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It can't be too far away... I got my regular subscription email this morning, telling me that the first volume of the AP was about to ship in the next few days...

Highlights from the other thread, just so we have everything in one place:

Exploration

The effects of roads and rivers on travel time are covered in the Pathfinder Core RPG, in Chapter 7. (These factors weren't really talked about in the exploration phase since you can't build roads until a hex is claimed, and you can't claim a hex until it's explored.) By building roads, you're making it easier to move around in your kingdom, which is why you gain those bonuses to Economy and Stability.

Rivers do not count as roads for farms, and they actually can cause more problems than they solve for travel, since you can't cross them easily at most locations. Again, rules for river travel itself are found in Chapter 7 of the Pathfinder RPG.

Ninjaiguana wrote:

I'm assuming that the players start out by deciding on their starting hex, and then must expand out from that hex at the usual speed and BP costs? Basically, they don't get any 'free' hexes added on, even if they've explored and subdued them, right?

Correct. No free hexes. First you have to spend the time to explore the hex, and then you have to claim the hex; two steps.

Claiming hexes are indeed the point at which you start sending settlers and citizens and soldiers into that hex and they start building homes or whatever. Your PCs can certainly say that they rule over all of the hexes on the map, but until they're officially "claimed" during the proper point during kingdom construction, the PCs are just blowing hot air.

The king of Pitax is essentially doing just that. He claims to rule a lot of the land north of the city of Pitax, but he hasn't had the time or resources to clear and explore and claim any of those hexes yet. They're still techniclaly no-man's lands.

And as for increasing consumption when you add hexes... not only is Jason right about the fact that you have to support the settlers who live there, but you also have to pay for patrols through the region to prevent banditry and monsters, pay for tax collector and other government worker wages, repair roads or buildings or things, and pay for longer amounts of travel time.

Basically, the size of a kingdom is directly related to the cost to keep it up and running. It costs more to run a larger kingdom than a smaller one, and since Consumption is the number of how much it costs to run a kingdom, increasing a kingdom's size by adding hexes also increases total Consumption.

Erik Freund wrote:

The existance of Pitax/Mivon brings up another question. How far south can the PCs travel or settle before things start to get dicey?

The maps we provide in the adventures of the Stolen lands pretty much conform exactly to the borders of how far the PCs can expand their nation before things get dicey. The top row of hexes in part 3 are technically part of Brevoy (and that adventure explains how to handle things if the PCs claim those hexes) and the bottom rows of hexes in part 5 are technically part of Pitax, but that adventure is all about a war between the PCs and Pitax.

So in short, the adventures have you covered. As long as you don't expand the maps in size, you won't need to worry about things getting dicey at all until the adventures themselves take that into account.

Cities & Buildings

I suspect that graveyards having a bonus to economy is a typo. They're really cheap to build, and giving them 2 bonuses for only 4 BP is an error. They should only grant a +1 bonus to Loyalty.

And tannerys, mills, and smiths are different buildings for 2 reasons.

1) So we could get more buildings on the list.

2) Because they have different needs. A tannery smells TERRIBLE and shouldn't go next to a house. Mills need rivers. Smiths have neither of those requirements, and are a significantly common building to see in RPGs. So, three different buildings.

The "buildings" are meant to be representational. A single "block" in the city grid is 700 feet to a side or something like that, so there's a LOT of buildings in there. The purpose of the "house adjacency requirements" is to ensure that your players actually build houses in their cities and to make it a bit more tricky to build the structures that actually increase your nation's stats. They're also to give places for everyone that makes a building function places to live, be those people employees, guards, street sweepers, customers, or whatever.

Majuba wrote:

For the buildings that are required to be "Adjacent" to a house, what counts as Adjacent?

Anything counts as adjacent; left, right, above, below, diagonal, or even across streets.

But you can't "double duty" a house. Once it's used as a prerequisite for another building, it can't serve as a prerequisite for a second building.

DM Wellard wrote:

Is there a limit on the number of districts you can have in a city?

Not really. A GM can certainly limit the number of districts a party puts in a single city if he wants, but multiple districts would be the only way you'd ever be able to model a really BIG city, after all. A city the size of Westcrown would take, IIRC, nearly 30 city grid districts.

Of course, your kingdom needs to be able to AFFORD all of those districts!

I originally had the structures take one month per square, so that a castle (for example) would take 4 months to build. The reason I chose to abandon this was twofold:

1) It really slows down the startup of a city. And if your players decide to build a 2 or 4 square building, the fact that they'll need to wait 2 to 4 months before they can see a return on their investment could well put them DEEP into the hole on their Build Points. That's not something you want to hit the players with at the very very very start of the kingdom building experience, because they'll just get frustrated and aggravated.

2) Because it's simpler to say that buildings are finished quickly so that you can quickly apply the modifiers to the kingdom. If they're delayed, you run the risk of forgetting to apply the modifiers.

Buildings that upgrade is a cool element. We had this in there at one point as well, but had to cut it for space reasons and because it felt weird (in the way we had it working) that a busy merchant town, for example, would have a waterfront but not, necessarily, a marketplace (assuming your marketplaces upgraded into waterfronts). Also, by not allowing buildings to upgrade, you make the land in a city grid all the more important; you can't "save space" by stacking effects, basically.

In the end, it does start to stretch verisimilitude to have a castle or an arena built in a single month, but keep in mind also that magic can speed things up considerably... and if you want, you can even say that even though the castle only got placed on the city grid in a month that the town's been planning to put that castle there for months or even years. In the end though, it's a sacrifice that I think is necessary in order to ensure that the game is fun and moves quickly enough to keep the attention of all the players.

Economy

Tem wrote:

The one detail I'm still missing is the classification of items that the PCs want to sell (and thus convert directly to BPs). If they've found a +1 sword while adventuring, is it a minor or medium magic item? It appears on both lists so can they choose or is it automatically the lower (or higher)? I can see circumstances where each of the two options might be better.

An item that appears on both lists should always default to the lesser. So a +1 sword would count as a minor magic item.

We've specifically NOT assigned direct gp values to how much a mine or any resource can bring in, since the game's economy has some disconnects between things like society economy and PC magic item economy.

Mines do nothing more than add to a kingdom's economy score, and when you make economy checks that helps you earn more Build Points. Mines aren't intended to fill PC pockets with gold, and they won't "play out" unless you want to houserule even more realism into the system.

...

TRY to resist allowing the PCs to mix gp and BP. Things will get messy if you do.

If the PCs want to buy an item that shows up for sale in one of their cities, they just buy the item with their own gp and that's that. Doesn't impact the kingdom at all, beyond opening up an empty item slot.

But you really REALLY should try to convey to the PCs that "BP" and "gp" are two different systems. We included methods to translate the two back and forth out of necessity, but if you can get away without crossing these streams, your campaign, I suspect, will be the healthier for it.

If you want gold mines to be worth more, it's a pretty simple thing to just change the economy bonus it grants up to +2 or more.

And here's the secret: we DID playtest these kingdom rules, but they're really still brand new. The longer a kingdom runs, the higher its scores are gonna get, and the more into weird unexplored territory you'll get. I'm REALLY curious (and a little nervous) to see where things end up in the long run at the end of the campaign. I'm relatively sure it's going to end up having kingdoms that are pretty stable and successful, but that's sort of the goal and the point. We don't want building a kingdom to be SO TOUGH that folks give up. And by the time "War of the River Kingdoms" begins, you'll probably be needing a LOT of BP to fund those armies and keep them going...

So what I'm saying is that if you think that a building or a resource needs to have different numbers... try out some changes! If things get to a point where you think things are getting too hard or too easy to run the kingdom, you as the GM have the power to have some event like a famine or a sudden run of good weather adjust the stats for the kingdoms any way you want to bring things back in line with what you want. As long as you couch these adjustments in the form of descriptive events during the Event phase, the ultimate success of a kingdom should be pretty easy to adjust.

You can attempt to sell a magic item once per Income phase per district.

So if you only have one city, you can only try to sell one item per Income phase. But if you have multiple cities (or a city of multiple districts) you can try to sell a magic item from EACH district.

Other

Command DC and Control DC are the same thing.

I think that's everything...