Settlement Management and Kingdom Building Rules


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So, this might be a weird niche, but I've been looking for a good system to use for managing a single settlement (such as when a PC is the mayor of a city, or something of the sort). They don't have to build the settlement from the ground up, so the Kingdom Building rules need to kind of come in half way.

Now, what I tried to do was build the extant settlement in the Kingdom Building portion of Hero Lab. Except, the city is a metropolis (Westcrown), and to get the population right you have to add nearly 40 districts. However, each time I added a district it added a +1 to every single settlement stat, resulting in base state like Law and Crime at +44 or other ridiculous numbers.

I'm beginning to think the Kingdom Building rules aren't right for this (or Hero Lab is wrong in adding a +1 with every district, which I can't find confirmation for anywhere).

Do folks have any suggestions on how they'd run such a thing? Scale down further to the downtime/teams/buildings rules?

I really want to focus on how hard it is to steer a city as massive and corrupt as Westcrown, while the PCs try to enact positive change.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Adding a district should add +1 to consumption and control DC, but nothing else that I can think of off the top of my head, so that sounds like odd behaviour for Hero Lab.

Try building the same settlement in the Kingdom Tracking Spreadsheet (see a few posts earlier for the Ultimate Campaign one rather than the Ultimate Rulership one, though URule is generally a good upgrade).

You'll probably have to add a bunch of hexes and farms to handle the consumption of a large settlement.

You then might want to consider taking the time to use Ultimate Factions from Legendary Games (disclaimer: I know the author) to help simulate the balance of power between different factions and groups within the city.

I will note, though, that the numbers for kingdoms do get a bit ridiculous, so +44 to something doesn't make me flinch at all.

Further note (I don't have my books to hand): each lot (36 per district) has a population of 250, so a full district has 9,000 people living in it. Is Westcrown's population really 350,000?


Westcrown has a population of 114,700 people. Meaning that, at most, it should have 12 full districts and half.

By the map I can count at least 9 districts, plus surrounding areas. That means if they are all full of buildings, and they seem to be, that is a population of 81,000 people by the basic rules. Two of the districts are really large, and could possibly be split into two for the purpose of calculating buildings and population, raising this total to 13 districts.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Thanks shadowkras, I knew someone would be able to help out in short order.

I think I might see if I can do this as a trial run - convert the details into something approximating the city to get stats out of it - I might even be able to come up with an easy way to do it, which would be really awesome.

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