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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.

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.)

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.

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.

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).

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.

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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).

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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.)

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

Once again, +1 sorcerer level to maintain CR.

I went the most off-script with Yithdul, in that there wasn't a readily available OGL template that matched his chaos-warped nature. I used a merge between the special abilities listed in the module and the Accursed Creature template. Instead of bestowing curses with every strike, he gets the once-per-day Chaos Touch attack.

With his additional feats from converting to Pathfinder, I also gave him the least sorcerer-y feats, given his focus in the module on physical combat. I also figured that metamagic feats are of limited use when he doesn't have a lot of higher-level spell slots to use.

Banderak's sorcerer level also received a boost, for the same reasons as Yakmar.

Converting Banderak proved a bit awkward because his stat array in the module was so high (Str 10, Dex 16, Con —, Int 19, Wis 16, Cha 22). I really couldn't make it match when starting from a standard Heroic stat array of 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. I think the Nightmare Creature template must have changed quite a bit from 3.5 to the Pathfinder version from the Bestiary 4 (subject to the comments made here). I infer that in terms of the template from the Bestiary 4, Banderak was a Nightmare Lord, gaining additional boosts to his stats. However, since he doesn't have 10 HD, he doesn't qualify as a Nightmare Lord in the Pathfinder version of the template I used.

In the end, rather than pushing him up to a 10th level sorcerer Nightmare Lord or dropping his mental stats, I decided to make him Old at the time of his death, granting +2 to the mental stats at the cost of -3 to the physical ones. This contradicts the comment in the module that of the three sorcerer-princes, Banderak "was in the best physical shape upon his death", but it keeps him with strong mental stats, which feels right for a custodian of the library. Reducing his physical stats certainly doesn't make him much less effective in combat.

(Reanimating this thread as a dread wight)

I've been converting Crucible of Chaos from 3.5 to Pathfinder myself. I followed the suggestions in this thread, so I thought I'd post my versions of the three sorcerer-princes, in case they're of use to anyone else and for feedback.

Since PC levels result in a CR one less than level, I bumped Yakmar's sorcerer level up by 1 to maintain his CR at the same value as it was in the module (CR 9).

It's interesting that with the -1 spells known at each level from the crossblooded archetype, he has 4th level spell slots but no spells known. I used the human favoured class bonus to cancel out the penalty for lower-level spells, but it can't be used for the highest level spell slots. Still, he can use the 4th level slots by using his metamagic feats, as suggested in the Tactics section.

Well, it's been a wild ride, but my players have finally put an end to Hargulka's Monster Kingdom. Thank you once again for this inspiring stuff, Dudemeister. It's been a blast - I reckon Hargulka is going to be a villain they will remember for a very, very long time.

One thing I added to the whole situation was an idea I stole from Spatula, that the ring of Nyrissa-hair worn by Hargulka sent dreams about Briar, dreams of lust and power. Hargulka became obsessed with the idea that he couldn't win the war with the PCs' Barony until he found the sword that he was dreaming about. This has foreshadowed Briar nicely, justified why the 50-troll army didn't just steamroller the PCs early on, and also meant that in the end, Hargulka waited and searched for so long that his starving army of 50 trolls defected, attacked the PCs' town without him. The delays had given the PCs enough time to build their own armies and get in mercenaries from Varnhold. Once they'd defeated the troll army, the PCs travelled to Hargul and basically got to go through the original dungeon as written... it all flowed so naturally.

Highlights include

• The Monstrous Feast: the Paladin decided he had to challenge the troll king to a duel, and everyone was very impressed when Hargulka honourably used non-lethal punches to club him into unconsciousness. With the Paladin out of the way, the Abadar-worshipping Baron then set up a trade deal with the trolls where he sold them food. In exchange, they started getting minor magic items and low-valued jewellery, which eventually turned out to be stolen from River Kingdom immigrants enslaved by the trolls while en-route to the PCs' barony. The Paladin and the ex-slave Cheliax-escapee Halfling Witch were not impressed.
  
• The random encounter which caused seven trolls to invade the players' territory to assassinate Jhod Kavken and bully Garuum into joining the Monster Kingdom, essentially re-creating DM's "Trolls and the Froggy King" encounter directly from the random encounter table.
  
• After collecting black rattlecaps, a prolonged chase through Monster Kingdom territory from the Mud Bowl to the ford being pursued by Howl of the North Wind (a Winter Wolf and Warden of the Monster Kingdom) and his pack of Worgs.
  
• Meeting the Forest Drake, flattering him outrageously, and on discovering that he could breath acid, paying him 2,000 gp in gems to help them fight the trolls come Spring. They also "gave" him the recently cleared Forgotten Keep as a new home.
  
• After rescuing a pair of worked-out River Kingdom slaves from the Lizardfolk village, given by the trolls to be tormented by the Spirit of Stisshak (substituted for Tig Tannersen), they fought and defeated King Vesket and drove off the Spirit of Stisshak, but managing to convince the remaining lizardfolk not to fight. They successfully argued the lizardfolk couldn't trust the trolls not to retaliate in force, and helped them relocate to a hidden campsite north of the Murque river.
  
• Having learned from the slaves rescued from the Lizardfolk village about the slaves in Hargul and the horrifying truth behind the valuables they were accepting in trade for food, they annulled the trade deal and organised a daring strike into Hargul to rescue the slaves at the outset of Winter. Coordinating with a diversionary raid by a tribe of Alseid from the southern Narlmarches who had declared war on the trolls, they managed to get over 100 refugees from Hargul through 20 miles of snow-bound forest to the boats they had waiting in the Murque River. The so-called Twenty Mile March was gruelling and many of the refugees collapsed from cold, hunger and exhaustion, but healing magic got them back on their feet (along with distributing supplies from the saddlebags full of food and winter blankets they'd brought, and putting the worst of the escapees on horseback). The Baron, at considerable personal risk, stayed behind alone (aside from his horse, for swift escape) in the slave stockade for hours after the others headed off, maintaining a Major Image of everything at the stockade being normal, which delayed the main part of the pursuit long enough that they got to the boats ahead of the 50 troll army. The trollhounds and worgs did catch up, but not before they got the refugees past the ambush point they'd set up with their own realm's 25-man Ranger army (plus some PCs) where they managed to slay all the monsters.
  
• On learning about Hargulka's sword obsession from some of the rescued ex-slaves who could speak Giant and understood the gossip between their troll overseers, the party started creating fake rumours and treasure maps implying that they were searching for it too, and hinting that the sword was in dangerous locations like Candlemere Tower and the Forgotten Keep. They actually tricked Hargulka into following one of these clues and going to the Forgotten Keep (witnessed by the Baron who was regularly scrying Hargulka), where he slew the Forest Drake and took the PCs' gem payment but found no thorn-wrapped sword.
  
• The PCs travelling to Varnhold to engage Maegar Varn and his Varnling Host (I re-purposed the name for an army of cavalry) to help fight the trolls, giving me a chance to show off the town and introduce various NPCs from Varnhold... the PCs liked Cephal Lorentus the pigeon-fancying wizard with his crazy notions of pigeons carrying messages, and they've taken some of his pigeons back to their barony to try sending messages to him once Winter ends.
  
• The final confrontation with Hargulka, after every other troll and non-trollish ally had been slain or won away from him, in the last room of the Dwarven Outpost, alone except for his trollhound pet (which he'd trained to bite him if he fell down in battle, after learning of the party's Witch and his tendency to Slumber everything in sight).
  
  Quote:

  As Hargulka is battered under the onslaught of the party, he starts to rant "This can't be happening! She promised me! The Queen of Forgotten Time promised that the rivers would run red with the blood of your people!" Irminric's greatsword strikes the final blow, and the mighty troll warrior slumps to his knees "No... she promised..." before collapsing to the ground. The trollhound bites Hargulka as trained, and then Willam throws a bomb at the trollhound, killing it. In the silence that follows the explosion, Hargulka's closed eyes suddenly open glowing green and a female voice speaks from his dead mouth: "The promise shall be kept. The Talonquake attacks the town even now!" Then the body slumps to the ground again.

One of my players has GM-ed Kingmaker, so he knows the overall campaign well, but he ran it by-the-book. I try to vary things up to keep it interesting for him, including incorporating lots of the excellent ideas from this forum.

Here's something I came up with as a variant of the Missing Townsfolk event in Rivers Run Red. I haven't actually run this yet, because Hargulka's Monster Kingdom is very much the focus of play at the moment.

Context: we're in the late stages of RRR, and I'm using DudeMeister's "Hargulka's Monster Kingdom" (plus some tweaks of my own). One of my players made a point of collecting a hair from Hargulka's chair after the Monstrous Feast, and he's recently acquired the Scrying spell. He plans to scry Hargulka every day.

As far as what the character sees Hargulka doing, assuming he scries at random times I'm just going to dice for it. Given that he's only seeing a few minutes out of the whole day, I've decided there's a 5% chance of seeing something useful, a 20% chance of seeing something interesting, and otherwise Hargulka is just doing mundane stuff and not discussing anything of great import.

On a day when Hargulka makes his Will save, the rules say that he "feels a hostile force or a tingle, but cannot deduce the exact nature of the attack." When he fails the save and the scrying occurs, he still gets a DC 23 Perception check to notice the invisible sensor.

What I'm wondering is, what will Hargulka make of the scrying sensor if he spots it? IMC he has an Intelligence score of 16, so he's pretty smart, but he has no Knowledge (Arcana) or Spellcraft skill. Still, this thing is going to be showing up day after day, invisible and following him around...

Possible things he might decide:

• It's some sort of creature, although it doesn't smell like a will-o-wisp (which is a scent he's familiar with).
  
• It's some sort of spell or curse
  
• It's some sign of divine favour
  
• ...?
  

• It's spying on him
  
• It's giving him bad luck
  
• It's giving him good luck
  
• It's just one of those things, and can safely be ignored
  
• ...?
  

I'm looking for ideas about how I determine what he decides. I don't want to automatically say "he immediately becomes suspicious that it's spying on him" and acts accordingly (not letting on that he's spotted it, not giving away anything important, perhaps trying to use Bluff to give false information), but I'm finding it hard to imagine how else one might interpret a small invisible flying thing that follows you around and tries to keep a low profile and doesn't talk to you.

(Of course, there's a chance you can cast Message through the scrying, so the sensor could actually "talk" to him if the player chose to... which might skew things towards a particular interpretation.)

I'm very pleased that my players are currently en-route to Varnhold during module 2, to enlist Maegar Varn and his mercenaries to help against the troll armies they know are coming.

The players' realm's armies aren't ready - they have a Tiny army of rangers, and a Medium army of soldiers who are still in training and won't finish boot camp for another fortnight. They're worried the trolls will attack before they're ready - they snuck in and rescued all the River Kingdom slaves from the trolls just at the start of the winter, and know the trolls are starving and becoming desperate.

When they originally learned about the Monster Kingdom they wrote letters to Varnhold, Fort Drelev and Mivon warning them of the threat, and Varn wrote back offering his cavalry as mercenaries if they needed, at very reasonable rates. Battle-ready soldiers and an experienced commander who all are ready to go right now are suddenly very attractive.

In order to save time, the party decided to try to go overland directly to Varnhold, despite not knowing the lay of the Tors of the Levanines and the lands beyond. A good couple of Knowledge (Geography) rolls has led them to the river valley of Varnhold Pass, so they've now discovered the watchtower and are just meeting up with the Varnhold soldiers posted there. I'm very much looking forward to having them meet some of the Varnholders and look around the town while it's still a going concern.

Thanks, CB!

I've wondered about writing up a "converting existing kingdoms" section, but I don't have any good ideas about how to do a conversion in a faithful fashion. The systems are quite different.

One of the things I really like about GMing this version of the realm building rules is the concept of "issues". I reckon that idea could be yoinked and used to replace the event table in the standard rules without needing to move completely over to the Fate-based system. There would need to be some mechanism for players to overcome issues and remove them from the deck in order to get the full benefit of events that change over time, though.

In my game, I have 13 different issues currently in the pile, and two more sitting in the wings waiting for the right conditions to activate, each of which has its own little event table or sequence of events.

For example, I turned Dudemeister's Hargulka's Monster Kingdom into an issue, using each of his encounters as an event I could tick off on the issue card. I also made a small event table of Monster Kingdom badness which I could roll on if I drew the card and felt it wasn't a good time to advance the "plot".

For the Realm Alignment issue, I've done up a list of six adjectives for Good, Neutral and Evil, and six nouns for Lawful, Neutral and Chaotic. When that issue comes up, I take the realm's current alignment, roll 2d6 and see what sort of event I can come up with based on the combination I rolled.

(With the Fate-based rules, the players don't actually get to choose their realm's alignment. Instead, the alignment starts at the "average for the citizens", and the players can take actions to try to slowly shift their realm to the alignment they want.)

So far, their realm is still Chaotic Neutral (an alignment that suits none of them, although the Chaotic Good Witch is happier about it than the Lawful Good Paladin or the Lawful Neutral Baron). I've drawn the Alignment issue twice so far... the first time I rolled "Well-intentioned recklessness", so the event revolved around a group of citizens who resented the Baron's trade agreement with Hargulka and his evil trolls, and were gearing up to march south and try to show the trolls what-for. Due to how that played out, these citizens became the core of the Barony's first army, known as "The Baron's Conscience". The second time I rolled "Balanced Freedom", so the event involved some of the new immigrants being of Issian stock (taking "balanced" to mean "representation of the other side") who were being vocal in their support of Issia ("freedom" = speaking their minds freely) to the annoyance of the formerly Rostlandic citizens.

The one-shot events in RRR (with Grigory, and Kundal, and Malgorzata Niska, and the Rezbins) are each their own issue with their own sequence of escalating events. And some of the 3rd party modules I'm planning on running are also issues, with various hooks that can come up when the issue is drawn. Some of these events are incidental to the central problem of the issue, but act as an introduction of an NPC that will be significant later (such a Malgorzata).

For the Kingmaker campaign I'm GMing, I've came up with a complete re-write of the kingdom-building rules, inspired by the Fate RPG.

I've played in a Kingmaker game before (as a player), and so saw how the original kingdom-building rules tend to become a unwieldy when the realm grows beyond a certain point. The "zoom level" of the rules don't change, so even when you're running a dozen cities across three maps, the rules are still focussed around individual city improvements. Also, since both the bonus to the Kingdom checks and the DC for those checks are under the control of the players (based on how much they build improvements vs. how much they expand), given time it's fairly easy to arrange things so your kingdom can't fail any check on anything other than a 1, even with unrest.

So, prior to the realm-building stage of the game I'm GMing, I came up with these alternative rules:

Fate-based Realm Building: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zlo3ep1_g4DZGTh4mE3zH5G-Wa51i1yd1BXwv3d l0Rg/edit?usp=sharing.

Apologies for the size of the document... it's not because the rules are particularly complex, it's because I wrote them for my players, who hadn't read the original Kingdom building rules, so I spell everything out from scratch and include examples.

My players are still in RRR and their Barony is relatively small (10 hexes, two settlements) so the rules haven't yet been playtested into the late game where the original rules start to have problems. Still, it's been working for us so far, with the players pretty engaged with their roles in the realm. I was going to wait until they'd been more thoroughly tested, but I had a request to share them, so here they are.

Below is the TL;DR version, highlighting the rules' key features.

• There are ten realm skills, one for each leadership role: Loyalty, Stability, Law, Diplomacy, Military, Piety, Arcana, Intrigue, Economy and Patrols. The leader's best relevant stat bonus boosts the corresponding skill.
  
• As is common in Fate, the realm skills must be arranged in a "skill pyramid", requiring that each tier of skills have more skills in the next lower tier to "support" them. Thus, a given realm can only have a small number of peak skills, with most other skills in lower tiers.
  
• Growing settlements and claimed hexes contributes skill points towards improving the realm's skills, stacking the skill pyramid higher.
  
• Realms, settlements, regions and leaders also have Aspects, a key feature of Fate. Aspects are free-form phrases describing the advantageous (and not-so-advantageous) features of the thing in question, and can have mechanical impact when they are relevant. For example, the hexes of the Greenbelt region claimed so far might result in the region having the aspects "Moon Radish Patch" and "Fertile Plains", whereas a settlement founded at Oleg's could have "Oleg's Trading Post" as an aspect.
  
• The realm turn only has three easy-to-remember phases: an income phase, an action phase and an event phase.
  
• The action phase involves the realm leaders taking actions, which cost BP. Each leadership role has a specific list of actions they can take - for example, the Treasurer can Create Advantage, Overcome Issues, Deposit Wealth, Generate BPs or Solicit Capital, which are done using "their" realm skill, Economy. The General can roll the realm's Military skill to Create Advantage, Overcome Issues, Muster/Improve Armies or Capture Localities. It is through these actions that hexes are claimed, settlements are founded and improved, edicts are passed, armies are mustered and so on.
  
• In the event phase, the GM randomly picks one of the realm's current issues (which are aspects on the realm representing challenges the realm is facing) and "compels" it, causing some event to occur relating to that issue - it might be good, bad or indifferent. Additional issues can be compelled by the GM by spending Unrest.
  
• The realm's issues change over time - players can take Overcome actions to tackle them, with success removing the issue from play; the associated events will no longer occur in the Event phase, so the players can actively impact the events they have to deal with. The GM can also introduce new issues, either due to failed realm actions or due to plot events. This means that the possible events the players experience change organically over time as their realm evolves.
  
• To reduce book-keeping, I didn't want the rules to require tracking ongoing running costs which must be paid out of each turn's income, balancing consumption budgets for farms, hexes, settlements, armies etc. Instead, actions are assumed to include future administration of the change in question. However, the BP cost to take an action escalates the larger the realm is, and the more consecutive actions the players take in a turn. The DC for actions also increase the more ambitious the action (e.g. claiming multiple hexes in a single "Claim Winderness" action) or in other cases (the DC to recruit or improve an army is increased by all currently mustered armies).
  

To give an idea of a game in progress, here's a snapshot of the Barony of Greenbelt (yes, I know, I apologise for the name, blame my players).

Dudemeister posted a series of party-alignment-specific "origin stories" for starting Stolen Lands. They might be of interest as alternative ways to kick off the campaign. He has other interesting ideas in the thread too.

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2kpjz?My-Kingmaker-Toolbox

According to the Iobaria timeline, there was also a plague which specifically killed males in Iobaria about 500 years after the Taldan armies of Exploration:

2546 AR Ohjar's Plague kills a third of all male centaurs, orcs, and humans across the land in a mere 8 months.

... but that was still 1,500 years ago, and you'd think that a gender imbalance caused by war or disease would correct itself within a few generations.

I haven't found anything in official Golarion lore that specifically says the cyclopes and centaurs were enemies back before Earthfall, but IMC I'm saying there was indeed such an enmity. That's why the Nomen centaurs today have inherited a duty to guard "the west" against Vordakai's return.

It's also going to be why, in Vordakai's tomb, I'm going to add a magical construct powered by the Four Horsemen, probably in W18, which visits plagues and death on male centaurs within 100 miles (since the males were the warriors when the thing was created). This ancient curse was the source of Ohjar's plague (which spread beyond the 100 mile radius once it got going), and continues to kill most of the male offspring of centaur tribes that dwell close to the Tors of Levenies. That's why the centaurs of the area still have a reputation of having "No men". It also means that if the PCs identify and destroy it as part of dealing with Vordakai, the local centaur tribes will start to increase in numbers, hopefully in time to be useful by the time we hit mass combat in War of the River Kings.

Is there an aggregation of various encounters and scenarios people added to Kingmaker?

I've been thinking about running it using episodic leveling, so having a lot more to discover and do around the map has a lot of appeal for my group since they only progress levels with the story events.

Here are some links that I've saved away for reference for my game.

Link to a thread discussing additions to the first module: http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2klsv?Kingmaker-Expansion

For the first module, there's also my offering, up towards the top of this page.

Link to a "best of" thread collecting community contributions to the whole AP: http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2q2t9?Starting-KM-best-community-creations, which includes links to Dudemeister's work (which you should definitely read - they deserve to be stickied, really).

Link to a thread listing published Paizo and third-party modules that fit well in the AP (scroll down to get the final list posted by Andostre, since you can't edit posts on the Paizo forums which are more than 10 minutes old, so he couldn't keep updating his original post): http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2qos5?List-of-Modules-to-Use-With-Kingmaker

Yes, there's no such thing as a custom item that's "built by the rules" if you're a player. Every one is a judgement call on behalf of the GM. The crafting rules give guidance, but the GM makes the ultimate call on feasibility and price.

That said, custom items that can cast a spell N times a day as a standard action (assuming the original spell was also a standard action) should be pretty uncontroversial. A constant Mage Armour item is obviously broken, but a custom item that casts Mage Armour twice a day at Caster Level 4, say, is a useful item with a fair price by the crafting rules IMHO. It can be dispelled, it costs an action to use if you're caught short (assuming you're even wearing the item at the time), and it doesn't cover the whole day until/unless you raise the CL or incorporate Extend or make it able to cast many times per day, all of which factor into the cost.

I've ruled in my game that you have to keep wearing the item for the duration of the spell effect, which means that if you want to have lots of buff-casting items you'll either need to stack them on the same item (paying 50% extra for most of them) or take up a lot of potentially useful slots (or pay double for slotless).

Even with sticking to standard magic items, another potentially problematic element of the crafting rules is this bit:

The DC to create a magic item increases by +5 for each prerequisite the caster does not meet. The only exception to this is the requisite item creation feat, which is mandatory. In addition, you cannot create potions, spell-trigger, or spell-completion magic items without meeting their spell prerequisites.

It's not hard for players to rack up a lot more Spellcraft than the DC required to make useful items (especially since it's been clarified that the listed caster level for items is not a requirement). You might want to make some rulings or add house-rules about missing prerequisites.

I'm not sure if it's RAW, but I say that the minimum CL for an item is the minimum to cast the highest level prerequisite spell (except for enchanted weapons and armour, which have their own special rules for minimum CL). I haven't had to worry about players crafting above their level, but if it came up I'd be inclined to say that each missing level is a missing prerequisite (so a 6th level caster trying to craft something requiring a 5th level spell (minimum CL 9) would not only be missing the spell, but also the 3 level shortfall is another 3 missing prerequisites, for a total of +20 to the DC).

A trick I found really useful was to simply create a list of names (whether NPC, Place, Tavern, etc.) ahead of time

+1 to having a list of names on hand if you're not good at making them up on the spot - I did the same thing.

I also ended up making some "random bandit details" tables, after my PCs started capturing and attempting to redeem every unnamed bandit in the Stolen Lands. I've posted them before, but here they are again if they're of interest.

Everyone having fun (players and GM) is definitely an important thing to aim for, yes. :)

Here are some more threads that might be of interest or use to you:

A similar thread to this one, where a GM about to start Kingmaker asked for people's opinions of the best community creations.

An old thread with ideas for number of expansions or additional encounters, mostly for the first module. There's plenty to do in the actual written module, but you might want to browse the thread for ideas.

Also the stickied threads at the top of the kingmaker forum by tdewitt274...all the links appear to be broken.

Yes, the forum software has been changed since those posts were made. I believe they just linked to the same stickies you can still see at the top of this forum though.

Since you mention it, you've probably already read through The Stolen Land's sticky. If you haven't, at least skim it for errata that the community spotted (as well as other clarifications of confusing things), if you have the time. I don't think there's anything too glaring in The Stolen Lands, but some of the later modules have some doozies (like omitting the tens column from some creature's attacks, so instead of +11 to hit they have +1 listed in the module for example).

In case it's of any use to you, I've written a javascript-based mapping "app" for Kingmaker which we use in our game. We have it running in a browser on a tablet in the middle of the table, so everyone sitting at the table can see the map and update it as the players explore and learn of locations. The icons on the left can be dragged on to mark places on the map, and the white hexes can be clicked/tapped to remove them, revealing the Greenbelt map underneath (and revealed hexes can be covered up in case you reveal something accidentally). The menu allows you to customise things like the map image and the icons, switch between different campaigns or import/export the current map data as plain text so you can copy/paste it into a document to move the map between different devices and to have a backup saved somewhere.

Here's a reasonable initial state you could import to get going. Copy and paste it (replacing whatever is already there) into the "import/export" dialogue accessible from the menu and hit the "import" button.

This being the 15-minute adventuring day style of AP there's a good chance your party will just steamroll everything. Especially with the combat heavy group you have.

... although just as a caveat, don't let that last comment make you cocky :) Kingmaker is very much a sandbox, and you can definitely encounter things well above your CR which will smoosh you if you're not clever about what you fight, what you talk to and what you run away from.

*Casts Raise Thread*

I'm planning on running this version of Candlemere Tower when (if?) my players go there. I made some maps of the place, which I thought I'd share in case they're useful for anyone else running this variant.

The maps are here. I have a separate maps of the ground floor, the High Priest's Cell upstairs and bottom of the pit, and also a single combined map with all three places on the same map.

I used Dungeon Painter to make the initial maps, then did a pass over it using The Gimp to do some extra niceness.

Enjoy!

What RobRendell said.

;)

Well, coming from you that certainly gave me a thrill :) Thank you!

I thought I'd share the latest development in my game with the Abadar-following Baron Hamysil who established a trade treaty with Hargulka. Despite the treaty, I ran the "Assault of the Fairy Nest" event, figuring that it still applied as an indirect and sneaky way to destabilise the players' barony. When they eventually tracked down Thruggnir the Stinky Egg Troll the Baron was incensed, and as they hiked back through the Narlmarches with Thruggnir's blackened bones Hamysil was composing and re-composing his scathing letter that he was going to send to Hargulka.

I rolled for wandering monsters when they entered the hex east of Garuum, and it came up with an encounter. So I rolled for what they encountered, and got a 77... forest, 77, oh, 2d4 trolls. I rolled the 2d4 and got 7. That's a lot of trolls. I do all my dice rolls out in the open, so my players knew they'd encountered 7 of something.

Not wanting a TPK, I decided to steal the idea I had above for Tarondor, and they came across a swathe of damage through the Narlmarches heading north. The party's ranger was not there that night, but another character had also invested in Survival and rolled well, so he was able to identify the trail as troll tracks heading north, about three hours ahead of them, in large numbers. They of course mounted up and headed after the "invasion force".

I figured that there was no way they could leave such a major incursion into their land at liberty, but also would probably TPK against 7 trolls, so I had the trail split in two. Four trolls continued north making a bee-line for the Temple of the Elk, where Jhod Kavken was living basically alone, while three peeled off to the west heading for Garuum.

The players had a nasty choice of which group to follow, not knowing what damage the ones they didn't follow might do, but they eventually chose to protect Jhod and headed north. They were on horseback and the trolls were on foot, so they were able to catch up in less than two hours. To convey the idea of disciplined trolls, when they caught up they saw the four trolls working in shifts - two would blaze the trail clawing through the forest while the two following behind resting, and then they would swap and the rested trolls would start to blaze the trail while the others rested.

Due to good tactics, courageous decisiveness and good dice rolling by the players, not to mention some woeful dice rolling on my part (bloody Witch's Slumber Hex), they actually wiped out the four trolls without taking a scratch. So they doubled back and managed to get to Garuum in time for me to run the "Trolls and the Froggy King" event pretty much verbatim.

One of my players sent this in an email after the session:

I should also point out that apparently Rob's random encounters table reads something like this:

...
65-75: encounter d4 wolves
76-79: start major war with nearest neighbour
80-83: meet kindly old women who provides d4 cure light wounds potions
...

My players just killed the scythe tree from book 2. One of my players is asking if its wood has any interesting properties beyond that of normal wood.

Are they thinking interesting properties along the lines of Darkwood, as a special material for crafting items with?

The tree hates (certain) fey, so perhaps its wood could be used to craft Fey-bane arrows or other wooden Fey-bane weapons at a discount.

I'm curious, what did the Paladin do in his role as ruler that has the rebel players all up in arms?

Murdering Grigori in front of the whole town is a pretty extreme reaction - I hope they got lots of unrest. In fact, if the Paladin was involved in that, I'd have been looking at the Paladin's Code of Conduct section.

IMC I had Grigori poke around town for a bit asking questions before he started his smear campaign, so the rulers had already got wind of him. The first time they got back from adventuring and found him rabble rousing in the town square, the party's witch rode forward and Slumber Hexed him unconscious right in front of everyone, and they dragged him away for questioning. I was ready to smack them with lots of unrest, but after questioning him while using Detect Thoughts they just ended up exiling him - he was stripped of his gear, publically denounced as a foreign spy (they didn't actually know whether this was true or not, but they had their suspicions) and declared him to be under sentence of death if found within their realm again. He was ridden out of town in front of everyone and delivered back to Fort Drelev. His magical gear was sold and the proceeds were distributed to the poor. I felt the PCs had done some clever things to moderate the rather extreme initial reaction, so the barony only ended up gaining 1 unrest out of the whole deal.

With your rebel councillors, are their characters so politically naive that they'd just walk up to the General and openly talk sedition and rebellion when they don't know where his loyalties lie? Note that I'm talking about their characters who have lived all their lives in a feudal society, not the players. Assuming they're a bit more subtle, perhaps allow them some Sense Motive checks to realise that the General is loyal to the Baron and will not join their rebellion *before* they blurt out their treacherous intentions.

If they're unable to get the General on side, perhaps they could ask that nice Mr Hargulka down south to help them overthrow the Baron? I understand he's building up some armies too...

But seriously, if the rebel players are actually pissed with the Paladin's player IRL due to his behaviour, it might be time for a bit of an out-of-character round table discussion to make sure that all your players are on the same page. Inter-party conflict can be interesting and result in truly unique emergent play, but only if all the players (including the GM) are happy to go for it - otherwise it can seriously break the implicit social contract of the game.

.... Munguk, the Marshal

Munguk the Wangering Marshal?

I'm worried they're following the troll problem too closely and not taking the time to build up XP and levels. They know that they're facing an increasingly unstable kingdom future until the troll issue is solved, but they're only 4th level (there are 7 of them).

...
Any suggestions (other than let them TPK?)

I'm sure Dudemeister will come up with awesome suggestions, but what occurs to me is that if they learn the scale of what they're facing, they might decide that building up their kingdom in order to muster and support armies is the best thing to do.

If they're heading into Monster Kingdom territory, they could come across evidence of Hargulka's troll armies, such as an unmissable trail of churned up mud and troll footprints leading to an area where they can spy on a "tiny" army of trolls being drilled. "Alright, wheel right, march! Kragg and Thrump, don't bunch up! Less than 40 feet between soldiers and you're fireball fodder! Trunksplitter, keep those trollhounds moving and with their noses to the ground!" Make the drill sergeant someone other than Hargulka, so it's apparent that this is *a* squad, but not necessarily *the only* squad. A tiny army is still 25 trolls, which should be pretty daunting to even the most gung-ho 4th level characters, and seeing them training intelligently and with an attempt at discipline should strike terror into anyone with a brain.

Alternatively (or as well), have their Barony Spymaster start getting reports about the Monster Kingdom... maybe at first just a chance encounter by a lucky trapper or an escaped slave who got away to tell his tale, but hopefully the Spymaster will start organising rangers and spies of his own to sneak into the Monster Kingdom to keep the barony informed. If the players see that Hargulka's kingdom starts off on par theirs in terms of BP income, kingdom stats etc. but is building up most slowly, they might see that they can out-compete him on that front. The intelligence reports can also indicate that Hargulka isn't imminently about to launch an all-out assault, so they don't have to panic about that.

And of course, Dudemeister's various adventure hooks in this thread give you good ways for the players to try to weaken the Monster Kingdom before a direct assault. Liberating slaves, wooing the Lizardfolk from the Troll Kingdom, taking out Howl of the North Wind and his pack when they're by themselves rather than part of a troll army... all safer ways to slow down Hargulka's expansion and reduce his power than charging in against his capital. You could make it that a successful mission against the Monster Kingdom counts as an automatic success on the Loyalty check in the "Troll Sightings" minor event for that month.

Ooh! You could make it that the Lonely Warrior's legendary blade is

... when players might actually consider the implications of the Core Race Aging Effects table when making the selection of their character's race.

(And players choosing Elves are even more smug than normal!)

Thanks - excellent suggestions!

I'm also wondering how safe the traders from the players' Barony will be when delivering goods. Hargulka doesn't want to mess with the trade deal at this point, but how disciplined are his troops? I wouldn't be surprised if some... unfortunate incidents happen at some point.

Would it be too cruel to have the trade goods that the trolls send north in payment for the food be the minor magic items and personal wealth of the enslaved immigrants from the River Kingdoms that they're collecting? That will really sting when the players eventually find out. The Paladin might never trust the Baron again :)

I could also tell that my players were going to explore the entire Greenbelt map in fairly short order - they were alternating kingdom turns with a bit of exploration, and probably would have uncovered the whole map within the first year. Now that there are defined boundaries between the Monster Kingdom and their Barony, I'm hoping the psychological barrier of "that's Monster Kingdom territory!" will keep them out of that part of the map for a bit longer.

Thank you so much for this whole concept of a proactive Monster Kingdom, Dudemeister! It really does look like it will turn RRR up to 11, lifting it from something enjoyable into something really memorable.

My players met Hargulka at the Monstrous Feast last night. I felt it went very well, although in slightly unexpected directions.

The paladin in the party was very restrained - he didn't start smiting on sight, given that Chief Sootscale had extended hospitality to *all* his guests. However, when Hargulka and the Baron (a LN bard and worshipper of Abadar) started to discuss boundaries and trade between their realms, the paladin objected to making deals with Evil, and challenged Hargulka to a duel outside.

The terms of the duel were wrangled - Hargulka would try not to kill the paladin, and the paladin wouldn't use fire or acid (and no outside interference, obviously). The party's witch started up a betting pool with the Sootscales, and the baron made a personal 50 gp wager with Hargulka as to the paladin winning (although he didn't have much hope for that). They also agreed that if the paladin won, the player's Barony would own the land north of the Little Sellen river, but if he lost the Monster Kingdom would own the land south of the Gudrun River. The baron even managed to fast-talk Nagrundi into wagering something, and Nagrundi put down his

The Sootscales marked out a 40 foot circle using lit torches in the evening gloom, and everyone watched while the paladin was beaten into unconsciousness in four rounds. Hargulka kept his fists closed so he didn't use his claws and sucked on the -4 penalty for dealing non-lethal damage, and still trounced the paladin (who admittedly was rolling abysmally).

With the paladin unconscious, negotiations of territory on the west side of the Greenbelt and trade resumed. The Sootscales stayed as "free members" of the players' Barony, but Hargulka got an agreement about boundaries between the realms and a trade agreement. The Baron came away feeling that Hargulka was very honourable and "evil is as evil does".

So, now I have to decide how Hargulka's kingdom is going to progress with regular shipments of food coming from the players' barony, and also what he might send up north in trade. Also, Grigori is going to love this :)

There's also the text on page 37 of the module:

You could easily claim that the aura affects things inside the tomb as well as the walls of the tomb itself. The ancient undead cyclopses didn't decay into skeletons, and Vordakai's corporeal body didn't crumble to dust.

In case it's of any use to you, here are some random ex-bandit tables I made up to help me when my players kept capturing generic bandits alive and giving them the chance to repent.

---

My players began paying their ex-bandits ("The Greenbelt Rangers') a wage, and encouraging them to patrol the land or take up a trade. They made a repeated point that they were big believers in second chances... but not third chances. In other words, they didn't want to know what circumstances had driven these men to banditry originally, but now that they are free men they have to toe the line from now on.

I think that Kesten Garess will definitely have problems with so many ex-bandits if they're in the fort with him and the Levetons. IMC, once they began to outnumber him and his three men-at-arms, he started complaining to the PCs that he couldn't protect the trading post if they rose up.

In order to keep Kesten happy, my players did things like getting them to build housing outside the fort's walls, sent working bands to occupy the Thorn River camp to keep it looking lived-in while the Stag Lord was still around, and repairing the bridge at Nettles' Crossing once that particular situation was resolved. They even floated Fat Norry 2,000 gp to fulfill his dream and build "Fat Norry's Feed House". Now that we're just starting RRR I've given them additional free buildings at the trading post as a result.

In the Kingdom Building sticky thread, a user named bcmdaniel reverse-engineered the costs of the buildings (the ones in RRR, at least) to come up with a price formula based on the building's stats. See these posts:

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2kqjx&page=16?Kingdom-Building#765

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2kqjx&page=16?Kingdom-Building#767

I've created an interactive kingmaker hex map for my game, but alas it's not designed to display a shared view from multiple independent devices - it's something we have on a tablet in the middle of the table, and people reach over and reveal hexes or drag icons onto the map as they discover things or hear rumours about them.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16299287/Kingmaker/Map/map.html

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

At the very least, it includes images of the maps from the first two modules with the fixed encounters and symbols removed, so that might be useful to you.

It has an import/export map feature which saves the current state of the map to plain text, but it would be pretty cumbersome to make a change, export the result and email the text to your group saying "import this".

Now that my players have finished Stolen Lands, here's an add-on I put together to replace Svetlana's Moon Radish quest. As well as giving Svetlana some more history, it also foreshadows Nyrissa a bit more overtly than Stolen Lands does.

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

And a stand-alone map image for 3D Virtual Tabletop or similar: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16299287/Kingmaker/Ruins-tactical.jpg

I hope it's of use to someone!

If they're not travelling at half speed and foraging as they go, they'll need to be carrying a lot of rations to stay away from their realm for weeks at a stretch. It sure would be inconvenient if the pack mules or horses carrying all those rations had a mishap crossing one of the uncharted rivers... and even if they're not trying to cross rivers, the beasts would probably make especially tempting targets for hungry trolls or other somewhat-intelligent monsters who can recognise saddlebags laden with supplies when they see them.

That's not to mention potions, scrolls, alchemical mixtures and other consumables the PCs might want to replenish by returning to civilization.

Also, they might run into NPCs out in the wilderness who they need to escort back to safety. There's

The players might also come across signs of threats heading towards their lands. Assuming they have decent Survival skills, they can identify the tracks of all sorts of nasties heading north. For example,

Another thought: a Barghest that attacks the party and then Dimension Doors away when it becomes apparent that they're not an easy meal should also raise alarm bells, since a Knowledge check should let them know that it needs to eat non-evil humanoids to grow into a Greater Barghest... and where might it find a plentiful supply of frail non-evil humanoids in the Greenbelt? Let me think...

Even if the players just intend to pop back quickly to resupply, drop off wandering strays or caution their subordinates or NPC council members about possible incoming threats, you should be able to show them things happening back home that suck them in. They come past Grigory in the town square ranting about the leaders who abandon their barely-established town to gallivant about the wilderness for weeks, they're approached by trusted NPCs who share their fears about rumours of a cult, and/or there's a letter waiting for them from Chief Sootscale inviting them to a certain Monstrous Feast from DM's RRR changes.

I'm in the process of making my own kingdom rules (inspired by the Fate RPG), which I'll post when I'm done. However, there's one idea in there that I think can easily stand alone that might be of interest to people.

The idea is to do away with a single unified event table for kingdom events. Instead, I'm going to have a number of index cards, each reflecting a different issue affecting the players' kingdom (aspects, for those familiar with Fate). On the cards, I'm going to have a list of events associated with the issue. Each kingdom turn, I'll draw a card, and then use what's on the card to determine the event.

The events on some issues are arranged in an escalating sequence - each time the card is drawn, the next event occurs and is then crossed off. On others, they're in a random mini event table of their own which I'll roll on. Some events have a mixture - a number of events that occur in sequence, and once they're done a random event table is used each time the card is drawn.

As the issues change over time, so does the set of possible events - hopefully, this changing variety means the players won't end up saying "ho hum, this event again". Also, if the issue is connected with something the players can do something about (such as the example above), they can remove a source of bad or annoying events by dealing with things.

IMC the players' realm will start off with a number of issues:

• Barely Established, with events specific to an immature kingdom (influxes or shortages of new colonists, food production or storage problems, skills shortages). Removed when the kingdom has established necessary buildings and infrastructure.
  
• Encroaching Wilderness, with events like monster attacks and Fey Chaos, which is removed once the kingdom grows to the point where at least half of its hexes do not adjoin wilderness.
  
• The Four Seasons, with a different event table for each season, depending on which month the card is drawn. Events such as good or poor harvests, hard or mild winters etc.
  
• Nervous Neighbours, with events relating to the deteriorating situation in Brevoy.
  

Also, some events will create new issues, with their own events.

I haven't finalised all the details and the mechanical effects etc (and when I do it'll be in my custom realm-building rules), so the above is not ready to pick up and use without work, but I think the idea has the potential to be quite cool.