loved the way that various ruling council roles were combined when your barony was small, so two roles could be done by a single councillor initially, and the two roles only needed two individuals to do the work when that area had grown above a certain point. This has multiple benefits - you start off with a small council and don't have to fill so many roles initially, and you get a real sense of growth as your council expands. You also get the opportunity to recruit new NPCs to your council progressively through the adventure rather than having to do it all at the start, allowing you to meet a wider range of individuals before you have a slot to fill.

I also liked that each council role was tied to a realm skill (unsurprisingly, since I had the same thing in my Fate-based alternative realm building rules), rather than the RRR/UC "Economy, Loyalty, Stability" trio of realm stats.

A request for the realm building rules, whatever they look like - they should allow the players to "zoom out". While initially the players may start out choosing to build individual buildings etc in their single settlement, eventually when the realm has grown and they're managing dozens of settlements across hundreds of miles of land they shouldn't have to be messing around constructing individual taverns and stables and whatnot. There should be a way to do more coarse-grained but far-reaching (and presumably more expensive) changes which affect whole areas without worrying about the individual buildings inside the settlements.

Dying and recovery no longer involves being slowed, so this is a holdover from 1.1.

The replacement Unconscious section for Conditions on page 7 of the errata also has the same holdover from 1.1.

Unconscious

You’ve been knocked out. You can’t act. You also take a –4
conditional penalty to AC and have the blinded, deafened,
and flat-footed conditions. When you gain this condition, you
fall prone and drop items you are wielding or holding unless
the effect states otherwise or the GM determines you’re in a
position in which you wouldn’t. If you ever return to 1 Hit
Point or more, you become conscious. If you were dying
when you regain conscious, you’re slowed for 1 round, with
a slowed value equal to the dying value you had just before
you returned to 1 HP. When you’re unconscious and at 0 HP
but no longer dying, you naturally return to 1 HP and awaken
after sufficient time passes. The GM determines how long you
remain unconscious, from at least 10 minutes to several hours.

Yes, I don't think a creature that can sense its surroundings perfectly well without light should automatically notice when bright light enters its space.

It's a realisation I had when GMing PF1e... I was making it hard for my players to carry light and stealth, but then I realised that I was imagining the situation from a human perspective. For a human (or other creature that relies on regular vision), the arrival of a light source when standing around in darkness would be blindingly obvious, if you'll pardon the pun.

But if I can also see my surroundings perfectly well without light, such as if I had Darkvision, the arrival of a light source is going to be a much more subtle effect. I'd be able to see colour where I couldn't before, so it could definitely be noticable, but not to the same extent as going from "not being able to see" to "being able to see".

I actually speculated that intelligent subterranean monsters with Darkvision might go so far as to paint "Intruders!" or similar in bright colours on the walls of their guard stations, so that they're more likely to notice if their surroundings start being illuminated.

1) My players don't want XP to reset each level, because they're proud of their ever-accumulating totals. It's a marker of what they've earned.

If you don't like your XP total dropping when you advance a level, you could just not do that. You'd effectively have a level-by-XP table which says 2nd level: 1000 XP, 3rd level: 2000 XP, 4th level: 3000 XP etc. Or, heck, say that 1st level characters start on 1000 XP, and then your level is just your XP total divided by 1000.

Personally, I view character level as the marker of what I've earned, and I'm not fussed by my XP total dropping. Increases in XP are a nice indication of progress towards the next level, but once I've levelled, I don't mind that the number drops. But then, I've played quite a few RPGs where you spend XP to advance.

The new system doesn't allow the low-level characters to ever catch up with the high-level ones. It enforces a party that must always level together. I really don't want a game where everyone's the same level.

Actually, it does allow low-level characters to catch up - the RAW suggest that they get double XP from each encounter:

Party members who are behind the party’s average level should gain double the amount of XP the other characters do until they reach the party’s average level.

However, now that I understand the maths of the system, I realised that it handles mixed-level parties really naturally without needing that "doubling" rule. I'm not sure why the RAW even has the doubling rule when it actually works just fine and quite intuitively to do it "correctly".

An encounter of a given difficulty and level goes up one difficulty for each level lower the PCs are, and goes down one difficulty for each level higher the PCs are. So, a High difficulty encounter for a level 3 party is a Severe difficulty encounter for a level 2 party and a Low difficulty encounter for a level 4 party.

Given that, you can simply award the XP from the table to each character based on the severity of the encounter for them, as if they were adventuring in a party all of their level.

For example, say the Grey Woods in a West Marches game is a level 5 region, so in one part of the woods you create a High difficulty encounter for four level 5 characters... a pair of trolls (two level 5 creatures). A party of a 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th level characters brave the Grey Woods and defeat the trolls. For the 3rd level character, it was an Extreme encounter (2 steps up from High, since they're 2 levels below 5) and so they get 160 XP. For the 4th level character, it was a Severe encounter (1 step up from High, since they're 1 level below 5), so they get 120 XP. For the 5th level character, it was a High difficulty encounter (as designed), so they get 80 XP. For the 6th level character, it was a Low difficulty encounter (1 step down from High, since they're 1 level above 5), so they get 60 XP.

If you go past Extreme off the top of the table, you can easily extrapolate higher levels by following the pattern of doubling the value two rows before, assuming the character actually survives. If you go below Trivial, the RAW say "no XP", which I'm fine with. I don't mind that a high level character learns nothing from fighting creatures more than 4 levels below them.

PF1's system was the best for any edition of the game. What bewilders me about this edition is how many of the wonderful parts of PF1 were jettisoned along with the clunky/time-consuming ones. PF1's XP system was a welcome innovation.

I've decided I quite like the PF2e XP system, because I think it answers the questions that players are most interested in, "Did I reach next level?" and "How close to the next level am I?", better than the table-of-XP-per-level approach.

In PF1e, say you're on 731,000 XP... how close to 16th level are you? You might have noted down that you need 890,000 for 16th level, but you still don't really have enough information. You'd also have to know that the start of 15th level was 635,000, at which point you can roughly work out in your head that you're about 40% of the way along.

Contrast with PF2e... if you're on 380 XP in the PF2e system, you have a pretty darn clear idea of where you're at.

Something with the XP system that is obvious in hindsight, but which did not immediately leap out at me on first reading, is that the categorisation of encounter difficulty (Trivial, Low, High, Severe, Extreme) drops down one category for each level the party goes up.

In other words, a Severe difficulty encounter for level 1 characters is a High difficulty encounter for level 2 characters, a Low difficulty encounter for level 3 characters, and a Trivial encounter for level 4 characters, with the corresponding XP adjustments (120 XP each for a Severe difficulty encounter, 80 XP each for a High difficulty encounter, 60 XP each for a Low difficulty encounter, 40 XP each for a Trivial encounter).

So, when a published module (say, Doomsday Dawn) says that a room is "High 1", i.e. a High difficulty encounter for a 1st level party, you can work out the XP reward for a higher-level party directly by dropping the difficulty and giving the appropriate reward for their actual level.

(Or you can dig into the Bestiary and adjust the encounter to preserve the difficulty for your higher level party).

Why do we have to look up where the encounter sits relative to the party (which, as someone points out above could have varying levels) and then split XP based on relative difficulty?

I guess it depends on how non-standard your party is.

If you have four PCs of the expected level, it's going to be simpler. You're going to say "Ok, that was a High difficulty fight for your level, so everyone gets 80 XP". You're going to learn the five XP values from Table 5 in the Bestiary pretty quickly, especially when you notice that it progresses like PF1e XP for higher CR monsters, doubling every two rows.

Even if their level is different, it should be simple enough... you'd be like "Ok, that would have been a High difficulty fight for level ones, but you guys levelled up last week so you're level two... that makes it a Low difficulty fight for you, so you each get 60 XP."

If you're running from a published adventure, it'll be designed for a standard party size. If you have a party of size other than 4, you'll have to decide (as with PF1e) whether you'll adjust the encounters to preserve the difficulty or run them as written and live with them being easier or harder than intended.

The rules strongly encourage you to adjust the encounters, at which point the XP rewards stay the same... a High difficulty fight remains High difficulty because you added or removed creatures, so it remains 80 XP each.

If you just run the fight as written though, it's going to require some more work. You'd have to say "That would have been a High difficulty fight for 4 PCs of your level, 80 XP, but there are 5 of you, so you each get 4/5ths of that... 64 XP."

Mind you, you'd probably get used to multiplying everything by 0.8 pretty quickly, since your party size isn't changing between fights. You could even pre-calculate your own adjusted Bestiary Table 5 for your 5 PC party with the five difficulties from Trivial to Extreme multiplied by 0.8 (Trivial = 32 XP, Low = 48 XP, High = 64 XP, Severe = 96 XP, Extreme = 128 XP) and just use that thereafter.

And if you scale up some encounters (say, the fixed encounters) but run others as written (say, wandering monster encounters), you can use your adjusted Table 5 or the original Table 5 as appropriate.

If you don't reward XP on the spot, and calculate it after the adventure, you'd just be adding up how many Trivial, Low, High etc. encounters they defeated. You could probably just use tally marks against the five difficulty levels (or if you have a non standard party size and you decide to run a mix of adjusted and not-adjusted fights, ten difficulty levels).

If you have a mixed-level party though, the simplifications they've made are going to get in your way. It can be done "correctly" (i.e. to emulate PF1e) as I suggested above, but you'll be needing to do a lot more work. Or you can do what the PF2e rules say and just give the lower level characters double XP until they catch up, but that seems unsatisfying.

I appreciate the maths needs some thinking about to make sure level progression is fairly steady but this game has nearly twenty years of work behind that sort of system (if you just start from 3E) so why change it. Doesn't make sense to me.

Well, as I worked through above, the maths is actually the same as PF1e. The rules in PF2e produce exactly the same progression as the three PF1e advancement tracks if you pick the right parameters.

I quote "For each character in the party beyond the fourth, include additional creatures worth an amount of XP equal to the Character Adjustment value for your encounter on Table 5."

I just dont get it.

In addition to the advice above, I'll point out that each room in Doomsday Dawn lists its expected difficulty. For example, room A1 (Slimy Cistern) says "Trivial 1" at the top, room A2 (Mudchewer Central) says "High 1", etc. That indicates the row of table 5 on page 21 of the Bestiary that the encounter was designed with.

So, I believe what you're meant to do is:

So, this discussion prompted me to delve into the maths of PF1e's XP tables, and I was surprised by the results.

TL;DR: first edition Pathfinder's XP requirements can, like the playtest system, be met with a constant number of level-equivalent encounters each level to level up. PF2e's advancement system produces results almost identical to PF1e, sitting somewhere between the Slow and Medium advancement tracks.

------------------------------------------------

Details:

Since the three PF1e tracks are just multiples of each other (Slow = Medium x 1.5, Fast = Medium x 2/3) I'll mostly just focus on one track, Medium.

The Medium track goes:

XP for each level: 0, 2000, 5000, 9000, 15000, 23000, 35000, 51000, 75000, 105000, 155000, 220000, 315000, 445000, 635000, 890000, 1300000, 1800000, 2550000, 3600000

In order to see how many XP you need to advance each level, here are the deltas on those numbers (to reach level 2 you need 2,000 XP, then to reach level 3 you need 3,000 XP more on top of the 2,000 XP you already had in order to reach a total of 5,000 XP)

XP gain required for each level: 2000, 3000, 4000, 6000, 8000, 12000, 16000, 24000, 30000, 50000, 65000, 95000, 130000, 190000, 255000, 410000, 500000, 750000, 1050000

The progression of those numbers may already look familiar... the values are generally double the value two before it. Yes, the XP requirement to level in PF1e scales at the same rate as monster CR.

If you assume a party of 4 adventurers advancing on the Medium XP track, they need to defeat 20 CR 1 monsters to advance from 1st to 2nd level (one CR 1 monster is worth 400 XP, divided between 4 PCs gives 100 XP each, 20 x 100 XP = 2,000 XP).

The then need to defeat 20 CR 2 monsters to advance from 2nd to 3rd level (one CR 2 monster is worth 600 XP, divided between 4 PCs gives 150 XP each, 20 x 150 XP = 3,000 XP).

The then need to defeat 20 CR 3 monsters to advance from 3rd to 4th level.

The pattern holds (more or less) all the way up to 20th level.

Number of level-equivalent creatures to defeat each level: 20.00, 20.00, 20.00, 20.00, 20.00, 20.00, 20.00, 20.00, 18.75, 20.83, 20.31, 19.79, 20.31, 19.79, 19.92, 21.35, 19.53, 19.53, 20.51

You can see it's exactly 20 level-equivalent creatures every level up to 9th. There are some perturbations after that due to rounding off the XP required for some levels to end with lots of zeros, but it's basically 20.

For the Slow advancement track, it's pretty much 30 level-equivalent monsters to advance (1.5 times the Medium track). For the Fast track, it's roughly 13 1/3 level-equivalent monsters (2/3 of the Medium track).

------------------------------------------------

So, how does this compare to PF2e? A level-equivalent monster in PF2e gives 40 XP to each member of a 4 character party. That means the party needs to defeat 25 such monsters to get 1,000 XP... they're advancing at a rate mid way between the Medium (20 creatures) and Slow (30 creatures) tracks.

Converting the PF1e advancement tables to PF2e values, the Slow track is 1,200 XP per level, the Medium track is 800 XP per level and the Fast track is about 533 XP per level.

Of course, no GM would restrict themselves to level-equivalent creatures for every encounter. However, as noted by Ediwir, the XP rewards in PF2e for creatures of different levels still follows the PF1e pattern of doubling every two levels. So, no matter what mix of creatures you use, as long as they're within the party's level +/- 4, it will work just the same as midway-between-Slow-and-Medium advancement in PF1e (and if you want to use creatures outside the range of level +/- 4, the maths is obvious... just double/halve the XP value in the table two levels below/above.)

------------------------------------------------

So having worked through all that, I'm pretty happy that the PF2e XP system will produce advancement rates akin to what we're used to from PF1e.

The only thing I'm not keen on in the PF2e approach is the bizarre aversion to dividing the XP by the number of party members. It's fairly easily remedied though - just multiply all the XP values in tables 4 and 5 in the Bestiary by four. Then, you get an XP total which you can divide by the actual party size to get the XP per character. For example, a trivial encounter would have a budget of 40 XP per character, which for two characters would be 80 XP, which might be a single creature of the party's level - 2. They would get 80 XP split two ways, i.e. 40 XP each.

In fact, the PF2e method would actually work fine for mixed-level parties, too. Say a party made up of a 1st, 2nd and 3rd level character defeated an Ogre (which is level 3). There were three PCs, so they each get a third of the XP listed in (the modified, multiplied-by-4) table 4 in the Bestiary based on their level relative to that of the Ogre.

I tried pivoting table 10-2 so I could get a better feel for it. The below version shows how challenging a given DC would be for characters of various levels.

DCs from 10 to 55 are listed down the left-hand side, and then it lists the level ranges for which that DC is Extremely difficult, Severely difficult etc. down to Trivial.

For a given DC, it shows the levels which table 10-2 shows as having that DC +/- 2 as the given category (so, for DC 15 it shows the levels that say DC 13 to 17).

I've had to pad it with underscores, because this forum doesn't have any way to format tables that I can see.

DC_______Extreme_______Severe_______High_______Low_______Trivial
_________________________________For levels__________________________
10__________0____________0 - 1_________0 - 3_________________________
15__________0____________0 - 2_________1 - 3_______2 - 4_______4 - 8__
20________1 - 3___________3 - 5_________4 - 6_______5 - 8_______9 - 13_
25________4 - 7___________6 - 9_________7 - 10______9 - 12____14 - 18_
30________8 - 10________10 - 12_______11 - 13_____13 - 15____19 - 21_
35_______11 - 12________13 - 15_______14 - 16_____16 - 19____22 - 23_
40_______13 - 16________16 - 19_______17 - 20_____20 - 21____________
45_______17 - 20________20 - 21_______21 - 22_____22 - 23____________
50_______21 - 22________22 - 23_________23__________________________
55_________23_______________________________________________________

Given the design of the playtest I think you'd still need the original table 10-2, because it's used to determine the DC of various monster abilities etc. Still, I thought it was interesting enough to share.

Well you could re-calc the exp budget. Say you have a high (80xp) enouncter with a 6 person party. you could treat it as a low (60xp) with +30(15 per extra) for a budget of 90, which is close enough to the base encounter.

Yes, you get approximately the same result if you multiply the 80 XP reward by (4 / # of PCs) = 80 x (4 / 6) ~= 53 XP each (close to the 60 XP you came up with).

I don't see that the original "problem" of having to do simple division to divide up XP in PF1e is really improved upon by the new system that still requires you to do division if the party size isn't 4, but then multiply the share-per-PC by 4 to put it back in line again.

I find it slightly ironic and humorous that you implied my complaint about how XP was determined and doled out as unfounded then do so similarly soon after.

Yes, my bad :) Your comments prompted me to look more closely at the XP system, which brought up my own questions.

I also thought the main thing you were complaining about was the way the PF2e XP system restricted the size of encounters you could construct for the players ("Encounters are small groups, individually wrapped, and built for quick resolution.") I didn't feel that the system specifically enforced that... you could still create several rooms of creatures who might be reasonable fights in isolation, but with a danger that they could band together if the PCs were careless (which was the experience I remember from the Caves of Chaos in B2).

However, re-reading your original post, I see you list a number of issues with the XP system, and the comment about bite-sized encounters wasn't really your main point.

The PF2e XP system appeared to have a certain elegance to me when I first read it, but in thinking about how it works at the table and with pre-published adventures with non-standard party sizes, it starts to get wonky pretty quickly.

The basic idea of the system, that monster XP scales down as the PCs reach and then exceed the monster's level, feels reasonable as a design goal. A high level PC slaughtering a million kobolds shouldn't really learn anything from it, for example. It's interesting that it was a feature of the D&D 3/3.5 XP system which Paizo discarded when they made Pathfinder 1, but now they want to bring it back.

The 3/3.5 system was somewhat clunky in its own right, but quite a bit of that was to accommodate variables like mixed-level parties and non-standard party sizes. PF2e seems to have built something that seems more elegant than the 3rd ed version, but only if you ignore the possibility of non-standard party sizes and forbid mixed-level parties (although they do have the throw-away line of "if someone is of a lower level than the rest of the party, just give them double XP until they catch up").

It's the "running the encounter as stated" case where I think PF2 has a problem. By trying to simplify the maths (removing the division), they actually make the case where you run a fight designed for one party size with a different party size harder (instead of dividing the XP for the encounter between the actual number of PCs as you would in PF1, you have to multiply the XP for the encounter by (4 / # of PCs))

Hang about... how does this work when I'm running a published module by-the-book with a non-standard-sized party? Either I'll need to adjust the number of creatures in every single fight in the published book to preserve the difficulty of the fight, or I'll have to reverse-engineer the difficulty to work out what it should have been?

Like, if a party of 6 PCs fights the Sewer Ooze at the start of The Lost Star, it's a level 1 monster, so if I just mindlessly apply the rules everyone gets 40 XP. However, to do it properly, I'd either have to

For parties that are larger or smaller the Bestiary says the challenge ratings must be adjusted. SO a party of 5 characters fights enemies worth 50 XP for the trivial encounter. However, it says the XP gain is NOT adjusted, so they gain 40XP regardless, not 50.

Wow. You're right, carefully re-reading that section shows that is how it's meant to work.

What a bizarre way to do things. We don't divide XP, but we scale XP for 4 players, irrespective of the size of your party.

So, essentially you'd just getting four times the XP you'd get if we divided the XP by the number of PCs. That means that you'd get the same result (ignoring non-combat XP) if you did divide XP, but you only needed 250 XP to level.

Thanks for the clarification!

If this is explicitly spelled out in the playtest rules, I'm not seeing it.

My expectation from PF1e and earlier editions is that you divide the XP for an encounter between the PCs. This is reinforced by the encounter-building rules in the Bestiary, which (somewhat convolutedly) says that a trivial encounter is worth 10 XP per PC, a high-difficulty encounter is worth 20 XP per PC etc.

However, the only mention I can find about dividing XP in the rules is:

Any XP award gained goes to all members of the group. For instance, if the party wins a battle worth 100 XP, they each get 100 XP, even if the party’s rogue was off in a vault stealing a treasure during the battle. If she collected a splendid gemstone, which you decided was worth 30 XP, all the party members get that XP, too.

That might be simply saying that everyone gets equal XP, whether they participated in a fight or not, which is consistent with Pathfinder's idea that there is no individual XP and all PCs in the party level up together. However, it also could be read to suggest that everyone gets the full value of the encounter...

It really doesn't make sense to me for a trivial encounter for a party of 3 PCs to award them 30 XP each and a trivial encounter for a part of 5 PCs to award them 50 XP each, so I feel it must be divided, but as I said, I'm not seeing it actually called out in the rules...

I think you might be reading too much into the XP system.

An extreme encounter (160 XP) is just four standard encounters (40 XP each) standing next to each other. In old-school play, it was always deadly to bring the whole dungeon down on top of yourself. I don't know the "Die, Dog, Die!" encounter, but does it start with all enemies aware of the PCs and ready to attack them in round 1? If not, it's not the same as a single extreme encounter.

In any case, the encounter rules don't dictate what you can and can't do, they just give you as the GM the tools to gauge the consequences. You could build the Caves of Chaos without a problem, it's just that unlike in Basic D&D, the GM would actually have a way to measure just how deadly it would be for e.g. the party not to notice the orc guard head on the wall of heads and have all the first tribe orc warriors assembled to attack them, because he could look at the numbers and say "hmm, that would be 200 XP... that's probably a TPK."

Now, sometimes GMs take encounter-building advice and treat it as holy writ. Justin Alexander has an interesting essay about the fetishizing of game balance that occurred in the 3rd edition community, where the advice about what makes a balanced encounter was warped into "you're only allowed to make balanced encounters". But if you treat the advice as just a way to measure things, rather than a straight jacket, you can populate your encounters with your eyes open to the consequences... this should be a push-over, that is going to be challenging, if they do this wrong they're going to have to run like hell or die.

This still doesn't quite make sense to me. In this case, a character could alternate Hustling with some non-fatiguing half-speed tactic, like Searching. By combining the tactics, they are moving at full speed, Searching, and are not Fatigued, which seems to break the rules somehow, or at least unbalance them.

If you alternated hustling with searching, you'd do 5 minutes of hustling at double speed without searching, followed by 5 minutes of searching at half speed. So, you'd only search 20% of the distance you travelled, which I guess the GM could adjudicate by effectively giving the hidden stuff a "miss chance".

You could also alternate 5 minutes of hustling with 5 minutes of wandering and move at 150% of your normal overland movement speed indefinitely.

Like I said, I'm not sure if the behaviour is intended or desired by the designers, but it's clearly implied by the rule they have about resetting the fatigue clock by doing something non-fatiguing for an equal amount of time.

It would probably make more sense for the rule to say that you have to rest (do nothing at all) for an equal amount of time to reset the fatigue clock, rather than doing any non-fatiguing tactic. Then if you spent 5 minutes moving at double speed followed by 5 minutes of nothing, your net movement would be the same as just moving at normal speed. You wouldn't be able to alternate hustling and searching or similar either. But you could do a fatiguing tactic indefinitely, at the cost of spending a lot of time sitting around resting.

I'm still running The Lost Star in the playtest, but I'm finding that first level characters also have annoyingly low bonusses. Ignoring stat bonusses, a PF1e character will have +4 for putting a rank into a class skill; a 1st level PF2e character with a trained skill gets +1. Also, it makes no difference if the skill is a "signature skill" or not until you're at least 7th level. Our party has a Bard but no Rogue, and despite being trained in Thievery the player has pretty much given up on trying to use it vs. the DCs in the adventure.

I'd prefer it if signature skills just gave a flat +3 (whether untrained, trained, or whatever) - that's your class training. Also, don't gate Master and Legendary based on signature. If a character wants to invest their precious skill advances in a non-signature skill, I don't see why they can't.

WRT the whole "+1 every level" thing... I can see that on paper it helps with setting DCs for mid or high level parties which can potentially be hit by everyone in the party without being an auto-critical for the specialists or impossible for the untrained, but I'm not sure why that's a huge problem.

If there's a wall to climb, you only need one PC to make the climb and then lower a rope.

If there's sneaking to be done in PF1e, the Rogue and Ranger can go off in front, and the clanky Paladin can follow behind, and because distance affects Perception DCs in PF1e that actually makes a difference. Even if an enemy notices the Paladin's clanking, the Rogue and Ranger's Stealth can still beat the monster's Perception and thus they remain hidden and ambush or flank the monsters as they rush towards the bait, err I mean, rest of the party.

By the time you get to mid-to-high level play in PF1e, the alternatives to skill checks grow massively anyway, so the fact that this legendary lock can only be picked by a high-level rogue isn't going to stop the party... the Wizard could cast Knock or Passwall, the Fighter can pull out his adamantine dagger and cut out the lock, the Barbarian can hack the door to pieces.

I may be drifting the intent of the Exploration Mode rules, but my assumption is that a tactic defines what the character is doing by default. If they walk into a room, they start interacting with the environment directly, and their exploration tactic soon becomes irrelevant while they get more specific about their activities. However, once they leave and start moving through less interactive areas (especially if they backtrack), they are assumed to resume the previous tactic.

WRT Fatiguing tactics:

Sometimes the group might stop a fatiguing tactic before getting fatigued, then resume the fatiguing tactic. You can reset the 10-minute timer for fatigue’s onset if the group spent a reasonable amount of time on less strenuous activities. As a rule of thumb, the characters should spend about as much time on non-fatiguing tactics as they did on the fatiguing tactic for the timer to reset.

So, that means that a character could alternate anything less than 10 minutes (say 5 minutes) of a fatiguing tactic with an equal amount of time of of a non-fatiguing one and have a 50% chance of being using the fatiguing one at any given time. Whether this is behaviour the designers want to encourage, or is realistic, isn't clear to me.

What is West Marches? I am not familiar with that campaign?

West Marches was a famous sandbox D&D 3.0 campaign run by Ben Robbins back when the 3.0 rules had just been published.

http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/

The players had a lot of agency, even to the extent of organising the sessions (subject to GM availability). There were over a dozen players, and they would form and dissolve parties as required - a player would solicit for allies for a specific expedition on the mailing list ("I want to check out the ruined tower south of the Golden Hills that I noticed on my last outing - who's free this Thursday night?"), and other players would reply with expressions of interest until they had a party for the night (or not).

As such, characters with wildly different levels could end up adventuring with each other, assuming the higher-level party members thought the lower-level ones could contribute (and the lower-level characters felt the potential rewards were worth the greater risks.)

After Ben published the details online, including "running your own" guidelines, it inspired a lot "West Marches"-style campaigns subsequently.

I had a though this morning. You know what would be simpler to run than rolling to fill and empty magic item slots every kingdom turn? Making the interesting bit (getting something valuable the PCs can buy) occur as a random event in the event phase. You could add something like the following event to your random event table:

Major Magic Item: a magic item of exceptional value has become available in your realm. Roll 2d4 and multiply by the base value of your largest settlement; this is the approximate value of the item that is now on sale. A ruler can buy it as normal, but if they simply order that it's handed over treat as a Withdrawal from the realm (creating 1 unrest per 2,000 gp value of the item). If not bought, the item has a 10% chance each month of becoming unavailable again (sold, stolen etc.)

In fact, I see that the UC random event table has a "Remarkable Treasure" event which works sort of like that. You could forget about magic item slots and use the above event in its place and you would save yourself a lot of pointless dice rolling each turn.

Also, there's more than one reason to make a Perception check. The players are exploring a hex, the GM calls for a Perception check and everyone rolls poorly. Does that mean there's something in the hex they missed, or does that mean that they're about to be ambushed by a wandering monster? In fact, intelligent or cunning enemies might stealthily tail the party for a few days before attacking to learn about their strengths and weaknesses, to wait for reinforcements or to wait until the party is damaged from another fight... maybe they were rolling Perception to notice the tail, and so even when an ambush doesn't immediately materialise, it doesn't mean they were obviously rolling to notice a hidden feature of the hex.

Something I planned in my game was to re-purpose rolls on occasion. I wrote down the difference between the Survival and Perception skills of my players, and the idea was that when they were foraging for food or whatever and made daily Survival checks to see how much they found, I could adjust the number to treat the roll as a Perception check instead. I didn't ever actually use this idea though, because my players seemed happier to simply load up their horses with mountains of rations and never go slowly to forage.

Given those things, why would you even care about item slots? Why not just take the 75% chance to find some specific item. Those random slots most likely will not have anything useful in them.

You're correct - the item slot rules in Ultimate Campaign are entirely pointless.

The context here is that this was one of the areas with the most significant changes from the rules published in Rivers Run Red to those published in Ultimate Campaign. In RRR, items that appeared in item slots were not limited by the settlement's base value - they were only limited by the buildings you constructed which provided item slots. In addition, if the players didn't buy them, items in item slots could be bought by NPCs (like in UC, but without the Economy penalty for doing it - instead, you could do it once per city district in your realm). The big difference though was that NPCs buying magic items generated BPs for your realm. Once your Economy bonus was high enough that you could reliably sell major items, you could abuse the system to create ridiculous incomes - try searching the forums here for "magic item economy".

In attempting to cut off this abuse of the rules in UC, Paizo nerfed item slots to the point of being useless. However, they didn't go quite as far as cutting them entirely, which they probably should have. So, you're left with a mechanic which is pointless, but which involves an awful lot of messing around with rolling to fill and empty slots each turn.

A way to make them perhaps more worthwhile would be to remove the restriction that the items are limited by the settlement's base value. That way, random interesting powerful items might occasionally pass through their markets to tempt the players, items which they couldn't just pick up through the usual channels (i.e. making the 75% check each month). It's still a lot of rolling and micromanagement though.

Sorry for the late reply - my gaming group cycles through several different games/GMs, spending a month or two on each, and I tend to visit these boards less frequently when my Kingmaker game isn't happening.

The Dropbox link to the source zip is indeed broken, because Dropbox changed their policy for public folders. Here's an updated link to my whole Kingmaker Dropbox folder, which contains the map source in Map.zip: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xcjj8wcjntrkvz1/AAAlCeNYcAGNFPqoiZsibdCPa?dl=0

The map is still hosted on Zor D'Lan's S3 link here. In addition, I've put a copy up on my new website here.

That was awesome - thanks for sharing!

The Influence system looked interesting but I worried it would prove a bit fiddly in play. Good to hear an actual play report where it worked nicely!

Ultimate Intrigue seems to be a pretty solid book... I really like all the advice on specific spells interacting with crime and intrigue, too.

Jason, can you share some of the general plans for the Tournaments section of the Forest Kingdom compendium? It presumably can't be as specific to Kingmaker and Ivrotti's Rushlight Tournament as your original manuscript. I guess it will contain rules for various tournament contests, each of which plays to different classes' strengths?

Alas, the links do not work.

The Dropbox policy change strikes again!

Here's a link from which you should be able to grab the New Sehir adventure and map, plus my other Kingmaker stuff.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xcjj8wcjntrkvz1/AAAlCeNYcAGNFPqoiZsibdCPa?dl=0

When I was running Stolen Lands, I played with the idea of ordering things from Restov a bit by making Svetlana Leveton have a bit of a psychic gift. As long as the players wanted to buy things under the Trading Post's spending limit that weren't too obscure, the Levetons would have just happened to have ordered in what they wanted in advance, and Svetlana would make comments like "I just knew you'd want that". I felt it gave her a bit more presence in the setting, rather than just being Oleg's wife.

If the PCs wanted expensive or custom things though, they had to send off to Restov.

I made the ex-hunter Vekkel Benzen (the quest giver for the Tuskgutter quest) one of the traders driving a cart between Restov and Oleg's. As it stands, there's no mention in the module of where the players can find him, so it worked well for him to roll up into Oleg's once every few weeks and take special orders. I made it that he'd lost his hand to Tuskgutter, rather than a leg, which is why he can no longer use his masterwork longbow. He defends himself on the road with several loaded crossbows in his wagon which he can fire one handed, as well as some hunting dogs (from the litter of his beloved Fang who gave her life so he could escape from Tuskgutter after losing his hand).

I'm about to run this and though this would be a great resource (we had to move my game up a couple of weeks and I'm short on prep time) but drobox says this is either private or deleted. Any chance you could repost these?

Sorry about that - Dropbox had a policy change which changed basic users' Public folders into private folders, invalidating any links to files in those folders.

Here's a new link to the same file (in the same place, but now shared as accessible to anyone with this link): https://www.dropbox.com/s/3zk413ifsrao3lb/KankerataRun.pdf?dl=0

The Spindler looks pretty cool, but there seems to be a bit of a gap in the lore to me. If Fey Nobles wear Spindler clothing, then do their courtiers have to save vs. the magical effects every day? Does the Spindler after s/he forces the clothes on someone else, for that matter?

It seems to me it would work better if fey (possibly including Gnomes) are immune to the magical effects, and just appreciate the fine craftsmanship - it's only drab mortals that sometimes find gazing on the garments too much to bear.

Likewise!

What does dotted mean?

People "dot" threads when they don't necessarily have anything to say (at least not right now), but they want to see how the conversation progresses. Dotting makes it easier to find them again in future, because any threads you've posted in get a little dot to the right of the title in the forum.

A side effect is to also let the poster(s) know that their thread is interesting to others.

Hi, Chuckbab. Here are all the issues currently in play in my game. I'll use [] to represent a checkbox.

As you can see, quite a few of them are just ideas for events that occur rather than having mechanics. I generally default to treating such events as Mixed - see what the players do in response, pick an appropriate realm skill, and get them to roll. The normal bad stuff happens if they fail, and they get some benefit if they succeed (an aspect with an edge or a bonus edge on an existing aspect, unless I can think of something else).

Some other events are hooks into stories for the PCs or just an opportunity to introduce a new NPC, rather than having any actual realm-level consequences.

They've also dealt with:

I believe intelligent magic items do have their own actions and place in the initiative order. Mind you, it makes sense for the sword to ready the Dispel Magic to counterspell, as you say, and after a readied action goes off, your position in the initiative order changes to just before whoever triggered the action, so you probably don't need to worry about rolling initiative for it or anything.

I was going to run Carnival of Tears in my Kingmaker game, but ended up writing it out... I had planned that the prime instigator of the events of that module was Rig Gargadilly, and he didn't manage to escape his first encounter with the party (surprisingly). Even though my players didn't know the consequences of letting him escape, I felt I should carry through and reward them for not letting him do so by not running the slaughter-the-townsfolk adventure :)

Making the consequences of CoT fall on a town that isn't part of the PCs' Barony, but which they can potentially recruit into their realm if they're successful, is a very nice way to deal with a module whose stakes could very well wipe out a young Barony if they fell on one of the players' towns. I like it.

In case you didn't know, conversions of the creatures in all four modules from 3.5 to Pathfinder are available on d20pfsrd.

I made a change to the backstory of CoT to integrate it better into Kingmaker, specifically around the summoning of the Cold Rider: in my version, Meliansie the Nixie was tricked by Rigg Gargadilly. Being a creature of water, Meliansie's heart freezes in the winter, you see, and she becomes more remote and uncaring. Here, I'll copy-paste the text that I had written for my prep - as you can see, I got a bit carried away and wrote it up like an actual module:

I also created a location for the Tent of Illusions (which was cut from the original module, presumably because of length reasons, but still appeared on the published map).

I've rolled many of Zor D'Lan's changes into the version I have up on github.

https://github.com/RobRendell/kingmaker-kingdom-sheet

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16299287/Kingmaker/Kingdom.zip

It now has images for all the UC buildings. There's a new menu item, "Configure Kingdom Rules", which allows you to select between RRR and UC rules for a given kingdom, as well as allowing a few other house rules. (The requirement of farms <= roads is in RRR, but not UC.)

It also has a section for storing details for your kingdom's armies, and a "turn sequence" section which shows the phases, with some buttons that automate some of the steps.

There are still a bunch of TODOs in the code relating to UC.

• Tracking Fame
  
• Item slots in UC are typed - e.g. an Academy has 3 minor and 2 medium item slots, but they can only have scrolls or wondrous items only (although item slots in UC are entirely pointless, since they can't generate items which exceed the settlement's base value... if a player wants an item whose value is <= the settlements base value they can just say "I go looking for such-and-such an item" and have a 75% chance of finding it for sale without waiting for it to come out the end of a Rube Goldberg machine populating limited item slots).
  
• Currently, houses are considered adjacent only within the same lot (not across streets), but the same house can support multiple adjacency requirements.
  
• The "half price building" mechanic doesn't support UC's "only once" rule.
  
• Buildings that share the same lot (Cistern, Everflowing Spring, Magical Streetlamps etc) and buildings that occur at the district level (Paved Streets, Sewer System)
  
• Granaries generating BPs from surplus consumption reduction.
  
• Waterways in the city should count as a water border.
  

Anyway, I thought I'd put it up as I go, in case Zor or someone else wants to grab the latest.

I also made a set of chase cards for the Kankerata Run, using images I pillaged from the internet all by myself.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16299287/Kingmaker/KankerataRun.pdf

The locations where the competitors need to mark a column with a bloody handprint are marked with... a bloody handprint :) For the locations where special events happen (such as Kankerata spring-attacking), I made a GM-only key page rather than marking the locations with cryptic symbols, because the players would probably figure out what the symbols meant after a few rounds.

Hopefully they will be of use to someone else!

I haven't got to running VV yet, but I have some intentions to change things up a bit.

I think that DudeMeister's changes go a long way towards making the hex encounters more meaningful, because he modified a number of the random quests tied to those locations into the extended task of winning over the Nomen Centaurs instead. I'm very much looking forward to running his version of Blood Furrows (the Kankerata Run). It also makes a lot more sense for the leadership of a barony or duchy to be fetching Manticore quills and Roc egg yolk to win favour with a touchy tribe of centaurs so they can learn what they might know of the history of the region, in order to solve the mystery of the Vanishing, than for them to be fetching them for a random poet or innkeeper or omelette chef.

Following up rumours or heading to locations they've been told about can also help make hexploration more interesting than blindly wandering looking for anything interesting. Assuming the PCs rescue the Varnhold map before it burns, they'll have a number of sites marked that they can follow up. They can also learn about sites from inhabitants of the lands... the taciturn folks of Nivakta's Crossing, farmers around Kiravoy Bridge, the Nomen Centaurs (eventually), Zzamas the phase spider (if you haven't written her out).

The webapp on github is the kingdom tracking software, not the hex map.

It looks like the version Zor D'Lan put up on his site has the peer-to-peer feature in it, so you can experiment using his link if you like.

• Click the "menu" link on the top-left corner.
  
• The bottom item in the pop-up menu is "Share map (peer-to-peer)". If you select that, it'll pop up a window saying "copy this URL and send it to the other person".
  
• Copy that link (which will look like the link you started at, plus a long unique key bit at the end), then close the dialog
  
• Open another browser/tab and navigate to the copied link.
  
• Windows should appear in both tabs describing the connection attempt ("New peer connection detected", "Connecting to peer..." etc.)
  

Once it finishes its stuff, you can try adding/editing/removing icons, moving the party location pawn around and revealing/covering hexes - you should see the changes in both tabs/browsers.

Note that the copied peer-to-peer link will only work as long as the original tab is still open. The map data isn't saved on a server or anything, so the peer needs to be able to connect to the GM's instance to get the current map.

So I downloaded the original source today but couldn't figure out how to open up the program that had the map hexed out. What am I missing?

If you have the files downloaded, you want to open the html file (map.html, if I recall correctly) in a browser. In most OSs you can probably just double-click the html file.

Here's a random thought: as Pennywit says, having Akiros and his bandits in the fort on the banks of the Tuskwater would perhaps be too similar to Happs at the border fort. So, roll back the clock at the Tuskwater fort too - make it still occupied by Gyronna cultists. Both the players and Akiros might be competing to oust the cultists and gain the fort, or perhaps temporary alliances might be made.

Also, if Akiros isn't in the fort, you could perhaps use the Drowned Trees bandits idea on page 65 of Varnhold Vanishing as how his bandit camp looks/works.