Creating a Kingdom in a Pathfinder Campaign

[Zeromage]

Hi, everyone,

I'm new here and relatively new to Pathfinder (I've played TONS of AD&D 2nd edition though). I got up to level 6 in the King Maker campaign setting as a player and now I'm creating my own campaign. I have a few questions about making a kingdom from scratch. I want this to be a long lasting campaign so I need to know a few things about designing a kingdom.

Eventually my heroes will be level 15 and above, and none of us like playing extraplanar adventures. So I'm trying to design this kingdom with some long term goals in mind. I don't want the heroes to be able to single-handedly overthrow this kingdom if they ever reach level 15, but I've heard stories that once characters reach that level they can easily dispatch 10,000 orcs, fight and kill gods etc.

Is this something I will eventually have to worry about?

The kingdom I'm designing has about 3 million people in it, and I'm estimating it will have 50,000-70,000 men at arms. Could a level 20 hero just walk in and overthrow a kingdom that size at will? What advice can you guys give me for this? What character level and class would you make the king himself, if he is a warrior?

I should also note that this kingdom is all alone on an island continent with no other landmasses on this planet. Half of the continent is the kingdom, and the other half is a bunch of scattered barbarian tribes.

Thanks.

[Andostre]

I may be mistaken, but the Legacy of Fire AP has some epic battle rules. I've never read them, but I'm following a play-by-post campaign of this AP, and it involves the high-level PCs taking on an entire army. Yes, they take on swaths of enemies at a time, but it's not like they never take any damage from doing that. You might want to check those rules out and see if they can help. They may also be revised/updated in Paizo's Ultimate Campaign source book.

Another option is to assume that the kingdom that you're worried that the PCs might try to overthrow has it's own high-level NPCs. Since you've played Kingmaker, you have a perspective on how a kingdom can grow around a group of adventurers.

[pendothrax]

High level pcs can devastate entire armies with ease if you do not take steps around this. remember that an entire kingdom of 3 million plus has a large tax base to use for enchanted ballistae with a 90 degree up angle, war golems tied to controller rings, and all kinds of other resource intensive war machines to face off against thier enemies.