Kingdom building system?


Kingmaker

Scarab Sages

My group will be starting Kingmaker soon. We have been away from Pathfinder for a few years and are looking to make a come back. Everyone is really excited about the concept of building and ruling a kingdom of their own. Several of my players are very mechanically driven and from reading the posts here it looks like the rule system included in the AP is lacking. I notice a couple of different supplements mentioned to assist.

My question is, would you suggest using Ultimate Campaign, Book of the River Nations, or some alternative kingdom rule set?

I really appreciate any insight or suggestions that can be offered. Thanks!

Scarab Sages

In my experience with Kingmaker, UCAM is a much more refined, clarified, and expanded system over the initial one listed in Book 2. Use that as you baseline. If you want further expansion or mods, I highly recommend (almost mandatory) using Ultimate Rulership by Legendary Games. This 3PP is made by Jason Nelson, who worked on the original system in Book2 and worked on the refinement in UCAM. Think of it as part II of the system in UCAM. If you go with the mass combat in Ultimate Campaign, there is also several expansions from Legendary games for that aspect as well.

Book of the River Nations was an excellent expansion for the base rules in Book 2. If you use UCAM or Legendary games, they are already past those rules. Still an excellent read, but less useful than before.


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I suggest you to surely use the Ultimate Campaign version of the kingdom building rules, those are better balanced then the original AP. UCam was published after the AP, so many troubles with the original rules were fixed in it.

If you wish to use also some 3rd party, I'll suggest also the use of the Ultimate *** line of product from Legendary Games, especially Ultimate Rulership and Ultimate War are completely compatible with UCam.

I initially used BoTRN of the Jon Brazer Enterprises, before UCam was released. It still has some valuable additions to buildings, feat and so on, but I prefer focusing on UCam/URulership now for mine current campaigns as GM (an homebrew planar kingdom building, a mythic version of the Kingmaker AP, and a Mythic Kobold version of the Kingmaker AP)

Book of Friends and Foes: Assassins in the River Nations, from Jon Brazer Enterprises too, is very useful for planning the eventual Assassination Attempt events during the kingdom building.

An other personal suggestion, pre-roll at least 1 or 2 years of kingdom events before your kingdom building session, it will help a lot as a GM in those phases of the campaign.

Scarab Sages

Great information! This is exactly the clarification I was looking for. I will go with ultimate campaign and the ultimate third party books instead of book of the river nations. Thanks!


Ultimate Rulership has some things I can take or leave. Recently, I introduced the Espionage Edicts, and my players are loving it.


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In general, use the kingdom building rules as a rough measure of "how good are you doing", and as a scenario and politics generator. Even with the UC version, don't use it as a gamable system for the players to 'win" at. It's not really well-suited for that.

The primary problem is the lack of negative feedback loops. As you build more and more of a kingdom, it becomes easier to make DCs, meaning after a while it's just about impossible to fail -- and then what? You as a GM want to generate _problems_ for the PCs to deal with, not just have them march to success on easy mode.

So add your own negative feedback loops. Different towns generate unrest if they don't get _something_. Different political groups want _different_ things, and usually these are not possible to fit together. Ambitious people want to be important, and need to be dealt with. Minions get into empire-building, and personality conflicts. Some people start something (e.g., wars with centaurs, or taxes on something some other group needs or wants.) Do some real difficulties for people to work with.

One minor thing I did that worked well was that I generated separate events for each map the PCs had claimed hexes on. Spread out your territory, have more problems to deal with...


Tonyz offers good advice. I found it was pretty effective to turn baddies into threats to the kingdom, not just the players. Your players will have armies and henchpeople at their disposal, so their enemies should as well.


FWIW, I would not allow PCs to turn BP into GP. At a certain point, they will be able to pull about 10k a month from the Kingdom with little to no consequence. Depending on how much downtime you have, this may really upset wealth by level balance.

Instead, if you want your players to benefit financially from their leadership positions, I recommend letting them earn a monthly salary equal to 10 gp x kingdom size. This scales much better over time.

And, no matter what you do, do not allow them to turn magic items into BP or GP. You will find no shortage of threads describing kingdoms exploiting this mechanics to an absurd degree.


Groglodyte wrote:
FWIW, I would not allow PCs to turn BP into GP. At a certain point, they will be able to pull about 10k a month from the Kingdom with little to no consequence. Depending on how much downtime you have, this may really upset wealth by level balance.

IMC, they can withdraw funds, though per UCAM they risk unrest. I've kind of kept things amorphous about kingdom compensation, but I finally settled on a lifestyle level -- essentially, if the kingdom is decent sized and prosperous, it supports the players at a certain level of style.

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