Hello fellow roleplayers.
I have been brewing my own campaign for a long time. The campaign is about exploring a new continent in Golarion and the kingdom building part of KM will be used. But I find many quests and the plotline very very good.
So my question for you guys are, is there some parts, NPC's, quests or other things in the Kingmaker Campaign that you find really bad, problematic or just absoluteley fantastic?
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A common GM
A lot of the side quests are wonky. Fortunately they're usually easy to alter.
It's very easy to introduce your own material
Exploration becomes less interesting after book 3, particularly since very few random monsters are even a challenge to the party any more. Also, there's too much empty space where nothing is happening on the third and fourth maps. Figure out what you want to do with that.
You really need to foreshadow Book 6 a lot more. Play up the fey and "she is coming " angle, as well as Nyrissas's involvement with the lesser villains.
Two edged sword : this is great for PCs with building-type goals (found a school, own land, build a city, etc., etc.). They have a lot of chance to do things. If nobody is interested in that sort of thing, maybe you should be playing a different Adventure Path.
Discourage people from treating the kingdom building rules as a mathematical min maxing method. Really discourage that. Play up "what do people want" and a certain amount of chaotic tendencies in kingdom growth. One way might be to grant each PC a city/area to develop and let them fight it out over "their" area.
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First question: Have you every played a Civilization computer game?
If yes, skip to **. If no, keep reading
So in any of the Civilization games, eventually you hit the end of the game, and you're running 20 some odd cities, 40+ land units, 10+ water units, are building a ship to another planet and each turn is taking 12 hours because you have to wait for everyone to move. It turns into this slow, drawn out long winded game of moving tiny things and building up queues and really wish that France and India would stop invading each other just so that turns would go quicker.
** The end of Kingmaker is like that for kingdom building. Your players will take 1/2 an hour to get through one round of kingdom building. They will have more Build Points than they'll know what to do with. Plan on rolling a LOT of random magic items.
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I find the suggestion in Stolen Land to limit encounters in hexes to 1 or 2 per day to be unrealistic and just asking for metagaming from your players (we only get 1 or 2 encounters per day, so I can blow all my spells). This is a wild land, there should be more encounters, even if a lot of them are with wildlife that (hopefully) won't lead to combat.
I agree with tonyz on the kingdom building. One suggestion I've seen on the boards that I like is to not give the players access to the specific bonuses they get from the various buildings until they actually build that building in their city. Not only will it hopefully curtail the metagaming a bit, but how would a character know the bonus a graveyard will give his city until he builds one and sees the impact it has? (even then, you could require some kind of roll for the character to figure out this correlation) I wouldn't suggest completely keeping the rules out of the players' hands (that's why I love the above suggestion) as that's a lot of the fun of kingdom building. I would do all I could to encourage the players focus on building a city that MAKES SENSE as opposed to trying to min-max or optimize it.
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Whenever I see the title to this thread I just want to break out in song, what is bad? Bad, Bad, Leeroy Brown, badest man in the whole downtown, badder than a junkyard dog, meaner than old king kong.
Anyway if I ever ran this AP again I would toughen up the 1 a day encouters starting in book 2, they are simlpy to easy. I wouuld remove the magic items generating income rules and replace it with some trade rules with neighboring kingdoms, I would cahnge the kingdome DC with a flat DC for some events. The way it is if the party is careful they will always make those DC rolls unless they roll a 1 (auto failure)
The only thing that really bothers me with Kingmaker are the stereotyped big bad bosses.
For example, The Stag Lord. Why write such huge amounts of background information for an NPC just to make him very very one-dimensional? You can, of course, alter his history. But why then hasn't he been made into something more interesting in the first place?
I have skimmed through all the other modules and it seems that in them the Big Baddies abound. This is a matter of personal flavor, because as a GM I enjoy hard moral choices more over the cliched good/bad axis. And some them are even present in KM, for example the nixie vs. wood cutter -problem in River Run Red. I just would've liked to see more of those, that's all.
But this is a small issue, because otherwise KM is just plain great.
Thank you so much everyone! This was really a great help!
I hope my homebrewed campaign with help from Kingmaker will be a great succes!
The moral choices are usually with the secondary plots. Akiros. Grigori. The centaurs in Varnhold. It goes on...
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I don't have a lot of bad things to say about Kingmaker my players and I have been having a grand old time. Just be prepared to put some work in and insert adventures of your own devising every so often. I do Kingdom building in chunks between books, anywhere between 18-36 months at a time. Dropping short 6-Room vignette adventures in every so often.
I changed the magic items to provide a +1, +2 and +5 bonus to the end of turn economy roll for minor, medium or major items respectively.
You can look at other alterations I've made by searching for Kingmaker Toolbox, Hargulka's Monster Kingdom, Dudemeister's Varnhold Vanishing and Dudemeister's Blood For Blood.
The new rules subsystems didn't get a lot of playtesting. If your group needs bullet-proof rules, you had better not use them unless you have a chance to vet them *heavily*. This is true for both the kingdom building and army combat rules.
There are a lot of easily liftable mini-adventures in KM and we enjoyed almost all of them. I personally did not like module 3 as much because the BBG's actions made no sense to me--this can be fixed but not easily. The BBG of module 5 is interesting in himself but his castle is not--I'd figure out a way to tell the PCs where to go as you do NOT want them trying to map that morass of small empty rooms.
As others have said, the large rewards for small quests make no sense, but this is easy to fix. I also agree that if you use the KM maps you should flesh out the later ones to the same detail level as the first one. That first map is a really nice piece of work with something interesting in almost every hex.
The random encounter tables have a few things on them that really cannot be random (d4 adult dragons, hm?) and you should either remove those or figure out where they live. Otherwise it feels really fake when they show up in the middle of the kingdom with no history or lair or food source apparent.
By the way, the stand-alone module _Fellnight Queen_ goes really well with KM and can help flesh out the faeries.
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My only real disappointments with the AP are the fact that the player's guide and everything we read gave this buildup about Brevoy and its politics, etc, then did nothing with it. As written, there is very little interaction with Brevoy. Maybe this was because they didn't want to tempt GMs to squash their player's kingdom with Brevoy, but I think it was a huge missed opportunity. I mean, what are the odds we are going to see an in-Brevoy AP anytime soon? Probably close to nil. The other thing was something Tonyz mentioned, the kingdom building rules were very math and formula oriented. I would have preferred more organic and player involvement in the system, and less reliance on magic item sales.
I think this AP gets mixed reviews sometimes because players and/or GMs are sometimes not clear about what it is and is not. This AP requires time to prepare and time to play, and neither should be rushed. Its more of a Noah's ark than a fast sloop. If your group/GM prefers railroady, canned type APs, this is not one of those. This seems to be the main problem some GMs/groups have reported here on the forums. .
This IMO is not an AP for inexperienced or busy GM. If a GM takes the quests, NPCs, background, storyline and uses them as tools and raw materials to make his or her own campaign, then I think they have gotten the most out of Kingmaker you can get.
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A lot of the side quests are wonky. Fortunately they're usually easy to alter.
It's very easy to introduce your own material
Exploration becomes less interesting after book 3, particularly since very few random monsters are even a challenge to the party any more. Also, there's too much empty space where nothing is happening on the third and fourth maps. Figure out what you want to do with that.
You really need to foreshadow Book 6 a lot more. Play up the fey and "she is coming " angle, as well as Nyrissas's involvement with the lesser villains.
Two edged sword : this is great for PCs with building-type goals (found a school, own land, build a city, etc., etc.). They have a lot of chance to do things. If nobody is interested in that sort of thing, maybe you should be playing a different Adventure Path.
Discourage people from treating the kingdom building rules as a mathematical min maxing method. Really discourage that. Play up "what do people want" and a certain amount of chaotic tendencies in kingdom growth. One way might be to grant each PC a city/area to develop and let them fight it out over "their" area.
There are a lot of little adjustments that are made to tailor every module. KM is no different. It's sandbox style, necessitates a GM to be extra prepared. Foreshadowing is also lacking as written so again the GM needs to do a little more homework.
As a DM, my biggest gripe with the Kingmaker campaign is the kingdom building rules. Which is a bit sad, since a lot of the campaign is about it. They are cumbersome and quickly grows very broken, with the scores racking up high, the BP keeps flowing in and every kingdom building phase becoming a chore. I ultimately decided to remove it entirely and just narrate everything that happens, because the kingdom building was just a needless timesink.
However, I love my players being the lords of the place, and I enjoy introducing all manner of quests and events they have to take care of. Being kings and lords is good roleplaying, and that is why I enjoy this AP so much.
Obviously the Barbarians need to be replaces with natives
Obviously. Because what could be more fun than colonizing a new continent and exterminating any indigenous cultures you come across?
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Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4, Legendary Games
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Obviously the Barbarians need to be replaces with nativesObviously. Because what could be more fun than colonizing a new continent and exterminating any indigenous cultures you come across?
Is there somewhere in Kingmaker where you exterminate all the barbarians you come across? I must have missed that part of the AP.
Is there somewhere in Kingmaker where you exterminate all the barbarians you come across? I must have missed that part of the AP.Obviously the Barbarians need to be replaces with nativesObviously. Because what could be more fun than colonizing a new continent and exterminating any indigenous cultures you come across?
I think it's more "making white Viking analogues the bad guy is okay; making native analogues the bad guy is not PC". *rolleyes*
I wouldn't call Kellid's white Viking analogs. Kellids are more classic Howard/Pulp Cimmerian Barbarians. Vikings/Nordic are basically Skalds.
True. But they're still more the Indoeuropean type than the Native American/Aboriginal/other indigenous culture type, at least typically.
Point more being, Armag and his tribe are the "bad guys" and portraying those indigenous cultures as "bad guys" is politically incorrect and leads to whining about being offended. (Unless you're like me and don't give a flip, or your PCs are villainous/don't care.)
Before we get completely derailed...
So my question for you guys are, is there some parts, NPC's, quests or other things in the Kingmaker Campaign that you find really bad, problematic or just absoluteley fantastic?
The major difficulty I've had is not with the kingdom building rules, but that the other 2 'charter' kingdoms essentially ignore them...and they're apparently headed by incompetents.
I've had to manufacture reasons why, when the player's kingdom is approximately 50 hexes, that Varnhold is less than 20...and there is no indication that any place other than varnhold itself has people in it, since none of the outlying hexes that are theoretically settled seem to have farms or anything similar (I changed that i my campaign).
Fort Drelev is even worse. Yes, Drelev has run into problems, but he does have some decent land nearby, and he doesn't seem to have people working it at *all*. His kingdom should be long bankrupt and wiped off the map.
If you are willing to put in the work, however, the campaign itself is a ball :)
I figure Varnhold got into a war with the centaurs and was spending most of its effort on fighting them rather than building up. Bad long-term move on Varn's part, but short-term he can either fight the centaurs or go under. That was fairly straightforward. (And a lot of farmers, etc., are hiding because something destroyed Varnhold -- though the timing issues don't really work out well in that module.)
Fort Drelev... yeah, it should work better than it does. And Pitax needed to be better thought through with regard to size, what hexes were part of the kingdom, and so on.
We just finished the campaign and it was a blast. It took a lot of work on my part as GM, but I'd run this AP again.
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I agree with Varnhold. Look at the army costs and it becomes clear that they couldn't build up further. And to make matters worse, farms were so exposed that Centaurs and other critters made all attempts at farming suicidal.
Drelev is even easier. Unrest. The Unrest is so high that not only do they fail almost all checks, but they've lost most hexes they had claimed and local critters have destroyed what farms there were. And like Varnhold, they needed more military power from the start to deal with local dangers - barbarians, bogards, etc.
Unrealistic?
No!
Do not forget that there have been dozens if not hundreds of attempts to settle for Stolen Lands. All failed. The players are the first group that beat the odds and manage to create something that might last.
The kingdom building rules may make success too easy on the players, but that's necessary to allow casual gamers to succeed. Likewise the players are always confronted with only one or two situations at a time. That's the key here - the rules as presented are a simplification stacked in the players favor to allow casual gamers to enjoy kingdom building and succeed without any optimization and little planing; everyone else operated by the harsher rules. If you have a group that is willing to go beyond the basics, the rules need to be toughened up; toughened to the degree that success becomes a real struggle and repeated heroics are necessary just to starve of failure. That would be a far better representation of the Stolen Lands... but also too harsh for most players to enjoy; campaigns would fail not because of TPK or loss of interest, but because kingdoms failed. Would that be fun?
In a homebrew where you can simply move on and continue with the characters and see how they deal with such a failure? Absolutely. In fact it is probably more interesting than success. But for a published campaign that's the end.
Perhaps the best analogy is playing a computer game on very easy. You play basically by the same rules, but get so many things...
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I completely agree with Old Drake. I also think it's likely that Paizo tried to walk a middle road with the kingdom rules, even going so far as to give side bars for groups who didn't want to deal with that aspect of the game at all. They anticipated that some groups would go nuts with the kingdom building aspect, while other groups would rather focus on standard adventuring. The rules as presented are that middle ground, light enough to hopefully not be too onerous to those who aren't as excited about the minutia of running a kingdom. If your group is really into that aspect, I don't think it would be a bad idea at all to expand on those rules and make it more challenging for your players.
I don't disagree. Both reasons (Varnhold is in a war, Fort Drelev is in near anarchy) are valid, and in fact are the justifications that I am using in my campaign.
My issue is that the material doesn't actually support either situation except in a vague story-sense.
Take Varnhold, for example. When the players complete Book 3, they gain 19 hexes to their kingdom. These are 19 hexes that by the nature of the rules are *settled*...they take no effort (beyond a Stability Check) or BP to settled (i.e., they are not merely 'explored'). This implies very strongly that Varnhold had 'tamed-and-claimed' these hexes beforehand, yet there is exactly one hex that indicates that it had been worked (an abandoned farm).
When Vordekai does his calling on the town of Varnhold, the effect is one mile in diameter, and veryone walks out of town, yet there is no indication of a trail, and I find it hard to believe that no one in all of those settled hexes ever tried to go to town nd noticed that everyone was gone (at which point they'd likely go screaming to Restov).
IMC, I decided the effect was much larger, it wiped out the entire Varnhold hex and the 6 surrounding hexes, and the people literally vanished *poof*...no massive several hundred person trails to follow...and when the party gets to the area (I've arranged for them to find out within a day of the event, though it may take a several days to get there) they will be meeting with panicked farmers who have seen the empty homes on the outskirts and are going nowhere near the place.
- The kingdom building rules felt tedious and boring to me and need major patching to prevent/circumvent the "magic item super-market" exploit.
- Many of the outdoor encounters are of the "one encounter per day" type and as such nothing prevents the party from going full nova on them, i.e. blow all their best spells to end the encounter early, with ( almost ) no fear of running into more problems in the same day.
- Because of the open world set-up of the campaign, NPC's are very bare bones in their motivations. If you want to keep some of them as recurring NPC's, you are on your own to flesh them out.
- All in all the campaign gives you a lot of leeway as a GM to do things you want to do, but this also means that the AP is a lot more work for you than other more railroady volumes.
For me, that didn't work well, both because of RL time constraints and because I wanted a more fleshed-out roleplaying heavy experience. Which I found in Carrion Crown and I hope for Jade Regent to provide the same ( with some work on the NPC's there ).
I rather liked the "running a kingdom" rules. There was one session where we didn't do any adventuring, but instead spent an entire year running the kingdom. I enjoyed that one, although some of my fellow players disagreed.
I do think that fewer magic items should be provided. Our group exploited the hell out of that one, and as a result, our capital of Elkheart became THE place to buy magic items. It also explained how fantastically wealthy our nation became. My suggestion in that regard would be to nerf or even eliminate the magic shop. Similarly, the library shouldn't provide magic items, although it could give them a large bonus on Knowledge checks while they're in town. Academies, temples, and mages' towers should be the preferred sources of magic items.
I do think that there might be another reason for the adventure's apparent low difficulty - namely, to prevent PC deaths. Continuity in this game can suffer if you have permanent PC deaths after completing Stolen Lands.
Finally, consider the possibility of alternative forms of government. The adventure path assumes a monarchy, but our group went with an oligarchy. It actually worked out fairly well, except for when the council became so dominated by NPCs to the point that we no longer had complete control. In retrospect, we might have been better off with a king.
As for modifying the campaign for an overseas colony story (which BTW sounds awesome), I would further limit players' access to magic items, especially when they don't have access to seaports. In fact, any magic items that they don't make locally should be more expensive.
To compensate, ensure that natural resources are fairly plentiful. Large forests, untapped mines, waters full of fish. I'd strongly consider inventing a couple of plants that are A) indigenous to the continent, and B) valuable to the folks back home, allowing players to possibly grow rich off the trade.
I'd also suggest establishing the concept of an ancient advanced civilization that formerly inhabited these lands, to explain why there are underground dungeons with magic items to loot. I would push for making it nonhuman, possibly even nonhumanoid. Find some intelligent race in the Bestiary. Their fate becomes clear only in Sound of a Thousand Screams - they were destroyed by the fey. For that matter, the fey should be an even stronger presence here than in the original.
I agree with Old Drake that WotRK needs to be revamped. However, I don't recall the details of that part of the campaign very well. My suggestion is to find another nation - smaller than your own characters' patron, but with equal proximity to the new continent - and use them as a Pitax analogue. They probably should have established their own colony some distance from yours. As a historical metaphor, you're the American colonies (albeit you got your independence early), your sponsor is Britain, and the Pitax analogue is France (with their own colony in Quebec).
You have to create a "Trade System", I remember the "Colionization" PC Game and the trade with the homeland played a major role.
Maybe you could gather some ideas from it. (Importing "Specialists" for BPs, selling rare Mats for BPs etc.)
I would honestly look at Book of the River Nations, as it encapsulates and expands the rules very nicely. The biggest problem so far has been player/GM communications, with me the GM trying to translate requests.