Timeline?

[wraithstrike]

Is the entire adventure path supposed to take place over the course of several years, or just a few months. I want mine to take place over several years, but I want to know about any potential side affects of me changing the timeline if I do.

[Lilith]

I believe the intention is several years.

[Jason Nelson]

The precisely correct and yet unhelpful answer is that it is intended to take as long as your players want it to take.

You can ignore almost all of the kingdom-building stuff, put it in the hands of friendly NPCs to chug along in the background while you adventure, and you can blow through the AP in a few months.

You can also spend literal decades in-game, managing your land, haring off every now and then to adventure, dealing with a threat here or a menace there, clearing out land, making alliances, taking side-treks here and there.

It absolutely will work for the campaign to take years, and is designed intentionally and specifically to allow that, but you can even push beyond "a few years" and really stretch it out if you like. Characters can grow and live, start families, have kids... shoot, if you wanted, you could rig a scenario where the original characters run the first couple of adventures and raise their kids up as adventurers exploring the wilderlands and leveling up and being the ones who carry out the latter adventures of the AP.

I think this is actually the trickiest part of expectation management with this AP - getting players out of the mindset that they have to rush, rush, rush through everything. There is no ticking time bomb. There IS stuff happening out in the world, but it happens at a fairly leisurely pace, and things can build and evolve over the course of many years in a perfectly logical and reasonable fashion that doesn't violate the plot or story concepts of the latter adventures.

[James Jacobs]

Jason is spot on. Kingmaker can take as long as you, the GM, want it to take. We're deliberately building it so that your PCs can burn through it in a few months if they wish, or they can take decades. The only assumption is that several key NPCs who've been mentioned elsewhere will ALSO be gaining levels as the PCs gain levels. For example:

Spoiler:

In "Guide to the River Kingdoms" we list Castruccio Irovetti, lord of Pitax, as a 9th level bard. When he finally makes a full-on appearance in "War of the River Kings," the 5th Kingmaker adventure, time has passed between "the current year" (which is what "Guide to the River Kingdoms" is a snapshot of) and wherever your specific Kingmaker game has advanced to and Irovetti will have gained quite a few more levels.

In any event, the idea is that you should pace Kingmaker so that time passes in-game at a rate you as the GM are comfortable with. The kingdom building rules give GMs a really handy tool to artificially pass time between key points in adventures, especially if your PCs are not the type to want to stop and craft items or otherwise not go on adventures. We even mention several times in adventure texts things like, "Now would be a good time to take a year off and let the PCs' kingdom grow a little bit".