Pathfinder 1E Best Resources for Running "Kingmaker"

[Remus Lupin]

Hey folks who have run Kingmaker, I could use your help.

I am starting a campaign after the first of the year, and I'd love some guidance about what you've used to help your campaigns run smoothly and easily -- In terms of everything from speeding up gameplay, aiding in tracking territory and resources, keeping track of what's going on in the kingdom, mapping, etc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I think this will be a fun campaign for both me and my players, but I'm a bit nervous about book-keeping.

Also helpful would be advice on best practices for GMing the game.

Thanks!

 

[Asmo]

http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/paizoPublishing/pathfinder/adventurePath/kingmaker

Asmo

 

[Remus Lupin]

Thanks for this, but to be honest I hate the Paizo boards deeply, which is why I posted this here. However, I'll sift through those pages and see what may be interesting. I'd still like to know what people's favorites are.

 

[Crothian]

My best advice is to use the NPCs and create and use more of them then the AP has. The kingdom building rules requires a number of NPCs to be used to help run the kingdom and the AP introduces enough to fill those roles but not to give the players a choice of who to use. There is a lot I would do differently now to expand on the kingdom rules like make sure the different NPCs have agendas (not necessarily bad ones) and to make the events matter more. I'd also give the general populace more of a voice in what they want and how they react to what the leaders do.

There can be a lot of record keeping in knowing what hexes have been explored and claimed and with the city building aspect of the game. Our group has an accountant in it and he took to these rules and kept track of everything with ease. If you have a player that you can trust to do this then you're going to be lucky because it can be a lot of extra work.

 

[feytharn]

Get the pdf of the map pack...it will save you time and stress.

 

[MerricB]

Have a look at my Kingmaker thread for some of my experiences running it. The series has a lot of problems; not least that the actual kingdom-building system isn't really that hard to break. It's fun for the 2nd and 3rd adventures, after that it becomes irrelevant.

The mass combat system is dreadful. Thankfully, it's only used in the 5th adventure, and not for very much of that.

The exploration of hexes is interesting only for the first 3 adventures. In the 4th, the writer actually forgot to include them and so they were kludged in later - they can mostly be safely ignored or handwaved, as they're not a threat and (mostly) uninteresting. The 5th doesn't really have them at all.

I'm about to run the 6th adventure, and it looks fun, mainly because it isn't a Kingmaker adventure - it's a standard Paizo adventure that just ends the series (and totally ignores that you're ruling a kingdom).

Cheers!

 

[Papa-DRB]

There is a toolkit to map your cities here: http://atuan.com/city-map-toolkit/ and you can create your cities. Also, JBE (a Pathfinder 3PP) has a zip file that contains the Book of the River Nations buildings that can be added.

-- david
papa.drb

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Hey folks who have run Kingmaker, I could use your help.

I am starting a campaign after the first of the year, and I'd love some guidance about what you've used to help your campaigns run smoothly and easily -- In terms of everything from speeding up gameplay, aiding in tracking territory and resources, keeping track of what's going on in the kingdom, mapping, etc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I think this will be a fun campaign for both me and my players, but I'm a bit nervous about book-keeping.

Also helpful would be advice on best practices for GMing the game.

Thanks!

I'm a player, rather than a DM, in Kingmaker.

Our group uses a wiki to keep track of a lot of stuff. Having said that, few of the players have any interest in kingdom management (the macro-game, that is; we like the decision-making) and mass combat. One player keeps track of all that stuff.

Early on, we had too much stuff to keep track of. Apparently there's nothing PCs can do about random events. (Eg riots, you lose 5 stability. No skill check or anything to counter that. I would recommend doubling the penalties, but then allowing PCs to find a way to reduce or eliminate those.)

One last thing - many of the preplanned encounters need help. We recently faced Armag in his "dungeon". Two previous encounters involved evil clerics who could have helped them. Instead, the bad guys were too scattered. We wiped out everyone but Armag, and that was only because we're three or so levels behind. (The DM tends to skip encounters but follows XP strictly.)