Kingmaker: Your City and Kingdom

[GlassEye]

1. Where your group built your first city and why.

Our group built our first city north of Oleg's but we're running Kingmaker with a highly modified story and map. In short, the original characters (we started with five, two died in the assault on the stag lord's keep and we've had four new players join our group and one quit; so we now stand at eight players) are the children of the adventurers originally hired to map and settle the region. They ultimately failed in their duty but did settle in a village leaving the politics behind and raising families. It wasn't too long into book one that one of the characters found the charter to settle and took up the responsibilities that their parents set aside.
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[/sblock]2. The name of your first city and why;

Our first city was named Langton. No reason really.

3. The name of your kingdom and why you chose it;

The Kingdom. Because we couldn't come to a consensus on what we wanted to call it.

4. What you developed/built first;

We built an inn first. The characters felt a place to meet regularly was important.

5. Other stuff.

We couldn't see the sense in not allowing any benefit (other that a settlement) in a hex 12 miles across so we instituted the following rule: As long as a settlement remains one district or smaller then that hex can still benefit from farmlands. We think it will encourage the settlement of small towns and villages and hopefully in the future let us divvy up territory as dukes, etc. Right now our politics/rulership (we have three queens & a council) are strongly influenced by the 'Old Ways' (worship of Erastil) but there is a new faction arrived in town from Restov that includes a priest and paladin (pc) of Abadar.

 

[TarionzCousin]

[sblock=map]
[/sblock]2. The name of your first city and why;

Our first city was named Langton. No reason really.

Are you sure it wasn't named "LangSton"?


For my group, defensibility was foremost in our thoughts. We're all "survivors" of a killer DM who, when he ran this module, had three 7th level Trolls ambush us at 1st level... among other things. Why yes, since you asked: all of his games do end with TPK's.

 

[Kaodi]

Speaking of kingdoms... I have not seen the rules for raising armies, as I only have the first two modules. But if paying for armies without selling magic items generated by your shops is problematic, do you think it would be possible to just alter the costs of armies, not be able to sell those items, and still have kingdom expansion work just fine?

 

[Kaodi]

Anyway, slightly more on topic: If you would count solo games that I was just running for myself, my second attempt at kingdom building was a game where my characters had started out as bandits who had actually ambushed and killed the original party sent from Restov, taking their charters.

As Brevoy is kind of Slavic, or close to it, I used Slavic names for my characters, which were a female human rogue (the eventual ruler), her ranger brother, and their half-elf barbarian uncle. The fourth character was a cleric of Norgorber who was their "hotline to the divine" . The family name of the siblings was Sokol, which means "hawk" , and the ranger did indeed have a hawk for his animal companion. Their kingdom was named Sokolia, their capital city Sokolgrad, which was founded at the Stag Lord's Fort (they also retained the services of Akiros, Fat Norry, and Topper Red I believe). The for itself was renamed The Hawk's Nest. Maybe not the most imaginative stuff, but it fit together.

Unfortunately, I lost interest in playing that party when they encountered the tendriculous, which would have been a futile fight as they little fire and were all about stabby and cutty weapons. I guess I figured that even if they survived, it was only going to get worse.

 

[S'mon]

Anyone else think it's really weird that 1st level PCs are sent into the wilderness to found a new kingdom? I guess this is an issue with APs always starting at 1st level; it seems at least a mid-level sort of goal to me. If it were *that* easy, some higher level guys would have already done it!

 

[IronWolf]

Anyone else think it's really weird that 1st level PCs are sent into the wilderness to found a new kingdom? I guess this is an issue with APs always starting at 1st level; it seems at least a mid-level sort of goal to me. If it were *that* easy, some higher level guys would have already done it!

It starts with simply the permission to explore and chart the region and eliminate any bandit threats. The characters will be higher level when the actual Kingdom building portion starts. The character's party also wasn't the only group sent out to begin these explorations.

But yeah, there is always that sense of "why not get someone higher level than us to help you?" with RPGs in many cases!

 

[Kaodi]

It starts with simply the permission to explore and chart the region and eliminate any bandit threats. The characters will be higher level when the actual Kingdom building portion starts. The character's party also wasn't the only group sent out to begin these explorations.

But yeah, there is always that sense of "why not get someone higher level than us to help you?" with RPGs in many cases!

It should probably also be mentioned that the PCs are only one of four groups sent to explore various parts of the Stolen Lands. Some of those other groups very much were higher level.

 

[Evilhalfling]

Please reply and list:
1. Where your group built your first city and why;
2. The name of your first city and why;
3. The name of your kingdom and why you chose it;
4. What you developed/built first; and
5. Whatever else you deem relevant, such as the locations of any subsequent cities or important structures.

In a solo game:
1. in the stag lords fortress the castle was too good to pass up.
2. Jerburg - for Lord Jeremy, the highest charisma (ie ruler) PC
3. erm I don't have that in my records. Not sure it got named
4. after the castle built a Shop and an Inn mostly to increase Economy, I liked to have the economy check succeed on 3-5 or better. The shrine was an attempt to start selling items, it failed miserably. Selling 3 BP worth of items before they built a casters tower in month 25.

After 1 year:
Size 6, 1 city districts, 5 farms
Buildings: Castle, Inn, shop, shrine, 4 houses,

After 2 years:
Size 11, 2 city districts, 8 farms
Added : watchtower, tannery, smithy, noble villa, brothel, exotic craftsman, 1 house


Tazaleford founded month 19,
Rivers run Red ended month 27
Gateway founded month 34 (Olegs Inn location)
Varnhold vanishing began month 44

EDIT : Loyalty seemed useless, but it worked well if all random events used loyalty checks to avoid instead of stability checks.

The most fun was when I added Cousin Laura (chr 16) and the idiot-brother-n-law (IBNL) to help rule the kingdom. 2 random disasters were blamed on the IBNL and he was moved to a different position after each failure. IBNL had +3 str mod, but a -1 incompetence penalty.

 

[Kaodi]

Also, regarding the OP, why would you not think that the top line of hexes are part of the map that can be settled? The blank hex map in the Player's Guide has enough spaces for those to be included, so I would wonder why it would somehow be discounted. In fact, I think it points to every hex that is more than 75% on the map as being part of the map. If the concern is that this does not quite make sense, given the placement of the South Rostland Road, keep in mind that the entirely of the Stolen Lands was considered to be part of Rostland, so having part of a highway fall in what is supposed to be an allied kingdom is probably no biggie...

 

[TarionzCousin]

Also, regarding the OP, why would you not think that the top line of hexes are part of the map that can be settled?

I'm not running the AP; I'm playing in it. My info comes from our DM... who also excluded the Stag Lord's fortress/hex from our map.