| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm reading the rules and thinking that there should have been more clear tiers for abilities and buildings, etc. My preparation for starting a campaign in July has mostly consisted in playing through a few mock scenarios so I can give good advice to my players and role play through it. This is what I'm thinking/planning.
In the first scene of the campaign I'll introduce a clerk of Abadar ... he's going to in-character be introducing the rules as they come up.
During the camp/hexploration scenes happening until establishment of the kingdom, this clerk of Abadar will chat with the players about what it means to civilize the wilds and establish a kingdom...
I think we'll montage a little as they return to Rostov and then a whole group of settlers accompanies the adventurers to the starting hex
When we establish the kingdom, and during kingdom turns, the clerk of Abadar will "call the meeting to order" and run through the agenda using a Robert's Rules of Order style.
For the first couple moves, the clerk will suggest a few things that need to get done:
- He'll whisper to the players which companions might be well suited to which roles...
- The first building in the first settlement on the first turn should probably be housing or else the kingdom will have overcrowding... and if there's population they also should establish a source of Food ... and other basic steps to start off on the right foot.
I've actually only got that far, but it would be great to hear if there is some other advice about first steps/build order for using these rules to establish a kingdom well. One thing I'm interested in is introducing warfare rules early so I wonder what it looks like to establish militia at a fairly early stage of the campaign as well....
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
- Except a paragraph saying Lady Jamandi and the Rostland support you, and you can roleplay the establishment as much as you cant, there is almost nothing telling you how people come to your newly found kingdom or what, why... When...
You're expected to make that stuff up, if it comes up at all. But effectively it's "people looking for a fresh start or opportunities migrate to your kingdom from the surrounding areas." Effectively by creating housing and other buildings you're creating opportunities for folks from elsewhere, and some folks take you up on it.
- I have a hard time seeing activities like "Craft Luxuries" or "Create a Masterpiece" being allowed since they do not have access to any shop, artisans, craftmanship...
The thing with the kingdom actions is that the PCs aren't actually doing those things for the most part. You're effectively a government ordering something done, and overseeing while other people do it. Even in a village, there's going to be basic artisans of some kind supplying things the other villagers need. Those folks do it, somehow. Maybe the players are involved in some way, but the fact that it uses kingdom skills and your PC skills have absolutely no impact on the results at all makes it pretty clear you're not personally involved.
It doesn't tend to make a lot of sense at first, but it's easy to not have enough to do as it is in a turn, so removing those options would make that problem even worse.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
- He'll whisper to the players which companions might be well suited to which roles...
The companions themselves could advocate for the roles they want, if they're willing to do them. That would probably be more interesting than another NPC who just showed up simply telling the PCs that.
- The first building in the first settlement on the first turn should probably be housing or else the kingdom will have overcrowding... and if there's population they also should establish a source of Food ... and other basic steps to start off on the right foot.
The food one is a bit of a challenge since you can't build a Mill at level 1 and you can't build farms in a Village without house rules (though I highly recommend that because the idea that a village can't support farms is absolutely baffling from a realism perspective).
I've actually only got that far, but it would be great to hear if there is some other advice about first steps/build order for using these rules to establish a kingdom well. One thing I'm interested in is introducing warfare rules early so I wonder what it looks like to establish militia at a fairly early stage of the campaign as well....
Big issue with early warfare is that its hard to have the food production to support it. Armies cost food, upgrading them costs resources, and you just don't have it for a while.
Wars also impose some significant downsides while they're going on that can also be a problem when your kingdom doesn't have many tools to deal with those. Might be better depending on which house rule sets your using, but in the core rules it would be rough. Hell, our kingdom wasn't even trained in Warfare initially because there just isn't enough skills to go around RAW.
(Honestly my advice is ditch the kingdom rules entirely, use kingdom in the background, and don't bother with any of this. But I know folks usually want to at least try these rules.)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The food one is a bit of a challenge since you can't build a Mill at level 1 and you can't build farms in a Village without house rules (though I highly recommend that because the idea that a village can't support farms is absolutely baffling from a realism perspective).
Hmmm... Yeah still looking through the rules and trying a few mock rounds to work out what needs to happen. Depending on where they are thinking about placing their starting settlement, I think my steward should recommend a starting hex with river or lake, so that fishing can happen for food right away (and point out about how useful it is to have access to rivers for trade routes). I think he'll also point out that an early town hall allows for third actions by each leader as a early goal to work towards.
Speaking of leadership actions... I'm wondering if the idea during these phases is to repair ruin and unrest scores; then if there's no bad stuff, generate as much RP and commodities as possible; and if there's nothing else going on try creative/supernatural solution once to generate kingdom XP
Big issue with early warfare is that its hard to have the food production to support it. Armies cost food, upgrading them costs resources, and you just don't have it for a while.Wars also impose some significant downsides while they're going on that can also be a problem when your kingdom doesn't have many tools to deal with those. Might be better depending on which house rule sets your using, but in the core rules it would be rough. Hell, our kingdom wasn't even trained in Warfare initially because there just isn't enough skills to go around RAW.
Good to note. Since we're starting in July with chapter 1, we probably won't have a kingdom until Battlecry is out and we can do some early troop vs. troop combat before upgrading to warfare. It just seems thematic though to have there be some level of mass combat scenes earlier than chapter 8. I'm thinking to have Brevoy houses and Mivon be skirmishing on the edges of the kingdom.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Hmmm... Yeah still looking through the rules and trying a few mock rounds to work out what needs to happen. Depending on where they are thinking about placing their starting settlement, I think my steward should recommend a starting hex with river or lake, so that fishing can happen for food right away (and point out about how useful it is to have access to rivers for trade routes). I think he'll also point out that an early town hall allows for third actions by each leader as a early goal to work towards.
Being on a water border is nice because the Mill is a small building that decreases consumption. So it helps a lot before you start getting enough farms to cover everything. The non-water equivalent is the Stockyard which is 4x the size.
Speaking of leadership actions... I'm wondering if the idea during these phases is to repair ruin and unrest scores; then if there's no bad stuff, generate as much RP and commodities as possible; and if there's nothing else going on try creative/supernatural solution once to generate kingdom XP
Pretty much, though later on Supernatural Solution becomes the go-to for a lot of things. You don't have enough skill boosts to be able to reliably hit the DCs in a lot of skills, and Supernatural Solution is the "roll Magic for this" answer. By level 8 we were using like 5 of them a turn because otherwise the failure odds are just too high.
We also did a lot of "if we have extra actions dump them into Focused Attention" since that has no cost, no downside to failure except losing the action, and you can use it as many times as you want. Once buildings got more expensive a typical turn had multiple Focused Attentions and multiple Supernatural Solutions.
It was effective, but also very, very repetitive.
Good to note. Since we're starting in July with chapter 1, we probably won't have a kingdom until Battlecry is out and we can do some early troop vs. troop combat before upgrading to warfare. It just seems thematic though to have there be some level of mass combat scenes earlier than chapter 8. I'm thinking to have Brevoy houses and...
Would make sense, yeah.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Thanks for the responses. I’m reading and thinking about it a lot and it’s kind of weird to me that there’s always ever only three region actions and early on I’m not really sure what a leader should do if there’s not much ruin/unrest to repair. Here’s my thoughts at the moment for some house rules and I’d love to hear what you think.
Start with zero base region actions. (Rationale: We can do them with leadership and armies as below and scale with the kingdom. )
Leaders can use leadership activities to perform regional and civic activities. (Rationale: This can accelerate early stages for the kingdom and settlements and make the leadership turns more dynamic rather than just repair and resource.)
Armies (even level 1 infantry) can also perform regional activities after they are deployed to a hex in the hex they are deployed to. (Rationale: This makes them like civ game builders or engineers. They give us extra actions for regional actions that scale up and incentivize an early army, even if not for combat.Abuse is curtailed by the penalties of size and army consumption )
Of course this also assumes reconnoiter is a regional action that could be performed by a leadership action or army in hex action and other K&V etc. mods