Two groups, one map

[Alex MacKinnon]

I'm within a month/month and a half of wrapping up both ROTR (6 players) with one group and Emerald Spire (4) with another. I'm considering running 'Kingmaker' with both groups of players but using a larger map. I thought this might lead to some cross kingdom intrigue, perhaps trade routes and border skirmishes.

Has anyone gone down this rabbit hole already? Starting to prep it now. But if someone has done this already, I'm good with not reinventing the wheel.

Suggestions?

[Gargs454]

Sounds pretty cool, but no, haven't done it. Not quite sure how you would mesh the two together other than potentially rewriting some of the books (though there are some intriguing options there if you do that).

Just a couple of options that come to mind would include having one group head to Varnhold while the other heads to Oleg's. Or, you could potentially even set one group up in Pitax, though that would greatly change the nature of their campaign.

[Queen Moragan]

If I had to run two groups on the same map, I'd set up a second charter area south of the original one, and reskin and relocate nearly all the encounters so that each group would still encounter everything seperately.

The southern kingdom would have the worse of the geography, but adding a hex row across the bottom might help, any more than that and you're getting into Mivonese territory. Maybe add a plateau to the SE Tors, with a different tribe of centaurs.

Could be alot of fun.

[Spatula]

The main hurdle that I see is, what happens when their kingdoms interact? Any interactions would be sloooooow, especially if the DM is acting as a middle-man. The game would basically slow down to PBEM/PBP speed - at best - when the two groups come into contact with each other.

The other thing is that, yeah, there's not really anywhere to stick a 2nd group. The kingdom's neighbors exist to be knocked down. You could insert another map area somewhere, or you could replace either Varnhold or Drelev with the 2nd kingdom. That would basically mean throwing out either book 3 (Varnhold) or book 4 (Drelev). Or maybe use Varnhold and change the precipitating event slightly, making the centaurs the ones who get Vanished.

In either case, you'll have to come up with new material for the 2nd group's early levels. And later levels. You'll basically need an additional adventure path's worth of plots and encounters for the other group. But then, it's easy to drop other adventures into Kingmaker so that might not be too big a chore.

[Philip Knowsley]

You could also run it with both sets of players on the same map & make it a race to see who gets to set up a kingdom...

The loosing team could then become 'subservient' to the winners.

However, I do agree with Spatula. In some ways, you're setting yourself up for a world of hurt as a DM. How do you foresee having 2 independent
Kingdoms (run by 2 completely different sets of players) running in a campaign created for one set of players to conquer & rule the area...?

[Tinalles]

Scenario: You have two kingdoms in the Stolen Lands, run by two groups: the Hares, and the Tortoises.

On Wednesday evening, The Hares establish their kingdom, and get interested in the mechanics of kingdom building. Along the way, they hit it off with Lily Teskerton, the barmaid in their city. They make her part of their council, and do three months of kingdom building that evening.

On Saturday, the Tortoises establish their kingdom. Then they decide to head over to the Hares' kingdom to say hello. They get a room at the bar, and a drunk patron picks a fight with them. In the resulting brawl, Lily is accidentally killed when somebody rolls a nat 1 on an attack and hits her instead of the intended target.

The next Wednesday, you are in the position of telling the Hares that not only is Lily not on their council after all, despite the fact that they clearly remember putting her there, but she actually retroactively died three months ago in a bar fight.

If you have two groups in one campaign, you cannot control the rate at which the two groups advance game time. As a result, you will inevitably wind up with two divergent timelines.

I once read an account by a GM who attempted to solve this by having two groups of equal size, in which each PC was cursed -- at the end of the session, they would transform or be replaced by a corresponding PC from the other group, such that you had only one campaign, but two groups, who'd hand off from one session to the next.

He put in place prohibitions on communication between groups, and made the focus of the campaign undoing the curse, with the first team to succeed getting a huge reward and the other team getting nothing. Furthermore, if one team died, the other team won. This setup was a tremendous mistake. When the two groups started trying to engineer situations designed to kill their alter egos, they had to end the campaign to save their real-world friendship.