Automatic / Milestone Kingdom levelling


Kingmaker Second Edition


I've been running Kingmaker for about a year now, and we're finally at the point where we can establish our Kingdom. After a disastrous dry run of a first Kingdom turn, my players have decided they don't want to participate in the Kingdom turns at all.

There are mentions of "Automatic" and "Milestone levelling" for Kingdoms in the book, and it states that if players don't want to manage the Kingdom they don't have to, yet I can't find any details of what actually happens in this instance for the GM. I can't find details of what these Kingdoms look like, or how that affects the adventure going forward.

Am I reading this incorrectly? Misunderstanding? Or am I clinging to a false hope that I don't have to manage the Kingdom on my own in the background while the players move on blissfully unaware that I'm doing all the Kingdom turns behind the scenes?


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There's a "Kingdom in the Background" sidebar near the start of each chapter that details the approximate size of the kingdom and major acquisitions that have occurred around the start of the chapter.

You don't have to do any Kingdom management either if you don't want to!

Personally, I have a world map in my game, and all I do re: kingdom management is update the borders based on the sidebar.


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If you ever want to try running the Kingdom Rules again, take a look at Vance and Kerenshara's 2e Kingdom Building Rules Problem Analysis. This is a collection both of issues in the rules, and suggested house rules to address them without replacing the whole system. These make a real difference in terms of reducing some of the problems with the Kingdom rules.

If everyone is just done with that, then Kingdom in the Background works. Narratively, the PCs are kind of giving broad direction but letting others actually implement things so they lose control but don't have to learn a bunch of new rules. You can always change things slightly from what's suggested as needed if they really want to do something specific.

I'm a player in this so I don't know exactly what that looks like from the GM perspective, but Exzachtly covered it. I would say that I strongly recommend NOT just running Kingdom Turns yourself and telling the players what happened. If you have a bad turn (and if you're running it RAW, it will absolutely happen), you can suddenly show up to a game and tell the players "so in the last month your kingdom got a quarter of the way to anarchy, crime is rampant, and a bunch of awful stuff happened." I say that from experience because we had a turn like that, where we had events that required skills the Kingdom is untrained in (because Kingdoms do not get nearly enough skills) and we were critically failing on like a 7 on the dice. Critical failures on Kingdom stuff range from "awful" to "catastrophic". It felt lousy as a player doing it, and it wouldn't feel better if the GM just showed up one day and declared it.

Doing it that way would be a huge time investment on your part without a real payoff.


I second Tridus' recommendation. Regardless of how the actual turns go, it's more work for you as the GM. There's already a TON of stuff to manage in this campaign, and if the Kingdom rules aren't your group's cup of tea, there's no reason for kingdom management to be anything more than roleplay moments.

My players continue to have fun playing as the rulers of the kingdom even though that section of the game has become all roleplay (We're about halfway through Chapter 7, for reference).


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

If you don't want to go super complex (Vance and Kerenshara's rules), and don't want to just handwave it, you might consider an intermediate option like these homebrew rules from TALlama:

Domainkeeper

They radically simplify the kingdom building process, and make things a lot less onerous on the GM (and come with a JavaScript implementation).

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