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Hi, all. I'm about to start running Kingmaker in a week or so, and I must say, there are some amazing resources and ideas floating around on this forum. Thank you all so much for your inspirational ideas!
As well as running Stolen Lands, I'm also a player in my son's game, where we're about to start Varnhold Vanishing. Since I'm allergic to spoilers, I've avoided reading the whole AP synopsis in the Stolen Lands, which is going to make it a bit tricky... I don't have a clear idea of what's really going on behind the scenes. We have learned of the existence of Nyrissa during Rivers Run Red, though, so at least I know that much.
Anyway, as a player I wrote a javascript/html application for kingdom building that I thought might be of general interest. I know that it works in Chrome, Firefox and on my son's iPad... I haven't checked if it works in IE.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16299287/Kingmaker/Kingdom/kingdom.html
It automates some of the kingdom stat tracking (like the excel sheets that are floating around) but also allows you to construct your cities and see the buildings laid out. Some BP costs need to be subtracted from your total manually - building roads or farms, for instance, because it doesn't know what terrain you're building them on. Likewise, income and magic items sales need to be added manually.
Some UI interactions are admittedly a bit obscure - you can edit the kingdom name by clicking the name even though it just appears as regular text, for example, and likewise edit people's names and stats. The [+] "icons" expand the relevant sections (Leadership Positions, People, Cities and Other Resources).
The information you enter is saved in your browser's local storage, but you can export and import the data as plain text from the menu (accessible from the link on the top right). It supports multiple kingdoms, as long as they have different names.
I've applied the errata from the Kingdom Building sticky thread for a few of the buildings, but for now it's a pretty straight implementation of the RAW in Rivers Run Red. I'm planning on adding a house-rules page to it though, giving the option of applying some of the changes I want to make.
The other thing I've written, now that I'm about to GM the Stolen Lands, is a simple mapping tool for exploring Greenbelt.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16299287/Kingmaker/Map/map.html
Again, the UI isn't perfect, but I think it's not too bad. The plan is to have it sitting on an iPad on the table when we play (hence the large font size of the links), and the players can reveal hexes as they explore and drag icons and stick pins onto the map. There's a pawn icon that can be dragged around to represent the party's current location. It saves its state into the browser's local store and supports multiple campaigns, but doesn't yet have an import/export feature.
The GM has to manually reveal the South Rostland Road in the north-east corner and place Oleg's Trading Post before starting, but I don't feel that's particularly onerous.
I hope these are of some use to people!
Thanks, all!
@tro1984, did you assign a Treasurer, Councillor and Grand Diplomat? If those positions are vacant, it locks the relevant edicts to None.
Re: other maps... since we're about to start on Varnhold Vanishing, I expect I'll be adding Nomen Heights soon. I'd actually like to make it so you can point it at any hex map image and edit some configuation (number of hexes wide/high, scale, offset etc.) so it's usable for more than just things I add.
Good thought about zipping them:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16299287/Kingmaker/Kingdom.zip
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16299287/Kingmaker/Map.zip
The Kingdom worksheet is also up on GitHub, for those who might find that useful:
https://github.com/RobRendell/kingmaker-kingdom-sheet
@Mr. Grogg, it uses an HTML5 feature called local storage, which can hold more data than cookies and only ever lives in your browser (it's never transmitted between the browser and a server). It won't be deleted if you clear your cookies, but it is possible to clear it in other ways. In Chrome, you can view what a site has stored in local storage by hitting F12, selecting the "Resources" tab and then expanding the "Local Storage" entry on the left - there's a different "space" for each site.
@MeridiaCreative, I don't own Ultimate Campaign, but reading this RPG Stack Exchange thread, it seems that there aren't a huge number of differences, so if I can find the differences in detail it sounds quite plausible that I could add an "Ultimate Campaign" mode.
Ok, I've enhanced the map application. Now you can configure it (for a given campaign) to point to any map image (either something off the web, or a local file if you're running it directly off your own disk - the image has to be in the same directory as the html file in this case).
After nominating the map file, you can enter the map's dimensions in hexes, and then position two guide hexes to configure the hex size in the app. Seems to work quite well for me.
I've also grabbed a map of Nomen Heights and stitched it together with the Greenbelt map so they join together seamlessly (although the mapping app currently only supports one map image at a time).
The Ultimate Campaign version of the rules (which isn't super different but does add a few things) can be found on the PRD here. If you're interested in making a version that works with those rules, that should give you everything you need.
The Ultimate Campaign version of the rules (which isn't super different but does add a few things) can be found on the PRD here. If you're interested in making a version that works with those rules, that should give you everything you need.
Thanks, Shadar Aman!
Hmm, reading through those rules, there's one thing that concerns me. In the worksheet I've written, Loyalty, Stability and Economy are often recalculated from scratch, since they're entirely derived from buildings, leaders, resources etc.
The Kingdom Building rules in Ultimate Campaign treats them more like a form of Unrest... there are events that can just damage them in an ad hoc manner. For example, the event Cult Activity can reduce Stability by 1, failing the Loyalty check when the Royal Enforcer reduces Unrest reduces Loyalty by 1, etc.
These events don't say to modify these kingdom stats "for the turn" or "while this event is active" or similar, which implies that these are permanent modifications to kingdom stats without any associated building or resource (contrast with the vacancy penalties, which also reduce the kingdom stats but only apply as long as the position is vacant).
So, it's nothing that I couldn't work around, but it's a fundamental difference in approach that means I'd probably need to do an Ultimate Campaign-specific version rather than just have a mode one can toggle.
The Ultimate Campaign version of the rules (which isn't super different but does add a few things) can be found on the PRD here. If you're interested in making a version that works with those rules, that should give you everything you need.Thanks, Shadar Aman!
Hmm, reading through those rules, there's one thing that concerns me. In the worksheet I've written, Loyalty, Stability and Economy are often recalculated from scratch, since they're entirely derived from buildings, leaders, resources etc.
The Kingdom Building rules in Ultimate Campaign treats them more like a form of Unrest... there are events that can just damage them in an ad hoc manner. For example, the event Cult Activity can reduce Stability by 1, failing the Loyalty check when the Royal Enforcer reduces Unrest reduces Loyalty by 1, etc.
These events don't say to modify these kingdom stats "for the turn" or "while this event is active" or similar, which implies that these are permanent modifications to kingdom stats without any associated building or resource (contrast with the vacancy penalties, which also reduce the kingdom stats but only apply as long as the position is vacant).
So, it's nothing that I couldn't work around, but it's a fundamental difference in approach that means I'd probably need to do an Ultimate Campaign-specific version rather than just have a mode one can toggle.
Huh, I hadn't even noticed that difference. Could you not just store them as a separate modifier in the same way you would store the modifiers from a building? As long as the total modifiers from that kind of events was stored, you could still recalculate from scratch.
This. Is. AWESOME!
I hadn't noticed that either, actually. In the AP, however, you have certain quests and things that will give permanent modifiers to the kingdom stats, so I thought that was built in from the beginning. I guess it's not actually in the kingdom building rules though.
The current implementation has "resources" that can apply arbitrary modifiers to Economy, Loyalty and Stability, for things like the +1 Economy from Resource hexes. So in fact, you could just add a resource called "event-based penalties" that you update with any such permanent modifiers, and the sheet would work as-is.
I wonder how the players would feel looking at that element called out so starkly though. I think they'd be looking for ways to eliminate the "damage" - kind of how stat damage in Pathfinder is carefully classified into Damage or Drain with explicit rules for how the damage goes away. If you can see that your Loyalty is 2 less than it otherwise should be due to some event you rolled in your first year, you'd reasonably want to do something about it.
Your work is wonderful. I hope to see a UC version of the kingdom sheet!
I love the map. I'd like to create a map which is explorable by my players without uploading a new version of it every time a new hex is explored or an icon is added. It should include reign boundaries, cities, links to more content and so on. But I think it should be saved on a server, so that every player can see the exploring development at home, and make it read-only for non authorized. Do you think it is a big effort to modify your map in this way? When I will go home I will try to study it a bit.
RobRendell - THIS is amazing. Thanks so much for sharing! I just tried adding my own map and it worked flawlessly. The potential here is very exciting.
When I will go home I will try to study it a bit.
I give up! The code is longer than I thought.
Several months trying to understand PHP to manage wordpress have been pleasant. Now JS is too much :) Thank you for your examples though! This is a proof that programmers have so much to give to the RPG society.