Pathfinder 1E Prepping for Pathfinder: Kingmaker (spoilers!)

[DragonStryk72]

I've been running a Kingmaker campaign myself, as it got us out of the standard "Go to X, kill monsters, get treasure, move on". We're on Book 3 now, just at the beginning of Varnhold Vanishing, and the PC Death Toll is 13. It got so bad that the group actually have taken a habit of leaving a lock of hair, and spellcasting costs at the local Cathedral of Erastil for purposes of getting them raised and healed of neg levels. They've come to calling it their "life insurance policy".

The class that has really shined in this campaign is the Bard. Already being socially aspected, with magic based off of Charisma, it's sort of the natural Base Class for Rulership.

I've also had a ball with another run: The PCs have a really bad habit of letting some of the non-boss monsters go, such as Dovan, the Quickling, the Spriggan leader, and I've been having them team up, with Dovan actually copying the characters' methods, using it to level up him and his.

On the other side, our group's Druid showed a particularly awesome run. At 7th level, she took leadership, and has established a council of druids within the kingdom, who go around using plant growth to improve the crops. If you go for Soil Enrichment, you can get a 33% higher crop yield, and it takes 1 minute per year, per field. With more than 30 Druids, including another druid who is making basically plant growth tokens, the groups been having a windfall with the farms. I figure the math that for every 3 farm hexes, they get 1 extra BP off their consumption to simulate the effect.

 

[MerricB]

Lee was unable to make our latest Kingmaker session due to his cat falling ill, and Dave turned up an hour late due to him forgetting about daylight saving starting; as Dave has most of the kingdom sheets, this wasn’t so good. Luckily, the group was still exploring the area around Varnhold, and so we weren’t doing any kingdom building to begin with. Once Dave did arrive, we were able to actually do some kingdom work as well.

The players and characters for this session:

Tim, playing Asmodeus, half-elf Alchemist 6/Master Chymist 2
Michael, playing Kiera, human Oracle 8
Dave, playing Joe, human Transmuter 8
Greg, playing Duke Wyvern, human Paladin 8
and his cohort Talia, human Wizard 6

The group were currently exploring the mountainous terrain of the Tors of Levenies, looking for the Nomen centaur tribe who they believed to be in the area and likely responsible for the disappearance of the townsfolk of Varnhold. They explored about six hexes this session, with their first encounter being in the Ironstone Gully, where a pair of Stygira, “hag cyclops”, attacked them from caves in the rocks. This proved a most challenging encounter, as the damage reduction of these creatures knocked out the effectiveness of Asmodeus and Wyvern, and Kiera, with her new Holy Smite spell, was having trouble with their Spell Resistance. The group didn’t flee (as they should have), but kept going, and I nudged Greg into using Wyvern’s Smite Evil ability. At that point, the group were able to start winning the combat, and Tim discovered his bombs worked just fine. Mostly, he prefers to use mutagens, but the bombs won this combat.

Dave then turned up, and helped them discover a lode of iron ore in the cave the Stygira lived in. It was a nice juxtaposition of a treasure hex plus a random encounter.

From there, they headed south-east to Vordakai’s Island, where they were much intrigued by the spire of stone rising from the pool below a waterfall. Making their way down the cliffs, they used their folding boat to travel out to the spire, although an attack by a couple of wyvern delayed their arrival; alas for the wyvern, fireballs, magic missiles, bombs and readied melee attacks were too much for them.

[imager]

I have undead Cyclops minis!​

[/imager]The group found an opening into the spire, which led into a carved passageway. An overturned amphora in the passageway contained a lot of coins from the cyclops empire and a jade bracelet, which they recognised from the scholar’s notes in Varnhold. They took them all, and proceeded onward to a chamber where two Zombie Cyclops attacked. They weren’t too much of a threat, and were dealt with swiftly. Paizo’s editing here leaves a lot to be desired: the statblock is actually given earlier in the book, but the page references are to two sourcebooks! I had to go online to realise that I could find the statblock in a completely different portion of this adventure. Typical incompetent editing from Paizo.

The group found the secret door that led onwards, and swiftly dispatched the dinosaur that lived in the pool that they next found. Stairs led underwater to another (dry) chamber, which Joe discovered after using a spell to give himself a swim speed. Greg misunderstood the drowning rules, thinking you could hold your breath for a number of rounds equal to your Con modifier - it’s actually your score, not modifier. Once we cleared him of that misapprehension, the group continued on to the dry chamber, filled with cyclopean pottery. Down another set of stairs led to a room of cyclops statues, and a trap which the group discovered but absolutely failed to disarm, causing the room to swiftly fill with water. However, the group had discovered the trap in good time and triggered it from a safe place where they were able to retreat. As they were lacking good underwater spells, they chose not to continue their exploration, but instead returned outside.

That night, Joe was attacked by a Soul Stealer, a creature summoned by a spell-caster to destroy its enemies. The group were able to destroy it, although it damaged Joe’s wisdom severely; Kiera was able to restore Joe’s loss easily enough.

The group then returned home, only pausing to fireball some Worgs along the way.

At this point, we realised that a nearby tower to their capital still hadn’t been explored, so after dealing with the kingdom business for that month, they went to claim the hex. It proved to be inhabited by will-o-wisps and overgrown with nettles, but thanks to Council of Thieves, the group knew all about will-o-wisps and quickly cast many magic missiles at them, until they died. They then fireballed the rest of the island free of nettles!

Joe had to do a couple of months worth of crafting for the group, so we just dealt with a further four months of kingdom building in this session. The group also explored some empty hexes of the first map they hadn’t explored yet, and that was pretty much the session. Two celebrities visited during event phases; the first brought a windfall of 14 build points to the kingdom, the second only four, but that was enough for the group to finally build a Caster’s Tower... and the magic items it crafts are going to make a big difference to the finances of the kingdom.

At this stage, the kingdom is 26 hexes big, and has key indicators of Stability 39, Economy 49, Loyalty 38 and 0 Unrest and about 1 Consumption. It’s doing pretty well, although it’s probably smaller than expected for this chapter. That doesn’t matter too much yet - it will be in later adventures we’ll have to make sure it’s big enough, so I expect we’ll end this adventure with a lot of kingdom building!

 

[MerricB]

This was the tenth session of our Kingmaker campaign, and we are now half-way through the series. Well, almost: the group need to do a bunch of kingdom-building before they’re ready for the fourth adventure, but they have dealt with the major threat of the Varnhold Vanishing. Most of the session was spent exploring Vordakai’s Tomb, with one month’s worth of kingdom-building activities.

The group also spent a few days out in the wilderness, exploring mostly blank hexes, although they did run off a group of rather clueless ettercaps who were swiftly fireballed out of their misery. I made sure to actually read the adventure’s description of the ettercaps to the players, so they could fully appreciate the comedy of the situation. I think a few worgs also popped up at one point (twin fireballs dealt with them), and Greg’s Duke Wyvern managed to convince the cyclopes living in the hills to join his growing kingdom. Hmm. He rolled high enough to convert “unfriendly” to “helpful” on his Diplomacy check, and given he’s also recruited a giant for the kingdom, it felt right.

However, this was all a side-show compared to the major attraction: exploring Vordakai’s Tomb. Not that they knew it was his tomb, nor that the vanished citizens of Varnhold could be found here. No, it was just another adventure site for them; they still though the centaurs were responsible, but they wanted to complete exploring the tomb. It should be noted that they had tried to find the centaurs, and wandered entirely into the wrong area of the map.

The major problem they had to face was the flooded trap room they’d triggered in the previous session; this was solved by Joe gaining water breathing and similar spells and using them so the group could pass through the chamber.

The second level of the tomb brought them to a room with a suspicious tile pattern on the floor; the group decided to avoid the pattern and check another set of doors. This led to a great crypt and two soul-eaters. That was a bit of a challenge for the players, but Greg’s paladin is terrifyingly effective with his sword, as likewise Tim’s alchemist with his mutagenic claws, and they were soon dealt with. Michael’s oracle used his restoration spells to get rid of the wisdom damage, and then we had to deal with one of Paizo’s map stuff-ups: the secret door is marked in the wrong wall, and the room codes obscure where the walls and doors actually are.

Once we’d worked out what was meant to be happening, the group found the secret teleportation chamber of the spire. Not that they did anything with it: just noting it for later use.

From there, they found the room of boiling tar, which was enough to make them quickly retreat from the chamber and actually try stepping on the coloured tiles of the first chamber. Duke Wyvern was the first to try it, and nothing happened to him! (This was a surprise!) Instead, he managed to trigger the trap on the altars as he opened the far doors, broiling everyone in Stygian hellfires. Cold and wisdom damage affected only a few characters, and Michael used up bunch more of his oracle's spells to heal the group.

The next threat was a Piscodaemon, which gave me a few probelms in pronouncing it. (Daemon is correctly pronounced “demon”, but you can’t tell the difference. So Piscodaymon is what it became). It might have had a high spell resistance, but Michael blinded it with a holy smite and from there Greg ripped it apart, whilst Tim wished his alchemist had a way of gaining “good” claws.

Beyond the daemon lay a captured centaur, who the group rescued and befriended. Duke Wyvern can be very charming when he puts his mind to it. As the group wanted better spells to get past the tar, they chose to leave the dungeon at that point, escorting Xamanthe the centaur out.

The next day, having prepared fire resistance spells and a lot of spider climb spells, the group tackled the tar pit and discovered its occupant, the undead wizard Cephal Lorentus. This was a hilarious combat. He went first, fireballing the group (for almost no effect) and flying up to the roof. Whereupon he was hit by three dispel magic spells, which hit first his flight, then his fire shield, then his shield. He was stuck in the tar with no chance of getting out, and swiftly perished. There were some really good dispel magic rolls in there!

Ascending to the third level of the spire, the group found a feasthall populated by the dead bodies of a lot of the Varnhold residents (including their leader) and four dread zombie cyclops, which weren’t too much of a threat to this party, especially as the zombies got a total of negative one for their initiative! Slow to act meant swift to die, and the group continued on after ascertaining the identities of the victims.

Above, they discovered a pool inhabited by an evil water elemental. This might have been a greater threat, but the Smite Evil power of the Paizo Paladin that Greg could employ is entirely insane.

From there, the doors led into the final encounter against Vordakai himself. He quickly dominated Tim, which greatly worried the rest of the group, but his first command to have Tim tear Dave’s wizard apart allowed another saving throw from Tim, which he made. Meanwhile, the rest of the group started hitting him with magic - and Greg had smite evil to completely ignore his damage reduction of 15. Vordakai teleported away, and the group pursued him down to his destination chamber. It took them about 6 rounds to get there, and he’d managed to heal about 90 hit points in the meantime; alas, the group were able to get rid of all of that in one round, and soon enough Vordakai lay dead at their feet.

Much treasure was found by them, along with the remaining commoners of Varnhold, held in magical prisons. I explained to the group how they could now annexe Varnhold, and we ended the session with the threat of Vordakai dealt with, the Nomen centaurs willing to sign a peace treaty, and the party’s kingdom expanded to 29 hexes - with another 18 hexes very close to joining them.

The next adventure should start when the group reach 75-80 hexes in their kingdom, so next session will probably consist of a lot of kingdom-building and a little exploration, before we can dive into the events of Blood for Blood.

The characters reached 9th level at the end of this session, and I’ll make sure they hit 10th level by the end of the next session. We’re abstracting out the level-gains to some extent.

The actual dungeon was surprisingly effective and enjoyable for the players; the threats in it felt dangerous, but it was the hazards that required inventive spell-use to get past that were particularly memorable. With luck, the remainder of Kingmaker will also proceed in this memorable fashion.

 

[MerricB]

The session this week concentrated on the kingdom the characters have founded, especially as they failed an economy check, meaning they were about 20 build points out of pocket! This meant a flurry of building construction and not so much hex-expansion.

They have annexed Varnhold, and as a result they've reached the magical 51 hexes, and so they can now build a lot of buildings every turn. If they have the money, which was more of a problem. It won't be for much longer, as they finally could build a waterfront, and thus were gaining Major Magic Items (and a lot of mediums). About 30 BP per turn are coming from those items...

Rolling up the Magic Items was a massive pain. Whoever thought up the tables for 3E needs to be chastised severely, and the Paizo layout people likewise for following the same method. It might make sense to put the Ring table just before the list of the Rings, but it does not make sense when rolling several magic items at once. I would have loved an appendix of consolidated tables. Instead, I was rolling type of item in the Core Rulebook, then going to Ultimate Equipment for what item it was (especially as the Core Rulebook lacks tables for weapon-types, wands, potions and scrolls), and by the end of it all I was getting very frustrated.

The group also finished exploring the lands around Varnhold. There wasn't much for them to find; a couple of minor quests. The biggest news was the trouble Brevoy was having with it's northern portion; the old land Issia. I'm still not good with the geography of Golarion, although I probably will get better if I keep running Pathfinder APs.

Tatzlford made its first real appearance as a developed town this session, and was a welcome bonus to the players. Next session it will actually matter, so giving them a few "free" buildings did help the economy along.

Dave's wizard found a new way to concern me: Fabricate. He's got a really high Craft check, and so can easily create a lot of masterwork items. He calculates it at about 10,000 gp worth of profit per month, and we went through a lot of months this session. I decided that this ate one of the kingdom's economy checks, but it does pretty much break the magic item economy. Using XP to make magic items? Yeah, I think I see why now...

What combats we had this session were rather lopsided or easily avoided. Leomund's Secure Shelter stopped all night time encounters (although I described one where a mastodon tried to look through one of its windows), and otherwise fireball did for the worgs who were unfortunate enough to visit.

After this slower (and maths-heavy) session, everyone will be eager for next week where we'll get back into the adventure portion of the game.

 

[MerricB]

The twins (Michael and Tim) weren’t able to make this week’s session, which saw no kingdom-building at all. Instead, we launched headlong into the fourth adventure in the series, Blood for Blood.

The game began with the attack on Tatzlford of a group of 25 mercenaries, 10 barbarians and six trolls. It is (ahem) a poorly-written encounter, as any party worth their salt would be able to deal with the mercenary forces in a couple of rounds by the use of fireball and other area effect spells. Instead, we got to preview the mass combat rules for Pathfinder and the group got to make some defensive plans - Dave’s wizard used fabricate to set up extra defense, snipers were placed in trees and on roofs, and barricades were set up.

Some good rolling from the players and some poor rolling from the mercenaries gave the party a slight advantage as we moved to a fight against six advanced trolls.

Apparently, in Paizo lands it’s fine to just say “trolls have a template” without applying the template to their stats. It’s laziness that I find pathetically useless. After flipping through the Bestiary a bit, I went with the Quick Fix advanced template and the fight was on. And then over. Greg’s paladin charged into the middle of the trolls, and the beasts couldn’t hit him. Well, they could on natural 20s, but not enough to make a difference. With fireballs being cast to hit the 15’ tall trolls and not Greg, the fight’s end was never in doubt.

The commander of the attack had escaped in the commotion (the group actually asked me what happened to him some time after it ended and they were celebrating, but it was a bit too late to capture him), and they settled down with the young woman who had brought them the warning; she came from the neighbouring “kingdom” of Fort Drelev. Well, it’s a city-state. Well, a town. It’s ruler was in trouble - not that he was a nice sort to begin with - and he had made alliances with neighbouring forces and was trying to annex the kingdom of the players.

Just as a note: Fort Drelev: 1 hex. Wyvern’s Demense: 70 hexes. How is this (a) a good plan and (b) even possible under the rules for kingdom-building? Well, it isn’t, but you’ve got to live with things like that in this series; the disconnect between “rules for the game” and “story” are big in Kingmaker.

An insult (and ‘danger’) like this couldn’t be ignored! So, the group rode around the swamp that separated their lands from Fort Drelev, found the secret passage into the keep, and killed Lord Drelev. Easy, huh?

Admittedly, it was a little more involved. They disguised themselves as merchants as they came into the town, and talked a little to the townsfolk (who were being oppressed) before meeting their contact in the town, the local brothel madam, who they got on very well with. She let them know about a secret passage into the fortress, and the next evening they made their way inside.

Two black puddings in the first chamber blocked their way, and shortly they became three, no four, no five, no six! puddings due to some rapid-shot action by Lee’s ranger. Oops! But the puddings couldn’t hit Greg, so it didn’t matter much. The two wizards (Talia and Dave) took them down pretty easily.

Incidentally, Greg’s paladin has an armour class of 30 in this adventure. The trolls had a +10 to hit, the black puddings have a +8 to hit. I’ve seen this happen before: it’s very easy to stack AC beyond what lower-CR monsters can hit.

It’s actually quite interesting what Paizo have done with the fortress here: it’s very similar to the ‘tactical’ format that Wizards used for most of 4e: the rooms of the fortress are described briefly, with the bigger encounters in a separate section later. The encounters aren’t those two-page space-wasters of 4E though.

Lots of secret doors awaited the party, but Lee’s ranger was with them so their Perception checks were successful. They began by finding their informant’s father, one-time servant of Lord Drelev, and now tainted prisoner. They gave him his arms and armour back, and set him to guard the way out whilst the group continued their exploration. Talia was able to open most of the locked doors; the one remaining door fell to Dave’s “knock” spell, and the treasury was gained!

Up above, a swift fight against two guards raised no alarms, and then they discovered Lord Drelev himself, along with eight guards, in his throne room. Greg charged in, and a “slow” spell from Dave ensured that the battle was no contest at all. Drelev actually had a good chance of hitting Greg, and his additional sneak attack damage meant that Greg’s paladin took a couple of nasty hits, but with “smite evil” online, Greg didn’t take long to kill the Baron.

From there, they discovered the leader of the attack on Tatzlford (he surrendered), the Baron’s wife (she surrendered) - and shortly thereafter the Baron’s wife escape, spirited away by her brother, who was a wizard and still at large. He might return for revenge at a later date - or possibly not. He seems smart enough not to!

A few hill giants in the courtyard proved troublesome, but after Greg slew a few of them, the rest became very co-operative.

With the Baron dealt with, the group got the town favourable to their cause, and planned their next expedition: into the hills to rescue a sister and deal with the barbarians behind much of the recent trouble.

 

[MerricB]

Here's my thoughts on the last month or so of our Kingmaker game:

With Baron Drelev dealt with, the group now needed to do two things: get back to their kingdom and rule it for a bit, and also deal with the barbarians that had launched the attack on their kingdom.

I’m reaching a stage of general dissatisfaction with the Kingmaker series: the actual exploration of the wilderness is mostly boring at this stage (it doesn’t help that the author of Blood for Blood forgot all about it causing the Paizo editorial staff to whip up a few uninspired encounters), and the actual kingdom-building mechanics take up time, cause a lot of calculations, but don’t actually feel like running a kingdom. This might have been helped by the events being better and more interesting for the players, but (a) there aren’t enough of them and (b) they rarely cause the players any problems.

There is a tension in the kingdom-building rules which comes from the conflict between expansion (in terms of hexes and size) and economy-building (creating cities and their buildings). Basically, consumption goes up the more you expand, and is countered by economy-building. It was great in the early days, when everything was new, but the tension between them is easily circumvented. Get your kingdom to a size where you’re happy with the number of buildings you can build each month, then stop expanding and just build lots of buildings. Purchase ones that can make valuable magic items if you can, as they’ll double the BPs you make each turn. Once your economy can handle everything, expand a few more hexes and repeat. The penalties for just making buildings are minor: there’s no minimum kingdom (farm) size to support a metropolis.

I’ve also given up rolling the magic items the stores produce: Paizo’s method of splitting the relevant tables over several books just makes it take too long. Even Ultimate Equipment doesn’t manage to get all the tables in the same book - and even with most of the tables, is happy to spread them throughout the entire book rather than have them all together in an appendix.

So, with the exploration and kingdom-building being more of a drag than a boon, was there anything for the players to do this session? Thankfully, there was: explore the barbarian’s dungeon. The dungeon was meant to be under the effects of one of my favourite spells, Guards and Wards, but after the first few rooms I basically ignored the spell as it wasn’t really adding anything to the game that the PCs couldn’t overcome.

The group began the assault on the barbarian position by rescuing the hostages the barbarians had taken. This was done very well, with the group stealthily approaching the barbarian camp and using sniper tactics plus targetted spells to destroy the barbarians before they could respond. The group weren’t able to guide the rescued hostages home immediately, instead setting them up in a safe camp before the group penetrated the caves behind the encampment.

Two Black Sisters - followers of Gyronna - attempted to stop the party, and a hard-fought battle erupted, with the sisters summoning great demons to aid them. However, once Greg’s paladin, Wyvern, dealt with the demons the Black Sisters weren’t able to stand up to the combined group.

A test of strength (moving boulders) was easily accomplished by Tim’s Master Chymist, but the next room provided a much greater challenge as Wyvern was caught in an Icebox trap. Unfortunately for the barbarians, he was able to weather the storm and countermagic was employed to detect the hidden door from the room and then open it without triggering the trap again.

A great Iron Golem, aided directly by the barbarian god Gorum, then faced the group, and as it wasn’t evil, Greg wasn’t able to directly bypass its damage reduction. Eventually, Tim was able to wear it down, with his brother healing the group as they took a lot of damage.

Feeling rather badly hurt, the group began to leave the dungeon, only to be ambushed in the corridor they chose to use by a Derghodaemon, which summoned another of its kind. The combined might of these two creatures came very close to slaying the entire party, especially as Greg failed to use his smite evil power to give the DR-bypassing to the entire party. Eventually, the daemons were slain, and the group limped out of the dungeon.

The next day, fully refreshed, they discovered that the barbarians hadn’t reinforced the destroyed challenges; to be fair, there wasn’t all that many barbarians or supernatural creatures to do so. In fact, there were just three more challenges: a group of bloody skeletal champions, which fell to area effect spells (like fireball and holy smite), Zorek, the guardian of the temple, who managed to use anti-life shell and blade barrier to rather discomfit the party until Michael used dispel magic a few times and Tim and Greg tore him apart, and finally Armag, a barbarian who thought himself the reincarnation of a mighty barbarian warrior.

Armag had more of the bloody skeletal champions with him, but they were sealed away from the combat by a wall of ice from Dave’s wizard, and thus the fighters were able to happily attack Armag undisturbed. Armag had won initiative, so he’d charged in to make one attack. Happily making many hasted attacks, Greg and Tim tore him apart.

With that, the bulk of the adventure was done. We did more kingdom-building, and then the great Exploration of the Slough. I didn’t have the heart to run combats against CR2 boggarts, and even the 12-headed hydra, which greatly excited the group when they were attacked by it, fell in a single round.

In other news, a number of potential big threats have been turned into elk by Dave’s persistent Polymorph Other spell. I kept rolling elk on the random encounter tables, so Dave has decided to add his own. Sigh.

However, we now had the opportunity to do something new: fight a war! Well, at least get the prologue to it, in War of the River Kings as the group went to a tournament organised by their (new) neighbour, King Trovetti of Pitax. It’s not that he’s new, it’s that they’ve expanded to a point (and eliminated their competition) so he’s basically a new neighbour.

One of the real poor points of Kingmaker is that the PC’s kingdom has been - for the most part - background window-dressing, and, in particular, there’s been no mention of neighbouring kingdoms. Where are the ambassadors? Where are the merchants asking for trade routes and favourable terms? Not part of this series, it seems, and with the highly abstracted kingdom mechanics becoming more and more irrelevant as the game continues, it’s somewhat nice to have an opponent who will actually bring the conflict to the PCs. We’ll probably have to fudge an army for the PCs at some point, but I’ll have the beginning attack be on Fort Drelev, which isn’t actually part of the PC’s kingdom yet, so they won’t lose anything if it is laid waste.

The group arrived in Pitax and met King Trovetti - Hooray! They hadn’t insulted him yet. The conversation between Greg and King Trovetti was short and to the point: Thanks for coming to my tournament; I’m glad you could make it. No mention was made of his schemes in the last adventure, as Greg had completely forgotten that point. Not that surprising, as it wasn’t emphasised at all.

The tournament itself saw the players have a horrible time, mainly because they didn’t really fit into the tournament categories: only Lee did, and he misplayed it horribly: shooting once per turn, not using Deadly Aim, and thus bouncing off the targets and gaining no bonuses for shooting all his arrows quickly.

The second round, that of the test of the axe, saw Tim trying his best with the strength fight. His master chymist did ok with his strength and hasted attacks, but he wasn’t anywhere near the best competitors.

The third round, which required Diplomacy, Intimidate, Bluff and Perform skills to do well in, saw Michael try with only one of the skills. He didn’t come last, mainly because the group spotted another NPC cheating.

Finally came the jousting round, where Greg’s paladin demonstrated that he couldn’t ride a horse. In fact, this was a pathetically written encounter, where some contestants needed rolls of Natural 20 to eliminate them from the competition and led to great boredom on the part of the participants.

In the end, Pitax won the competition, and King Trovetti was happy. The group hung around a bit, until they got the news that Fort Drelev was under attack and we ended the session. I’m not particularly hopeful that the actual war will be exciting, but I might be surprised.

 

[NewJeffCT]

My group ran through Kingmaker in a pretty straightforward manner. Bandits bothering Oleg? We must defeat all the bandits before we can do any exploring. So, they took on the bandits at Oleg's, then the river camp, and then moved on to the Stag Lord's fort. Despite my upping the difficulty of the fort, they still managed to beat the Stag Lord. Then, they started exploring. There was the lost cleric looking for his temple - bam, no exploring until we can help him, so they did that. (and so on & so forth) The first module was concluded with the Mites vs Kobolds.

They finally did some exploring with the second adventure, but it was often more of the same. Get a clue and make a beeline for it. While doing this, they did explore along the way and started to actually build a kingdom. However, while they initially expressed interest in being kings or people of import within a kingdom, they didn't really want to do the bookwork required in tracking all the buildings that make up their main city. So, that fell to me as DM... I ran the "big" combat in the 2nd adventure as is, without any mass combat, as I didn't think it was that huge.

I didn't love the 3rd adventure, though the final villain was a good one. Adventures 4 and 5 I can barely remember. I did like the end, as I had dropped in a few hints about the ultimate BBEG (Big Bad Evil Girl?) and one character had a background that meshed nicely with the finale (and, he probably thought I had forgotten all about it.) And, thanks to some hints on here, the finale went fairly well.

 

[MerricB]

We tested out the Kingmaker Mass Combat rules in our last session, as the War Got Real. And, not surprisingly, I found them extremely lacking.

There is a fundamental disconnect between the narrative needs of a RPG and the details required by a wargame (and, by extension, a good kingdom-building system). Kingmaker grafts on the army system to the rest of the kingdom-building system, and it doesn't integrate well. In particular, a system that has been working on a monthly system suddenly becomes a weekly system. It creates a system where you can build armies of unbelievable strength given enough time and resources - and resources haven't exactly been in short supply in the game.

It's actually possible to use the system-as-written to create an army of 20th level wizards. Just spend a year training them or thereabouts.

Given how horribly broken the training and upkeep of armies is, at least once they're on the field, it gets better. What, it doesn't? Who'd have guessed? The combat rules are basic but they work (sort of) for combat, but as to the other effects of armies - pillaging, looting, and taking over the land of other kingdoms - is ignored. Do you think that unrest might grow if there's an enemy army stomping around your territory? I do, but the Paizo staff don't.

There's a lovely wargame (and relatively simple) called Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage, which manages to incorporate a political dimension into a wargame - and, not unlike Kingmaker - Hannibal really has a very small number of armies on the map. The board squares have three states: controlled by Rome, controlled by Carthage and uncontrolled. Winning battles causes the loser to lose a number of squares (becoming uncontrolled) depending on the size of the loss, and armies (along with spending of resources) allow conversion of territory from one side to the other. (Other games, like Washington's War use a similar system).

However, Kingmaker runs into a real conflict of purpose: it wants an easy system that doesn't conflict with the role-playing, instead complementing it. However, it first has a rather fiddly economic system, and then squibs on the actual conflict resolution system. As a system that you might consider using in another campaign: forget it. As a system just for the Kingmaker adventure path, it doesn't really work either. Colour me disappointed.

So, we spent about 2 hours of the session playing around with the army building rules (which are badly written, confusing and contradictory) as the armies of Pitax annexed Fort Drelev (which the group hadn't quite yet gotten into their kingdom). Great hand-waving on my part, (how long does it take Drelev to be annexed? I decided about a month) and then the armies of Pitax marched on their next stop: Tatzlford.

In the meantime, the players summoned a couple of armies from their 'vassal' kingdoms: the centaurs and the cyclopes. The latter came from some good role-playing a few adventures back, and it felt right to reward the players now for their good play back then. They also set up a couple of smaller "kingdom" armies, and then sat behind a half-completed wall to let the siege of Tatzlford commence!

Seeing the small size of the forces involved - I think only about 1000 troops on both sides of the battle - was a bit of a shock. Especially as one of my favourite game series is the Great Battles of History (GMT Games) where troop sizes are a lot higher. (Agincourt was about 10,000 men a side, Granicus was about 25,000 Greeks vs 50,000 Macedonians). The accepted numbers for a siege are 3:1 odds, but the Pitax army was more deadly than the opposing forces... if defenses weren't taken into account. So, although my player's forces took some damage, in the end it was a loss for the attackers and the utter destruction of their invading armies.

From there, the players marched on Fort Drelev and retook it from the garrison force that had been left there - a lot of barbarians! It's actually likely that they wouldn't have been able to take the Fort, as the defense bonus was just so strong, but I made a house rule to deal with critical hits - as the actual text manages to squib this. (Critical misses are horrible, Critical hits do nothing). And the players rolled three 20s, routing the barbarian defenders. The players finally annexed Fort Drelev, and began plans to invade Pitax.

In the end, they just walked in the front door (using a seeming spell), and made their way up to the palace, planning to bring their full might against King Irovetti. Greater Invisibility got them in a side door, but it was guarded and the group made very, very poor Stealth checks - the guards noticed Greg's paladin clanking away, and the doors mysteriously opening. Two porticulli came down, trapping the group, and we ended the session.

The next session will hopefully run better - although I'm not particularly impressed by the palace design. Some interesting plotting has been lost under a badly designed and poorly developed set of rules.

 

[MerricB]

The 17th session of our Kingmaker campaign did indeed go better than the previous one, with a welcome return to more traditional adventuring. We'd finished the last session with the group trapped by two porticulluses slamming down on them, and we resumed with the characters in that position.

I'm glad we're not using miniatures, as the scale of King Irovetti's palace would not accommodate all the archers and trolls that now swarmed the party. Two trolls in a 20'x20' room leading into a 10' wide corridor does not make for good play. Neither can trolls attack characters trapped behind a porticullus with the greataxes they were armed with. I instead gave them greatspears, and they poked the group as the archers ineffectually fired at the group, who were under the effect of several individual greater invisibility spells. Not that they would have been effectual even so; the group far outstrip the low-level threats the archers were.

Disintegrate destroyed one of the porticulluses, and Tim's master chymist disabled the mechanism on the other, allowing him to lift it out of the way. Dave's wizard summoned twoInvisible Stalkers, and they slew all the archers whilst the trolls were dealt with with fireballs and melee attacks.

From there, the group made their way to the throne room, where, still invisible, they had a great advantage against the King and his defenders. Sure, Irovetti could see invisible, but no-one else could. An attempted dispel magic failed to affect the invisibility spells, and soon the King and his Ogre Magi general fled using dimension door, leaving low-level bards, some trolls and a high-level barbarian to deal with the group. Not surprisingly, they failed, with the trolls fleeing after the barbarian was slain, trampling a few poor heralds who tried to stop them from leaving!

The group found a servant to inform them as to the location of the King's secret chambers, and found him, his general and his concubine - a polymorphed Spirit Naga. King Irovetti met his match as Dave turned him into an elk, but the battle against the Naga was much harder - several chain lightnings got the group down to dangerously low level of hit points, and confusion spells from the general kept things interesting. (Michael was very sure to dispel the confusion on Tim before his brother could tear the group apart!)

After the King was captured and his supporters slain, the group invited representatives of neighbouring kingdoms to witness the trial of King Irovetti. I assume he was eventually convicted and executed, but his power-base was gone, and the group began to move onto more interesting matters: in particular, a magical sword they'd found in his quarters. This had been taken from a nearby ruined abbey, and his documents indicated there was more to it than met the eye, so the group went to investigate.

By this stage in the campaign, the exploration of individual hexes in the map has become boring: very few are challenging or even interesting. I glossed over a lot of those in the last adventure, and for this one I just waved my hands and detailed a few things they'd discovered, before moving onto the interesting stuff: the ruined abbey. There, the group found the ghost of an old, insane halfling monk, who had been responsible for the downfall of the abbey. On his own, it might not have been an interesting fight, but the eight advanced will-o-the-wisps made it so, especially after they killed Dave's wizard. Will'o'wisps are insane in Pathfinder: most magic doesn't work against them, they have a very, very high AC, and they have a touch attack that will only miss on a 1! So, given all floated down to attack Dave, his Wizard didn't stand much of a chance.

Tim was panicked by the ghost, and so there were four rounds when the group greatly missed him. Michael's cleric was the eventual saviour, using Mass Cure Wounds spells to heal the group, destroy the group, and he also used Breath of Life to restore Dave's PC. The group reclaimed an ornate water-clock at the end of all of that, which Talia (Greg's PC's wife and henchman) took for herself.

The abbey proper yielded agents of Irovetti, who weren't yet ready to forgive the group. Most of them were weak and forgettable, incapable of hurting most of the group, and I decided to run them as minions and have them die quickly. More dangerous was the wererat ranger in the rafters, who dodged the spells being cast at him and did a lot of damage to Michael in return. Lee and Tim combined to finish him off, Tim eventually dealing about 100 damage in one turn after he'd climbed up to the wererat's position. I was running the game very fast-and-loose with respect to skills at this point: far more interested in the fun that the nitty-gritty of the mechanics.

The rest of the abbey yielded little, and so it was back to the capital, Wyvern's Roost. There, Talia discovered that the clock held a nereid who had once been entrusted with the keeping of the sword, Briar, that the group had recovered from Pitax. Dave quickly realised that the cloth the sword was wrapped in was the nereid's shawl, and returned it, earning her friendship and loyalty. She was then able to tell them about the fey queen, Nerissa, who would soon be turning her attention to their kingdom...

We're into the home straight now with the campaign: only the final adventure to go. By this point, the kingdom-building rules have become a source of unwelcome distraction and mathematical fiddliness, so we're ignoring them for the final stage of the campaign. I'm quite happy with how Nerissa has been introduced; I also showed the players how Irovetti was her servant and how she's been responsible for quite a lot of the grief they've suffered in the past two adventures.

War of the River Kings doesn't handle its scant material well, but we should be set for an interesting final chapter. We'll resume the campaign in the new year, and I expect it will take another 3-4 sessions to conclude, although I might be surprised.

(And that's how I spent my fortieth birthday!)

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

Before the next session, I'm going to get together a bunch of miniatures for the creatures in the final adventure. Some of them, at least, as there seem to be a few too many gargantuan creatures for my liking.

I find that as I get older, I prefer monsters to be represented (in general) by one size smaller than they are. So, Ogres and Trolls with medium bases, huge Titans with large bases, and gargantuan/colossals with huge bases. It allows more manoeuvrability in the combats.

So, next step: get a list of monsters in the adventure, and then find minis to represent them which I can carry with me. Shouldn't be too difficult...

Cheers!