Which books have just the rules necessary to do the kingmaker "thing"? Just the exploration and conquering rules and the like? My players are interested in kingmaker by style but home brew by definition.
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The second book, Rivers Run Red has all the Kingdom building rules. Exploration is in the first book, but it is basic and you can pretty much find it all in the core book or figure it out on your own, not sure you really need this one to make it work. Mass combat is in the fifth book, War of the River Kings.
The first adventure in Kingmaker (Stolen Lands) has a small section on how to do exploration. Most of it is fairly straightforward - how long it takes to travel across vs. fully explore a hex, stuff like that.
The second adventure has the Kingdom Building rules.
The fifth adventure has the mass combat rules, which are actually fairly basic.
The free download Kingmaker Player's Guide has some useful forms, too, including blank hex pages for filling in as the PCs explore, and icons for all the buildings that Paizo included in their rules (so some of the ones from the 3PP product, mentioned in the next paragraph, won't have graphics here).
An alternative - Do a Search for "Book of the River Nations" in Products - it's a third party version which includes all the open content rules for kingdom building, all compiled in one place, with some additional material (a small number of extra buildings and the like).
You may still want to get one or both of the first two Kingmaker adventures, just to get a sense of how these rules are applied in practice - the 3PP book (or at least the kingdom-building-and-exploration one that I got) doesn't necessarily explain much about Resource Hexes and the like, nor give guidance on how the DM should build an interesting hex map and distribute things for the PCs to discover, or what sorts of DCs are appropriate for finidng hidden locations.
IMO, it isn't the kingdom rules that make kingmaker "work". They don't feel fully developed to me, especially not the mass combat rules.
What makes Kingmaker work is the same as what makes the other APs work: adventure content. Only this time the adventure content is laid out as a kingdom/founding exploration adventure.
If you remove that content and homebrew, I'm not convinced you're going to end up with something better for using the KM rules. You could probably use it as a basis for whatever you home brewed, but having that big hex map and the key to what is in every hex laid out ahead of time... that is what makes KM works as a "sandbox".
You can definitely run the Kingmaker AP in a homebrew world. The stuff that's Golarion is very minor, and can be easily stripped out.
It would be a lot easier to do this than to purchase "Book of the River Nations" and then have to build your own hex maps, lay out all of the encounter areas as fleshed out as they are in the AP, etc. (Don't get me wrong - in the future, I will definitely be doing this. But as a first-look at the rules, it's better to have the areas plotted out for you.)
Which books have just the rules necessary to do the kingmaker "thing"? Just the exploration and conquering rules and the like? My players are interested in kingmaker by style but home brew by definition.
[commercial]
is exactly what you're looking for. It contains the exploration, kingdom building and mass combat rules as well as feats, spells, prestige classes/archetypes, and magic items that helps to rules regardless of where their kingdom is. Plus there's helpful tables, explanations and GMing notes for each of the new rules sections. The individual sections are currently available in PDF but the print book will be released in early/mid-May. And if you buy the print book, you get the PDF for free![/commercial]
An alternative - Do a Search for "Book of the River Nations" in Products - it's a third party version which includes all the open content rules for kingdom building, all compiled in one place, with some additional material (a small number of extra buildings and the like).
You may still want to get one or both of the first two Kingmaker adventures, just to get a sense of how these rules are applied in practice - the 3PP book (or at least the kingdom-building-and-exploration one that I got) doesn't necessarily explain much about Resource Hexes and the like, nor give guidance on how the DM should build an interesting hex map and distribute things for the PCs to discover, or what sorts of DCs are appropriate for finidng hidden locations.
I really appreciate you mentioning us Cintra. And you are right. We didn't do much in the way of explaining to a GM on how to build their own map. We wanted to, but we were limited by space of the print book. If the print book does well (and we believe it will), we'll do a follow up book in the future. Topic like building your own map, alternate environments (including planar), and a nation vs nation system (for things like spying, making treaties, sabatage, etc) are slated to be included within.
