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So a while ago I posted some musings about freeform city creation and I've been using them for my campaign for the past 6 months. It wasn't that bad, the hardest part was finding higher resolution images of the buildings. I tried making them myself using vector art programs but that was a bust. So this past week I tried to get DALLE-3 to make building artwork for me, and it did a great job. Just in isometric, grid based fashion rather than in the top down fashion that I asked for. So I used Inkscape to transform my map into an isometric version and created tokens from the artwork. Still a manual process but it only took me a couple hours to put together.

It ended up looking so good I had to share it.
Old map (taken immediately after a certain city event)

New map (Taken after the city was rebuilt)

My process.
1. Create a map of the terrain in DungeonDraft. (I typically also place the roads in this step because it is easier than making roads in Inkscape).
2. Create an isometric grid in Inkscape
3. Export the DungeonDraft map as a png then load into Inkscape.
4. Move the map to a "Background" layer then rotate and resize the map to fit the grid.
5. Generate "Isometric strategy game art of a <Blank>" using the AI generator of your choice.
6. Copy the generated artwork into a free art tool (GIMP, Microsoft Paint 3D, etc.) to remove the background and isolate the building.
7. Copy the resulting building into inkscape, move it to the desired position.
8. Repeat steps 5-7 until the buildings are placed.

I've found the Vance and Kerensharas errata a necessity but doesn't go far enough for my group. We got burned out trying to run it after kingdom level 3. Way too many rolls and too many things for players to keep track of.

So I went ahead an rolled my own rules using the 1E kingdom rules as a starting point. The result is something that plays a lot like Terraforming Mars, each turn the players bid on Tasks to take on and spend kingdom resources to complete them. So far my group is fully on board for the switch. Takes way less time than the original rules and they find it less boring. I've been balancing my system to make sure the math adds up for a 100 turn game (works fine for 30 turns but I'm still tweaking the numbers).

I'm doing internal playtesting and getting them ready for a release later this summer. I'd definitely appreciate some additional play testers to make sure I'm not building something that is overly specific to my gaming group. Based upon your earlier post this might be more up your groups alley than the existing ruleset. Send me a private message if you are interested in playtesting.

I can also respond in thread if people have questions about my ruleset.

Many of those plot threads are very similar to ones I've decided to expand for my players. They aren't as intimately familiar with the video game but they are aware of enough of the story beats that I'm refocusing on character specific plotlines instead.

I'm focusing on the Candlemere / Yog-Sothoth plotline for two of my players. One of them is an Imperial Sorcerer and I decided his empire is the one that fell when the Yog-Sothoth cult took hold and corrupted the previous Pharasma worshiping kingdom. The other is the lone survivor of Skywatch which I've decided was subject to a similar time-warping effect to Candlemere. So I'm planning out a bunch of extra dungeons for them to explore to find out the background of this ancient kingdom and slowly piece together the connections between it's downfall and the Yog-sothoth cult.

I'm also considering playing up the Brevoy civil war. I haven't figured out how I want to do it yet, it partially depends on my players. I'm going to start dropping more and more clues that civil war is imminent. If they start following those plot threads I'll elaborate on it. Otherwise I'll just let them follow the original plotline.

As recommended in this thread, I've reduced the frequency of random encounters. Camping already takes enough time as it is without throwing in combats as well. Plus the combats aren't particularly threatening to my over-optimized party so it just kind of fills time.

The random encounters they get from critically failing their activity rolls and the threat of a random encounter are enough to keep things interesting. Although rather than roll on the table I select the encounter I need from the table to introduce the next story element (e.g. I had them lead mitflits back to camp when they stopped too close to Old Sycamore)

The thing that is currently is a sticking point is the cooking rules. It's session 5 and they already have over 200 basic ingredients. The bottleneck is rations and special ingredients since each meal requires rations in addition to these ingredients and right now you get orders of magnitude more basic ingredients compared to special ingredients. So in addition to using hunt and gather I've allowed them to use the Subsist activity to get rations (one of the characters took the Forager feat to effectively negate any penalty from 8 hours of exploring).

We are debating whether or not to remove the rations requirement from cooking. As it is they are skipping cooking entirely most nights because they also have to subsist as one of their downtime actions in addition to using hunt and gather to stockpile special ingredients.

I may have made this problem worse on my own because I did introduce a table of special ingredients (e.g. Freshwater Oysters, Quality Nuts, Arachnid Legs) with one associated with each recipe. Which does mean they gather the special ingredients for any given recipe at a slower rate. Generally though my players seem ok with that. It's more the rations issue that is bothering them.

My other cooking house-rule was adding a Moon Radish soup recipe and that one of its effects was vivid, possibly prophetic dreams. What actually happened was I introduced a set of Owlcat style dream sequences sent by Nyrissa when they first camped at Oleg's Trading Post. They decided it was the soup and I figured I'd run with it.

Looks like if I do encounter XP based on total enemy count and the party does every single thing they can reach 1000xp. Is this correct?

I've got 830 xp from Chapter 1:

** spoiler omitted **

And then Chapter 2 has about 60 more from the Spider Nest hex encounter (if you do it).

Not exactly 1,000 xp, but it's pretty close.

Ok, I understand where I went wrong. I was using the encounter level rather than the XP total of the opposition. For example in A11 it is listed as Moderate 1, but the enemy is a Creature 3. I was awarding 40xp instead of 80xp. That would explain why I was falling short.

I wanted to try using XP instead of milestones to really get into the Hexcrawl experience but I'm afraid I can't get the numbers to add up. The milestone they list to reach level 2 is defending Oleg's Trading Post but at the end of Aldori Manor they will have only gained 620xp, and will only get 40 more from the Moderate 1 encounter.

I don't see where they will get the remaining 340xp they need to reach level 2 before venturing into Greenbelt. Unless the idea is it is supposed to include ~8 random encounters along the road to Oleg's.

I'm still pretty new to Pathfinder 2 but my impression is that I'm basically forced to use milestones because there is no way the listed numbers will allow the party to level up at the expected rate.

My gaming group is very excited to get involved with the city building portion of the campaign. But I'm worried that the strict rectangular grid might not appeal to their desire to get creative with their towns. So I'm considering allowing freeform city design using the drawing tools in Foundry VT and Dungeon Draft.

The process I'm considering is to first create a base map in DungeonDraft. Then add special buildings in a freeform manner as tiles. Finally just draw roads using the drawing tools in VTT. Adjacency bonuses would just be awarded if applicable when buildings are connected by a road shorter than 200ft.

Then in addition to building special buildings every time they level up their city they also have to create zoned districts to reflect the attributes and skills they increased (commercial, residential, dense residential, farmland, etc). For example each level up might require 4 acres of new development. They draw them on the map using the tools in Foundry VTT and then I place normal buildings to fill in the space. No need to be super precise. Just get the right feel for it. If they alter the map too much, such as cutting down a forest, I may have to go back to Dungeondraft to get a new base map. I'm not too worried about it since I think they can do a lot just within Foundry VTT itself. There are no rules on where these districts need to be placed, it's just a way to tie city growth to in-game growth and have a bit of collaborative city design.

Here is a shot of what it might look like.
https://imgur.com/a/5RFdZYQ

To get my artwork I'm using StableDiffusion to generate new buildings to populate the town and it is working pretty well. Just draw rough shapes and let the AI do the rest. Although I have to manually extract and convert the buildings into tiles using GIMP.
https://imgur.com/a/gSip6nD

Has anyone else attempted something like this? Other than the headache of making custom maps and artwork are there any mechanical implications that I might be missing? I plan on updating this thread in a few months after we've had a chance to put it into practice.

Thanks for the tips, I am also unable to wait for the official module so I’ve also been setting stuff up myself. I’ll definitely check out those hexmap tools.

I don’t have much to contribute since I haven’t tried anything outside the main P2E module. I think that should be good enough for quests and camping. The one extra tool I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting with is Stable Diffusion to create supplemental artwork.

I’ve had a lot of fun using the AI to create woodcut style black and white artwork for all the notable locations on the hexmap. I’ll post my folder of hexmap icons once the book is officially out.

It’s going to be a while before my gaming group will need to worry about kingdom building or warfare and I hope other folks might have some ideas by then.

The suite of 13 products will be for sale at game stores and paizo.com in late October. Preorders are being intentionally delayed until backer shipping is completed shortly. The landing and product pages are ready and will go up when our initial shipping is complete.

Will the PDFs be available earlier than the physical books? Or will both become available at the same time for non-backers?