Pathfinder 1E Pathfinder Kingmaker E6?

Werebat · Jul 22, 2010

I'm going to be all over the map with this, so bear with me...

I'm currently running an E6 Eberron game with 3.5 rules. Some of us have the Pathfinder rules, and overall we think they're pretty cool, but we haven't converted our long-running games (mine and a friend's who is running Age of Worms).

My current game has the players playing orcs and goblinoids who are fighting aberrations and trying to keep the Daelkyr minions from re-opening a gate to Xoriat. I'd say player reaction to E6 is mixed; some like it (including the DM of the other game, who says he's switch to E6 if he could run AoW with it), some not so much.

I'm thinking about a possible next campaign. My first thought was to use the basis of the Civ4 mod "Fall From Heaven", set in a frozen world ruled by a renegade god of Winter, in an E6 campaign. Then I spied Kingmaker and thought it included many of the elements I wanted to use (particularly the nationbuilding). Now I've got this crazy idea of combining Pathfinder with E6, Kingmaker, and the FFH mod from Civ4.

Am I trying to do too much?

How well would Kingmaker work in E6? The first three modules should be runnable with little to no modification. I'm not sure about the last three, but then I'm not sure if I'd mind dropping out of Kingmaker at that point to go in my own direction with the FFH storyline.

Does E6 work well in Pathfinder?

How well would Kingmaker dovetail with a FFH based campaign? In essence, the PCs would not just be agents of a powerful kingdom, they'd be the ones rebuilding civilization from a frozen wasteland. I considered having the leader from the FFH mod (the wizard Kylorin) ruling the nation, then thought it would be better to let the PCs rule their own nation with Kylorin as some sort of sage or advisor mysteriously providing aid when the modules call for the parent kingdom to do so.

Any advice?

- Ron ^*^

Psychotic Jim · Jul 23, 2010

Well, I'm not familiar at all with E6 or it assumptions, nor have I ran Kingmaker yet, so take my guesswork advice with a grain of salt. I think you could run some of the earlier modules okay (I've only read the first two). By the end of the second module (Rivers Run Red), PCs are assumed to be 7th level (so presumably previous to that point, they're assumed to be levels near or within the E6 range. The rest I'm guessing you'd really have to scale down, possibly including some of the wandering monsters in book 2.

Getting to the specifics of it (here are spoilers):

The sandbox nature of what I've read so far means you could probably mine different parts of the adventure path while leaving others out. There is some backstory that serves as a setup you might need to modify if you were to change it, but much of the meat and potatoes you could mine for other purposes. Some of the elements are fantastic (from legions of trolls to spontaneously risen undead) whereas others are less so (from an overgrown [but otherwise mundane] snapping turtle to agent provacateurs from rival kingdoms). This is true even in the second book.

The game has a rustic, northern/possibly Norse feel to it, with the land having an ancient barbarian past. The setting can be fairly gritty if you play up those themes. I don't know if that would fit with what you're going for here (never played Civ4).

Some of the potential allies your characters can get might be fairly powerful (one is a 5th level nixie sorcerer and another is a hill giant, for example) if the cap for a normal human is 6 levels. Some of these of course, could be scaled down (an ogre with a few levels of barbarian instead of a hill giant, for example).

Edit: Another thing that gets my attention is the player reaction to E6. You mentioned the reaction of the players in your group was mixed. What can you can do to make this better received? Can you extend the E6 methodology up a few levels into the mid-level tier?

Nimloth · Jul 23, 2010

As a group, we like and have used E8 (really GestaltE8). Currently we are starting Kingmaker (now, lvl3, in the 1st module). The DM was thinking about E8/10(?), but has decided the effort to adapt the later modules to it isn't worth the effort. Though he hasn't ruled it out.

I will chat with him and let you know what he thinks.

I think E6 would be quite usable by Pathfinder.

Werebat · Jul 24, 2010

Nimloth said:
As a group, we like and have used E8 (really GestaltE8). Currently we are starting Kingmaker (now, lvl3, in the 1st module). The DM was thinking about E8/10(?), but has decided the effort to adapt the later modules to it isn't worth the effort. Though he hasn't ruled it out.

I will chat with him and let you know what he thinks.

I think E6 would be quite usable by Pathfinder.

I use a sort of gestalt E6; without getting into it too much, I estimate PC power at 6+2 feats to be roughly equal to 7th, and 6+5 to be 8th. After that, there's about one level gain in power per five feats (9th at 6+10, 10th at 6+15, and 11th at 6+20). After 20 "epic" feats, the system breaks down a bit and 5 feats might not be equal to one level anymore.

So I think you could use AP modules further than the second, but somewhere along the line the plot would have to shift or the DM would be very busy rewriting encounters. Do-able, and as someone mentioned in another thread probably less work than designing a whole campaign from scratch.

As a DM, my biggest issue with E6 is that past a certain point you can't really use AP type "campaigns in a can" and HAVE to write your own stuff.

IronWolf · Jul 24, 2010

I am not familiar with the E6 rules and basing this off what has been posted in this thread so far as to how it works, including your approximations for power level as you add feats.

I haven't run Kingmaker yet, but I have been preparing for it and reading through the modules and such as I do so. Judging from what I have seen so far I would suspect the possible power discrepancy issues to start popping up by AP 4. The encounters in some of the later APs look pretty tough to me even for a rules as written character.

I think it would probably require some pretty substantial modification by the DM for the later AP modules to work well.

Perhaps looking at one of the mini-arcs Paizo has would be worth doing? Something like Crypt of the Everflame, Masks of the Living God and City of Death. They start at level 1 and work their way up over those 3 modules.

Werebat · Jul 24, 2010

IronWolf said:
Perhaps looking at one of the mini-arcs Paizo has would be worth doing? Something like Crypt of the Everflame, Masks of the Living God and City of Death. They start at level 1 and work their way up over those 3 modules.

Thanks for the suggestion! Kingmaker got me interested primarily due to the ruleset included for building a kingdom; that plus the exploration element in the first and second parts are strong elements to what I was thinking of doing in the first place (the seed concept coming from an addon to Civilization 4).

Right now I'm thinking I'll probably end up plundering the 1st-3rd parts for my own campaign, drifting further from the AP as time goes on; although the 4th (I think -- the one where the PCs are guests of a rival nation?) intrigues me and may be worth mining for ideas.

Will definitely check out those mini-arcs, though. Anything that starts at 1st and finishes up around 10th-12th would be excellent for E6.

- Ron ^*^

EDIT: Checked out the mini-arcs -- thanks! A couple looked like wonderful backbones for future E6 campaigns! What a find!

Pathfinder 1E Pathfinder Kingmaker E6?

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