What Might An Urban Kingmaker Look Like?

[nedjer]

Did someone call for an urbane kingmaker?

Seriously, a quasi-"Three Muskateers" style campaign (with obvious plot and setting differences to make things more gray and complex) might be in order, where a hands-on group of duelists are constantly weighing if they are on the right side of history

Agonisingly close to using the auto-XP Flashing Blades words

 

[NewJeffCT]

A good part of Kingmaker involves the players setting up a city as a capital of their newly found nation. You may be able to start off in a similar fashion, and then expand upon the urban encounters - one of the modules (the second one?) has a whole table that lists encounters for your kingdom - visiting celebrity, assassination attempt, etc.

If you want, you can quickly gloss over the initial set-up phase, and then expand upon the urban encounters listed within the module. You can also convert some of the wilderness encounters to urban ones, even if you have to change the entire flavor of the encounter. (There are a decent amount of urban encounters already - a rabble rouser type gathers a following in the city when a series of murders happens... an evil cult starts to flourish in a hidden location...

 

[Mark CMG]

Agonisingly close to using the auto-XP Flashing Blades words

How so? I don't really know Flashing Blades. Your post promted me to read an old review which mentions the combat was its best feature. True?

 

[nedjer]

How so? I don't really know Flashing Blades. Your post promted me to read an old review which mentions the combat was its best feature. True?

Yeah the swordfights are entertaining. It's also a real murky, backstabbing sort of a setting to get into, with a kind of twisted morality behind it all. At least that's how I took it at the time

 

[Herobizkit]

Gangs of New York.

That's how I'd run it.

 

[Kaodi]

I am back to thinking about a sort of Phlan-style campaign, which I was looking at placing in Eberron, but there are actually a couple places in Golarion which may almost have been designed for this campaign.

Kravenkus and Kraggodan are two dwarven Sky Citadels that have are partially abandonned. I would have thought Kravenkus was the more ideal for this sort of campaign from the Pathfinder Wiki descriptions, but I found a very short thread with this comment by James Jacobs:

Dwarves of Golarion is a little unclear; those four sky citadels are the only ones that are cities that still function as cities. Kraggodan still has some dwarf holdouts, but it's not a city as much as it is a ruined adventure site with an on-site safe zone to retreat to to rest and recover.

I think one of the big questions in running a campaign when you are rebuilding an old city is whether you want to essentially design what the city would have looked like before it was destroyed and strongly suggest that players rebuild things as they were, or if you want to allow the players to build whatever they feel like. The later option would probably not be discounted nearly as much (flat -2 BP discount to buildings, rather than the 1/2 for rebuilding old structures).

 

[howandwhy99]

An urban Kingmaker?

Civilization(tm) in the medieval eras, but with more magic. This includes both the computer and board games.

Other board games might include: Empires of the Middle Ages, Divine Right, and even Magic Realm for the beginning exploration / settling phase.

 

[Squire James]

Master of Magic?

I still remember that initial cutscene, where I could clearly hear one side of the conversation while the other wizard mumbled, muttered, and said incomprehensible words but won anyway.

 

[Kaodi]

One other thing which would be rather important to a Phlan type game: How long does it take to explore each block in a city district? Assuming each block is roughly equivalent to 400 ft. by 400 ft. of densely packed dwarven architecture... Two hours? Four? A whole day?

 

[Derulbaskul]

WotC's Neverwinter Campaign Guide strikes me as feeling very much like an urban Kingmaker, especially if one (or more) of the players chooses the Neverwinter Noble theme (IIRC) for their character(s).