So I am running an adventure for a group of people playing Pathfinder for the first time. I have both run and played in the Kingmaker AP, its one of my favorites. Since these are new players I am giving them generous 25 point buy stats and max hit dice -2 in hp, as well as auto bonus progression because honestly it gives a better feel to the game and new players often are not aware when their defenses or offence is not on par for their level.
I am wanting to spice things up a little, and maybe add some more details to the story. For starters, I would like to tweak the Stag Lord a bit and make him more like a cross between Negan from The Walking Dead and Robin Hood. Also the bandits need a little tweaking too. With evil Fey and trolls running around it seems like they might do well to have a bit more cold iron and alchemist fire available.
I have always wondered, who exactly are the bandits robbing besides Oleg? Do they go farther north? Why is there a bandit problem in the first place? Is the first world screwing with people's minds or are there more mundane pressures such as a bad economy, war, or terrible nobles.
Has anyone else replaced the mites and the kobolds? Even though the mites are fey they kinda feel out of place. That brings me to something that always bothered me, when people hear about fey they tend to think more about fairy dragons and nice things rather than monstrous horrific stuff. I maybe want the encounters in general to be a bit more tense.
Has anyone else made similar tweaks to the Stolen Lands?
The presence of Oleg's trading post and various set encounters implies that there's a decent-sized community of hunters, trappers, and loggers in the area. There's probably some homesteaders scattered around the Rostland plains, too. There might also have once been some sparse trade between Restov and Mivon, but the Staglord would have choked that off.
If I was going to run the AP again, I would throw in more encounters with neutral NPCs, have the PCs find lone farms or abandoned hunter camps, etc.
This made me think of one of my favorite bits from our current campaign, from way back in our second session. The PCs are getting ready for the bandits to come to Oleg's, and the rogue wanted to dress up like a hunter and talk to the bandits when they come. He does so, and then Haps orders his men to take the rogue's purse. The player was shocked! He tried explaining to them that if they robbed the people who traded at the post, there wouldn't be anything to steal at the post, but they didn't seem to care. They took his purse and stabbed him while they were at it. :D
I kept everything mostly as-is, though I beefed up the bandits a little and made them (and the Stag Lord) more proactive in going after the PCs.
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Ya I think having the Stag Lord being slightly more active in figuring out whats going on adds a bit of realism. I have played several times through stolen lands, and most players kinda expect the bandits to be more proactive to the point of not wanting to wast time on mites and kobolds when bandits might be organizing an attack.
Might replace the mites and kobolds with more bandit towns, with leaders also calling themselves the Stag Lord, kinda How Negan in the Walking Dead has all of his men calling themselves "Negan" as well. The players might think they have killed the Stag Lord only to find that he now hunts them.
Also might change the Stag Lord's father quite a bit. Torturing the Stag Lord as a boy made him a monster, and if I remember correctly there is a half-starved owlbear in the fort. These seem very much like things a druid in the cult of Rovagug might do. Turing a man into a monster in order to stop the spread of civilization sounds exactly like something a follower of Rovagug or Lamashtu might do. Starving a dangerous animal to make it more violent seems Rovagugish too.
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Definitely taking that rovagug idea, religion is important to the story I’m presenting
And making the bandits more proactive.
I made some edits to my game world, and the relevant change is that I moved the emerald spire from one side of the river kingdoms to the other, making it end up right at the top of the green belt by the bend in the river.
They went from level one to three in there so far (to be fair they were almost level 2 when they got there)
Having the bandits do stuff in the background while they are distracted might make them more engaged in the story