A few Kingmaker questions

[Mugsy]

I am starting Kingmaker in a month or two and I have a few questions.

1. I understand the campaign is balanced for random encounters in terms of experience but are the random encounters also supposed to give random loot or is the loot in the book already enough to keep them roughly on par with the Character Wealth by Level. Assume no magic crafting and no pulling money from the kingdom for this one otherwise it gets too complicated.

2. There is a lot of talk about the Civil war in Brevoy but I don't see anything in the books about it actually occurring or what the sides would be. I can see how it could (and at some point probably will) happen but am I correct that it is outside of the official scope of the campaign?

3. Is there any official limits on the armies you raise? Such as small towns creating massive armies, small armies with high class levels appearing out of nowhere, or an army of mages coming out of a city without even a library? I could always stop things too ridiculous myself but I was wondering if there was anything official I could work off of.

4. Is there any reason to have a standing army? It seems like you can raise an army in no time which seems unrealistic. Also it leads to the largest kingdoms having no armies in peace then pumping out massive armies in a week.

Thank you for the help, I like to have as much of an understanding as possible going into a game.

[Hassy]

1. In my experience you don't really need a lot of random encounters to match the XP progression, as long as your PCs want to explore most of the maps. Hence the loot from them also doesn't matter much. However, my party was slightly below guidelines for most of books 4-5, when I basically stopped running random encounters. Not that it really mattered.

2. Correct. There are a lot of good threads here about ideas. Personally I ran the campaign so that House Rogarvia hadn't yet vanished when the campaign started, had it happen in the background and then brought the politics into the forefront midway through the adventure path, leaving an actual civil war for after the campaign (haven't run it yet, switched GMs for now).

3. Not as far as I recall.

4. Standing armies are sort of "modern" for the setting, IMO. Real world history had levies as the bulk of most armies. However, I houseruled that a time to raise an army anyway.

[pennywit]

Mugsy wrote:

1. I understand the campaign is balanced for random encounters in terms of experience but are the random encounters also supposed to give random loot or is the loot in the book already enough to keep them roughly on par with the Character Wealth by Level. Assume no magic crafting and no pulling money from the kingdom for this one otherwise it gets too complicated.

I haven't given my players much loot with random encounters, and they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves. I have increased loot on some of the bigger critters, though.

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There is a lot of talk about the Civil war in Brevoy but I don't see anything in the books about it actually occurring or what the sides would be. I can see how it could (and at some point probably will) happen but am I correct that it is outside of the official scope of the campaign?

It is officially outside the scope of the modules. Howver, there are some pretty good resources here on the boards if you want to run that.

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3. Is there any official limits on the armies you raise? Such as small towns creating massive armies, small armies with high class levels appearing out of nowhere, or an army of mages coming out of a city without even a library? I could always stop things too ridiculous myself but I was wondering if there was anything official I could work off of.

Nothing official that I've seen.

However, according to the rules, you may raise one army in place of establishing a new settlement. So a kingdom with 100 hexes could potentially raise only two armies in one month. There's also a "Max Armies" entry in the army sheet from UCam. I have no idea where this "Max Armies" number was supposed to come from.

I have looked through (not heavily) Ultimate Battle, a supplement from Legendary Games. That supplement contains quite a few passages that imply a few things were cut from UCAM during editing.

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4. Is there any reason to have a standing army? It seems like you can raise an army in no time which seems unrealistic. Also it leads to the largest kingdoms having no armies in peace then pumping out massive armies in a week.

The rules assume that your kingdom has some kind of militia or guards in the background, represented by various Stability and Loyalty checks. Otherwise, if you want to keep a standing army, you're paying its Consumption per week. That gets really expensive really fast. On the other hand, you can keep some of your armies as reserve armies.

Thank you for the help, I like to have as much of an understanding as possible going into a game.

[Lee Teague]

what is ucam?

[captain yesterday]

Ultimate Campaign, I also find that abbreviation annoying but with Ultimate Combat out what are you gonna do, peeps love abbreviations IMHO, KWIM:-p

[Lee Hanna]

Two reasons I can see to keep a standing army: One is that new armies have Morale +0, and units that have won battles may increase their Morale and add Tactics. So, veteran/standing units are more capable than green ones.
Second is the limit to how many can be raised per month, as mentioned above. If you need lots of armies, you'd better start early.

Ultimate Rulership (Legendary Games) adds rules for population, and caps army size based on that (and that can be altered by edicts).

Ultimate Campaign also allows armies to be put in reserve, taking less Consumption per month. This is very popular with my players.