Tell me about it. Every spam e-mail is like a dagger in my heart.
Just read through and I can't wait to apply the kingdom building to the stronghold in Hook Mountain Massacre, since my playgroup is running thorugh RotR.
The book mentioned the nation getting up to 200 hexes. When will these extra hexes be presented?
The book mentioned the nation getting up to 200 hexes. When will these extra hexes be presented?
Well, there are 77 hexes per area and there are 4 areas altogether, so we'll have 308 by the end of the AP.
Tell me about it. Every spam e-mail is like a dagger in my heart.
**dribbles on cover**
The book mentioned the nation getting up to 200 hexes. When will these extra hexes be presented?Well, there are 77 hexes per area and there are 4 areas altogether, so we'll have 308 by the end of the AP.
I'm a bit confused about what's going on here. What does it mean to "claim a hex" and "add it to the Kingdom"?
I see a three-stop process:
1) Explore a Hex
This is where your group of adventurers scouts over the 140-something square miles taking notes and making maps. You can do as many of these per month as your adventurers can crank out.
2) Claim the Hex
I have no idea what's going on in the fluff and what I will say to my players when they ask why they can't just claim all hexes they've already explored. (Instead of the rules which say only 1 per month.)
3) Clear the Hex
This is where you send out a team of a few dozen NPC workers to go out and "terraform" roughly a square mile of land: clearing trees, leveling the ground, digging wells, setting foundations, and everything else required to actually start putting up a city. This is limited to once every 2 or 3 months, depending on the terrian type, due to all the work involved.
Now, sometimes step 3 is replaced with "build a road" or "build a farm", but I think we all understand, fluff-wise, what that means.
So what is "claiming a hex" and why does it increase Consumption?
Creative Director
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Hey James,
I have a question about the mines in Kingmaker. I am assuming that since they are in hills that it will take 2 months to get them up and running, is this correct? After which time they add +1 to the kingdom's economy. How much actually wealth(gold, silver, wood, ect) do such resource sites put in the ecomony? If we use the 4,000gp = 1 BP model it would be nice to know how much our mines produce a month and how long they last until played out. Did I miss this somewhere?
Thanks for your help and your awesome products!
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.
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Creative Director
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I have to say that when I was looking at the first book and the gold mine in particular, I thought it would be a huge source of income for the PC's settlement but the rules in the second volume put all mines at +1 BP regardless of what they produce.I think I have my Sid Meier's Civilisation head on and want a gold mine to be more valuable.
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.
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4, Legendary Games
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The book mentioned the nation getting up to 200 hexes. When will these extra hexes be presented?Well, there are 77 hexes per area and there are 4 areas altogether, so we'll have 308 by the end of the AP.I'm a bit confused about what's going on here. What does it mean to "claim a hex" and "add it to the Kingdom"?
I see a three-stop process:
1) Explore a Hex
This is where your group of adventurers scouts over the 140-something square miles taking notes and making maps. You can do as many of these per month as your adventurers can crank out.
Yes, exactly right.
2) Claim the Hex
I have no idea what's going on in the fluff and what I will say to my players when they ask why they can't just claim all hexes they've already explored. (Instead of the rules which say only 1 per month.)
The real reason, of course, is because it's a game-mechanical limitation on the rate of expansion of the kingdom.
The in-game rationale, however, is that each time you claim a hex, you add it to the legal territory of your kingdom *AND* you add 250 settlers to your population as they settle the hex. During the course of a month, you can scour the wilderness like the mad wilderness fiends that you are, but a small beginning kingdom can actually only SETTLE that hex so fast. People need to be induced to move, to find the clear spots of land to build their homesteads, to build better homes and gardens.
If you like the sound better, you could rename "claim a hex" to "settle a hex."
3) Clear the Hex
This is where you send out a team of a few dozen NPC workers to go out and "terraform" roughly a square mile of land: clearing trees, leveling the ground, digging wells, setting foundations, and everything else required to actually start putting up a city. This is limited to once every 2 or 3 months, depending on the terrian type, due to all the work involved.Now, sometimes step 3 is replaced with "build a road" or "build a farm", but I think we all understand, fluff-wise, what that means.
Clearing a hex to build a city needn't replace building a road or building a farm - you can do them during the same turn (and, as your kingdom gets bigger, of course, you can do multiples of each).
As for understanding the fluff, I'd just make sure it is understood that "farm" doesn't mean a single farm, nor road a single road - it means you have developed a network of farms or roads throughout that hex.
The same is true in a city. If you build a "shop," it occupies a city square that is 750 feet on a side. That doesn't mean you just built a hardware store the size of a football stadium (including the parking lot). It means that you have built a neighborhood of small shops (and homes) where the focus of activity in that section of the city is on commerce.
So what is "claiming a hex" and why does it increase Consumption?
It's all about the settlers. They move in, establishing the hex as a hex owned by you, your kingdom, and your people.
BUT, those settlers also consume stuff. If you have your settlers build farms, and they compensate not only for their own consumption but also help balance that of others in the kingdom. Settlers in non-farm hexes aren't sustaining themselves, but they still gotta eat and get supplies from the rest of the kingdom.
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Creative Director
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Just read through and I can't wait to apply the kingdom building to the stronghold in Hook Mountain Massacre, since my playgroup is running thorugh RotR.
Cool! Because this kingdom building article is what I'd hoped to have available to run the Keep in Hook Mountain in the first place, but I didn't have the time to write it. Which was also what happened with Farshore in Savage Tide. It turned out to be a weirdly difficult concept for me to explain to other writers what I wanted it to do, for whatever reason.
But yeah; the rules should work perfectly for Hook Mountain Massacre.
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And what Jason said is spot on.
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.
Two (extended) questions:
1. How exactly does the founding of Tatzlford affect the PC's kingdom? It says Loy asks for support from the PCs but it doesn't specify what sort of support this entails. Do the PCs have to spend their own BPs to start building things there? Or will things already be there in future APs if/when the PCs include that hex in their kingdom and thus annex it?
2. If the PCs want to sell items, do they just get the BP bonus following the 1BP/4000gp rule? Otherwise, how do they know if a given item is minor, medium or major? Also - what happens if the PCs want to buy the items available in their city? In particular, does it have any effect on their treasury?
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I'm assuming that the 250 new settlers that arrive after you've 'claimed a hex' during the course of the month are coming in from Brevoy?
If you like, they can. Some might be squatters or trappers who decide to settle down. Others might move in from Mivon or Pitax or might come up the river from parts south when they hear about a new kingdom taking root out in the wilderlands. They could be people heading to or from Mendev as part of the crusade who decide they like the opportunities better in your kingdom than up on the front lines of the crusade and decide to stop halfway there.
There's plenty of precedent for this kind of settling in U.S. History - people setting out along the Oregon Trail, for instance, but deciding that "this river valley right here seems like a pretty good spot" and never getting to their intended destination, but instead dropping stakes where they found a good spot (or a new town or county or whatever).
Brevoy is certainly closest source for settlers, but you needn't limit yourself to assuming they'd be the only source.
First, thank you very much for your reponse to my Claming question - it makes great sense.
I'm assuming that the 250 new settlers that arrive after you've 'claimed a hex' during the course of the month are coming in from Brevoy?If you like, they can. Some might be squatters or trappers who decide to settle down. Others might move in from Mivon or Pitax or might come up the river from parts south when they hear about a new kingdom taking root out in the wilderlands. They could be people heading to or from Mendev as part of the crusade who decide they like the opportunities better in your kingdom than up on the front lines of the crusade and decide to stop halfway there.
The existance of Pitax/Mivon brings up another question. How far south can the PCs travel or settle before things start to get dicey? I recognize that book #4 deals with that concept a little bit, but while we're waiting for that, what should we tell the PCs? How far is it from the south end of the map to the nearest Mivon settlement, or Mivon road? Logically, there should be some sort of Oleg's-counterpart somewhere down there, right? What provides for a logical lower-bound beyond running out of graph paper?
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Two (extended) questions:
1. How exactly does the founding of Tatzlford affect the PC's kingdom? It says Loy asks for support from the PCs but it doesn't specify what sort of support this entails. Do the PCs have to spend their own BPs to start building things there? Or will things already be there in future APs if/when the PCs include that hex in their kingdom and thus annex it?
If their territory extends over to that hex, they will be able to start the town using the regular rules for clearing and founding the city and building stuff there, with the free building as described in the module.
Alternatively, if their territory does not connect to it or they don't want to spend the BP to get involved in it, Loy will go ahead and found the town anyway as an independent town outside their borders. If they expand over next to it, they will have the ability to try annexing it later.
If you like, you can also bend the rules a bit, depending on what the PCs have done and whether you want to throw them a little bone for in-game niceness. IMC, the PCs had helped out Jhod Kavken earlier in the adventure, and he later offered to the PCs to help found a town over by the Temple of the Elk. It had the ruined temple (so half price for that), but he also rounded up some other Erastil followers and offered to clear the territory for them to make it ready for a city. The PCs still had to expand through the woods to an adjacent hex, but by the time they did it Jhod and his crew had prepped the hex for founding a city.
They still had to spend the BP to build roads out there, to actually found the city district, build things, etc., but they got the "clear a hex (forest)" at no cost in actions or BP to them. You could do something similar with Tatzlford.
2. If the PCs want to sell items, do they just get the BP bonus following the 1BP/4000gp rule? Otherwise, how do they know if a given item is minor, medium or major? Also - what happens if the PCs want to buy the items available in their city? In particular, does it have any effect on their treasury?
1. Officially, all minor items are worth 2 BP when sold, medium 8 BP, and major 15 BP. That division of items is based on the magic item tables in the RPG (table 15-2, p. 461).
Unofficially, that's a lotta BP - by the value ratio, it's much higher than the average gp value of a minor item (around 1100 or so, or about 0.25 BP), medium item (I think around 12000, or 3 BP), or major item (about 30000, or 8.5 BP). IMC I just had value accrue based on actual price of items, and every time that number hit 4000 they got a BP. The rest of the value just stayed "in the bank" until the next month's item sales.
2. PCs can always buy stuff that is for sale. This doesn't count against the number of items you can sell using Economy checks.
3. There *is* no treasury per se, unless your players decide to set aside cash to spend for kingdom purposes. The kingdom runs on a BP economy. Your BP has value, but it is value mostly in raw materials - livestock, lumber, tools, real estate, seed, plows, wagons, weapons, ore, all sorts of tangible goods. You can use that wealth to "buy" buildings and plant farms and build roads... but you can't use it to buy gems and magic items.
When I first got the kingdom rules I thought prices for buildings and such were a little high - 3 BP for building houses, that's 12,000 gp! Holy cow! But then I thought about it, and given the size of a city square, and assuming fairly modest houses with small yards, like enough space for a garden and such... and you probably have a little over 100 houses per city square. So each house is only 120 gp, which is actually pretty cheap, comparable to a horse and wagon and the attendant gear.
For about the same price, you can claim a grassland hex and plant farms, and you have just carpeted around 150 square miles with cropland at a cost of less than 10 gp per square mile.
Still, that's not a pile of gold ingots sitting in the middle of your neighborhood or your farmland. It's wealth, and it continues to produce wealth through the output of hundreds of citizens toiling at the small tasks of the day, baking bricks and making nails and hauling wagons. Your treasury is mostly in non-liquid goods.
If you want to have cash money in the bank, PCs will need to put it there as gp, not as BP.
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Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4, Legendary Games
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First, thank you very much for your reponse to my Claming question - it makes great sense.
The existance of Pitax/Mivon brings up another question. How far south can the PCs travel or settle before things start to get dicey? I recognize that book #4 deals with that concept a little bit, but while we're waiting for that, what should we tell the PCs? How far is it from the south end of the map to the nearest Mivon settlement, or Mivon road? Logically, there should be some sort of Oleg's-counterpart somewhere down there, right? What provides for a logical lower-bound beyond running out of graph paper?I'm assuming that the 250 new settlers that arrive after you've 'claimed a hex' during the course of the month are coming in from Brevoy?If you like, they can. Some might be squatters or trappers who decide to settle down. Others might move in from Mivon or Pitax or might come up the river from parts south when they hear about a new kingdom taking root out in the wilderlands. They could be people heading to or from Mendev as part of the crusade who decide they like the opportunities better in your kingdom than up on the front lines of the crusade and decide to stop halfway there.
You can look at the Guide to the River Kingdoms and eyeball it, but there's no exact answer other than "that's not in the module, so you'll need to make it up as you go along."
To the southwest, between Pitax and Mivon, is a borderland area of fine wineries around a town called Sarain. My original draft for KM #5 dealt with PCs going there and them (as representatives of their kingdom) being drawn into a border dispute between their two neighbors over this borderland (which also would be bordering on their own territory)... and much violence ensued.
But, the adventure ended up going a different direction so that it could stay on the map!
That's the danger of using premade products. They cover what they cover; you go off the map, and you're into "unleash your creativity" territory. You'll need to come up with some rationale for why your PCs can't or shouldn't go there. The approach the AP takes is to *draw* their attention to the east and to the west with stuff going on there, so that they won't be entirely at their leisure to just wander off to the south. Give them a shiny enough lure, and they'll go where you want them to go. By the end of the AP, you may have some ideas of where to go next once they've filled up the map that you have.
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Creative Director
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First, thank you very much for your reponse to my Claming question - it makes great sense.
The existance of Pitax/Mivon brings up another question. How far south can the PCs travel or settle before things start to get dicey? I recognize that book #4 deals with that concept a little bit, but while we're waiting for that, what should we tell the PCs? How far is it from the south end of the map to the nearest Mivon settlement, or Mivon road? Logically, there should be some sort of Oleg's-counterpart somewhere down there, right? What provides for a logical lower-bound beyond running out of graph paper?I'm assuming that the 250 new settlers that arrive after you've 'claimed a hex' during the course of the month are coming in from Brevoy?If you like, they can. Some might be squatters or trappers who decide to settle down. Others might move in from Mivon or Pitax or might come up the river from parts south when they hear about a new kingdom taking root out in the wilderlands. They could be people heading to or from Mendev as part of the crusade who decide they like the opportunities better in your kingdom than up on the front lines of the crusade and decide to stop halfway there.
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.
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Creative Director
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Two (extended) questions:
1. How exactly does the founding of Tatzlford affect the PC's kingdom? It says Loy asks for support from the PCs but it doesn't specify what sort of support this entails. Do the PCs have to spend their own BPs to start building things there? Or will things already be there in future APs if/when the PCs include that hex in their kingdom and thus annex it?
2. If the PCs want to sell items, do they just get the BP bonus following the 1BP/4000gp rule? Otherwise, how do they know if a given item is minor, medium or major? Also - what happens if the PCs want to buy the items available in their city? In particular, does it have any effect on their treasury?
Jason did a great job answering these questions, but I'd like to hammer down a point a little bit more.
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.
We have THOUSANDS of subscribers to the Adventure Path, and as a result it takes several days for us to ship them out. And since the PDF doesn't show up in your downloads until the day we ship the physical copy to you, the exact day a PDF shows up can vary over several days, especially if the shipping process happens before and after a weekend.\
My PDF file has been available since Friday, but I never received a notification that the physical copy had shipped. Does that mean it hasn't shipped yet and I got the PDF early somehow? Or was it one of those before-and-after a weekend things you mentioned?
Thanks Jason and James - that clears up a lot.
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 +2 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.
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Creative Director
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My PDF file has been available since Friday, but I never received a notification that the physical copy had shipped. Does that mean it hasn't shipped yet and I got the PDF early somehow? Or was it one of those before-and-after a weekend things you mentioned?
We have THOUSANDS of subscribers to the Adventure Path, and as a result it takes several days for us to ship them out. And since the PDF doesn't show up in your downloads until the day we ship the physical copy to you, the exact day a PDF shows up can vary over several days, especially if the shipping process happens before and after a weekend.\
I would contact customer service with that sort of question—that's not something I have the insight into answering, alas.
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Creative Director
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Thanks Jason and James - that clears up a lot.
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.
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And what Jason said is spot on.
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.
Just so I understand the initial kingdom building here is my best guess.
Month one I claim Oleg's as my first hex. Month two I claim a hex south and build a building at my first city-Oleg's(grassland so no extra clearance time). I can also build a road at Oleg's but no farm yet as a city is in my only hex right now. Month three I build another building at Oleg's, claim a third hex, build a road in hex two and establish a farm. Rinse and repeat. Do I have that right?
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Question for you James. I am debating having some of the larger structures take more than a month to complete (castle, arena, cathedral, etc..). Maybe 1 month per square the structure occupies (castles could take years to construct historically but not trying to emulate that exactly). Is there a reason, other than simplicity that you did not do this? I'm also thinking of having buildings that can be upgraded over time (outpost->keep->castle->fortress or shrine->church->cathedral).
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Creative Director
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Just so I understand the initial kingdom building here is my best guess.
Month one I claim Oleg's as my first hex. Month two I claim a hex south and build a building at my first city-Oleg's(grassland so no extra clearance time). I can also build a road at Oleg's but no farm yet as a city is in my only hex right now. Month three I build another building at Oleg's, claim a third hex, build a road in hex two and establish a farm. Rinse and repeat. Do I have that right?
Yup!
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Creative Director
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Question for you James. I am debating having some of the larger structures take more than a month to complete (castle, arena, cathedral, etc..). Maybe 1 month per square the structure occupies (castles could take years to construct). Is there a reason, other than simplicity that you did not do this? I'm also thinking of having buildings that can be upgraded over time (outpost->keep->castle->fortress or shrine->church->cathedral).
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.
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Thanks Jason and James - that clears up a lot.
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 +2 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.
The way I run it is that the economy rolls to sell items ONLY count for items that are generated by your buildings.
Any magic stuff that you find in treasure and want to sell and add to the kingdom, you sell for its normal sale value and it's treated as a cash donation to the kingdom, which uses the 4000 gp/1 BP conversion rate.
So, if you sell a +2 shortsword, you get 4155, so you get 1 BP, plus 155 towards your next BP.
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Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4, Legendary Games
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And what Jason said is spot on.
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.
Just so I understand the initial kingdom building here is my best guess.
Month one I claim Oleg's as my first hex. Month two I claim a hex south and build a building at my first city-Oleg's(grassland so no extra clearance time). I can also build a road at Oleg's but no farm yet as a city is in my only hex right now. Month three I build another building at Oleg's, claim a third hex, build a road in hex two and establish a farm. Rinse and repeat. Do I have that right?
Month one you claim Oleg's.
Month one you can found a city in Oleg's.Month one you can build a building at Oleg's (plus a house, of which you can build one for free, PLUS the free building you get for founding a city at Oleg's).
Think of it like feats. Say you're a 1st level fighter. You get two feats. You take Power Attack, and then you take Cleave. You have to take PA "before" you take Cleave, but it doesn't mean you have to take it at an earlier level. As soon as you qualify for Cleave you can take it, as long as you meet the prereqs (i.e., (1) have an open feat slot, and (2) also have PA, which already requires (2a) 13 STR).
Same thing with founding a city at Oleg's. As soon as you claim the hex, you qualify to found a city; as soon as you found a city, you qualify to build a building.
Month 1: claim Oleg's hex, build Oleg city, build building of your choice at Oleg's, build house (if you want) at Oleg's, get free building at Oleg's (stable, tannery, or shop I think are the choices), build road in Oleg's hex (although the map does show that part of the South Rostland Road does pass through the hex, so it wouldn't be too crazy to give the PCs a free road in that hex).
Month 2: claim hex next door, build farm in hex next door, build road in hex next door, build building at Oleg's
rinse, repeat until you found a second city.
Thanks Jason and James - that clears up a lot.
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 +2 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.
The way I run it is that the economy rolls to sell items ONLY count for items that are generated by your buildings.
Any magic stuff that you find in treasure and want to sell and add to the kingdom, you sell for its normal sale value and it's treated as a cash donation to the kingdom, which uses the 4000 gp/1 BP conversion rate.
So, if you sell a +2 shortsword, you get 4155, so you get 1 BP, plus 155 towards your next BP.
Hmm.. I think given what James was saying above about 'not crossing the streams that the cash from selling the item goes into the PCs pockets as GP rather than BP.
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Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4, Legendary Games
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Thanks very much for the quick answer James. I'll have to mull it over some more (we haven't started the campaign yet) but I thought it might be something like what you said.
In looking at the possibility of doing an upgrade method of buildings when we started using the kingdom rules a few months back, I did work out a structure of "upgrades" for buildings. In the end, we decided NOT to use any of the rule ideas that follow, but if you're interested, you could go one of two ways:
1. CONVERSION: You MAY convert a building into a more advanced version by using a turn's "build a building" action and paying the difference in BP.
Example: You can convert an Herbalist (10 BP) into an Alchemist (18 BP) by spending 8 BP.
2. PREREQUISITE: You MUST build a basic version of a building before you can build a more advanced one. You can build them separately (e.g., if you already have a Shop, you can build a separate Luxury Shop) or convert one into the other (as #2). Once you have built a prereq building, you can build as many advanced versions as you like; you do not have to convert them from lesser versions. An advanced version still counts as all prerequisite versions of itself.
Satisfying prerequisites is on a city-by-city basis; building more advanced buildings is not a matter of technological possibility but of economic and logistical buildup from one stage to the next within a community.
Example: You build a Shop (8 BP). You can convert it into a Luxury Store (28 BP) by spending 20 BP or you can keep the Shop and build a separate Luxury Store at full price.
If you want to build a Market (which requires Shop as a prereq), the Luxury Store still counts as a Shop for satisfying the prereq.
BASIC BUILDINGS: These are buildings you can make at any time in your city (though many require you to have at least one house adjacent to them; tenements count as houses).
Barracks - allows Castle, Garrison, Jail
Brewery
Brothel (Next to house)
City Wall
Dump (Not next to house)
Granary
Graveyard (Not next to house)
Herbalist - allows Alchemist (Next to house)
House - allows Mansion
Inn (Next to house)
Library - allows Academy
Mill (Next to water)
Monument
Park - allows Theater
Piers (Next to water)
Shop - allows Luxury Shop, Market (Next to house)
Shrine - allows Temple
Smith
Stable (Next to house)
Tannery (Not next to house)
Tavern (Next to house)
Tenement - allows House (Counts as a house)
Town Hall
Tradesman - allows Exotic Craftsman, Guildhall (Next to house)
Watchtower - allows Castle
INTERMEDIATE BUILDINGS: These buildings require you to have built a previous building, and most allow you to build in turn an Advanced Building.
Alchemist - requires Herbalist, allows Caster's Tower (house)
Exotic Craftsman - requires Tradesman (house)
Garrison - requires Barracks, allows Castle
Guildhall - requires Tradesman (house)
Jail - requires Barracks
Luxury Store - requires Shop, allows Magic Shop
Mansion - requires House, allows Noble Villa
Market - requires Shop, allows Black Market (2 houses)
Temple - requires Shrine, allows Cathedral
Theater - requires Park, allows Arena
Waterfront - requires Piers (water)
ADVANCED BUILDINGS: These buildings require you to have built one or more adjacent buildings, and you expand, convert, and even combine them into the final building.
Academy - requires Library
Arena - requires Theater
Black Market - requires Market (2 houses)
Caster’s Tower - requires Alchemist
Castle - requires Barracks, Watchtower
Cathedral - requires Temple
Magic Shop - requires Luxury Shop (2 houses)
Noble Villa - requires Mansion
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Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4, Legendary Games
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Hmm.. I think given what James was saying above about 'not crossing the streams that the cash from selling the item goes into the PCs pockets as GP rather than BP.Thanks Jason and James - that clears up a lot.
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 +2 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.
The way I run it is that the economy rolls to sell items ONLY count for items that are generated by your buildings.
Any magic stuff that you find in treasure and want to sell and add to the kingdom, you sell for its normal sale value and it's treated as a cash donation to the kingdom, which uses the 4000 gp/1 BP conversion rate.
So, if you sell a +2 shortsword, you get 4155, so you get 1 BP, plus 155 towards your next BP.
Any way you want to account for it will work fine. On one level, it would make all items less than 4000 gp sale price useless for BP purposes... EXCEPT for the fact that the PCs can just bank the cash from the sale of such items in their own pocket and then dump it into the treasury during the next econ phase of any turn when the cash register hits the magic 4000 gp number.
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Creative Director
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Any way you want to account for it will work fine. On one level, it would make all items less than 4000 gp sale price useless for BP purposes... EXCEPT for the fact that the PCs can just bank the cash from the sale of such items in their own pocket and then dump it into the treasury during the next econ phase of any turn when the cash register hits the magic 4000 gp number.
Also, having been a player in Jason's campaigns before... I can vouch for his ability to handle complexity. The guy eats it up like it's some sort of weird candy. Simplification is not needed for a Jason Nelson Game.
Oh, and watch out for hook horrors. Those guys are TREACHEROUS.
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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.
Suggestion: for the >1 square stuff, you could explain the difference in that Brevoy sends teams of engineers/builders to assist; once the territory is cleared/secured, in a world where stone shape spells exist, imagination is the limiting factor...
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Good stuff there Jason. Thank you for providing the conversion and building list. I too do not shy away from complexity if it helps me flesh out the world as long as it remains fun. I guess what I am really shooting for is when war comes to the PC's city they will think very long and hard about how they want to defend it because it really is a creation they put a lot of time, love, and effort into. That and it being a living breathing thing to them.
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Suggestion: for the >1 square stuff, you could explain the difference in that Brevoy sends teams of engineers/builders to assist; once the territory is cleared/secured, in a world where stone shape spells exist, imagination is the limiting factor...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.
One point diverging significantly from reality in the building rules is that you have to pay the BP cost for a building up front.
That means if you start to build a cathedral (58 BP), you already have all the material (stone, wood, iron, workforce, ...) available.In reality, the construction of cathedrals often stopped for several years while they were trying to raise new funds.
You could house-rule that it is possible to start construction of a building without having the full BP amount, and continuing as you have BPs to spare. This way, you could construct a cathedral in 58 months by spending 1 BP each month.
Of course this would introduce a lot of error-prone bookkeeping.
I was also thinking about house-ruling that for each city district in a kingdom, there must be 1 claimed forest hex.
This represents the need of firewood and wood for construction, and would add another aspect of realism and resource management.
It also leads to possible tensions with the good and neutral fey living in the forest...
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Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4, Legendary Games
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I was also thinking about house-ruling that for each city district in a kingdom, there must be 1 claimed forest hex.
This represents the need of firewood and wood for construction, and would add another aspect of realism and resource management.
It also leads to possible tensions with the good and neutral fey living in the forest...
That's an interesting idea. I might phrase it this way:
That way, it feels less punitive (you MUST have a forest to have a city), but does give a motivation to claim forest hexes as well as farmable ones.
It still doesn't help much with making swamps or mountains appealing to claim, but we got time to think about it.
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Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4, Legendary Games
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Good stuff there Jason. Thank you for providing the conversion and building list.
Thanks - hope you and others find it interesting. I came up with this list after we transitioned from the draft rules to the final ones and put it to a player vote as to whether we wanted to implement it, and in the end the votes were to keep it simple(r), but if you started with it from the get-go people might not mind it.
I too do not shy away from complexity if it helps me flesh out the world as long as it remains fun. I guess what I am really shooting for is when war comes to the PC's city
On the subject of war and city walls, let me just say this: Yes, by the rules the city district puts walls on one or more sides of the grid. DON'T TRY TO ENFORCE THIS LITERALLY IF THE CITY IS ATTACKED. Obviously, it would be retarded if a city had a wall on only one side. It would be useless, as the enemy would just go around it. The City Wall improvement offers +4 (if I'm remembering right) defense to the city. Assume it is a wall that goes around whatever buildings there are in the city. If you build "two city walls," the wall is higher, or thicker, or both. If you build three or four city walls in a city district, perhaps in actuality it is a set of concentric walls or subdivided walled districts. Just please, for the love of Gorum, don't say "well, you just have one city wall, so the enemy ignores it."
they will think very long and hard about how they want to defend it because it really is a creation they put a lot of time, love, and effort into. That and it being a living breathing thing to them.
It's an interesting balance to work through. One of my players wants to draw more free-form pictures/maps of the cities. Others are more interested in just filling out the city grid and crunching the numbers. It depends on how your players approach the kingdom side of the game.
If you give them the kingdom-building rules, they are more likely to approach it from a numbers perspective. It's a game, and they want to play, and they want to know the rules of the game. On the down side, they may get bored with it if it feels like an accounting exercise.
If you keep the kingdom-building rules secret from them, or only give them partial information on how they work, they are more likely to approach it organically, making decisions based on flavor rather than numbers. On the down side, they may get frustrated if they feel like they are getting screwed on the mechanics because you are withholding information.
Know your players and how they play, and revisit the issue as you go along. If it gets to be a drag, adjust or else kick the kingdom into the background for a while. That's the beauty of the sandbox adventure; there is always stuff for the PCs to explore or to KILL if you need to nudge them out of the throne room!
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Creative Director
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One point diverging significantly from reality in the building rules is that you have to pay the BP cost for a building up front.
That means if you start to build a cathedral (58 BP), you already have all the material (stone, wood, iron, workforce, ...) available.
In reality, the construction of cathedrals often stopped for several years while they were trying to raise new funds.
You could house-rule that it is possible to start construction of a building without having the full BP amount, and continuing as you have BPs to spare. This way, you could construct a cathedral in 58 months by spending 1 BP each month.
Of course this would introduce a lot of error-prone bookkeeping.
While that's certainly an interesting way to handle things, it's not the way that everyone plays the game. Especially when magic gets involved.
But if it works for your game... go for it! Kingmaker is open-ended enough that it should be able to handle a campaign of any length of time, but if you let things stretch out TOO long, you'll find your characters dying of old age. While that might make for an interesting campaign, with each of the 6 modules basically being played by a new generation of PCs (and facing a new generation of enemies), that's WAY beyond the scope of what we figured most groups will do.
I'd certainly be interested in hearing how such an excessively long-term Kingmaker campaign plays out, though!
One point diverging significantly from reality in the building rules is that you have to pay the BP cost for a building up front.
That means if you start to build a cathedral (58 BP), you already have all the material (stone, wood, iron, workforce, ...) available.
In reality, the construction of cathedrals often stopped for several years while they were trying to raise new funds.
You could house-rule that it is possible to start construction of a building without having the full BP amount, and continuing as you have BPs to spare. This way, you could construct a cathedral in 58 months by spending 1 BP each month.
Of course this would introduce a lot of error-prone bookkeeping.
While that's certainly an interesting way to handle things, it's not the way that everyone plays the game. Especially when magic gets involved.
But if it works for your game... go for it! Kingmaker is open-ended enough that it should be able to handle a campaign of any length of time, but if you let things stretch out TOO long, you'll find your characters dying of old age. While that might make for an interesting campaign, with each of the 6 modules basically being played by a new generation of PCs (and facing a new generation of enemies), that's WAY beyond the scope of what we figured most groups will do.
I'd certainly be interested in hearing how such an excessively long-term Kingmaker campaign plays out, though!
It was more of an academic consideration... the rules as written are great in my eyes, and I would use them with only minor changes in a campaign.
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I'd certainly be interested in hearing how such an excessively long-term Kingmaker campaign plays out, though!
Hi James, are campaign journals a good way to give the Paizo team some feedback about the adventure paths, or is it preferable for you guys to receive shorter, (but less detailed) reports about our gameplay?
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Creative Director
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I'd certainly be interested in hearing how such an excessively long-term Kingmaker campaign plays out, though!Hi James, are campaign journals a good way to give the Paizo team some feedback about the adventure paths, or is it preferable for you guys to receive shorter, (but less detailed) reports about our gameplay?
Shorter reports are MUCH better for us.
The discussion in this thread has so far tended to be almost exclusively about kingdom building (and it has been a *wonderful* discussion that I hope continues at the same level!), however these threads are traditionally used to discuss GMing the various plot elements and encounters of a module. Eventually, we'll want to discuss those.
If I may make a humble suggestion: have two stickies for "Rivers Run Red": one for kingdom building, and another for more scenario-specific questions. I feel we'll be running over each other too much if I started to ask questions about how best to run the attack of the owlbear, for example.
And again, thanks for all these amazing mechanics. I am *itching* to get into this stuff at table! Slow PCs...
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Creative Director
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The discussion in this thread has so far tended to be almost exclusively about kingdom building (and it has been a *wonderful* discussion that I hope continues at the same level!), however these threads are traditionally used to discuss GMing the various plot elements and encounters of a module. Eventually, we'll want to discuss those.
If I may make a humble suggestion: have two stickies for "Rivers Run Red": one for kingdom building, and another for more scenario-specific questions. I feel we'll be running over each other too much if I started to ask questions about how best to run the attack of the owlbear, for example.
And again, thanks for all these amazing mechanics. I am *itching* to get into this stuff at table! Slow PCs...
Good idea. I'll make a Sticky Kingdom Thread. That sounds gross.