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The kingdom turn occurs every month regardless of player actions. The players ideally spend 1 week of each month attending to their duties. If any character that has a kingdom role is not present for that week, their position is considered empty. So if the players skip a month, the kingdom will take lots of penalties on the rolls that have to be made each turn - mainly stability and taxes, and possibly events.
"We are going to break ground on a logging village and have identified the best spot for it. We would very much like to join your kingdom once you have pacified the regions between." But the main reason for Tatzylford's existence, I believe, is that it is a know place, common to all kingdoms, that Drelev's armies can attack in Blood for Blood.
The Control DC I see in the book or the player's guide for the PF 2 version isn't 20+mods; it's a DC scaling with kingdom level (going up on average more than once per level) and also modified by 'size category' and various penalties like unrest... Thank you for actually answering the question! I'm digging through the rules in the Player's Guide and liking what I am seeing, so far.
Before getting the 2e AP, I was curious if the fundamental issues with Kingdom Building from 1e had been addressed at all. Is anyone able to comment on if any of the following have been rectified, and in what ways? (taken from here) 1. The players control both their bonuses and their target numbers. The Control DC for the kingdom is 20 + size + districts + unrest. The first two variables are entirely under the player’s control. Unrest isn’t, but it’s also pretty easy to get rid of with Houses. It’s also easy to avoid once you only have a 5% chance of failing a check. And once the BP are rolling in from static income (mines, quarries, sawmills) and tax collection, stacking up your bonuses is simple. This is the first and most important failing of the system, because there’s no clear way to fix it. 2. Very little happens in the kingdom. Regardless of how big it is or how many cities there are, there’s still only 0-1 events each month, with a very slight chance for more. The bigger the kingdom is, realistically, the more problems there should be. And the more events that happen, the more chances that “1” could come up in a d20 roll. Instead of one roll for events each turn, maybe the DM should be rolling once per settlement, and then rolling again for every 10-15 hexes in the kingdom. 3. Most events don’t have much impact. In the early days, a +2 for a turn can be a lifesaver, but it’s meaningless once the kingdom has matured. And since even continuous events are resolved with kingdom checks, which are rarely failed at that point, they don’t stick around for more than a turn or two. I would like to see more events with minimum lengths, but also events that have more of an impact on the kingdom. Ore veins get tapped out. Extreme logging leaves a forest hex depleted. Resources disappear, landmarks vanish, rivers get dammed, labors go on strike, border regions try to secede. International events wreak havoc on your exports, hurting your economy. Your nobles demand a war against a neighbor. Enemies stir unrest within your borders. And so on. And maybe some events just happen, and can’t be resolved with a too-easy kingdom check. 4. More specific to Kingmaker itself, the adventure path itself doesn’t interact with the system much. You get some BP as treasure, and maybe a kingdom bonus as a quest reward, but aside from the pre-planned events in book 2 (and some in book 6) the whole AP runs almost parallel to the kingdom building, instead of being integrated with it. I suppose they did this on purpose so that groups uninterested in the kingdom could still enjoy the AP, but if that was the reason then I strongly disagree with it. If you’re playing Kingmaker, it’s because you want to be kings, dammit.
I'm working on making VTT maps for the Mysterium in preparation for eventually running this AP, and I wanted to put some simple mosaic designs on the classroom floors on level 1. Obviously the white/dark mask of Nethys is one, but I'm not a big Golarion buff so I'm not sure what might be appropriate for the other three. Are there some symbols of related gods, or symbols related to whatever kingdom the Mysterium is located in, or other symbols for knowledge/learning/Nethys?
Yeah, there's a fair amount of that in the 1st adventure in particular. I think I addressed it by having Nugrah say some stuff about how they killed his worthless son when they first come down into the basement. It's not the whole story, but it (and Nugrah being held prisoner in the basement) gave the players enough to guess that the Stag Lord's face was caused by acid, wielded by his abusive father.
I'm not sure you really need to make any changes for an evil party. The adventures revolve around threats to the PCs' kingdom, and presumably PCs of any and all alignments would want to protect their land. For adventures 4, 5, and 6, there is a story that unifies 4 and 5. Irovetti sends a mercenary army to Drelev. Drelev surrenders, so the army continues to move east, and attacks the PC kingdom. Afterwards, Irovetti claims that he only hired the army to attack Drelev, and the attack on the PC kingdom was Armag's fault. Then he plans the trap for the PCs at the Rushlight Tourney. Adventure 6 is its own event. It could happen years after the PCs defeat Irovetti. Nyrissa's ritual to capture the Stolen Lands is finally ready, the sword has been revealed, and the PC kingdom comes under attack. There are many ways to strengthen the story. Foreshadowing the various NPCs and their goals and personalities helps a lot in my opinion.
I like the WotRK tie-in, especially given the PC levels. Another possibility is that Irovetti seeks out (and eventually uses) the Oculus to strengthen his hand against the PCs and/or Nyrissa. Maybe he doesn't intend to use it, just keep it in his back pocket, but as events progress he is no longer able to resist its lure... obviously he would use illusion magic to keep others from seeing what he's done to himself. Another idea is that the thing is so evil that it starts corrupting the land around its resting place. Which lake did they dump it in? The one that their capital (I'm guessing) sits on the banks of and uses for trade and transport? Ooops. Maybe as things escalate the Oculus starts bringing in piscodaemons, which are, after all, aquatic in nature. Yet another idea is that Nyrissa sends some powerful fey to find and remove the Oculus, because after all the land is ultimately hers and she doesn't want that thing hanging around polluting the landscape and attracting daemons. Or heck, use all of the ideas! The Oculus is befouling the water/land, daemons are popping up in hexes bordering the lake, and while the PCs are trying to figure out what's going on, agents of both Pitax and Thousandbreaths are competing for the thing.
What exactly is the issue that you're looking to correct, here? WBL is pretty meaningless in most Kingmaker campaigns; once the kingdom is up and running the PCs can pay themselves a couple thousand gold every month from the treasury. The loot found in the published adventures is perfectly adequate, in my experience. Especially considering that the enforced downtime between kingdom turns plus some item creation feats will allow the party to outfit themselves beyond the WBL guidelines.
Fort Drelav is not set up yet is it? It develops as time goes on the AP after the PCs venture through the acts? There's no official timeline for when Drelev or Varnhold are established or how they grow over time. It's all up to you.
Which was a mistake, IMO. Is there an option in Wrath of the Righteous to play without the mythic rules? (there may be, I dunno, but I'm guessing not since you'd have to redo all the monster stats)I believe I read that there is an option to run it without using the mythic rules. Well, I got curious so I looked it up. Apparently there are some notes in the 2nd adventure that amount to "maybe hand out non-mythic power-ups like stat boosts and free Leadership feats to the PCs." But the DM is still stuck using the mythic rules for the NPCs or re-doing their stats. If you're going to do a domain management AP, do a domain management AP. If people aren't into it they can wait for the next one.I think that in a business like Paizo's, you're more likely to see them drop the kingdom mechanics so that the AP is more accessible to everyone rather than go all-in on the mechanics NS publish an AP that they think a lot of people won't enjoy. This two-systems-that-never-touch approach is most likely the best we could have gotten. But that's not how the APs work. Are you a subscriber and don't like Lovecraft? You still get 6 months of Strange Aeons. Don't like mixing tech and fantasy? (a sentiment I've seen expressed often online) You still get 6 months of Iron Gods. You absolutely do not allow evil PCs? (another common one) You still get 6 months of Hell's Vengeance. And so on. I imagine that, as Kingmaker was a relatively early AP, they didn't have the confidence that they had for later APs that their audience would stick around. If they did it today I'd like to think they would have done it more like Wrath where the subsystem is baked in and groups that don't want to use it have to make some extra effort.
Not to disagree with what anyone is saying in this thread (I also abandoned the Kingdom rules after a while), but I want to point out that the disconnect between the adventure and the mechanics is by design. Paizo recognized that the mechanics of the kingdom wouldn't be for everyone, so they made sure that the adventure didn't rely very much on the size or status of the PCs' kingdom in case any group wanted to drop those rules and just run the AP as a more standard AP. Which was a mistake, IMO. Is there an option in Wrath of the Righteous to play without the mythic rules? (there may be, I dunno, but I'm guessing not since you'd have to redo all the monster stats) If you're going to do a domain management AP, do a domain management AP. If people aren't into it they can wait for the next one. Making the rulership part optional just means that the players' kingdom can't really interact with the published scenarios. Which in this case resulted in a complete lack of diplomacy and a lack of warfare until it's irrelevant (as the PCs are a group of walking nukes by WotRK).
I will say I did get a fair bit of mileage out of having rivals (and the First World) lay waste to the players' kingdom. But aside from dictating what was where, the kingdom management rules didn't contribute a tremendous amount to that.
The application home page is here: https://daddydm.wordpress.com/software-apps/the-kingdom-manager-app
Honestly I would consider ditching the kingdom management system entirely. It's too complicated for what it does model and it doesn't really model the bits that are important. It also doesn't work very well with the given scenario - without significant outside pressures (not present in the published adventures aside from perhaps the month of blooms in book 6) the PC kingdom will quickly reach a state where they can ignore events and build most anything short of Colossal armies of high-level NPCs with magic arms & armor. There's some more details about the system's failings here. I've thought about ways of correcting the issues but I don't think it's possible. I think at the very least the DC of kingdom checks needs to be divorced from the size of the kingdom and set using some other metric. Instead of 1 potential event/month, there should be multiple chances for events, maybe one for each settlement and another for each significant swath of hexes. Some solid guidelines for what level and size of armies can be recruited would also be welcome. But in any case, I feel like a better approach would be to create a list of the internal factions to the kingdom and external threats. Set long-term and short-term goals for each. Maybe rate each with a small collection of bonuses (Influence, Money, Spies, Military, Loyalty - something like that). The PC kingdom would be rated similarly, and the PC bonuses would be determined by where they spend their influence (a limited resource/month) and also by external events. Finally each month there would be a chance of some number of events where each is either a random occurrence (fire burns down most of a town) or based on one of the factions' goals. Events would require PC decision making and possibly the expenditure of influence, or delegation to others which possibly costs more influence? and allows the situation to be resolved with a check. But that's just off the top of my head.
The setup seems to assume that the Stag Lord is drunk off his ass often enough that taking proactive steps to counter the PCs is beyond him. Though even if that was the case, some ambitious bandit like Dovan might see the situation as an opportunity to increase their own standing with the gang. In my game, the PCs went to Kressle's camp right away, and 2 bandits escaped their assault. I played out their journey back to the Stag Lord's fort, and they made it. The news they carried led to a later attack on Oleg's.
Doubt you're still looking after all this time, Tenebrous Sage, but here's a link for anyone who is searching for the same thing:
Bad luck on the right saving throw vs. a high-level caster can completely transform the battle. Like failing a save vs. finger of death could completely bone an average or smaller size party. Or any other save-or-suck that doesn't have an easy remedy. OTOH, I know a group that beat her in the first round when the melee PC with Briar rolled 2 crits in a row. D&D can be very swingy. In my game, once the party had weathered her higher-level spells she wasn't all that scary.
It's at the start of Varnhold Vanishing that Restov is supposed to cut ties with the colonies under threat from the Regent. That's the pretext for having the PCs investigate Varnhold instead of the Swordlords. I like the idea of there being a tit-for-tat between Restov and the Regent in picking Varn and Drelev. There's a question of what Varn's background is exactly, the 1st and 3rd adventures contradict one another, but if you go with him being a Swordlord then it makes some sense there was a Surtova loyalist in the mix of colony leaders. I do think that the Regent's plan was to let Restov/the colonies do the heavy lifting of pacifying the Stolen Land and then absorbing them through force or intimidation when the time seemed ripe. And then handing those lands over to the Great Houses that have been loyal to the Surtovas. Restov's ploy is the far riskier one - when push comes to shove, will the new kingdoms join the rebel cause, or would they sit out the conflict or even side with Surtova?
Just came here to ask this! The fake doctor guy says the PCs should go over there and take out the one oneirogen, but otherwise there's no real push for them to head over that way, not when Zandalus is right above them. I've been thinking about possible rationales for needing to remove the tower oneirogen before Zandalus but haven't come up with anything solid yet.
No, nor does it explain why the BBEG is so interested in it. I think it's just supposed to be an anomaly, one of those places where the prime is touched by another plane. *** spoilers for the AP! *** In my campaign, I had the Stolen Lands be the place where Count Ranalc and Nyrissa courted and kept their relationship secret for a time, away from the intrigues of the faerie courts of the Eldest. Their visits opened the way to other faeries, and the place's significance to Nyrissa's past provides some rationale as to why she wants to bottle it up.
Sounds interesting! (I initially read that as the Colony of Immortal Ants which was also interesting but much more weird) I do agree with Gargs454 that if you're going to add in a major political element, ideally it would start sooner than book 3. I mean, ideally the players would be invested and bought into it from the get-go.
Here's the fixed link that Canarr posted above to my recent summation of running the campaign and advice for others:
For convenience's sake I will post the advice section below. The actual post has links to resources and whatnot but those got lost in the pasting. Decide what your focus is. Paizo puts together a free Player’s Guide for each AP that is supposed to help players make characters that match up with the Path’s themes and settings. Players reading the Kingmaker Player’s Guide would naturally come to think that the campaign is all about a Game of Thrones-style struggle between Brevoy’s great houses. And yet none of that is actually in the AP. Talk with your group before starting this Adventure Path and learn what it is that interests them. Is it the wilderness exploration? The prospect of ruling their own kingdom? What about rulership appeals to them – the politics? Warfare? Civ-style empire building? Armed with that knowledge you’ll be able to better tailor the AP to their expectations. The bad news is, if they do want a game that’s like GoT, the adventures aren’t going to help you. At all. The good news is, there are other DMs who have done some of that work already, that you can use for inspiration. One example that I’m familiar with is Redcelt’s Game of Thrones in Brevoy from the Paizo Kingmaker board. Don’t try to do too much. The open-ended nature of the adventures, especially the first two, means there’s lots of space to throw in new adventure sites, or entire adventures even (I’ve never read it but I’ve seen Realm of the Fellnight Queen frequently mentioned in this context). There’s also lots of room for the PCs to pursue their own goals, which is great. It’s easy to get carried away and throw too much plot into the pot, however. If the players are happy wandering around and finding unconnected adventures to go on, that’s wonderful. If there’s a particular endgame in mind, though – whether it’s Sound of Thousand Screams or something else – you might want to watch for the overarching story getting lost in a sea of side plots. And if you’re adding in some political machinations, don’t go overboard with the number of factions and their schemes. There’s a lot of potential sources of trouble between Brevoy’s Houses and the River Kingdoms, plus all of the foes in the AP, so pick a few and focus on them so that you don’t get burned out and your players don’t get lost. Foreshadowing! If you’re sticking with the AP’s central plot of Nyrissa trying to bottle up the Stolen Lands, you’ll do well to sprinkle references to her and her schemes throughout the first five adventures. There are lots of ways to go about this. My own approach was to: have lesser faeries talk about her, have some of the adventure antagonists bear a distinctive ring from her, add in additional fey encounters, have the PCs interact with her and her underlings before the last adventure, and have the PCs deal with some “proto-blooms” that presaged the real deal. The open-ended adventures really lend themselves to adding in your own ideas without having to change much else. There are also other characters and events in the AP that would benefit from being set up in earlier adventures. Having the PCs meet Varn, Drelev, and/or Irovetti, for example. Plant seeds for the political turmoil in Brevoy, the centaur conflict in the Nomen Heights, the presence of the Tiger Lords in the Glenebon Uplands, River Kingdom politics, the legend of Armag, the Rushlight Tournament, and whatever else strikes your fancy. Give the players the information they need to properly act as rulers in the game world. Have your antagonists actively oppose the players. It’s probably the result of restrictions on page count, but the published adventures are very poor about presenting active antagonists. Most of them attack the PCs and then sit around and wait to be killed in their lair. How boring! Have your villains take notice of the PCs actions and fight back! Have the Stag Lord send his lackeys to go burn down Oleg’s! Have the trolls sack one of the kingdom’s border settlements! Have Vordakai scry and fry the PCs in their beds or council meetings! And so on. Make the PCs work for their victories. Also have other, non-antagonistic factions come into conflict with the players. Varnhold and Drelev would both want territory in the Greenbelt. Once the PC kingdom gets going, Brevoy or Mivon might decide it’s ripe to be annexed. Certain guilds and merchants may not appreciate the competition. Don’t let the PCs rule in a vacuum – they have some prime real estate, and other people will want to horn in on it. Don’t feel bad if the kingdom or mass combat rules don’t work for your group. They aren’t very good. I go into more detail in other post-mortems, but in brief: The kingdom rules model the wrong things in my opinion, and the adventure setup doesn’t provide the active opposition, scarcity of resources, or random disasters needed for the players’ decisions to have consequences. It’s also far too fiddly. I like the Kingdom Manager that I wrote to aid with the fiddly-ness, but there are also some nice spreadsheets out there that do much of the same work. The mass combat rules are nicely simple in that you can quickly convert individual-scale stats to army stats, but they are also complicated enough that you can’t just hand those stats to the players and run a battle. The outcome of battles is also super-swingy. We used the rules starting from Rivers Run Red, and in all that time I would say that most of the battles fell flat in terms of being enjoyable or interesting to the players; the system definitely needs some work from the DM (maps, tokens, etc.) to make it work, I think. Think about some potential answers for the mysteries of the campaign. There are a lot of questions in the AP setup, and the players will naturally become curious about at least a few of them over the course of the campaign. But the AP has few answers, so it’s a good idea to have some of your own ready to go. What caused the Vanishing of House Rogarvia? Where are or what happened to the members of House Rogarvia? What does the Vanishing have to do with Skywatch? How do the players undo Gyronna’s zombie curse on the hillside of the Stag Lord’s fort? Why are there all these faerie in the Stolen Lands anyway? Why is Nyrissa so interested in this one specific patch of Golarion land? Can the players talk to Count Ranalc or and of the other Eldest? What happens when/if Nyrissa gets hold of Briar? Is it possible to make Nyrissa whole, and what then? The fate of House Rogarvia was one that I never had a satisfactory answer for. Or at least I didn’t until it was too late. Drew, Satampra’s player, was very interested in that one. But by the time I had a semi-formed idea that I liked, the campaign was heading into the endgame, and I didn’t want to delay or derail that. In a world with infinite gaming time, we might have taken that up in the intermission between WotRK and SoaTS. I still might revisit it, possibly using 5e D&D instead of Pathfinder, but we’ll see. For now I am enjoying being a player again. There are a lot of Kingmaker resources out there. Seriously, the Paizo Kingmaker message board is a gold mine, and surprisingly active given the age of the original AP. Use the online communities that are out there for aid or inspiration in your own campaign! Some helpful threads that I made use of myself were the 6-player conversions and Venture Capital, and I also stole ideas and maps and other useful bits from lots of other discussions.
I had similar thoughts as you, denigruer. I had used small troll armies back in Rivers Run Red, and the trolls ended up sacking Tatzylford. When the town was rebuilt it was with an eye towards defense. There was no way the scenario outlined in the adventure was going to work so I envisioned something bigger using the mass combat rules. I wrote down my thoughts on the adventure prior to running it here, and a recounting of how it all turned out starts here. Basically, I had Brevoy invade the players' kingdom shortly after the attack on Tatzylford and before they could properly invade Drelev (hit them when they're weak!). The PCs managed to beat back Surtova's initial foray and then immediately put Drelev on the backburner to deal with the bigger threat. When the players later met with Irovetti, he claimed that he had hired a mercenary army to sack Drelev, not their kingdom. They must have fallen under the sway of this "Armag" character and gone rogue, he told them. And they mostly bought it. In your situation, you have a nice opening with Mivon being an antagonist. Mivon and Pitax are at odds over this border town Sarain that's off the southern end of the map, and don't like or trust one another (hmm, I thought I read that the town changed hands between the two kingdoms somewhere but now I can't find the reference). You could have Irovetti approach the PCs now and offer an alliance against their southern neighbor. He can befriend them before the invasion, and perhaps the players will be more likely to believe him when he blames the attack on Armag.
I used this map (or one very much like it) for my campaign, along with the kingdom manager application that I created to handle kingdom managment.
Spoilers for Sound of a Thousand Screams, of course. While prepping the last half of book 6 for my campaign, I was struck at how odd the setup of the Fable was. It has 4 levels, with each level being reachable through a different gateway placed somewhere in the House. The first two layers are normally infinite spaces, but if the realm is uprooted, they become 20′ wide circular rooms. The other two layers are always 20′ wide circular rooms, which is an insultingly-sized area to fight an epic battle in. There doesn’t seem to be any method to move between the levels, though presumably Nyrissa can do so at will. Or does she have to exit the Fable and re-enter from a different portal? The adventure doesn’t say, or not that I can find. The levels of the Fable are all pretty boring. There’s a pleasant field, an infinitely tall tree whose branches the PCs could fall from if they weren’t capable of flight for some bizarre reason, a room with a statue of Nyrissa and a scrying pool, and another room that’s her bedchamber. It’s not really clear what the purpose of the separate levels is in the published setting – Nyrissa is said to avoid the PCs, so they will have to hop in and out of the different areas of the Fable, as there’s apparently no way to progress through them, until they find the one that she is in. And the levels that are empty of Nyrissa are also empty of obstacles. When Nyrissa is encountered – probably on the third level, from which she can scry upon anyone in the House – there’s not enough room to have a proper battle. She’s has druid spells and could theoretically summon gigantic allies – but there’s not enough space for that. She can fly – but the ceiling is 20′ high. She has area of effect spells – but she will be caught in their area along with the PCs. All in all, I find the whole design of this area very puzzling. What is the point of the different areas if the players are just going to pop into them, see there’s nothing there, and then leave? Why such a small area for the final confrontation? I ended up making a bunch of changes for my game so that it would make sense to me (see the above link) but I’d be curious to hear how this played out for other groups, or how DMs changed around the Fable for their own campaigns.
Paizo never incorporates Power Attack/Deadly Aim into stat blocks, unfortunately. And as Morrigan mentions, the Stag Lord has -2 to everything from the sickened condition, representing his drunkenness.
My personal conception of it is: The Greenbelt is roughly the area between the Hooktongue Slough in the west and the Tors in the east. It's marked by lots of rivers and lakes which make the area very, well, green. The Kamelands is the hilly region within the Greenbelt (kame is a kind of hill or mound). The Narlmarches is of course the forest (marches is an old word for a borderland, whereas "narl" is perhaps meant to invoke "gnarled"). The flatter area in the north is the southern edge of the Rostland Plains and is perhaps not properly part of the Greenbelt. The Nomen Heights is the Tors and points east. The Dunsward is the flatlands (the plains hexes) within the Heights.
No worries, I was just glad to see that used. I honestly might have lifted it from somewhere else myself; it's been so long I don't remember!
In the end, Grigorij was abducted and murdered by the remaining two members of a Coven of Hags working for Nyrissa (an idea I stole from DaddyDM, I believe). The PCs had killed the third Hag, and they wanted to summon the Talonquake to their capital in revenge, but they needed a bard to play the magical flute to do so. They made him play the flute, then murdered him. Ooh, you used the flute, too! :D Love what you did with Grigori there, it seems like a suitable end for such a person.
Destroying Irovetti's palace just makes the PCs' lives more difficult. His chambers are underground so they'd still have to dig him out, he has the ability to escape using teleport, and they would just be giving him the opportunity to come back with charmed allies to strike at them when they are vulnerable.
Hey Curtis! Your blog looks great! I look forward to reading it. EDIT: I added yours to my list of Kingmaker blogs.
With the annexation of territory (Varnhold, Drelev, Pitax) I used the "union" section in the UC rules: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/kingdom-building/#Formin g_a_Union as a starting point. In addition to Loyalty and Stability penalties I also increased Unrest a bit, depending on the circumstances. Annexing Pitax could create some real problems. The local lords are likely to be resentful of the PCs coming in as conquerors, the crime families that ran the city will be looking to regain control now that Irovetti's gone, nearby River Kingdoms may not take kindly to the PCs gobbling up their neighbors, and so on. I didn't want to deal with that by that point of the campaign so I just added on a bunch of Unrest and penalties and let it be. But the whole thing could be spun into an intrigue-based adventure all on its own.
That's exactly what I did, 10% of the population as 1st level NPCs. Though it came up earlier in the campaign (I ran the attack on Tatzylford in Blood for Blood as a mass combat), and I use 100 pop per plot so the city population, and thus the militia size, was smaller.
There is some traffic going from humanoid to dragon-like. For example a sorcerer with the draconic bloodline. Add on the Dragon Disciple prestige class, which gives one some dragonic traits. There's also the "form of the dragon" spells, which turn you into a dragon. Maybe the bloodline has form of the dragon as an innate spell-like ability, or maybe Choral is a Dragon Disciple, or maybe he's managed to make his dragon transformation permanent, or maybe he's a dragon pretending to be human and his descendants are part-dragon. As Gargs454 says, go with whatever works for your story.
I thought energy damage wasn't multiplied on a crit. So it would be 9d6+90 + 3d6 fire, average 125. Which would still probably kill most characters at that level. But smart PCs will have breath of life handy, because instant deaths will happen around this point, and going forward.
War of the River Kings (#5) - the assassination encounter at Whiterose is not really designed with 12th-13th level PCs in mind. My players turned invisible when they got ambushed, and when Gaetane started to sniff them out, they flew or teleported away. Then they came back a little later and murdered Gaetane and the low-level flunkies after some prep and planning. Irovetti has this convoluted plan to draw the PCs to Whiterose, so that they can be ambushed by an archer that has no ability to handle any spellcasters, either to detect or stymie them, or to evade spell effects - it doesn't make much sense.
A lot of the aforementioned problems with the encounters are baked into the system (equal CR fight 1/day, 1 foe vs. many PCs), so I dunno what can really be done about them. But yeah, almost every single-foe encounter went down like a chump, even with me updating the stats and giving named opponents max HP. There are lots of fights throughout against groups of melee-only creatures that are cakewalks because the PCs have spells and ranged attacks and the monsters don't. Adventure #2: the lizardfolk, the trolls. Adventure #3: spriggans, the zombie cyclops. Adventure #4: just about every fight. Once the PCs start hitting the sweet spot, groups of foes need ranged options and/or spell support. The NPC stats in adventure #4 are, frankly, terrible. Aemon and Drelev are jokes. Armag has lots of fighter levels for no good reason, cutting him off from the better rage powers. But maybe the adventure was intended to be a cakewalk, I dunno. It doesn't feel like it was written for the level it's supposedly aimed at. Adventure #4 also spends a lot of time on encounters in the swamp when there's no reason to go in there, aside from some quests from nameless NPCs (save Garuum, my PCs did do that one). Swamps are worthless terrain by the kingdom rules. The Rushlight in adventure #5 should have results pre-generated for NPCs. While not in the published adventure, the greased-tower climbing challenge in the draft is basically impossible for anyone who doesn't have an insane climb skill. In general, a lot of the NPCs can be improved by using newer classes, feats, and spells.
Wow, 3 deaths in the tomb and 1 outside! That was a brutal adventure for your group!
I've had similar frustrations with this sort of thing. Some players just aren't going to take certain steps, whether it's kingdom turns or doing all their character stuff out of session or what have you. So I would say to do the turns with the one player that is interested. You can't force the others to care. And in any case the kingdom rules are kinda boring once the kingdom is beyond the early growing pains. You build stuff but there's no built-in pushback or scarcity of resources unless you've changed around the AP a fair amount (or unless the players have expanded beyond their means). Events are resolved with checks that can only fail on a 1, and even if they fail it's just a couple of numbers off the kingdom's big bonuses. It can be fun in a "I'm making a thing in the way that I want to" way (which is better done with 1 player anyway), but it's not very good as a mini-game. What makes Kingmaker interesting and different from other APs, IMO, are the part of rulership that aren't represented by the kingdom rules.
I see it more as the sword will attempt a dispel on Armag every turn on his (or the sword's) turn. So it only impacts spells with a duration.
It's a bad idea just because of the kingdom turns. The PCs need to be in the capital for one week every month. If they have to hoof it everywhere, their range is extremely limited.
There are other "domain management" rules out there, though none specifically for Pathfinder that I know of. The question is how compatible they are and how much work you're willing to do to translate the stuff from the adventures into the chosen system. That's why ultimately the UC rules were good enough for us - it was too much effort for me to find something better. Some other options off the top of my head:
Someone in this forum posted way back about developing a FATE-inspired set of rules for the kingdom, but it wasn't fully fleshed out as I recall.
After thinking about it some more, I suppose I should say that the UC system is "good enough" if you have some means of handling the number crunching - AND if you have players who prize building impractical monuments to their own greatness over pure number-crunching. I'll also add that IMO once the kingdom gets to whatever size it probably is around book 3-4 (100+ hexes maybe) it needs to come under much more pressure than what's in the adventures. Part of that is simply that the kingdom probably can't fail most checks at that point except on a 1 (and the penalties from events become negligible), so you need to challenge it in new ways. Another part is that left unchecked, the kingdom will accumulate absurd amounts of BP. Standing armies are needed to drain some of that off, but the players won't recruit them if they don't need them.
Tips when running the campaign, or tips for the kingdom building? There's lots of discussions here concerning the former. Just to establish my bonafides, I created and maintain a huge software application for managing one's kingdom and armies. I also have a Kingmaker campaign blog that's ongoing - we're on book 5 at the moment. We've been using the Ultimate Campaign rules this whole time. Despite all my work on my Kingdom Manager (which is still continuing) if I were to do it again I would say use a different system. I lay out specific issues I have with the Ultimate Campaign rules here. I've also looked at the Ultimate X books, which IMO just add more complexity to an already fundamentally flawed rule set.
Name: Remesio of Mivon
They had a pretty good plan - the arcanist hit Jurrg with a quickened glitterdust and a souped-up dimensional anchor, and then the melee types charged in - but they didn't know that Alasen the weretiger was lurking invisibly nearby. During the fight she pounced on poor Remesio of Mivon, and tore him to shreds. The rest of the group was forced to retreat again, and didn't have the strength - or the will - to retrieve Remesio's body. And so ended the reign of the kingdom's third (and longest running) High Priest. Long live the new High Priest!
"You're a good guy, Andre. I hates to rob ya, I do! But I gotta pay my cut to the boss, yeah? So c'mon, hand it over. Don't make me an' the guys haveta hurt you an' your friends, eh? We wouldn't like that, on account a you being our bud an' all."
Ohohoho... dude, this is some genius stuff! I'd actually scoured the forums and found a good few of your posts- the mites was a thing I was definitely gonna do, but now this is some really cool stuff! Wow, thanks for the kind words! In truth I owe a lot to this forum and all the ideas that DMs have posted here over the years. Recently one of the players summed up everything he could remember about Nyrissa (the Green Lady as they know her) and Thousandbreaths and the rings and the Castle of Knives and the rest. This was shortly after the end of Blood for Blood. Reading over it has reminded me that I've added a fair number of additional faeries to the campaign to help reinforce the players' knowledge of the BBEG. 1. the villain of one of the original players' backstories turned out to be an evil fey in search of the sword. 2. not mentioned in the link, but there's a faerie court near the Stag Lord's castle, presided over by an unstatted faerie known as the Owl Prince, whom gives them advice from time to time. 3. I took an early kingdom event and said it was being caused by spriggans who had come into the PCs' world via a faerie ring. The spriggans were kidnapping peasants and the PCs went through the ring into the First World to get them back. The addition of faerie rings to the campaign has led to other plot points and to other fey incursions. 4. I added a korred to the Lonely Barrow, placed there by Nyrissa to keep the fey-bane spear out of mortal hands. 5. After Varnhold vanished, more than just spriggans moved in; all the local faeries figured the town was theirs now, in the same way that all the Stolen Lands were said to be. and so on. I'm always looking for places to insert fey into the story to remind the players of what's to come. And it seems to have worked! When the blooms come in earnest the players will be able to look back and see how it had all been building towards that point.
What I've been doing, starting with the players' encounters with the mites in Stolen Land, is to make it known that a powerful fey has an interest in these unsettled lands. All the fey know it, and talk about it (though they generally don't know many details), and evil ones see it as a reason the lands are "theirs." The players call the powerful fey "the Green Lady" but she has other names. This foreshadowing has manifested in a few ways in my campaign (I no longer remember what I've taken from others on these boards or made up myself): With regards to the specific events of book 6, I've started having the players encounter "test runs" of Nyrissa's ultimate plot. Basically, they had to deal with an early "bloom" between books 4 & 5, and I'm about to spring another on them. They've already met some of the NPCs from book 6, as well, or heard their names.
The very best thing you could do as a DM is to directly ask the players what plot hooks they want the chance to play out with their characters. Which might be nothing, it could be they just want to hang out and kill stuff. If they're not interested in having a backstory, they're not interested and pushing it on them will leave everyone (especially you) unsatisfied. You, as the DM, get to decide the overarching plot and how it interacts with the characters' stories. The players get to decide what their characters' personal stories are, or at least how they begin.
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