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Hi everyone! I ran the Grigory encounter for my PCs and it turned into a very unfun session so I wanted to share my experience in hopes that it helps future GMs modify the encounter.

So the initial role play was great. PCs instantly hated him, but couldn't deny that he had made some good points in his critique of their decisions. Then when they saw the unrest go up, they knew they had to do something. I introduced the fight propaganda downtime activity, and they all agreed to do that.

The problem is, his DCs are really high for a 4th level party. Most of my players have a range of +8 - +10 in their social skills and his DC is 24. Which means anywhere from 14-16 on the D20. Not very good odds at all. Furthermore, every failure looses them a support point, so when they got a good roll and got a support point, the odds were almost always in their favor they were going to loose it soon.

They did 4 downtime days of fighting propaganda and they had a net 0 support points, plus additional unrest and corruption for a crit fail one of them got. Everyone at the table was really frustrated because they said it felt like there was literally nothing they could do besides be evil and arrest him for not breaking any laws or let him single handedly destroy their kingdom. I have some players who were very uncomfortable with the idea of arresting someone for free speech.

At the end of the day, I quickly realized my players were getting frustrated, disengaged, and not having fun. Which stinks for me because I was really looking forward to playing him and having him be a reoccurring thorn in the player's side.
At the end of the day, we all agreed to just have him run out of town by the citizens so we could get back to doing fun adventuring.

So I do think this encounter needs to have a way to beat it that doesn't involve arresting or attacking a man for free speech, or passing 15 very hard DCs in a row. So words of advice for GMs getting ready to run this encounter. If it looks like the players aren't having fun and they can't win, have Grigory do something that's clearly evil or illegal to give the PCs a Casus Belli to attack or arrest Grigory and turn the adventure back to something fun, or just be ready to cut him if your players aren't into this.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

Are the players really supposed to stand a chance against this thing at level 4? They have no way of knowing it’s a wil-o-wisp to prepare for the encounter and as written a success on diplomacy has the king lizard folk bring them to the wil-o-wisp who then orders the king to attack them. It’s a party level +2 king and party level +3 wil-o-wisp.

The Wil-o-wisp can easily frighten them, has 28 AC and can go invisible. I think the best a non fighter level 4 character has is like +11 to hit. That seems crazy! How is my party going to survive this as written unless a majorly pull punches? Was this encounter tested?

I don't think we're going to get a fix from Paizo. As you mentioned, there are members of this community who have done the lord's work in fixing the system.

I agree with you that the official final product is.... disappointing. This was a herculean effort to put this hardback together and the game is better for it's existence then not. However, it seems like between the pandemic and doing this one as a crowd funding campaign instead of through their normal release schedule the quality of the final product took a hit.

It was delayed over 2 years and it seems that the bulk of the work was given to one developer to do with no playtest support for the rules. The fact that we got as good of a system as we did under those circumstances is nothing sort of amazing.

Does the system have problems? It sure does. But as written is it playable and workable? 100%. James Jacobs did an outstanding job with the timeline and resources that he had, and the community has taken it from there to fill in the holes. That's sorta par for the course for RPGs.

To be clear, I don't think Paizo as a company should get a free pass for releasing un tested rules, but I don't think anything in there is so broken that it's unplayable, and I think together as a community we can come together to make the whole better than the sum of it's parts!

I'm also very confused about this. Like what does Belcorra need to do to actually fully restore Gauntlight? Does she just need to gather the 4 lenses and use them in the temple (j20)? How exactly does Gauntlight become fully restored so it can unleash it's powerful attacks every minute on Absolom? I can come up with good reasons for her to delay or whatever, but I need to understand the actual mechanics of how the lenses interact with the lighthouse to fully restore it and the book doesn't exactly explain it well... or at all...

I'm running it and I just gave Carmen Rajani the magical crafting feat. He's a blacksmith and his entire trade is crafting weapons. In a world where anyone over a level 1 adventurer would want rune infused weapons, it feels weird for someone making a living crafting weapons to not take the magical crafting feat.

Plus he's an important NPC in the town so it gives the players more chances to role play with him and get to know him.

I ran our first session last night. It went well, but the Influence portion of the feast... could have gone better. The players just ended up with abysmal rolls, round after round. All of them even used their initial Hero Point and either got the same result or worse. They ended up with no more than two points with a couple of NPCs.

I'm not sure (off the top of my head) if there are any other situations designated to give them another chance at Influencing the companion characters, but if not, I'll probably find a way to let them do that at some point.

There is plenty of time for them to influence the other NPCs. What I did was have the NPCs form their own adventuring party and every now and then they cross paths with the party in the wilderness and share a campsite. Then the PCs can talk and swap stories and get more opportunities to influence them. They also meet up at Olegs every now and then and swap information about things they've seen while exploring.

I'm not sure if it got into print, but my intention for encounters during camping is 100% that there should be no more than 1 per camp session, and often not even 1.

The amount of camp encounters with monsters should absolutely be tailored to your table's preference, but capping it at a maximum of 1 per camp is my preference (and that also matches the computer game's take on things—once you have an encounter interrupting your camp session, no other encounters hit you that session).

Yeah, that for sure didn't make it into print. The math on the rolls have you at well over 75% chance of a random encounter in most zones even if you don't do any activities. I think we did the math if every PC did 1 activity we were at like a 95% chance for an encounter at some point during the camping.

Furthermore, the rules don't say one encounter per camp session, they say once you have an encounter, the encounter zone dc just resets. So playing RAW, it's not only entirely possible, but often likely you'll get at least 2 random encounters per camp session, which certainly bogs down the game.

I get the GM is responsible for cutting out random encounters that are a) not fun and/or b) serve no narrative purpose. But would be nice for some sort of amended rule that lets the PCs do camping activates, but readjusts the math to like a 40-60% chance of an encounter depending on the danger of the zone. I'll just do it by feel for now I guess.

FWCain wrote:

In their defense, they have mentioned that they have seeded numerous encounters for boosting the kingdom's XP into the Adventure Path, especially early on.

I would guess this was a deliberate choice -- specifically, how to balance growing your first settlement (your capital) quickly in the beginning, but =without= also speed-growing your subsequent settlements later on. Hence, the rules giving you that delay, but the adventurers encountering lots of kingdom XP.

Just my two coppers' worth. ;-)
Franklin

I hear what you're saying, but I have done the math for the early Kingdom chapters of the AP, and it's not looking good. There is only about ~1500 XP worth of quests, milestones and kingdom events in chapter 4, and 4.1 already assumes your kingdom is level 4 before triggering some of those events. The bulk of your XP as an early kingdom comes from Kingdom Events that occur on average every 2.5 months and grant 30 - 190 XP (Event +4) each (but most will be ~70 XP). Even when converting all of your RP into XP at the end of turn and successfully claiming a Hex each turn, you will still be spending a significant time (2.5-4 years) before reaching Kingdom Level 3.

Now I personally am fine with it taking a year per level, as long as the gameplay is interesting, but all these limits on the early levels (number of structures, no farmlands, low commodity storage) just turns those early turns into very boring ways to waste time. You can't really expand too fast by claiming hexes, because your DCs will go up. You can't stockpile commodities for later turns, because you can only store 4 of them each. You can't build Farmlands, because your Town has 0 influence. You can't build structures. All you're doing for 30-50 Kingdom Turns is hunting/foraging/trading for food to pay consumption and rolling for kingdom events.

Let's also consider what the progression of the Town looks like from the outside. In the first month, the old fort is converted into a Town Hall and we build some...

Agreed. This was not well play tested at all. I like the spirit of the rules and what they were going for, but it’s very clear that these rules, and really the AP as a whole, was not well play tested. The treasures awarded doesn’t even comply with the general rules in the GM section. This is going to take a lot of work to run.

Here is the first cut of things we found while doing data entry for Foundry:

Back Matter:
- Aldori Dueling Sword: Priced at 20g instead of 2g
- Mindrender Baton: No clear value for intimidation DC - recommmend DC 31 based on the wording
- Gromog: Unsure if perception is +5 or +9 (has the blinded condition, but can become unblinded)
- Hargulka: Morningstar is listed as piercing with versatile P trait; should be bludgeoning with versatile P
- The Stag Lord: Composite Longbow has reload 1, should be reload 0
- Tartuccio: Sickle strike has no attack modifier (Suggest +15 - moderate for level 6)
- Wild Hunt Archer - Should have true seeing as a constant spell
- Wild Hunt Scout - Has constant true seeing, but it isn't listed in the perception block as normal

Chapter 2:
- Unstable Pit: No disable check
- Hateful Hermit and Boggard Cultist: missing range increment and reload 1 traits for blowgun
- Hooktongue: Missing beast and aquatic traits, added animal trait compared to base NPC. Undetectable action is missing the detection, divination, revelation, and scrying traits; water travel is missing the concentrate trait
- Ngara: Attack modifier is from the level 8 base creature (DC32, +20 Attack), missing all coven-related abilities.
- Windchaser: Lost animal trait and gained beast trait compared to base NPC
- Tiger Lord Hill Giant: Fist has striking damage compared to greatclub (which should have it)
- Oversized Chimera: Breath weapon missing range - should be 30 foot cone per base chimera
- Hill Giant Butcher: Battle Axe should probably have reach 10
- Tree that Weeps: Saves are for the level 6 Scythe tree; which is far too low for a level 18 NPC
- Chief Sootscale: First attack is listed as a spear instead of a club (no spear in inventory, no strike for club)
- Spirit of Stisshak: Has nightmare as a third level spell, but it is fourth level
- Rigg Gargadilly: Spell DC is for a level 4 creature instead of a level 7 creature (not changed from base NPC)
- The Dancing Lady: Save DCs are for a...

This is why the PDF should have been turned over early to backers before going to print.

Snake0202 wrote:

Swiftbrook wrote:

Roboconn wrote:

I cant find the west wing in the interactive maps. Am I blind?

If you are, so am I. No west wing.

I emailed support about the west wing. I was told they are fixing it and we should get an update soon.

any updates on this? also noticed issues with map labels not showing up on the maps but under them.

I think Support must have been mistaken when the emailed me. They told me it’s already been updated to include the west wing but it clearly has not.

Locations RL4 and RL5 should swap places. R4 on the map is Fort Serenko and R5 is Crooked Falls.

I'm worried about the pacing of the kingdom turns too. First read does feel a little slow, and it's a little concerning that it wasn't playtested much, but like James said, if your group is getting tired of it there's nothing stopping you from increasing the XP to RP conversion, or even reducing the kingdom xp to level from like 1000 to 750. Could even start at like 500 xp to level 2. 750 to level 3. 1000 to level 4. And then evaluate to see how the pacing is.

I get where the development was going. It wouldn't make sense to go from a 1 hex village to a multi hex kingdom with several settlements in the span of like a year. That would break verisimilitude. (I guess as much as a player going from a newbie adventurer to a level 20 champion of the multiple planes of existence in a period of a couple months like some other APs.)

I do feel like this AP is going to take extra work and adjustment from the GM to get just right. Also, I think it would be very helpful to check in with the players often and ask how they feel about the kingdom stuff. If the group is bored of the micro management, it might not be a bad idea to just ask them what their plans are at a high level and then you the GM run the kingdom stuff off screen and report back to the players with problems their individual PCs need to step in and handle. I think the AP actually suggests running the kingdom in the background if you can tell the players are getting bored with kingdom management.

Also, I think the players should know what they are getting into, and if you the GM are planning on running the kingdom management RAW, I think you owe the players a session 0 where you set that out and tell them the type of game you're running so they aren't all of a sudden shocked when they show up to game night and it's 4 hours of planning towns, gathering resources, and handling kingdom events.

At the end of the day, I think this AP is going to require a lot of adjusting to the individual group. I can see some groups out there that are Civ 5 buffs who would want to spend their entire time playing kingdom management and not adventure as much, and other groups who don't want to manage the kingdom at all and just want to do traditional adventuring. Check in with your group early and often imo.

Roboconn wrote:

I cant find the west wing in the interactive maps. Am I blind?

If you are, so am I. No west wing.

I emailed support about the west wing. I was told they are fixing it and we should get an update soon.

Snake0202 wrote:

Hi!

New to Paizo products. The AP mentions a spoiler free Kingdom Rules document. Anyone know where I can get that?

Thanks for your inquiry. We are working on the player's guide. It will be a free PDF. We don't have a hard date yet, but it should be later in this month, yes. This is about a month before retail sales start, so it is on target.

Thanks both of your for the reply!

The speed at which kingdoms level up is for sure something you'll want to adjust as you play. The easiest solution is to just have the kingdom level up automatically when the PCs level up. The kingdom rules are expected to happen over the course of years though—kingdoms that go from 1st level to 20th level in the span of a few months kind of breaks verisimilitude a lot more than characters doing the same. But still... as the GM you should absolutely feel free to adjust the amount of XP handed out.

EDIT: Full disclosure, I agonized quite a bit over how much kingdom XP to give out. I didn't want PCs to effectively skip kingdom levels or only play one kingdom event per level, but I also didn't want them to be stuck at 1st level to the very end. I hope that I found a happy medium, but it might still be too slow for a lot of folks' taste. Having unused RP turn into Kingdom XP at the end of every turn is something that'll fuel the most of the XP I expect, especially if players devote some of their Leadership activities every turn toward earning RP expressly for transferal to XP. You could even consider expanding that reward rate to 10 XP per 1 RP.

Awesome! Thanks for the design input. I agree, I want time to pass and the kingdom not to grow from a 1 hex village to a massive empire in a year. My main concern would be the level 4ish PCs having to do 3+ levels of kingdom management in a row to get their kingdom up to their level, before continuing on with the story. I may speed up the early levels until the Kingdom is at their level or maybe use the early parts of Rivers Run Red to really focus on companion quests and quests specific to the PCs and not necessarily specific to the AP storyline.

Perhaps do a Season 1 Smallville model where we do a few months of sessions where each session is a few kingdom turns and then a problem of the week that is focused entirely on one of the PCs backstories. So the PCs feel like their kingdom is growing while also dealing with their personal motivations and also getting some downtime.

Yeah, considering each kingdom turn is a month that’s over a year between level 1 and level 2 and a lot of downtime for these characters.

I think my players might get bored just doing 18 straight kingdom turns before going back to adventuring but the book says the Kingdom level should be within a couple levels of the party.

An ascendant Orc nation, Belkzen, lies some ways to the west of the Stolen Lands, and plenty of that people leave it to work as laborers, bodyguards, and mercenaries. If they have political ambitions, as fits Kingmaker, they could’ve been ousted by a stronger rival in Belkzen, driven into exile and forced to seek a throne elsewhere.

The Stolen Lands are very near the Worldwound (or in 2e, the Sarkoris Scar), where Abyssal energies exploded into the Material Plane for over a century. Tieflings with demonic features are thus not too uncommon across much of Avistan’s north, while in Cheliax to the south, there’s a considerable devilish Tiefling minority; they’re treated poorly, so I can imagine one fleeing that oppressive nation to build a kingdom of their own.

Great ideas, thanks. The Orc is basically doing that. His parents were sick of the tribal b#~!&**& and wanted to be mercenaries. Then they went missing on a job and the PC ended up getting a job as a laborer in Restov doing the grimy work no one else wanted to do. One night while working an overnight shift he was able to help the city guard capture a thief and word got around town that an Orc had contributed to keeping the city safe. So Jamandi Aldori decided to invite him to the feast.

Just finished reading the Kingdom rules. Anyone else concerned that the kingdom level up is pretty slow. 30xp per event, 10 xp per hex, 1xp per unspent RP, and the one time milestone bonuses that are normally less than 100xp.

Considering players will be around 4th level when the kingdom is founded it seems like it would take a lot of kingdom turns to even get to third level. Considering there’s only one event per turn.

Or am I missing something? What do y’all think?

Hi!

New to Paizo products. The AP mentions a spoiler free Kingdom Rules document. Anyone know where I can get that?

Andostre wrote:

Anyway, I also haven't read all of it, so I may be missing some context of what's in the 2E version that's driving some of your comments. But they are saying that they've added content to the AP that wasn't in the CRPG, so there's that.

I did skim through the new version of the kingdom building rules, and that looks more compact, which could be a plus. Still, I can't ever really get a good feel about rules systems without playing them; just reading them isn't enough.

I agree that the pages look great, and I can't wait to get my physical copy.

Yeah, I'm a little wary of the new kingdom building rules. I've already decided to ditch the army rules for a homebrew of the old AD&D Battlesystem rules. I'm kinda shocked how easily those could be ported over.

I'm not sure what they did add that wasn't in the CRPG (which I haven't finished tbh - on the equivalent of Book 5). What I am seeing is this weird mix of stuff nearly verbatim lifted from the original AP, maps, images and all and stuff that seems to be lifted straight from the CRPG. I find it a little janky at times, but that may be me.

I am looking forward to the books, and I am looking forward to GMming this. We're doing an in-person campaign and kick off in ten days. I've been through KM as a player so I'm fine just with the updated stat blocks. But whereas the 1e KM was almost not enough info and the GM filled in the cracks, this one seems a pile of too much material and the GM will need to weed out bunches of stuff.

We'll see how it plays. That's the thing.

Yeah, I agree. There seems to be a ton of info and I’m not even sure where to start. What are you doing for maps at the table?