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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Retreater" data-source="post: 5344303" data-attributes="member: 42040">Chalk me up as one "against" the Kingmaker Adventure Path. I'm midway through DMing the 4th adventure, and it's mostly fallen flat for my group.  Here's a few issues we've had with it. 1) If everyone doesn't get into the kingdom building aspect, you're going to have several players sitting around for an hour or so of each session doing nothing but being bored. (Unless this is all handled via email, but that's been hard for us to coordinate.) 2) Based on the first mass combat battle featured, the mass combat system so far has been a little "wonky." The party easily overpowered their rival army. 3) If a player becomes the ruler, that person can bully around the other party members. More of an interpersonal issue, but it's still there. 4) It's been very difficult to build up the kingdom, particularly to get Build Points. Every turn (which takes about 15 minutes) nets about 5 Build Points. (It takes something like 10 to build one section of city wall.) Therefore the kingdom building aspect is very slow and tedious.  5) Be prepared to have your kingdom information on a spreadsheet. It turns into an accounting exercise very quickly due to all of the different modifiers. (You'll be making what amounts to DC 100 checks regularly later on in the Path. So if you can imagine tracking all of your modfiers - it gets a little crazy.) 6) Concerning the adventures themselves, I've found them to be of average quality at best. A general comment is that they're not adequately challenging. Meaning that you can be 1st level and run into 1d4 trolls or 11th and have fights with CR 2 bullywugs (okay, boggards). The overall feel is of a bunch of disconcected, one or two room adventure sights (most of which aren't mapped).  I'll delve into each of them a little.  Beware the SPOILERS from here to the end!!!  i.) The Stolen Lands: This adventure is good. The PCs take down a bandit lord and his minions. A few of the other adventure sites are event connected to the main theme of the adventure. (For example, there is an undead creature that had been wronged by the bandit lord; there is a subgroup of bandits that can be turned against the bandit lord; there is a frontier keep under attack from the bandits.) This one started the Path off with a bang and persuaded me to start the series.  ii.) Rivers Run Red: This adventure is disappointing. It is a level grinder of an adventure. Basically, these are just a bunch of unconnected adventure sites with no unifying theme. You fight a giant owlbear, a troll encampment, and do some errands for a couple of fey creatures in the woods. The point of this one is to build up your characters' levels and to start building your kingdom. iii.) The Varnhold Vanishing: This is the first in the series that actually feels like a real adventure. There is a clear goal: investigate the disappearance of the citizenry of Varnhold. There is a clear villain: a lich that wants to dominate the countryside. There is a sizable dungeon to explore: the lich's tower. This one is okay, except that the lich can easily mop the floor with an inexperienced party (or one that doesn't know what they're getting into). I had to drop a lot of clues before they faced him to avoid a TPK. Overall, a harrowing combat.  iv.) Blood for Blood: This is the one I'm currently running. The party is attacked by a rival nation and gets intel to sneak into the rival baron's palace and kill him. On the way there, the party is harrassed by pushover encounters with monsters that can't touch their ACs. When they enter the palace, every encounter is a joke of a single NPC waiting to get murdered. (Or, at least, that's how it's written. A well-written adventure would give the DM a few sample combats and situations where the NPCs would work together; however most of the NPCs aren't trusting each other and would likely not band together anyway.) After that, there's a dungeon crawl to find and kill a barbarian leader who has kidnapped a few of the rival town's fair maidens. v.) War of the River Kings: While I haven't run this one yet, it seems more or less a repeat of Adventure 4. The party is invited to a suspicious celebration held by a rival king. This will probably take some railroading to get the group started. Once they're at the celebration, there are some interesting mini-games involving a poetry slam, jousting, and log chopping. Once that's over, the PCs find out their kingdom has been attacked in their absence and they have to again sneak into a rival kingdom, breach the palace walls, and assassinate a rival ruler. Here the challenges are a little more varied and interesting - partially because the NPCs are working together and have strategies in the adventure. Overall, it seems like a rewrite of Adventure 4 that has been improved. However, coming right on the heels of such a similar adventure, it feels a little redundant. vi.) Sound of a Thousand Screams: This is the unnecessary capstone to the Adventure Path. The group has probably had no clues that an evil, otherworldy force was behind everything. Apparently, a crazed nymph was behind everything that happened. She wants to run civilization out of her lands, and that means eradicating the PCs. While this one sounds interesting, they have really upped the difficulty. There are creatures that attack that have something like DR 20/vorpal, so the characters are pretty helpless - yet they must be killed to advance the story. Then the final villain has an obscene AC (I think it's 51) that no PC can have a decent chance to hit (I've looked ahead and done the math just to be sure that my group will have no chance to beat her). Given the entirety of the module, it seems that the writer just came up with the toughest encounters imaginable and said "ha! let's see somebody beat that!" It's as if they never intended anyone to actually play it. It reads more like Killer DM porn than a playable adventure. Of course, your mileage may vary. Retreater</blockquote>

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