BBEG Idea for foreshadowing *spoilers*

[joshua neeley]

Just an idea I’m tossing around in order to involve the bbeg a bit more in the story over all.

So Nyrissa wants to accomplish a few things

1. Destroy the last kingdom of 1000
2. Bottle the stolen lands as a gift to the fey lords
3. Reclaim Briar

So in essence she could stand to gain from assisting the player’s kingdom until it is big enough to “claim.” Maybe she could join them for a while as an advisor to the chaotic and fey filled nature of the region until she is found out or simply reveals herself after she feels the kingdom is “ready?”

Do you think this would work? Her motives feel a bit conflicted to me. Does she want the player’s kingdom to succeed or stop them before they ever get off the ground?

[James Jacobs]

Some notes, spoilered because they're spoilery...

Spoiler:

Nyrissa wants the PCs' kingdom to succeed, because if it doesn't she can't claim it as her final trophy for the Apology. That's why she doesn't start the process of absorbing the kingdom until after the PCs defeat Pitax and have a bit of time to carry on their kingdom to show that it's a stable and successful nation, but the same goes for ANYone who gets that far, be it Pitax with King Irovetti, or Armagh and his barbarains, or Baron Dreliv, or Vordakai or the troll king or the Stag Lord or even the sootscales. She doesn't care who's kingdom ends up being the best and the grandest, but she can't directly help build a kingdom. In fact, she needs to test them to make sure they can withstand hardships.

If she were allowed to help kingdoms grow, it would have been a lot easier for her to gather a thousand kingdoms, and those kingdoms would have had a much smaller reason to need a party of adventurers like the PCs to protect them. Put another way—the more Nyrissa helps a kingdom, the less there's a reason to have an Adventure Path about it. That just turns it into a standalone adventure once she betrays the kingdom and attempts to absorb it.

Her motive is to gather 1,000 kingdoms so she can get out from under the Lantern King's oppressive Apology, but she can't actually make those kingdoms (or directly help them) herself. But she DOES need to be somewhat invested in the growth of the kingdom from the start, because that's intrinsic to her being able to suck the kingdom up into the Apology—which is why she doesn't just absorb any kingdom she wants. She actually has to plant the seeds as it were, then be patient.

A good analogy is that to Nyrissa, a kingdom is like a tree. She plants the seed, then has to wait until the tree is fully grown before she cuts it down.

Reclaiming Briar is mostly a side thing. She's failed to reclaim the sword so many times that she's more or less given up on it, but once she realizes that the PCs have the sword, she'll for sure want it back—hence sending the Horned Hunter after them. Before that, she's pretty much given up on ever finding it and still thinks King Irovetti's trustworthy enough to let her know if he finds any leads.

[James Jacobs]

Also...

Spoiler:

With the analogy of Nyrissa being a tree grower and the kingdom being the tree, a good way to foreshadow her is to have her show up as a mysterious protector of the wild as the PCs explore. Maybe she'll intervene now and then when the PCs face a TPK and save them, or perhaps they'll just hear her mentioned by those the PCs fight against—that foreshadowing is already built in to the advneture, in fact, with her being the direct muse/inspiration for the Stag Lord, the troll king, King Irovetti, and to a lesser extent other movers and shakers in the region. The tricky thing here is that you don't want the PCs to suddenly try to directly confront her before they're powerful enough to do so.

The Kingmaker computer game had some really interesting methods by which they foreshadowed her, up to and including having some of the companion NPCs be her agents, or having the PCs be potentially lured out to meet her only to get killed. Those sorts of methods work better for a computer game where it's one person playing, though, rather than a tabletop game where the "main character" role is shared by multiple people. It's a lot tougher to do the stories that Owlcat did without making one player feel more important than the others... or without making the PCs feel like the NPCs are the actual focus of the plot...

[DM_aka_Dudemeister]

The way I square the circle, of her motivation is that Nyrissa is trying to kickstart kingdoms that will be easier to take when they ripen. Her original plan was to take Pitax, before Irovetti rebelled by hiding Briar and using it as leverage to protect his pet tyrrany.

So she moves onto the Stag Lord, a bandit Kingdom should be easy enough to take, but she underestimated the Stag Lord's sloth. When the PCs destroy that she doesn't have enough information to know if they'll succeed at building a kingdom. So she inspires Hargulka to build a kingdom of monsters, she figures it could grow big enough to be her final apology, but be too chaotic to organise against her.

When the PCs defeat the monster kingdom she sets her sights on taking the PC's kingdom. She figures Vordekai and Irovetti will soften it up enough for her to deal the killing stroke.

[mattdusty]

DM_aka_Dudemeister wrote:

The way I square the circle, of her motivation is that Nyrissa is trying to kickstart kingdoms that will be easier to take when they ripen. Her original plan was to take Pitax, before Irovetti rebelled by hiding Briar and using it as leverage to protect his pet tyrrany.

So she moves onto the Stag Lord, a bandit Kingdom should be easy enough to take, but she underestimated the Stag Lord's sloth. When the PCs destroy that she doesn't have enough information to know if they'll succeed at building a kingdom. So she inspires Hargulka to build a kingdom of monsters, she figures it could grow big enough to be her final apology, but be too chaotic to organise against her.

When the PCs defeat the monster kingdom she sets her sights on taking the PC's kingdom. She figures Vordekai and Irovetti will soften it up enough for her to deal the killing stroke.

That's a cool idea. How is this information conveyed to the players?

[DM_aka_Dudemeister]

With the Stag Lord any surviving bandits can talk about how Stag Lord drunkenly rambled about his Green Eyed Queen who delivered him a crown and castle. Easily dismissed as the ramblings of a mad drunk.

With Hargulka, when the PCs defeat him, as he's dying and his regeneration finally gives out his eyes snap open one last time and he laments his failure at fulfilling his Green Eyed Queen's dream of a united monster kingdom, and then tells the PCs how its too late, his Queen will avenge him, as the great owlbear is already on the warpath.

With Briar either Nyrissa in disguise or one of her loyal agents tells the PCs they believe that Irovetti has a stolen magic sword of some significance and would like it returned for a magnificent reward. They know only he keeps its location a well-guarded secret.

[joshua neeley]

James Jacobs wrote:

Also...

** spoiler omitted **

Thanks James! That helps alot. I guess I’m just looking to find a way to make her a bit more present so the players have a face to know her by a little earlier in the game. Do you have any more tips or recommendations to accomplish that?

[James Jacobs]

joshua neeley wrote:

James Jacobs wrote:

Also...

** spoiler omitted **

Thanks James! That helps alot. I guess I’m just looking to find a way to make her a bit more present so the players have a face to know her by a little earlier in the game. Do you have any more tips or recommendations to accomplish that?

The whole point of Kingmaker, and the initial customer/reader feedback that prompted its creation in the first place, was a call for an Adventure Path that was a sandbox and that didn't put its main villain/primary story front and center–folks wanted a break from that model of Adventure Path, or so they claimed. Turns out that appears to be a vocal minority of Adventure Path customers, and that most people want each installment to obviously move the main story forward.

So my advice here is to first and foremost be honest with your players and find out what they want and expect. What a GM wants from a campaign and what the PCs want from the campaign aren't always the same!

But if you and your players are looking for something less of a sandbox and more of a tightly-scripted story from Kingmaker, I suppose the best suggestion would be to have the PCs themselves...

Spoiler:

...have a shared dream in which Nyrissa, as an initially mysterious patron, compels them to create the Stolen Lands. You could even add in a late-game twist where it's revealed that Jamandi Aldori has been her prisoner for decades, and that the version of her that the PCs and the rest of the world has been interacting with for that time was Nyrissa (or one of her agents) in a shapechanged disguise. Alternately you could work with each of your players separately to build up personal links to Nyrissa in their background, but this works best for a mature group who is comfortable with other party memebers perhaps being at odds with them, as I could see this route (which is, essentially, the route Owlcat took by having some of the NPC companions have Nyrissa-adjacent agendas) causing enough party strife to implode a campaign.

But the best way to handle it, I think, is to be ready to ad-lib in bits of foreshadowing when it seems like the PCs are noticing things—even connections that might not actually be there in print. LIke, if you describe a forest encounter and drop in a detail about a flock of blackbirds in the trees suddenly flying away, intending it just to be a tiny bit of flavor text to spruce up an otherwise dull bit of text, but a PC suddenly gets the idea that those blackbirds are messengers or spies, then roll with it and in a later encounter have that PC notice more ravens watching them and then, when the time is right, reveal that the bird featured in Zuddiger's Picnic might have some sort of link to all those blackbirds the PCs have been spotting.

It's best, in other words, for you to customize these changes to the Adventure Path as written to your party, in the same way you'd adapt a pirate-themed Adventure Path to work for a party of paladins, or a kobold-slaying campaign to work for a party of kobold PCs. The core assumption of Kingmaker is a sandbox where the PCs are in large part the drivers of the story's direction and plot, based on how they react to events that put themselves before them. Certainly there's more than enough encounters in Kingmaker (even before you add the Companion Guide adventures) to get the PCs to 20th level well in advance of the climax, so the path the party picks through this enormous campaign is intended to be one where the PCs make those choices rather than chase an obvious story lead.

[Cydeth]

One of the things I've considered doing when I run this is adding a few bits and pieces of ruins across the Stolen Lands, remnants of different kingdoms from different times, and having odd, recurring sculptures of Nyrissa without giving too much other information. If it's across multiple kingdoms and huge time frames, it gives them some clues.

[joshua neeley]

James Jacobs wrote:

joshua neeley wrote:

James Jacobs wrote:

Also...

** spoiler omitted **

Thanks James! That helps alot. I guess I’m just looking to find a way to make her a bit more present so the players have a face to know her by a little earlier in the game. Do you have any more tips or recommendations to accomplish that?

The whole point of Kingmaker, and the initial customer/reader feedback that prompted its creation in the first place, was a call for an Adventure Path that was a sandbox and that didn't put its main villain/primary story front and center–folks wanted a break from that model of Adventure Path, or so they claimed. Turns out that appears to be a vocal minority of Adventure Path customers, and that most people want each installment to obviously move the main story forward.

So my advice here is to first and foremost be honest with your players and find out what they want and expect. What a GM wants from a campaign and what the PCs want from the campaign aren't always the same!

But if you and your players are looking for something less of a sandbox and more of a tightly-scripted story from Kingmaker, I suppose the best suggestion would be to have the PCs themselves...

** spoiler omitted **...

Oh definitely. I don’t want a linear story at all. I believe I’ll be sticking to keeping her in the background and sort of tease this idea that there is something much larger at play. Then wait for the most opportune time to give a “face” to this threat. The open ended sandbox nature is a must imo, and is what really makes this adventure special.

And Cydeth, I really like that idea. Just a bit more to add to the idea of this Queen that seems to somehow be connected to much more than what she first appears to be.

[Optic_TH]

mattdusty wrote:

DM_aka_Dudemeister wrote:

The way I square the circle, of her motivation is that Nyrissa is trying to kickstart kingdoms that will be easier to take when they ripen. Her original plan was to take Pitax, before Irovetti rebelled by hiding Briar and using it as leverage to protect his pet tyrrany.

So she moves onto the Stag Lord, a bandit Kingdom should be easy enough to take, but she underestimated the Stag Lord's sloth. When the PCs destroy that she doesn't have enough information to know if they'll succeed at building a kingdom. So she inspires Hargulka to build a kingdom of monsters, she figures it could grow big enough to be her final apology, but be too chaotic to organise against her.

When the PCs defeat the monster kingdom she sets her sights on taking the PC's kingdom. She figures Vordekai and Irovetti will soften it up enough for her to deal the killing stroke.

That's a cool idea. How is this information conveyed to the players?

I feel from my experience as a DM this is the most elegant solution. Other suggestions risk being ham fisted or too opaque and not achieving what people are setting out to fix.

[Gator the Unread]

I just started my Pathfinder 2e Kingmaker, and I have started adding plant/fey based actions to key NPC's. Right now, certain people have the ability to extend a vine from their arm to grapple the heroes at range. Visually, these villains will have green veins under their skin running from their face to a single limb, and maybe a patch of leaves replacing an eye.
Imagery could be hinted at, if one is trying to be subtle. Have the PCs notice a woman plant a tree, and the DM could describe how that she would tend to the tree until it was big enough to chop down. A few sessions later, a man could be tending a orchard, plucking ripe fruit, stripping the meat of the fruit away, and planting a seed. A farmer is fattening a hog to either butcher or gift to some one who will. There could be a tendency for merchants to building up a business, then sell everything off to a few dozen people (chopping it up for parts).
For a much darker tone, have a slave owner carefully train his slaves in certain skills, and then sell them as trained craftsmen instead of brute labor. But this is more evil than I would want to see most kingdoms.
Other analogies could be done with farmers. A lost sheep or tool could have been given up on by the actual owner, until some one else finds it. One of the local judgements that rules have to deal with as kingdom leaders could be such. Record their decision, and have the idea come up again with the PC find the...magical sword thing.
I hope some of this rambling is helpful.