This thread has some helpful advice concerning weather, enemies and such, but I think the most important one would be to make sure the bandits are more active.
Starting from the day Happs Bydon come at Oleg's to collect the 'protection money' (and fails to come back), you should make a rough timeline of the bandits' actions and adapt it to the PCs' actions.
For example, in my game, they took a lot of time to get to the bandits camp by the river, focusing on the hills exploration and finishing the kobolds/mites subquest. As a result, Oleg was really angry at them, the bandits knew something went wrong with their collecting party, and Kressle had time to prepare and start to investigate.
The camp had wooden barricades and more bandits were present. Some were on guard duty all day and night. The PCs even arrive a day I determined Dovan was present to convey the Stag Lord's orders. He fled when the battle went sour, but had the time to see the faces of 2 PCs. Some days after, all the bandits of the region were aware of their general description.
I also recommend this weather generator to preroll a few weeks of weather in advance (useful when the party rolls high Survival checks).
Calendar - use the real world calendar adapted to Golarion to track stuff. I'd start using a backdated RW calendar from 10 or 20 years ago. From what I recall, Germany or the northern midwest of CONUS will have the appropriate climate - look up the historical weather online and use those so that you know the weather (and can answer 'what weather is coming' spell/Survival questions).
Random encounters just nab whatever map you can grab that strikes your fancy. I'd recommend pre-planning some so that your players don't go "power-leveling" on random encounters.
Foreshadowing, use it, love it, work it in however you can.
Also, decide how much of the fey and/or Old Cults aspects you want in your campaign. They come up, but it's up to you to decide how much of it you want. Read ahead through all six chapters and make yourself an outline of some sort accordingly.
There are two important decisions for you to make. As written, the entire AP is done in less than 10 years - many PCs won't even hit middle age by the end chapter.
The first decision is how long you want the campaign to take in game time. Do you want multiple human generations? Are you fine with it being wrapped up in a decade or less? Somewhere in between? The answer here is to define how rapidly you want their kingdom to expand. Annual turns instead of monthly, or seasonal instead of monthly, can serve admirably to put the brakes on ridiculousness.
The second decision is not one pertaining directly to the players, it's becoming familiar with the Kingdom rules. As written the players' Kingdom is almost certainly going to explode into all kinds of gawds awful nasty before Chapter 5. You need to run a "mock up" of your own, complete with random kingdom events, to see how scary this can get. The players will either dive into it with all of their feet, or they'll want to handwave it. If nothing else, doing so gives you a good idea of what to expect - and you will have generated all the 'random' events you need in advance of starting Chapter 2.
Stat blocks are easy enough to come by online. You'll be fine there.
I'll second Turin - plan ahead.
Including by predetermining the 'random' encounters. (both wilderness encounters
& kingdom events.) That way you can actually have them built into the story,
rather than scrambling at the table to try & think of something suitable.There are some cool Golarion calendars out there - find one & use it in your
game. Print 2. Give one to the PCs to look after & use one yourself...then
you can write in, in advance, things like weather, special happenings etc.
My PCs have all of their kingdom's celebrations marked on the calendar etc.Love Turin's suggestion re using seasons for building, rather than months. Wish
I'd thought of it - buildings in a month can break believe-ability, & this would
make for a cool generational game...Lastly - read these forums. There is a HEAP of good sh*t on here - use it!
This AP could easily have been written as 12 books, so there is A LOT of stuff
which Paizo could have put in, but haven't. If you want to do your game justice,
you're going to need to work to do so...but if someone else has already done
the work, why not steal it. e.g. Turin, Redcelt & others. Also - find Chemlak's
kingdom sheet - it's an Excel sheet that is free & works really well.
Believe you me, there's plenty that I wish I'd thought of that others came up with either after my group passed that point in our campaign or just straight up came out later. The best known of these seems to be the (in)famous Hargulka Troll Kingdom. Great stuff, man, great stuff.
Kingmaker deserves a mega-makeover. One that takes generations (at least two, I'd prefer three). Proper foreshadowing worked in. The Brevoy Civil War pain the tucas. Make everyone play humans/half-humans/anything that lives not more than 100-125-150 years. I'd have loved to have had grandchildren of the original PCs bringing the pain to 'N' after 50+ years' game time of being as literal a royal pain the rear as possible. Rumors et al from 'the west' building up even more impressively than the PCs' kingdom. A certain undead hag that rules the lands directly south of them. A certain Old Gods cult arising in their midst all subtle and nasty-like. I really wish that they had gone with "V" as SKR originally envisioned him instead of what they went with. Space limitations my keister, they have extra space already.
Space limitations my keister, they have extra space alreadyYeah - there are pages & pages of 'fluff' in the back of each book...
Exactly. ;)
For maps, it depends what system you use. If you use an erasable mat, then of course you can sketch out a new chunk of forest each time, though it can get tedious drawing all those trees. You could also make a bunch of trees and rocks and things on graph paper and cut them out, then rearrange them for different encounters. If you use a flip mat, don't worry about it too much, the repeated terrain isn't too much of a problem.
Another thing you could do is make a list of different terrain circumstances that would change the feel of an encounter and the options for movement. Then you could roll or select from the table for each fight. For example, for forest you could have:
- thick undergrowth -- poor visibility and difficult terrain
- narrow path, thick bushes on either side
- clearing with trees all around
- bottom of rocky cliff, difficult to climb
- top of rocky cliff, danger of falling
- rocky gulch, cliff walls on either side
- sparse trees, large branches, easy to climb
- tall trees with no low branches, little other cover
- by bank of stream, 10 feet across, strong current
- etc
A lot of those things could be accomplished on the same mat, just be redefining the meanings of the tree, bush, path, and open tiles.
A calendar is a really good idea. There's lots of options as others have noted, though I'm a big fan of this excel table: LINK
Giving the players a calendar of their own is also a good idea and something I wish I had thought to do. Let them see that winter is coming and worry whether they'll be done exploring in time.
To make the exploration portions less repetitive, something I found fun was to prepare little vignettes -- scenes or puzzles the players would come across, where they could learn something or avoid a hazard based on taking actions or using their skills. For example, I had one hex where the players came across a bunch of dead birds, and guessed they may have been killed by insect-borne disease. Then a little later, they were all being surrounded by clouds of mosquitoes, and those who didn't take precautions like covering themselves with netting had to save against disease. I had another one where they found an abandoned nest, and by studying the tracks and fur in the area with Survival, they were able to determine it had been an owlbear nest. Later, they met a mother owlbear with a young cub.
You definitely don't have to have everything ready all at the start of the campaign. Honestly, between fairy pranks, "random" encounters, bandit activities, new NPCs, wilderness vignettes, and political events, you can spend a near endless amount of time preparing material for this campaign. If you have the time, the results can be very engrossing and rewarding. If you don't, then don't worry, just focus on the parts you think will be most interesting to your group.
That said, reading over the rest of the AP as soon as possible is a very good idea. You can skip a lot of the dungeons, just make sure you know the key plot points. And you will probably want to have all the scripted encounters on the current map ready as soon as possible, since you never know where the players will travel next.
If you want more miscellaneous advice, it's all over the forum, but one particularly concentrated thread of it is here: LINK