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How do I remove this from my side cart so it ships on release?

This is my initial thought:
Downtime. Will run a kingdom turn which takes 1 week of the players time. I will force the Public Outcry event, giving our ruler a chance to RP calming the masses. Then will have 3 additional weeks of downtime. In each of those weeks I will say the PCs can "fast travel" anywhere in the area and do a research check. So each Player can decide what their character would do. We'll have a running number of RP on the board so the players can see "number go up" After 3 weeks of research, regardless of what they learn I will tell them that they hear rumors of some weird looking people covered in leaves in an area they haven't explored. (An empty hex in the adventure). I will put a small little cult hideout in there with a whole bunch of Bloom Cultists and have it as a FOB for the cult to infiltrate the area. Let them have a combat encounter, then if one of them survives, they can use social skills on that one to gain more RP. And that should be a solid session. Then next session we can probably pick up with another Kingdon turn and I can force the Urban Outbreak Event onto them and then hopefully they have enough RP to give them the Goblin Village lead.

Can anyone give me some advice on how to run Part 2 of chapter 5, Full Bloom. It feels like a lot of random rolls until the PCs get enough research points, but the consequences are just repeating the same events over and over which I don't want to do because I think my players will get bored

Can anyone give me some advice on how to run Part 2 of chapter 5, Full Bloom. It feels like a lot of random rolls until the PCs get enough research points, but the consequences are just repeating the same events over and over which I don't want to do because I think my players will get bored

I like camping rules in theory, but in practice RAW they cause way to many random encounters. Honestly, this is the hardest part of running this AP for me. Realistically, there should be A LOT of random encounters. This is the Stolen Lands. An area of the River Kingdoms that is so dangerous that no nation has been able to settle and hold it. So if you treat it with the respect it deserves the party should be engaging with a lot of random combat encounters with beasties and bandits.

However, those encounters can just get really dull. There's only so many times you can fight dire wolves, kobolds, bandits, spiders, etc.. in a wilderness biome map before the players just want to get on with it.

Honestly, the best way to do it is to create custom encounters with detailed RP. Instead of a random wolf attack, come across hunter being attacked by wolves who then meets PCs and eventually settles in their kingdom.

But those types of random encounters can take a lot of time to prep, and introduces NPC bloat.

The struggle is real for me, this AP takes A LOT of energy from the GM. Also, the kingdom management needs a lot of work to make it playable.

I think by default they shouldn’t get much of value from it. They are giving up direct value to their kingdom in exchange for roleplay and allies. I would just have the fey narratively assist them in the future as thanks for their assistance. Maybe have the turtle aid the PCs in any future battle near his hex.

Okay… so the consensus is the the 4th level mercy feat counteracts the condition, but the affliction remains. So if it’s clumsy 1 for 1 week disease and on day 1 you mercy counteract the clumsy 1, you don’t have any effect of the disease for the next 6 days, but then after a week passes you make your save against the disease and if you fail you get the stage 2 effects?

Is that right?

Sure Footing has the wording restricting it from counteracting afflictions because it doesn't counteract conditions, it counteracts an effect that causes a condition. Invigorating Elixir does the same

The Mercy feats don't say they counteract effects that cause conditions, only the conditions themselves. I read Affliction Mercy's "instead of effects" to mean it counteracts afflictions, but not OTHER effects (like spells) causing a condition

I'd guess this wording was probably because some earlier version of the new consolidated Mercy feats (there were 6 between the CRB and APG in 2e; I count 4 in PC2) did counteract effects causing a condition, like the original 2e Mercy did for effects that caused the fear or paralyzed conditions

So if the condition is coming from an affliction the level 4 mercy feats would not counteract it, but if the condition is coming from something else.. (spell, hazard effect, monster ability effect,) then the level 4 mercy feat would counteract it? Is that what you're saying?

We've not actually published any fiction directly inspired by Kingmaker. "The Crusader Road" was a tie in fiction piece for the Pathfdinder MMO by Goblinworks, similar to "The Emerald Spire." All of THAT was itself inspired by Kingmaker, but mostly in the way that Kingmaker has kingdom building themes set in the Stolen Lands... not so much the lore of the region.

That said, Nicolas Paradise's suggestions are pretty good ones to go with.

Brevoy's houses aren't something we've done much work expanding upon yet. It's one of those regions that's been on our to-visit list for a long time. We'll get there eventually, but that won't be of much help at the moment, alas.

I'm currently running a homebrew in Brevoy and I love the setting. Can't wait for y'all to revist it. Would love to see a political intrigue campaign with an adventuring focus on what happened to the Golka dwarves. Would love a 6 book AP with the first 10 levels being a political intrigue Brevoy storyline, and culminating with a high level adventure into the Golushkin mountains to learn the fate of the Golkas!

This is likely a strange error that crept in after the value of darkwood jumped between editions that went unnoticed/got missed during development. My suggestion is to make his weapon a normal weapon instead of a darkwood one.

That's what I think I'm going to do. Even without the Darkwood, I think it's still an 8th level item and will be the first property rune the party encounters, so I still think it's got that cool factor. Thanks for the tip.

Hi!

I'm prepping the Hargulka encounter for next session and I noticed his weapon is a level 11 weapon due to the darkwood precious material it's crafted with. Rules as written that weapon is worth like 2000 gold, and can be sold for around 1,000. Assuming the players could actually sell it. (Restov is probably a high enough level settlement and has enough high level large creatures in the area to have at least a chance of being able to sell it) that's a huge amount of wealth for a 5th level party.

I assume the intent is that the players would not be able to sell it for it's value and would use it for the runes / materials? How are other GMs handling this? Just not allowing players to find a buyer for it?

As an update, we managed to get through this encounter in this weeks game. It took 2 hours (plus the time from last week), and we had to go to a "only the person with the best chance of success is going to attempt it" strategy because having three of us trying was not even remotely working... and the best person for the job wasn't the one with the best modifier in the skills: it was the one with Halfling Luck*.

The obvious problem with that is that effectively 4/5 of the table was locked out of being able to participate. However, the "failure removes a success" rule here makes it almost necessary since anyone but the best person at it rolling is making it harder to make progress, as we found the first game night we tried to deal with this.

So two of them started doing long term crafting, one of them retrained, and the last one (me) launched an investigation to try and find some evidence to convince everyone else to deal with this guy faster. I'm not sure how helpful that actually was, but it was fun to be doing something other than rolling to aid 15 times or declaring "I'm crafting an armor potency rune and will spend all these days reducing the cost" and then being uninvolved for 2 hours.

Then the trial event came up, and we pushed through that Kingdom Turn as fast as practical (which caused us to make mistakes) just so we could get this over with and not have it drag into another game night because we just want to get back to adventuring.

I'd definitely recommend a GM consider reworking how this works to either remove the failure situation, or have this guy come and go over multiple events. As written, you basically have no choice but to stop everything and deal with this for however long it takes, and it's just not enjoyable as written with the failure mechanic discouraging participation.

*RAW that doesn't work, but we have generally allowed it anyway because its usually fun when its applied to something like cooking dinner. In this case it turned out to be wildly overpowered. That...

Thanks for sharing! Yeah, this encounter is not designed to be beaten at level 5 in the social arena I don’t think. If I ever were to run it again I would change it heavily and make it much more RP focused and would not run the fight propaganda downtime activity RAW.

Grigori is supposed to last a few levels and be a thorn in the side as he is described. I figure if you use Grigori, he should start being annoying early in the kingdom's growth at lvl 4 and still be there being annoying by 6th level or so. The idea is he is this threat lurking around rousing people up in your settlements with a campaign against the PCs. So you use him at various points after events in the kingdom happen as he builds his case. So he doesn't have to be done all in one encounter with a constant amount of rolls. You can slow play him over a few levels.

At least that is how I run it.

Yeah, if I could do it again I would run it like this. Instead of having him show up unload a boatload of criticism, I'd start introducing him around level 4 and just have him be that annoying NPC. I think I went to hard to fast with him. Oh well... I probably won't ever get to run him again.

First, Harrim needs to be Magister (according to the book).

That means that the players not only need to refrain killing or silencing his neverending rambling about the inevitable end of times, but give him an actual leadership role in their kingdom!

Jokes aside, the Folklore skill is not a good one, so passed level 5-6 the test should be harder if they don't invest in it.

Personnally, I think it's strong without being broken: the Linzi one is overused by my players and it is also quite good (-1d6 unrest on a success if I recall).

They don't have a ton of unrest so they never felt the need to spam it though.

My players are trained in folklore. I homebrewed it a little bit. If Harrim is the magister, the players can do it once per kingdom turn and it doesn't take one of their leadership actions to do it. It's just a side benefit of him being magister. That applies to all leadership NPCs. I think that's a good benefit for having an NPC be in a leadership role without letting them spam a powerful ability.

How many times is this leadership action allowed to be used per Kingdom turn? It’s in the Companion’s guide. It seems really powerful to let every leader use it once per Kingdom turn. Was it intended to only be used once per Kingdom turn total? Or intended for every leader to be able to use it once (so 5 times per Kingdom turn for a party of 5).

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.

Several of the encounters in Kingmaker are intentionally difficult, because that's part of the goal of creating a sandbox experience—the chance for the PCs to get in over their heads is a big part of what makes a sandbox game rewarding, with the PCs encountering severe encounters and then having to flee, then return at a higher level to finish things up.

We pegged the encounters in that area to be for 4th level, so that this encounter would be a significant challenge... but it's entirely possible your group might stumble into this area at a lower level or higher level too.

This particular set of encounters gives the PCs a chance to recruit some of the locals for help, as well.

But yes, it's intended to be a dangerous encounter as written.

When running a sandbox game like Kingmaker, the GM should keep a close eye on encounters that the PCs might be heading toward. As mentioned at the start of the book on pages 6–7, PCs in a campaign like this will inevitably stumble into areas that are too easy or too tough, and if you realize your group is headed toward an encounter that might be too much for them, it's important to give them context clues. The simplest is a "DANGER AHEAD" sign. In this specific case, a warning from an allied local can do the same.

Thanks! I think I might role play the Wil-O-Wisp as being above engaging with the party and just have it try to frighten them and urge the king to kill them. So instead of feeling the full brunt of fighting a level 6 and level 7 creature at the same time, instead have them either fight in waves or have the wisp leave after consuming the terror of the party / lizard king and maybe take a reoccurring role in the next few levels. Maybe have it follow the PCs back to their town and feed on the terror of their citizens. I just don’t see them surviving if I go all out to kill based on their classes and what they have prepared.

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 can't find any warfare encounters in the early levels. Maybe I'm missing it, but the troll chapter doesn't have any warfare encounters against troll armies and I don't see anything in season of bloom. Looks like the first time to actually go to war is Trouble in Tatzlford. Am I missing any war encounters earlier in the AP? My players are interested in forming a small militia, so I don't want their choice and cost to mean nothing, but I don't really want to invent war encounters outside the scope of the AP either. Thoughts?

FWCain wrote:

VanceMadrox wrote:

... I think the majority of campaigns will want negotiation DCs for at least the Brevoy houses and Mivon.

I'd *love* to see the results of a poll for this. ;-)

I presume that, if any one has that ability on these forums, it would be Mr. Jacobs or other staff at Paizo.

That sort of thing isn't really something I have the time or bandwidth to do or manage.

That’s perfectly understandable. This is by far the most fun AP I’ve ever run and I’ve definitely had to make a lot of homebrew changes. But that’s part of running an AP. Thank you for making this.

In the Kingmaker book it says that establish settlement is a region activity, But on page 542 under Establish your Village it says it's a leadership activity. Which is it?

Question: My party rescued Lasada from being the anchor of the light house, but they never found Otari's ghost. They went down the stairs in Belcorra's office and went straight to the Voluk fight and rescuing Lasada. I don't really want to just have someone else kidnapped by a random minion to send them back into the dungeon on the same quest... but I'm not sure how else to keep the story going as they think the mission is over. Any recommendations.

So it looks like a larger party just gets free additional leadership activities since more PCs in leadership roles = more leadership activies. Is this by design? Seems like a larger party would have access to more leadership activities then they know what to do with where as a smaller party may struggle. It also doesn't seem like there is a desgined way to increase the difficulty (like adding monsters to encounters with extra party members). Can someone clarify how to handle a large group? Or should I just not worry about it and let them do tons of leadership activities. Since different PCs can generally do the same leadership activities, it seems like it would be broken the larger the party is.

I've ran the graveyard encounter, but let's just say my PCs luck has turned against them. One died to the Cult of the Canker, and another turned into a ghoul. The three others ran for their lives. They've now decided to take some downtime to recruit new heroes, retrain a bit, and intergrade themselves into Otari.

Sounds like a good plan to me, but I don't want them to feel like the threat of the Gauntlight will wait for them, so I've been describing how each night the blue glow gets a little brighter.

My question is, if they take over a month to go back I want to launch another attack on the town, what sort of encounter would you recommend? I don't just want to redo the Graveyard encounter, I'd like to do something different that maybe focuses on another part of the town.

Thoughts?

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 think a year to level 3 or 4 is good. Time should pass and kingdoms don't pop up over night.

Yeah, I would give them some sort of narrative forshadow that this is a dangerous creature and / or area. But also part of the nature of the old school dungeon crawl which this module is a homage to, is the party encountering something out of their league and learning when to run. The Void Glutton very specifically does not chase the party and if the party demonstrates the intent to run I probably would not chase them to do the finishing blow, but instead use actions to intimidate.

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.

Hi, I'm preparing the Violet Fungus encounter on the 3rd level. The stat block says no vision but tremor sense 60 feet. It does not specify if tremor sense is precise or imprecise. I know the default rule for tremor sense is that it is imprecise, but normally when a monster has no vision, the stat block will normally tell you whether their other senses are imprecise or not. (See giant fly Bestiary 2 pg. 120). The Violet Fungus does not seem to have anything else in their stat block to make up for it being at such a disadvantage if it's considered to be blinded (-2 AC from flat footed (off guard) and DC11 flat check to even hit).

Was this an oversight in the editing / production of the book? Is the violet fungus' tremor sense supposed to be precise?

Glad to hear you've found a pace that works for you. I think all 5 of your changes were in our suggestions :-)

Vance, our group built our kingdom and I just wanted to personally thank you for doing the leg work to balance out the rules! We're really looking forward to it.

Sorn wrote:

An update on Ultimate Rulership (PF2E) from the Kickstarter page - it looks like it will hopefully be done soon:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/legendarygames/ultimate-faeries-fey-mo nsters-and-campaigns-for-dnd-5e-and-pf/posts/3859545

Linkified

How is this different from the rules in the Kingmaker book?

Yeah, the Hexploration rules as written have been rough because it takes days for the players to get anywhere. I've sorta been hand waiving that and saying with their horses they basically get 2 actions a day, (1 if in a particularly difficult terrain like a forest or mountain range).

Would love to see better exploration and camping rules because I've been handwaiving it for the most part and just throwing in random encounters when the story seems appropriate to have one. I just pretend to roll dice behind the screen so my players don't think it's preplaned. I hope they haven't caught on.

Anyone have stat blocks for these NPCS. I want to introduce them in a "random encounter" tonight, but I don't really have the time to make them myself. My party is 3rd level.

Thanks!

I know the PCs have to spend 1 week a month attending to their duties, but if you do a "time skip" and do 12 campaign turns back to back. Would you give them 252 days of downtime to spend? I feel like they could accumulate decent amount of money earning a living (and basically living for free as rulers of their capital)

FWCain wrote:

As long as we've got Mr. Jacobs' attention, and on this topic... ;-)

Having an abstract Urban Grid works OK for a city, but only up to the point where that city becomes a metropolis, if it also had walls or is an island. In this case, what happens then? Do the walls on the borders get retroactively redistributed? Same question for the Water borders of an island city.

Personally, I like the idea of having the "old city" be enclosed in a set of inner walls, with the "new city" outside of said walls. And for an island, I'd prefer to predetermine the size of the grid(s) that can be fit on it, to give the players and the GM the opportunity to plan ahead.

Thanks!
Franklin

If you want your metropolis to have walls/rivers around each district, then build walls/place water on all four borders of each urban grid. If you want your metropolis to have only one wall/water border, then place them so that when you put all of your multiple urban grids down that their borders where they connect do not have walls or rivers. If you already built walls there, you'll need to demolish them. That said, having a metropolis that still has internal walls where it outgrew its original size is something that happens all the time in real world history, as well as being an element in Golarion city maps now and then.

That all said, the whole kingdom building and settlement building rules are meant to be tools to help you tell parts of the story that the Core rules don't work for, and depending on the type of story you and your table prefer, you should absolutely adjust the rules as works best for your group. There's lots of great suggestions on these boards for how to adjust or fine-tune the kingdom/city/army rules that I'm largely and intentionally NOT taking direct part in because I don't want to foster the idea that there's only one "correct" interpretation for them.

But I stepped in to answer the question about the urban grid because in that case I felt comfortable sharing my take.

Always happy to hear your take for anything you're willing to give it on! Thanks for the input!

I laminated the maps put on wall. Group can dry erase or put sticky notes on map

Did the exact same thing! My players stay 15 minutes after the game and update the map on the wall with notes and sometimes come a little early to plan out their travels for the session. It works great and you really feel the sense of progression as the blank slate map slowly gets filled up with notes and pictures to represent what the players have found and done. (In my game they burned down the Old Sycamore after killing all the mites so they drew a picture of a fallen tree on the map.

I'm using the Stag Lord chapter to introduce all the companions. Right now we're having adventure of the week sessions aka season 1 of Smallville. Each session the players meet one of the companions, they get introduced to their personality, do a quest with them, introduce their overall goal and quest line, then at the end of the session the companion departs. This chapter will come to an end when they assault the Stag Lord fort, and depending on how that fight goes I'll have some companions waiting in the wing to help if it's looking like a TPK. Then once they establish their own Kingdom, the companions will move in and come and go as they please. The party will be able to bring 1 along at a time on a particular quest if they want to, and I will throw companion hooks at them if they want. It's such a sandbox I want them to decide who they want to spend time with and who they dont.

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 know James Jacobs checks out these forums. Would love to know what he thinks of these changes.

Hye Azakyte wrote:

On page 22 of the AP, under Tartuccio's stat block, for the Influence 6 "reward", at the very end it says "Tartuccio intends to use this gift later to help him accuse

one of the adventurers of being a Pitaxian spy."

I know this is part of the story on the CRPG, but this seems to be the only mention of it anywhere in the book? Is there an event or something I have missed?

That subplot ended up getting cut from the adventure and I forgot to scrub that little bit from page 22, alas.

Ahh, I just included it anyway. He blamed the Orc Barbarian and then later in the Sootscale Cave the Orc Barbarian got the killing blow on him. It was a funny full circle moment.

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.

Is there a document for the players for the camping system? I noticed it's not in the official kingmaker player's guide. I'd like to be able to hand them a document with all the camping activities.

Question. The Companion guide says that if certain companions go into certain roles that role gets invested in addition to the 4 roles you choose to invest. So it looks like if you have more than 4 PCs it's more beneficial to exclude one of the PCs from a leadership role and put the companions in the Leadership Roles. Since no matter the amount of PCs, you are limited to 4 invested from PCs, but the NPCs can invest in their particular role in addition to the invested roles from the PCs.

Am I reading this right? Is it optimal to fill your leadership roles with NPCs so you can invest in all the leadership roles?

Well I just saw that in the event phase if the kingdom skill has a PC leader associated with it they get a circumstance bonus to the roll. So maybe it balances out?

Question. The Companion guide says that if certain companions go into certain roles that role gets invested in addition to the 4 roles you choose to invest. So it looks like if you have more than 4 PCs it's more beneficial to exclude one of the PCs from a leadership role and put the companions in the Leadership Roles. Since no matter the amount of PCs, you are limited to 4 invested from PCs, but the NPCs can invest in their particular role in addition to the invested roles from the PCs.

Am I reading this right? Is it optimal to fill your leadership roles with NPCs so you can invest in all the leadership roles?

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.