I've been playing the video game a lot lately, and since we're ending our current campaign, with the last session being on the Third, I put up a vote containing 3 Pathfinder adventures and 3 D&D 5e adventures. I added Kingmaker as one of the three Pathfinder games because I've been enjoying the video game. I gave everyone two votes each (I have four players in my group). Kingmaker won with 4 votes. We Be Goblins was the closest with 2 Votes. But everyone tossed in one vote each for Kingmaker.
Now, I've never really ran a pre-made campaign before, outside of the Warhammer 40k RPGs, so I was just wandering if there was any general advice for running Pathfinder APs, as well as advice for running Kingmaker.
Of course, I plan on making the campaign 'my own'. My players enjoy adventure, exploration and political intrigue and I plan on making sure to include things that will get them more invested in the world.
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Main advice:
Read the entire AP. People can tell you to change anything and everything, but if you don't understand how the AP is written and why they're suggesting those changes you likely won't understand the goals of the changes.
And when reading the AP remember that the GM knows more than the players. The GM learns a lot of background information that the players won't know about and sometimes that background stuff is important but there isn't always a way written in to the adventure to allow your players to learn it.
Read through the stickied threads. There's great advice in all of them and you can see what other GMs struggled with / didn't understand.
Random Encounters don't necessarily have to be a fight. If you put a monster in front of the group they will assume they can fight it and win. That's not always the case with random encounters.
The changes Dudemeister made to books 2 and 3 are the best changes I've ever seen for this AP. (Book 2: Hargulka's Monster Kingdom; Book 3: Varnhold Vanishing: Changes and Revisions)
The changes to book 2 make the enemies more of a threat and you can use them to put pressure on the group if they're not getting things done quickly enough. His changes to book 3 make the centaurs (which aren't in the video game) much more interactive and fun as well as provides reasons for the fetch quests. (The fetch quests on the inside covers are silly. Dudemeister uses most of them to help earn the trust of the centaurs. I've run 2 1/2 APs since and their interactions with the centaurs is still their most fond memory of gaming.)
Noteworthy: Nyrissa is WAY more active in the computer game. As written, the players don't really find out about her until the 6th book of the AP and she kind of comes out of nowhere.
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As Warped Savant says, you really do need to read the entire AP, possibly twice if you can. I would start with that and then look at some of the various threads around here for how to make changes to better the overall experience. The biggest thing of course is that Nyrissa really doesn't appear in the written modules until the last book. You will almost certainly want to start hinting at her earlier and there are a lot of good ideas around these forums for that.
In my game I'm running now, I started by having her make the Stag Lord's Helm and she uses it to occasionally communicate with the wearer/scry on the wearer. I actually made it cursed as well so that wearer didn't want to take it off. He eventually broke through the curse, but still wears it since it has extra abilities, etc.
The other thing I would tell you to pay attention to is weather. The wilderness aspect of this AP can really be played up early on. My party got caught in a blizzard early on while out exploring and it really reinforced the wilderness/nature aspect of the AP. Someone on here made a random weather generator that you can use as well.
Also, I think its a great idea to introduce the party to the other adventuring groups that are sent into the Stolen Lands early on. The beginning to VV becomes a lot more interesting if the party already has a connection with Varn for instance. In my game I had all four groups together when the Swordlords handed out the charters and let them mingle with the others. Varn came over to the group and immediately talked about setting up communications between the two groups in case either needed assistance. I then followed up after book 1 and before book 2 with another meeting of the four groups where the Swordlords gave them their kingdoms . . . except of course for the Wolves who didn't show up (for obvious reasons).
Finally, this is less a prep thing, and more a "be aware of" thing. As written, the AP has the party engaging in hexploration for five full books. Odds are that while the hexploration is fun initially, it will eventually get tiresome. I would be prepared to just kind of roll with it when your party gets tired of it. For my group, by the end of the second book, they were pretty much done with it. There's still the "discovery" aspect of going into new areas and not knowing what is there, but making them take the time to fully explore every hex just seems like punishment. The only thing to be wary of is if you use XP leveling as opposed to milestone. The party gets XP for exploring hexes and may end up a bit behind the 8 ball if they stop exploring and you don't make up the XP elsewhere. If you use milestone then this won't matter of course.
There's obviously a lot more that can be said, but I think a lot needs to be digested first and then a lot will just vary from group to group. Most important thing to remember is that this is a great resource here in the forums with tons of great ideas. These particular forums are not quite as active right now (though that will likely change when the updated AP is released) but a lot of us are still running games and checking it out semi regularly. Good luck and most importantly, have fun!
Here's the fixed link that Canarr posted above to my recent summation of running the campaign and advice for others:
LINK
For convenience's sake I will post the advice section below. The actual post has links to resources and whatnot but those got lost in the pasting.
Decide what your focus is. Paizo puts together a free Player’s Guide for each AP that is supposed to help players make characters that match up with the Path’s themes and settings. Players reading the Kingmaker Player’s Guide would naturally come to think that the campaign is all about a Game of Thrones-style struggle between Brevoy’s great houses. And yet none of that is actually in the AP.
Talk with your group before starting this Adventure Path and learn what it is that interests them. Is it the wilderness exploration? The prospect of ruling their own kingdom? What about rulership appeals to them – the politics? Warfare? Civ-style empire building? Armed with that knowledge you’ll be able to better tailor the AP to their expectations.
The bad news is, if they do want a game that’s like GoT, the adventures aren’t going to help you. At all. The good news is, there are other DMs who have done some of that work already, that you can use for inspiration. One example that I’m familiar with is Redcelt’s Game of Thrones in Brevoy from the Paizo Kingmaker board.
Don’t try to do too much. The open-ended nature of the adventures, especially the first two, means there’s lots of space to throw in new adventure sites, or entire adventures even (I’ve never read it but I’ve seen Realm of the Fellnight Queen frequently mentioned in this context). There’s also lots of room for the PCs to pursue their own goals, which is great. It’s easy to get carried away and throw too much plot into the pot, however. If the players are happy wandering around and finding unconnected adventures to go on, that’s wonderful. If there’s a particular endgame in mind, though – whether it’s Sound of Thousand Screams or something else – you might want to watch for the overarching story getting lost in a sea of side plots. And if you’re adding in some political machinations, don’t go overboard with the number of factions and their schemes. There’s a lot of potential sources of trouble between Brevoy’s Houses and the River Kingdoms, plus all of the foes in the AP, so pick a few and focus on them so that you don’t get burned out and your players don’t get lost.
Foreshadowing! If you’re sticking with the AP’s central plot of Nyrissa trying to bottle up the Stolen Lands, you’ll do well to sprinkle references to her and her schemes throughout the first five adventures. There are lots of ways to go about this. My own approach was to: have lesser faeries talk about her, have some of the adventure antagonists bear a distinctive ring from her, add in additional fey encounters, have the PCs interact with her and her underlings before the last adventure, and have the PCs deal with some “proto-blooms” that presaged the real deal. The open-ended adventures really lend themselves to adding in your own ideas without having to change much else.
There are also other characters and events in the AP that would benefit from being set up in earlier adventures. Having the PCs meet Varn, Drelev, and/or Irovetti, for example. Plant seeds for the political turmoil in Brevoy, the centaur conflict in the Nomen Heights, the presence of the Tiger Lords in the Glenebon Uplands, River Kingdom politics, the legend of Armag, the Rushlight Tournament, and whatever else strikes your fancy. Give the players the information they need to properly act as rulers in the game world.
Have your antagonists actively oppose the players. It’s probably the result of restrictions on page count, but the published adventures are very poor about presenting active antagonists. Most of them attack the PCs and then sit around and wait to be killed in their lair. How boring! Have your villains take notice of the PCs actions and fight back! Have the Stag Lord send his lackeys to go burn down Oleg’s! Have the trolls sack one of the kingdom’s border settlements! Have Vordakai scry and fry the PCs in their beds or council meetings! And so on. Make the PCs work for their victories.
Also have other, non-antagonistic factions come into conflict with the players. Varnhold and Drelev would both want territory in the Greenbelt. Once the PC kingdom gets going, Brevoy or Mivon might decide it’s ripe to be annexed. Certain guilds and merchants may not appreciate the competition. Don’t let the PCs rule in a vacuum – they have some prime real estate, and other people will want to horn in on it.
Don’t feel bad if the kingdom or mass combat rules don’t work for your group. They aren’t very good. I go into more detail in other post-mortems, but in brief:
The kingdom rules model the wrong things in my opinion, and the adventure setup doesn’t provide the active opposition, scarcity of resources, or random disasters needed for the players’ decisions to have consequences. It’s also far too fiddly. I like the Kingdom Manager that I wrote to aid with the fiddly-ness, but there are also some nice spreadsheets out there that do much of the same work.
The mass combat rules are nicely simple in that you can quickly convert individual-scale stats to army stats, but they are also complicated enough that you can’t just hand those stats to the players and run a battle. The outcome of battles is also super-swingy. We used the rules starting from Rivers Run Red, and in all that time I would say that most of the battles fell flat in terms of being enjoyable or interesting to the players; the system definitely needs some work from the DM (maps, tokens, etc.) to make it work, I think.
Think about some potential answers for the mysteries of the campaign. There are a lot of questions in the AP setup, and the players will naturally become curious about at least a few of them over the course of the campaign. But the AP has few answers, so it’s a good idea to have some of your own ready to go. What caused the Vanishing of House Rogarvia? Where are or what happened to the members of House Rogarvia? What does the Vanishing have to do with Skywatch? How do the players undo Gyronna’s zombie curse on the hillside of the Stag Lord’s fort? Why are there all these faerie in the Stolen Lands anyway? Why is Nyrissa so interested in this one specific patch of Golarion land? Can the players talk to Count Ranalc or and of the other Eldest? What happens when/if Nyrissa gets hold of Briar? Is it possible to make Nyrissa whole, and what then?
The fate of House Rogarvia was one that I never had a satisfactory answer for. Or at least I didn’t until it was too late. Drew, Satampra’s player, was very interested in that one. But by the time I had a semi-formed idea that I liked, the campaign was heading into the endgame, and I didn’t want to delay or derail that. In a world with infinite gaming time, we might have taken that up in the intermission between WotRK and SoaTS. I still might revisit it, possibly using 5e D&D instead of Pathfinder, but we’ll see. For now I am enjoying being a player again.
There are a lot of Kingmaker resources out there. Seriously, the Paizo Kingmaker message board is a gold mine, and surprisingly active given the age of the original AP. Use the online communities that are out there for aid or inspiration in your own campaign! Some helpful threads that I made use of myself were the 6-player conversions and Venture Capital, and I also stole ideas and maps and other useful bits from lots of other discussions.
My mantra when I post in this forum: Drop the encounters that aren't interesting, aren't appropriathe te for a kingdom's rulers to handle, and that don't advance the overall or PC's personal story lines. Replace them with more targeted encounters or drop XP altogether and just tell your party when to level up.
The exploration aspect of this AP makes most encounters fall into the "five minute workday" theme, where the players quickly realize they only have one (sometimes two) encounters a day, so they have no reason to not drop all of their best spells and daily abilities right up front, trivializing most encounters. It becomes apparent that many of these "filler" encounters exist solely to keep the PCs on the correct XP track.
Beyond that, I second most everything others have said here. Also, Legendary Games published two adventures that were specifically (if on the sly) designed to fill in some of the gaps in Kingmaker: Cold Mountain & Horns of the Hunted.
Note that PCs who get used to steamrolling 1/day encounters can have real difficulties adapting to some of the really nasty lairs, particularly Vordakai’s or the Stag Lord.
Note that PCs who get used to steamrolling 1/day encounters can have real difficulties adapting to some of the really nasty lairs, particularly Vordakai’s or the Stag Lord.
Very true. One of the better suggestions I saw somewhere on these boards was to look at some of the "random" or even planned encounters as a series of encounters. Turn them into a mini dungeon just so the players don't start thinking everything is going to be one fight a day.