Magic items purchase and the first kindom year

[Necro_y2k]

Hi! First of all, sorry for my english, it's not my native tongue, I know it's awful...

Doubts:
--> About magic items purchase: I'll start running the 2nd book, so I think my players will be purchasing a lot of magic items in Restov. I also assume that they will be sending someone to buy things for them. I've calculated the travel duration from Staglord's Fort to Restov, it's about 9 days from one place to the other (18 days in total plus some time for item enchanting if happens), and I wanted to know how do you manage this. Do you add extra fees on the purchases for the delivery? How long it would take to obtain the items? Also, do you have in mind the 75% chances for the item availability? and If the availability roll fails, when can be done the retry? How do you apply it?

--> About the first year: The suggestion in the book is to let the events and exploration happen after the first year of kingdom building, but how do you mannage this first year?. I Think I should run the four phases of each month narrating what the PCs did, and probably there will be at least 6 kingdom random events to resolve. The first year could take 2 session of play and seems kinda boring, will have too much die rolling and too little roleplaying. Another option would be run only upkeep, improvement and income fases in the first year. Make it quick and then start with all the other things. How did you run this?.

Thank you for reading-.

[Lee Hanna]

1. I haven't dealt with this yet, so I have nothing.

2. My group tends to do this kind of record-keeping and administrative detail outside of the regular play sessions, mostly by email. For this game, my wife wanted to do all the kingdom playing, even though her character isn't the ruler. The rest of the players were more than willing to let her do it, so we do the kingdom turns at home, away from the game sessions. We run 3-4 turns in advance of the hexploration, but I allow revisions based on in-game events. She checks her ideas against the actual ruler, just in case.

[Thrund]

My group is nearly at the end of Book 2 and hasn't bought any items from Restov or commissioned anything from within the kingdom. I give them a list each game month of the items available in the kingdom and they have bought maybe two so far. Even most of what they find, they donate to the treasury as they are far more worried about growing the kingdom quickly than increasing their personal power.

[Philip Knowsley]

1. My guys have ordered things a couple of times from Restov, but nothing
strange, so all I've done is padded the cost a little to pay for couriers
etc & made them wait...heh heh heh...
Next time - the courier will be waylaid by bandits...there is, after all,
a fair bit of land surrounding their wee kingdom & Brevoy, which is still
unclaimed...
i.e. make 'em work for it & surprise them once in a while...

2. So far, I've mostly run the kingdom building as just that, & kept the
adventuring to a later date. Generally the last month of the last session
of kingdom building has been the first month of adventuring...

Run it how you want it - but remember that Kingmaker can go for decades if
you want it to. If you allow all adventuring to happen at the same time as
kingdom building - your campaign will be over & done with in months...
There is no way in a realistic world where you could build a kingdom large
enough to challenge those around you in such a short time. i.e. - you WILL
need to build in 'pauses' in the adventuring.

I explained this by saying that there are periods of relative stability, &/or
times when the PCs got really engaged in running the kingdom, rather than
running around exploring/adventuring all the time.

Cheers

[Necro_y2k]

Thank you all for the comments.
I think'll set some fees like 5% or 2% over the total amount, and a probability of 20% for failure (and if some failure exists could exist another roll for failure type >20%= Product not available, 20% assaulted caravan).

About the first year, yes, you are alright, it's important to feel that the development lasts a long time, it's more realistic. But, a good choice would be to limit the random kingdom events for the first year to a maximum of 4.

[plober]

At my campaign, the magic items are a touchy subject. The rules we are using are the following:

1) There's a 100% of having an available non-magic item below the settlement Base Value.
2) There's a 75% chance of having an available magic item below the settlement Base Value.
3) The Vacant Magic Item Slots of any given settlement are refilled once per month per settlement disregarding the Base Value. However, they must be empty
4) In order to empty a Magic Item Slot (Once emptied, there's a 50-50 chance of refilling), they can:
a) Buy it
b) Make a successful Economy Check (DC varies in the type of Item)
c) Force its circulation (they get an Economy check, but risking a permanent -1 to Economy if it fails).

5) There's a 0% (zero, none, nil, the nada, void) chance of having an available magic item above the settlement Base Value.

One of characters -2nd lvl Arcane trickster- is burning his feats into item creation ones; he can create quite intresting Wondrous Items. Since they make them very specific (to lower the price), the items won't sell to the masses, due to their particular requirements.

The intresting bit is that, needing enchanted weapons and armor, they sent the money and commisioned a sword from Varnhold, after reading that it was way closer than Restov or Pitax. Heh...

[Spastic Puma]

I just let them buy any magic items full price and as along as it wasn't too silly of an item it would be available. It never created any problems and the game was still challenging. However, when doing this, make sure the PC's are spending relatively equal amounts. Having full magic item availability gets out of control if one or two players take ALL of the wealth and buy ludicrously powerful items.