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"Good time of the day noblemen. It's time we, the Swordlords, do something about our southern borders..."
So yeah, me and my group are going to start Kingmaker around mid-late August. Maybe later if things don't go as planned. A party of 4-5 people, classes and backgrounds set (a ranger, a rouge on the path to an arcane trickster, a druid and a mage)
But eve now I scroll through books and forums and other sources for fun and memorable things that I can add or throw in.
The thing is, I am not a big fan or modules, usually think all of my stuff myself, but I rather liked Kingmaker. It's fun. Still, I am going to add a few of my own twists and turns instead of random events. And would love to hear what changes and additions, what detours other Dungeon Masters made to make their game more fun.
So far I have read only the first few books and had these ideas:
1) The variant rule to make simple firearms martial weapons, will give the game a more wild west/colonial era vibe.
2) After 1st book, but before book 2 and the creation of the settlement, make the players earn those resources by forging alliances and taking loans in neighboring countries.
3) Add situation NPCs with own agendas to possibly play cohorts, help or hinder PC kingdom building.
Two the ones already conceived are:
a) A young Numerian Warlord, who claimed this land beforehand but only now turned up to build a country (can be a rival or an ally or make a union with him)
b) A corrupt noble from Brevoy, with forged parers to act as an adviser and siphon money into his necromancy experiments.
4) An early small invasion of local Kobolt (or other minor critter) tribes, to make a point that "you need an army guys".
5) After some 2-3 years throw in some political turmoil from all sides.
What other fun ideas are there? Friendly advice? Maybe some critique on these ones? Some ideas to add or change to mine?
There's a Kobold tribe in the first book that you can possibly make an alliance with, so I'd recommend either setting them up as rivals to the invading Kobold tribe, or going with a different race.
A good suggestion would be Boggards - a Boggard refugee can be found in Book 1, and his tribe shows back up in Book 4, so you could have them or some other tribe hopping over from the neighboring swampland to the west and doing mini-invasions.
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You should really enjoy Kingmaker if you like making your own campaigns. It seems from the boards the very best ones are those whose GMs use the AP as a framework and add a bunch of their own material in. I can recommend Orthos, Dudemeister, Pennywit, and quite a few other regulars here for nice additional material. I definitely recommend getting the class differences in the player's heads early, as the difference between the lives of nobles and commoners are vast.
I recommend giving your players lots of hard choices. You can take this fat purse of gold and resources, but it has strings attached. Or you can go it alone and take your chances, but be unfettered. You can become allies with these tribesmen, but you also then inherit their enemies. This NPC will help you, but wants to be made the marshall in exchange. These are decisions a party doesn't usually get stuck having to make when they are just sacking dungeons :)
Alright, boggards it is... with a particular nasty general I believe.
I recommend giving your players lots of hard choices.
This exactly. Oh the possibilities. Forced marriage with a trick. Easy lone with strings (a very old senile gnome accountant). Trade deals that hurt in the long run. Pilgrims to non-existing shrines of non-existing gods. Halfling brigands from River Kingdoms asking for protection money. Secret organizations planning a crazy coup. Migrating dwarven clan who wants a home. Hussle about a meteorite. Barbarian settlers/nomads/possibly alien invaders/snake oil salesmen.
And that's not even getting started on the fey craziness =D
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I gave the party a sage that helped them out a lot during the early levels with knowledge and information. Along the way they noticed he avoided stepping outside into direct sunlight. They had suspicions, but decided he was worth the problems at the time. Now that they are 9th level, he has his own keep, a village that he runs, and villagers are occasionally turning up dead, drained of blood... :)
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Here's a thread that links a bunch of other threads full of inspiration.
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2q2t9?Starting-KM-best-community-creations
I've also collected a list of links to some of my favourite ideas that I'm planning on using in part or in whole when my players get that far (some overlap with above thread):
* Hargulka's Monster Kingdom by Dudemeister is a fantastic way to make the second AP much more dynamic and exciting, and fulfils your "you need an army guys" sentiment. His changes to the later modules are also great, but my players are still in the first module at this point.
* Aristocrat NPCs contains some ideas for random nobles you can bring in to complicate the players' lives.
* Venture Capital AKA a deal with the devil is one of the threads Philip Knowsley was referring to about the players needing to seek out investors in their kingdom, and getting strings into the bargain.
* I liked this inspired ranting from everyone's favourite rabble-rouser from RRR.
Thanks a lot, those will be super helpful. Enough to fuel some imagination cogs of mine!
But what about giving out firearms? Will that change the balance a lot? Sadly I had little experience with firearms in our games.
At low levels a firearms-using character will be slightly more accurate, but unless they're an actual Gunslinger, it'll level off the higher level they get, especially outside the relatively short touch-attack range; if your players are getting close enough to use those touch attacks at higher levels, they'll be close enough for melee enemies to still be a threat. Otherwise, they're no more dangerous or game-breaking than archers.
Gunslingers shake things up a bit, by being able to make those touch attacks at longer ranges and having a few other tricks up their sleeves, but not in a way that should be game-breaking.
The main difference will be things that have a massive disparity between normal AC and touch, such as dragons. And you can mitigate that with their spells - focus less on AC and more on DR, on miss chance, and all the other myriad tricks casters use to avoid getting killed. I heavily, heavily recommend redoing the spell list of every major caster enemy the party faces (off the top of my head: Vordakai, Imeckus Stroon, Zorek in Armag's tomb, lots of the Pitax enemies, Ilthuliak, The Wriggling Man, and Nyrissa herself) to both suit them better and, especially as you near the endgame, to tailor their spells to have the best methods of dealing with your party.
Lore-wise, as far as I understand, firearms are also something quite uncommon, so i'ts more of a "does this make any sense to have guns" question. Sure a traveling gunslinger or a dwarf or a gnome may have access to a gun but the general population of bandits and settlers? Usually I do things in my homebrew worlds, but lately I've been giving Golarion a shot.
The Stolen Lands are right along the border of Numeria, so it's quite logical that some guns could have meandered their way south and east.
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It's heartwarming that when these sorts of threads pop up that others are quick to plug my expansions. Hargulka's Monster Kingdom is largely complete, I heartily recommend using the bonus hp rule in that thread otherwise Mass Combat ends up quite swingy.
My book 5 expansion (Irovetti's Clockwork Empire) is still a work in progress.
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Kingmaker is a really good AP if you like to swing your own adventures and design your own stuff -- much of it is modular, so you can swap various encounters and dungeons out or in, you can add (or subtract) whole threads as to what's going on. You can do a LOT if it strikes your fancy.
General recommendations:
1) figure out what kind of campaign your players like. Emphasize elements that swing that way, de-emphasize elements that don't. We ended up having a lot more interaction with the Swordlords than the AP envisions, which made for a much better campaign. For instance, the part where the Swordlords tried to use Vordakai's phylactery to enslave the lich to help them against the rest of Brevoy... still quite memorable.
2) Treat the kingdom-building rules as rough guidelines and encounter generators, not a system to try and game for maximum advantage. I got a lot of work out of that, mostly by looking at what the locals might want and what they weren't getting. Some players will love the idea of building and influencing their own kingdom and towns, but not everyone will. (Try getting one town per player -- suddenly a lot more interpersonal politics comes into effect if it's "my town" instead of "random village #4".)
3) You can change the ending if you want -- but whatever you do, foreshadow where you're going more heavily. If Nyrissa is involved, play up the fey element. If you want to turn this into a game of political warfare with Brevoy, you can do that too (whether or not Choral the Conqueror shows up at all). Or you could end it after book 5 if the players are happy at that point.
4) You can have additional elements -- for instance, one of my players wanted a Hellknight cohort. I had SO much fun with the interplay between the Hellknights trying to establish Law and (Terrified) Order, led by the cohort, and the priesthood of Erastil trying to get together a written lawcode for Law and (Traditional Village) Order. Work with what the players do, add themes, etc. -- this is an AP that really allows for this sort of thing to happen. (The PC who tried to establish an order of tiger-riding knights did not fare nearly so well, mostly because the other players were Not Happy with the idea...) I did a lot with Candlemere (a site just crying out for more use!) and it eventually became the Hellknight base.
5) Tie things together. If the PCs had a good interaction with an NPC in the previous books, let them live, and use them as a quest hook as much as possible. The mad alchemist in book 1 can be the guy delivering the "odd ingredient" quest hooks in book 3 or 4, and maybe he knows someone in Irovetti's court in book 5... Keep the number of NPCs under control that way.
6) If they're running with the kingdom rules, USE THOSE NPCS! Have the players roleplay recruiting them. Have them speak up for different goals (e.g., army vs. exploration vs. other stuff; locals vs. outlanders; etc.) Don't be afraid to have the particular appointee come to them with a quest hook that falls under their area of expertise, either!
7) Foreshadow the other Stolen Lands groups from the beginning -- Magnus Varn's fate means more if the PCs have previously met him, knowing that Baron Drelev is building stuff up in the West means the PCs are more aware of what it might mean when he attacks, etc., etc., etc.
8) Stop hex-by-hex exploration somewhere around level 10. By then the thrill is over (and PCs of that level should be having minions do this sort of thing anyway). Save your gaming time for fun additional dungeons suggested by the PCs' actions and choices during previous games.