[OSSR] Pathfinder Kingmaker

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Introduction

The Kingmaker adventure path is over 10 years old at this point, which I believe qualifies it for an OSSR. Reading through it pissed me off to no end, so here we are…

Kingmaker is a classic example of an excellent premise with an abysmal execution. The party gets to create their own kingdom! Logistics and Dragons! Lead armies into battles! Maybe even some of that political intrigue that GoT likely popularized! But they fucked it all up! The mechanics for kingdom building and mass combat are a fucking atrocity and the adventure itself was written by talentless hacks. Few things are more frustrating than seeing a product with a good idea but faceplants into the pavement on the way to the finish line. On a more detailed level, few of Kingmaker’s actual ideas are good, but we’ll get to that later.

However, I would be remiss were I not to mention this adventure path recently (2018) was adapted into a video game bearing the same name. I have played the Kingmaker video game, but I gave up on it pretty quickly thanks to its obtuse design. So, I can’t comment on the video game too much and the finer points of how it differs from its source material.

Anyway, the Kingmaker adventure path is split into six parts. The module itself is designed to start at level 1 and end at level 17.

A lot of Kingmaker’s ideas don’t work at higher levels, a fact that will readily become apparent as we tear into the later chapters of this travesty. The tendency to think of mid to high level 3.P characters as, “Just like the Fellowship of the Ring!”, is one of the Paizo writers’ more egregious flaws. This is Savage Tide all over again…

Each of the six parts are roughly 90 pages each, with a decent sized chunk of the page count being “dedicated” to fluff that I don’t care about. I’ll be skipping those sections. But this trend doesn’t just restrict itself to those portions. Each NPC, even minor ones, get something like a paragraph of backstory. Even the ones who just show up to fight the party and immediately die. And it’s clear to me someone had an unhealthy fixation with the BBEG. Also, most of them have tragic backstories.

Another universal problem with Kingmaker is the amount of down time it hands out to the party. We’re talking years where the PCs can do whatever they damn please. I’ve seen the Paizo fans bemoan that this means the naughty, naughty, players craft themselves a veritable mountain of magic items. Because why the hell wouldn’t they? This is Pathfinder, magic item crafting is ludicrously good if you have time to do it. But what I don’t hear the fanboys mention are how all this free time interacts with Planar Binding. Not terribly surprising, most Paizo fans couldn’t optimize their way out of a wet paper bag, but naturally more canny groups are going to net themselves armies of powerful outsiders. Of course, the designers didn’t take that into account when making this damn thing…

With all that out of the way, let’s get this review started.



Part 1: Stolen Land

The entire premise of Kingmaker is for the party to annex a chunk of land roughly the size of Maine, the titular Stolen Lands. The module proceeds to tarnish this excellent premise by stating that the nobles that hire the PCs are planning to turn them into puppet rulers. But then the module takes a turn into WTF -ville by informing us a Nymph queen has her own plans for the region. This is our BBEG for this adventure path. The party isn’t supposed to know she exists until the last part of the module. So, she comes so completely out of nowhere, I’ve actually heard some people on the Pazio boards talking about removing her entirely. It’s that bad.

The part of the adventure path that actually concerns the players is the bandits that have currently set up shop in the Stolen Lands. And their leader, the Stag Lord. The adventure proper starts at a trading post where said bandits have been causing trouble. The owner of the place is Oleg, a fucking idiot who would have stupidly gotten himself killed trying to take down the bandits, if he wasn’t worried what would become of his wife. Naturally, the pair of them get several paragraphs of backstory, despite only being featured in this sole chapter.

The first actual encounter of the module is the bandits that have been strongarming Oleg into handing over his wares. This is also where we get our first bit of magical tea party.

If the PCs ambush the bandits, the PCs automatically gain a surprise round—in addition, the bandits themselves are so agog at this unexpected development that they all suffer a –8 penalty on their Initiative checks.

At least it’s not dickish, but I tend to hate MtP in rules heavy games on principle, especially when it’s in a published book. Then we get a couple paragraphs of backstory about the lady bandit who leads these thugs, even though she’s not present in this encounter. On top of that, we get some backstory about the bandit who does lead the group the party is fighting. Even though he’ll probably just die here and now, with the party never even learning who he is.

The bandit leader is a level 1 Ranger, and the three other bandits are level 1 Warriors. The module labels the Ranger as CR ½ because Pathfinder gives NPCs a CR equal to their class level -1 (-2 for NPC classes). The exception being NPCs who get full PC wealth by level. This is, of course, batshit insane, especially where spellcasters are concerned. Note that 3.5 doesn’t do this; under that system, class level = CR, unless you have levels in an NPC class. Then it’s class levels -1 for CR, because NPC classes suck. This further cements my belief that virtually every change Pathfinder made from 3.5 was to the detriment of the game.

Thankfully, these bandits are utter weaksauce. Their boss has only a +1 to WILL and his flunkies have -1 to WILL; any party packing Sleep or Color Spray will effortlessly win. Even without them, the Ranger only has an AC of 14, albeit with 11 HP. The Warriors have 9 HP and an AC of 13. Even a level 1 party should be able to kick their asses without the I win Buttons, barring some shitty luck.

At this point, Kingmaker opens up and lets the players explore the wilderness. But the module can’t resist piling on the stupid.

While you can certainly track Oleg’s financials down to the last copper piece, it’s easier to assume that the first time the PCs return to the Trading Post, he has enough resources to purchase 500 gp worth of goods per week. If the PCs exceed this number, Oleg can arrange to have additional funds delivered from Restov in a week. The primary concern is that you should work to accommodate the PCs’ requirements if possible, preventing the need for them to abandon their duties in the Greenbelt just to sell loot.

Now, this is utter bullshit. Because if the party attempts to confront the Stag Lord immediately instead of dicking around with sidequests first, they’ll almost certainly TPK.

Of course, we get more paragraphs of backstory for NPCs you’ll likely meet once and never see again. We have a Fighter who got disowned by his family for sleeping with a “lowborn woman” (Scandalous!), and a Cleric who got a mob to lynch a guy who he mistook for a werewolf. How tragic.

The module moves on to the aforementioned sidequests. We’ve got a pair of prank loving fey, a Faerie Dragon and a Grig. The dragon apparently killed a local hunter because he was an asshole and now, they decide to harass the party. Because that sounds like fun! There’s a temple with a cursed bear, featuring a bunch of backstory you don’t care about. Next is an encounter with a boar the party can kill for a bow and some magic arrows. There’s an undead monster whose paragraph long backstory can be summarized as thus; the Stag Lord killed him cause he’s a dick and he wants revenge. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these little random encounters is a dead unicorn. The evil Fey queen killed them for the lulz and left the body. Of course, the party can’t find out this is the case, Speak to Dead explicitly only yields vague bullshit. Because fuck you.

The next stage of the plot is basically tracking down the lady bandit who leads the brigands who attacked the trading post. Of course, lady bandit gets even more backstory and I can’t be bothered to care when she’s just going to die in the first encounter. Her backstory isn’t very well written and part of it is she ended up working for the Stag Lord after maiming a couple of his men. Who tried to rape her.

This won’t be the last time Kingmaker includes rape in these backstories, and of course the hacks at Paizo don’t handle this topic with any sort of care. Bandit lady is a level 2 Ranger with a +1 WILL save and she’s accompanied by a group of level 1 Warriors. Four plus whatever brigands survived the trade post encounter. Once this fight is done, the module suddenly remembers that the party might have taken prisoners. We’re told what the bandits know and apparently no checks are needed to get them to talk. The most pertinent information the party can learn is that the Stag Lord loves his booze and the password to enter their fort. The big brain plan the module writers have is that the PCs take the wine the bandits stole and try to disguise themselves as bandits. We’ll discuss the problems with this idea when we get to the Stag Lord encounter…

The next major section is dedicated to a conflict between some Mites and Kobolds. If you aren’t aware, Mites are a type of fey. The Mites stole the Kobolds’ idol, and this is the reason they’re fighting. The Mites’ hideout is fairly boring. The most interesting encounter being with a CR 3 centipede and a trap that can drop the party into its lair.

Meanwhile, the Kobolds have a ton of backstory dedicated to their shaman. Who’s actually a Gnome who was killed by Kobolds and then reincarnated into a Kobold. He now seeks revenge against all of Kobold kind. The party can return the idol to the Kobold tribe and form an alliance with them. But only if they give the idol to the Kobold chief, if they give it to the shaman, the Kobolds attack them. Got all that? Good.

With all that sidequest bullshit out of the way, we finally arrive at the showdown with the Stag Lord. And holy backstory Batman! The Stag Lord and each of his lieutenants gets several paragraphs dedicated to each of them! Easily the most poorly written is the ex-Paladin who had an affair with a married woman, who falsely accused him of rape. And then he killed her and her husband in a blind rage.

This guy is supposed to defect to the players’ side, BTW.

The bandits are just DERP! DERP! EVIL!!! The guy who loves torturing probably being the stupidest example of this.

Dovan and Auchs flee with the rest, although Dovan could well return later on to plague the PCs, particularly if one of them caught his eye as a possible victim to torture (Dovan prefers blondes for this grisly pursuit).

Fuck!

The Stag Lord’s grand backstory is… His father was abusive. Why was his father abusive? Because his wife died in childbirth, but her kid lived. Fucking seriously? This old cliché? The Stag Lord fought back against his father after doing the horizontal tango with the fey queen lady. Now he beats his dear old papa and keeps him locked in the basement. All these shittily written backstories are starting to sap my will to live. Let’s move on to the actual encounter design itself.

As I stated earlier, Kingmaker seems to be banking on the party disguising themselves as bandits and sneaking into the fort. They’re given a +4 bonus on their checks if they’re dressed as brigands and have stolen goods. That bonus goes up to +8 if they brought the Stag Lord’s hooch and he promptly gets shitfaced. The primary problem with this is the designers seem to be assuming the party has a talky-talky guy in their party. This is hardly the only time they make this assumption and parties without a Face are going to have a hard time with the entire adventure path. Even with a +8, it’s not improbable they could fail if they didn’t take ranks in the relevant skills. This is especially the case with the Disguise checks, since each PC would have to make one. Odds are, someone is going to fail that.

The module doubts the effectiveness of an all-out assault and they may have a point. The party is supposed to be at this point level 3, max. They could be even lower if they decided to deal with the Stag Lord ASAP instead of dicking about with sidequests. The approach to casa de le Stag Lord features a hillside with a fucking dozen zombies. Good god, it would suck to actually run that encounter, it’d take forever…

The fort itself has a wall and the Stag Lord is explicitly stated to be too wasted to join combat initially. But of course, the module writers have to be dicks…


[quote="Kingmaker]You can thus delay the Stag Lord’s entrance into the battle for a particularly dramatic moment—perhaps just as the PCs think they’re about done with the fight, or after they suddenly gain Akiros’s aid, or maybe even as they’re trying to flee.[/quote]


Let’s talk about the Stag Lord for a moment. Thanks to his hangover, he’s treated as sickened until he sobers up. How long does that take? Fuck you, the module never says. This fucker is a goddamn level 8 character (Ranger 3/Rogue 5) but he gets a -1 to CR for being drunk. This asshole has +3d6 Sneak Attack damage and magic item that once per day treats someone he attacks with a ranged weapon as flatfooted. I could see him taking the group on by himself.

His underlings are a level 3 Fighter, level 3 Rogue and the Ex-Paladin 1/Barbarian 3 guy who is supposed to side with the PCs. There are also 7 level 1 Warriors and an Owlbear the bandits locked up (though it just attacks whoever). Oh yeah, hiding in the basement, there’s also the Stag Lord’s dad, who’s a 6th level Druid. But he’s only CR 4 because he’s old. EVEN THOUGH HE HAS WILD SHAPE AND 3RD LEVEL SPELLS!!!

How exactly is the party supposed to survive? I mean, yes, the Stag Lord has a shitty +1 WILL save (until he sobers up) and the PCs won’t be fighting all of them at once. But I could easily see this turning into a TPK, especially if the party heads to the Stag Lord’s fort as soon as possible. And remember, most groups won’t be packing Color Spray and Sleep. Druid dad picked crappy spells, but he explicitly will try to summon, whist Wild Shaped into a wolverine and on the ceiling. This includes casting Summon Swarm, which the party may not even be able to hurt. God damn!

The big fight with the Stag Lord marks the end of this chapter, but the book still isn’t’ over. I’m skipping over the fluff about the surrounding lands and moving straight to the random encounter chart. And holy shit is this bad! The party can encounter a Shambling Mount, a Will-O- Wisp, or 1d4 Trolls! Even a relatively optimized group isn’t winning against some of that! A PF Will-O-Wisp has an AC of 26! A Shambling Mound averages 12 damage on each slam attack, has reach, and can attack twice per round! The PCs are fucked if it grapples them, and an encounter with more than one troll is just going to be a TPK. All it takes is one unlucky roll and some players that don’t realize they’re outclassed. Forget the Stag Lord, some groups might not even make it to him. Especially if they decide to explore every last chunk of the area.

The Stolen Land is a damn poorly written and leaves a pretty poor first impression. But, next time, we’ll be looking at the second chapter: Rivers Run Red. We’ll get to see the utter travesty that is Kingmaker’s kingdom management rules. I’m not looking forward to it.

[hogarth]

I played in two play-by-post Kingmaker games that both died during Stolen Lands. One time we were skull-fucked by a shambling mound and the other one just petered out.

A Shambling Mound averages 12 damage on each slam attack, has reach, and can attack twice per round!

Don't forget the +16 Stealth check in forests. We got boned by a night-time random encounter roll.

[Orca]

When we played (face-to-face) it the idea of fighting this stag lord early was brought up and rapidly shouted down. We kept doing side quests until we thought we might be able to take on a crappy fortress and it worked.

The game sank during Rivers Run Red because half the party didn't want to engage with the kingdom rules, one guy lost interest because his character died and the reincarnated version just didn't match his concept (went from half-orc to mite), someone else just started being disruptive...there wasn't enough there to keep people interested and onside.

[Grek]

Perhaps the most noteworthy of these little random encounters is a dead unicorn. The evil Fey queen killed them for the lulz and left the body. Of course, the party can’t find out this is the case, Speak to Dead explicitly only yields vague bullshit. Because fuck you.

Fun fact for aspiring necromancers out there: this particular unicorn has been cursed to never decay for bullshit reasons, making it an absolute delight to be raised as a fast zombie mount. I ended up hauling the corpse back on a sled and hiding it in the woods near Oleg's until I got the stuff together to put up a desecrated shrine to animate it at. My Kingmaker character rode that thing all the way to the penultimate act, where it was regretfully teleported out from under her and re-killed. Good times.

The module doubts the effectiveness of an all-out assault and they may have a point. The party is supposed to be at this point level 3, max.

Our party had the brilliant idea of using magic from a distance to sneakily light the backside of the Stag Lord's (wooden!) fort on fire, distracting the bandits inside while we rammed down the front door. Also, I think the zombies are supposed to be a soft 'you must be this tall to kill the Stag Lord' check, because if your party can't deal with a dozen zombies, they can't deal with the boss fight either. In our particular case, the GM basically drew a line on the map and said 'if you go south of this line, you might TPK, I'm warning you now' which, given the random encounter table for that area, was pretty damn merciful.

The Stag Lord fight itself is absolutely fucking brutal though, especially if you have the Stag Lord come out while the party is still bogged down with the lesser bandits and open up with a pot shot sneak attacks at one of the back row casters in the party. We ended up taking hard cover behind some of the buildings while setting more fires in order to force them to come to us from a single direction where we'd be harder to flank and/or get shot at by the Stag Lord. This did not stop two party members from dropping unconscious during the fight and needing potions poured down their throats.

The druid fight is a lot less painful, as for all levels dru-dad has on the party, the action economy is very much not in his favour even after summoning his swarm. If you can get a hit in on him, the climbing rules in Pathfinder say that he falls off the roof, takes falling damage and lands prone in a pile, presumably surrounded by the rest of the party. Despite being a full caster on paper, he honestly felt kinda weaksauce due to bad tactics.

[Thaluikhain]

Part 1: Stolen Land

The entire premise of Kingmaker is for the party to annex a chunk of land roughly the size of Maine, the titular Stolen Lands. The module proceeds to tarnish this excellent premise by stating that the nobles that hire the PCs are planning to turn them into puppet rulers. But then the module takes a turn into WTF -ville by informing us a Nymph queen has her own plans for the region. This is our BBEG for this adventure path. The party isn’t supposed to know she exists until the last part of the module. So, she comes so completely out of nowhere, I’ve actually heard some people on the Pazio boards talking about removing her entirely. It’s that bad.

That picture does not seem to fit that premise very well.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

I played in two play-by-post Kingmaker games that both died during Stolen Lands. One time we were skull-fucked by a shambling mound and the other one just petered out.

A Shambling Mound averages 12 damage on each slam attack, has reach, and can attack twice per round!

Don't forget the +16 Stealth check in forests. We got boned by a night-time random encounter roll.

Good point, that pretty much guarantees a surprise round.

Perhaps the most noteworthy of these little random encounters is a dead unicorn. The evil Fey queen killed them for the lulz and left the body. Of course, the party can’t find out this is the case, Speak to Dead explicitly only yields vague bullshit. Because fuck you.

Fun fact for aspiring necromancers out there: this particular unicorn has been cursed to never decay for bullshit reasons, making it an absolute delight to be raised as a fast zombie mount. I ended up hauling the corpse back on a sled and hiding it in the woods near Oleg's until I got the stuff together to put up a desecrated shrine to animate it at. My Kingmaker character rode that thing all the way to the penultimate act, where it was regretfully teleported out from under her and re-killed. Good times.

Also, I think the zombies are supposed to be a soft 'you must be this tall to kill the Stag Lord' check, because if your party can't deal with a dozen zombies, they can't deal with the boss fight either.

That's possible, but my impression was the module writers expect the PCs go take the disguise route and the zombies were supposed to be a fuck you for trying to enter another way.

The Stag Lord fight itself is absolutely fucking brutal though, especially if you have the Stag Lord come out while the party is still bogged down with the lesser bandits and open up with a pot shot sneak attacks at one of the back row casters in the party. We ended up taking hard cover behind some of the buildings while setting more fires in order to force them to come to us from a single direction where we'd be harder to flank and/or get shot at by the Stag Lord. This did not stop two party members from dropping unconscious during the fight and needing potions poured down their throats.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Stag Lord TPKed groups.

The druid fight is a lot less painful, as for all levels dru-dad has on the party, the action economy is very much not in his favour even after summoning his swarm. If you can get a hit in on him, the climbing rules in Pathfinder say that he falls off the roof, takes falling damage and lands prone in a pile, presumably surrounded by the rest of the party. Despite being a full caster on paper, he honestly felt kinda weaksauce due to bad tactics.

Fair. I'm not surprised that Paizo didn't understand the climb rules of their own game. Wolverines do have a climb speed, I don't know if that would be a factor.

[Kaelik]

We played this module as part of playing many of them in the run over Discord and Roll20. Our characters were Tome characters and we MAY have been higher level than level 3 when we fought the staglord, not sure from just grinding stuff or if we started higher.

Our party still wiped on the staglord/fort fight, though that was partly because of bad decision making, but if 4 level 4 Tome characters are wiping the average 3.5 party at level 3 is going to have a hell of a time.

I'll wait for the fun parts of the story of that group for when you get to those modules, but we definitely encountered all the marked encounters, though our DM was probably being nice and ignoring the random encounters because I don't remember any of those.

[Chamomile]

I forget exactly what they were, but I slapped a few significant nerfs on the Stag Lord when I ran Kingmaker. The party still half-wiped (the survivors fled) while attacking his fort, although that's partly because they were undergeared, having made a beeline straight from the encounter to the fortress after figuring out where the Stag Lord lived from, if I recall correctly, interrogating that first pack of bandits. Notably, one party member noticed that this place had a dozen zombies as a perimeter guard and questioned whether it was a good idea to attack (especially when he knew from a metagame perspective that they were behind wealth-by-level), but got outvoted. It went reasonably smooth for them when they returned at level 3, but I'm pretty sure someone was able to exploit the +1 Will, which isn't necessarily a given at 3rd level, plus the fort had a couple of casualties from their first assault that weren't refreshed for the second.

I didn't pay as much attention to nerfing the random encounter table, and I really should've. Shambling mounds appear as solo encounters, and possibly more egregious are the encounters with multiple trolls. The shambling mound encounters were, through sheer chance, so common (something like three or four of them, out of maybe 10-15 random encounters in the area, not counting wildlife that were basically ignored as soon as they were rolled) that I wound up incorporating them into the plot, having them as the result of a fairy lord who's going around making shambling mounds to harass intruders into the realm Nyrissa's got her eyes on. It's not Paizo's fault that the specific shambling mound result came up so often, but it is their fault for having such a hideously balanced random encounter table at all.

I also retconned Nyrissa into being far more prominent early on: I forget if I did anything with the unicorn encounter, but the fey all know about Nyrissa and will mention her name in a moderately menacing way, and after killing Nyrissa's pet Stag Lord, a flower knight (stat block of my own design) shows up to try and avenge him.

[saithorthepyro]

So, just a few things on the Video Game version, which does actually clean some of this up. Nyrissa actually shows up very early on in the module and has a more active role throughout the game. Most of the stag lord's lieutenants do not have their backstory explained to you except the fallen paladin and the lady bandit, both of whom you can recruit along with a mini-squad of bandits to help you out against the Stag Lord. You can also free the owlbear and it won't attack you in the video game version as well. You get slightly more of a connection with the mite/kobold conflict because the gnome whose a kobold is one of the other people trying to claim the stolen lands using the Swordlord's charter, etc.

It's not a massive improvement but it is there.

[Harshax]

So, just a few things on the Video Game version, which does actually clean some of this up. Nyrissa actually shows up very early on in the module and has a more active role throughout the game. Most of the stag lord's lieutenants do not have their backstory explained to you except the fallen paladin and the lady bandit, both of whom you can recruit along with a mini-squad of bandits to help you out against the Stag Lord. You can also free the owlbear and it won't attack you in the video game version as well. You get slightly more of a connection with the mite/kobold conflict because the gnome whose a kobold is one of the other people trying to claim the stolen lands using the Swordlord's charter, etc.

It's not a massive improvement but it is there.

I enjoyed this chapter of the video game. I hated the kingdom management bits and ended up installing mods to basically skip them. I'm interested in hearing how exactly it was designed for table top, because kingdom projects felt like you had little to no time to complete in the video game, so I'm not sure how that exactly translates into significant time to craft. Further ... I'm curious if the kingdom tasks gave XP in the tt, because if it didn't I'm not sure endlessly crafting is a thing, since you're not getting XP between chapters of the story. That is, unless Pathfinder crafting doesn't cost XP?

[Grek]

Pathfinder crafting doesn't cost XP. And the tabletop version gave you XP per hex explored (enough to care about for the first handful of levels) and lump sum XP for certain kingdom milestones which, by the time you're actually reaching those milestones in the module, you don't especially give a shit about.

[MGuy]

I feel like the game is actually a massive improvement on the opening chapter.

[GâtFromKI]

I have a friend who played it.

1/ They discovered who was the BBEG at the beginning of each module. But they wren'nt high level enough, so they had to grind sidequest they didn't care about.

2/ Regurlarly, they unlocked a new part of the map with higher level-monsters.

It's not a ttrpg module, it's a fucking mmorpg. Grind xp, go higher-level zone, grind, go higher-level zone, grind,...


3/ Most of the encounters they had were the only encounter of the day. Full nova, xp, sleep, next. Each time they tried to explore more, they were almost tpked.

[K]

I feel like the game is actually a massive improvement on the opening chapter.

In the game, the Stag King is also a complete nightmare if you don't grind and sidequest, unless you let the owlbear loose and let it kill him.

Overall, the game is a grindfest. The quests are a lot of "why do we care about this?" and/or "a secret timer bones you if you don't address this right now." Often, I was so overloaded with loot from every quest that inventory management frustration was the only thing I felt most of the time.

A lot of the time I felt like the game had a very intended party/class composition and you suffered greatly if you deviated, and often it was non-obvious. For example, you had to multi-class a few of the base characters out of their starting class because some classes honestly just suck after level 6 or 7 (I'm looking at you, Inquisitor and Alchemist) and you have good or great stats for better classses.

In the beginning, there were a lot of encounters that felt like an auto-lose without the right party composition. By the end, a multi-caster approach curb-stomped encounters handily if there weren't secret mechanics making the fight harder.

The castle management part could have been fun, but too often you are greatly encouraged to save-scum because even a few failed events can be catastrophic, but a few successful ones means gaining skill and not needing to save-scum as much.

Overall, it's flawed and frustrating, but since so few people are making isometric RPGs these days you should play it because it will scratch that itch for a while.

[MGuy]

The two times I ran Kingmaker the players chose to spend a good deal of their time doing side quests. I didn't perceive the side questing as at odds with the intended way to play the game.

The party you're given and their class/ability set up struck me as unplayably bad and I got mods to fix that.

The most frustrating parts that remained for me in the beginning were:

When I discovered there was a timer the game didn't warn me about for certain things. Like the Fang berries going bad if you don't immediately deliver them (not a big deal but real annoying).

Some encounters are bullshit without preparation. The cave with the Fang berries has swarms in them. Make sure you're prepared because I wasn't and that screwed me.

There is at least one hidden encounter I'm more hesitant to spoil that I'm not sure is possible to even beat it at the time you can easily find it and it felt like a big fuck you.

Other than that things were pretty fine for me up until the kingdom minigame began. I legit liked that it was better set up than what they give you in the actual ap but all that good will ends where the kingdom management began. I didn't immediately understand it and I've quit the game for the time being until I feel like figuring out what to do with it. The ship battles/management in. Pillars 2 was a bit weird to me but not overly engaging with it wasn't nearly as crippling as the kingdom minigame in this.

[shlominus]

the kingdom minigame can be put on auto if you don't care for it. this used to cause a gamebreaking bug, but it has been fixed for a while now.

[Koumei]

When I played it, I grabbed a modpack that lets you tweak various things, including "every Kingdom Event, even ones with a 0% chance of success, is always a massive success. Fill your boots."

Which is like save-scumming it except more convenient and generally much better.

That said, if you don't have the expansion that adds the Tiefling(s), you're still going to have trouble filling out all the rolls, especially Economist - yes, you can get your Alchemist (and winner of the "Gnome NPC who isn't just an annoying joke" award for D&D-based video games) to do that when he joins (missable). But you want an economist ASAP, and there is also a rule that can only be filled by Jaethal, a Tiefling and maybe one other person who is probably already doing something else?, so without that expansion, you pretty much can't select the options that give Jaethal a Good-aligned character growth (and as such, can't take both her and Tristian into the final battles).

As a single-player PC game, it does a better job of establishing Nyrissa and pacing out your knowledge of her. You sort of meet her very early, before you fight the Stag Lord, and you see some more glimpses of her, she even helps you learn about the Stag Lord's past. And then in the dream meeting before you go and get betrayed by her (which is very much a direct betrayal that everyone knows about in character), there's enough of a hint there that something is up. "Come meet me by yourself" is basically code for "I'm absolutely going to kill you" after all.

And going forward from there, you learn more about her, have enough interactions via dreams and such between the "and now she sends forces out to try killing you" parts, and ends up being a romanceable character (this is certainly not easy). It was almost like this was designed to be a single-player PC game and not an adventure path. That's also what gives me hope for their next game, that maybe they won't have the worst elements of the AP in question.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

I apologize for gap in between uploads, I'll try to have the next part posted sometime tomorrow.

Been a bit busy with my D&D groups.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

The delay for today's upload was brought to you by Comcast. Because my internet went down for hours at time...

Part 2: Rivers Run Red



The first section tells the DM to embrace huge timeskips in between chapters. The party may be only level 4 now, but eventually this tendency will cause problems once the Planar Binding spells come online.

This chapter revolves mostly around a pissed off Owlbear that will eventually attack the PC’s kingdom. Crazy Fey queen makes her triumphant return to backstory land and give a cursed Ring of Animal Friendship to some guy. She told him about a pair of Owlbears he could control with said ring but when he tried, the curse activated. Then the Owlbears went berserk, one died in the ensuing fight, and the other now thirsts for the blood of the civilized. No, seriously.

This curse affects the magical beast with a rage spell, and instills in its brain a hatred of the wearer of the ring of bestial friendship used to charm it, forcing the magical beast to attack the ring-wearer and kill him. After this point, the curse of rage fills the magical beast with a deep loathing of civilization, forcing it to wander further from its lair with each passing day in search of a city or town to attack and destroy.

The crazy Fey queen apparently wanted this to happen.

Don’t ask me why she couldn’t have found/used a more effective means to fuck with the party’s kingdom. She also has apparently been giving the local Troll warlord funny dreams so he’ll be more aggressive. Oh yeah and the guy in the backstory wanted to bang the crazy Fey queen; because she’s hawt.

The module opens with some sidequests involving the party’s fledgling kingdom. The first of which is perhaps the worst. It involves a werewolf that has killed a couple NPCs and is about to kill a third. If the party botches their Perception checks, they can’t stop the werewolf from killing the last NPC and then it fucking skips town. Seriously.

If the PCs do nothing to investigate the attacks or don’t discover Kundal’s lycanthropy, the merchant becomes the werewolf ’s third and final victim—his cries wake the town, but by the time the guards arrive, Kundal is gone. The man returns to his room at the inn early next morning, gathers his things, and leaves the region, never to be seen again.

I guess the implication is the players could catch him after he kills the merchant but before he escapes? It’s still terrible design.

The second sidequest revolves around a spy who’s basically going around giving speeches about how much the party sucks. Confronting him will explicitly yield nothing useful.

But under no circumstances will Grigori divulge anything beyond the fact that he is working for “parties interested in seeing your little nation fail,” and that he aims to remove the PCs from their positions of authority over the town (even those admissions are made only under duress).

And Diplomacy won’t actually stop him causing trouble. We get some references to the kingdom management minigame that we haven’t gotten the details about yet, but this guy will fuck shit up if left to his own devices. At this point, the module seems to be under the impression that publicly imprisoning him for his dissent or openly killing him would be frown upon. Not sure how historically accurate that is, and I’m also not sure how much the players will really care. My prediction is the party will either assassinate his ass on the sly or arrange an unfortunate, “accident.”

The last sidequest revolves around a cult dedicated to a hag goddess. The party can interrogate some suspects but failing the Diplomacy check causes unrest. Fucking seriously? Are these NPCs actually from the Marvel universe or something? They seem to get pissy over the mildest shit. The suspects won’t admit to being part of the cult unless you use magic or torture. But then there’s this:

A DC 15 Knowledge (religion) check reveals that those attracted to Gyronna’s cult are often adulterous wives, embittered prostitutes, and spurned lovers.

Just… why?!

As one final fuck you from this sidequest, the gem that the cultists has might curse the players if the DM feels his dick isn’t being sucked properly like it.


But now we move into the wilderness portion of the adventure. The first encounter revolves around a hawt Dryad and her Satyr fuckbuddy. These two lovebirds want the party to kill an evil tree for them and they’re not afraid to use enchantment magic to get the party’s cooperation. Encounter number 2 revolves around some loggers that pissed off Nixie by cutting down her trees. Some Diplomacy checks can diffuse the situation, but each side will still demand compensation. The Nixie chick wants her trees to be replace and the loggers want trees to cut down. Because nothing screams fun like playing parent for two bickering groups of NPCs…

Encounter three involves a group of Gnomes who’ve gotten their wagon stuck in a river. I really hope the high STR characters in the party aren’t wearing heavy armor, because even a DC 10 Swim check might be too much for them. Leader gnome requires a Diplomacy check for him to sell his map, and all these selfish NPCs are starting to give me a headache…

One of these encounters appears to have been stolen directly from Keep on the Borderlands, the mad hermit. This crazy old man pretends to be helpful and then attacks the party. This type of bullshit is why so many players stab first and ask questions later…

There’s an encounter with old woman and her animate scarecrow I don’t care enough to talk about and an encounter with a snapping turtle that I feel the same way about. There’s a tower with a bunch of Will-O-Wisps living there, an encounter with a Tendriculos, some woods with forest drake, a hill giant that the party can be bribed with booze, and a monster that mimics voices as part of an ambush (a Leucrotta). There’s also a mini dungeon with some wights. None of these are all that interesting.

Finally, we get another major set piece; some evil Fey have taken up residence in an old fort. The leader of this ragtag band is a hawt Lady Fey who’s basically a discount vampire. Someone on the design team seems to have a thing for sexy lady fey… But the first encounter in the Fey Fort is a Quickling, a weirdass monster that’s invisible while it’s not moving. The second Fey here is Grimstalker that keeps an Assassin Vine as a pet.

Teorlian has allied himself with the Dancing Lady (see area G8), and often hunts the Narlmarches for new victims to bring back for her to feed on. Their skulls, however, he keeps for himself, and these now adorn the walls of this tower. The Dancing Lady believes that he makes these offerings out of a sense of loyalty and perhaps unrequited love. And while Teorlian does love her after a fashion, these offerings are given solely to make her dependent on him, so he can eventually claim lordship of the keep for himself, taking the Dancing Lady as his consort, willingly or not.

The Dancing Lady is a Baobhan Sith, which is a creature from Scottish folklore. In Pathfinder, they drink blood similar to a vampire (in a grapple), can cast Suggestion, and can dance to daze everyone within 30 feet. To my amazement, the statblock stats that creatures sexually attracted to females take a penalty on the save, not just males.

If forced into melee combat, she focuses her attacks on female opponents, attempting to tear them limb from limb with teeth and claws.

Goddamnit, Paizo! You just what little good will you gained with this bullshit!

Her combat tactics are generally stupid since they involve her grappling someone and draining their blood. I’m sure that’ll go well for her…

The next major sidequest revolve around a bunch of Lizardfolk who are venerating a Will-O-Wisp posing as one of their ancestor spirits. What’s with all the Will-O-Wisps in Kingmaker? I remind you that the party starts this chapter at level 4. Anyway, this segment is nothing but dumb melee brutes, so let’s move on to the trolls. Yes, the band of trolls that been threatening the land because the crazy hawt Fey Queen has been giving their leader weird dreams. You know, that band of trolls. These are more melee brutes with terrible WILL saves. Next.


Let’s move on to the main encounter of the module, the Owlbear. In a scripted cutscene, the players come back to their capital to find it shambles because of the aforementioned Owlbear. A piss easy (DC 10) Survival check is sufficient to follow the beast back to its lair. Most of the encounters in the Owlbear lair are not all that interesting. A Shambling Mound and a Centipede Swarm are the highlights. By this point, the party is supposed to be level 6 and if they know what they’re doing, they should be able to fly.

The CR 9 Owlbear actually has a good WILL save (+9) but it also can’t fly and it’s about as fast as a normal PC. If the party can fly, the ceiling is more than high enough (30 feet) for them to just shoot its fat ass to death, though it has 135 hitpoints. Meleeing is a bad idea. It averages 16 damage on each of its three attacks and explicitly try to grapple a PC with its +23 CMB check. All of its attacks have a +19 to hit and it has Power Attack. But it can’t do a damn thing against flying archers.

The corpse of the asshole who pissed off the Owlbear with the curse ring is still here. But it’s the ring itself that I wanted to draw attention to. This is one of the biggest, stupidest, fly-covered piles of bullshit in this entire fucking module. And that’s saying a lot.

Although fashioned from Nyrissa’s hair, using this ring as an aid in scrying the nymph is a poor choice—if the ring is used in this or any similar manner (such as to create a simulacrum), the ring instead explodes into a blast of lightning. This destroys the ring, counters the scrying (or other) effect, and inflicts 6d6 points of electricity damage in a 20-foot-burst (DC 15 Reflex halves).

Fuck you! Just fuck you! If you didn’t want anyone to Scry on your precious BBEG, you shouldn’t have given the PCs a lock of her goddamn hair! I guarantee they did this because during playtesting, someone tried to use the ring to scry on her and the DM threw a fucking temper tantrum.

What’s worse is that crazy Fey Queen can cast 8th level Sorcerer spells! She could have fucking just taken Mind Blank and prevented all this bullshit! Fucking fuck! You lazy, incompetent, idiotic hacks!

Now for the kingdom building mechanics and the first thing that strikes me, is that the only supported style of government is a monarchy. This seems shortsighted, since explicitly not all the players can be the king/queen. You’d think you could set some kind of ruling council, since that’d solve that problem immediately, but no.

You can have up to two monarchs, but only if they’re married to each other. I expect the Bard and Sorcerer to announce their marriage and ascend to the throne, regardless of how much sense it makes. Especially since CHA is important for the ruler. More on that in a second.

The second thing I noticed is how many fiddly modifiers there are and how many stats there are. This sounds like a pain to keep track of and any players who don’t enjoy the mechanical side of TTRPGs are going to go play Smash Bros. during kingdom management.

Watching Jigglypuff punch Ganondorf is way more entertaining than running a kingdom.

But it gets worse. So much worse… A 20 is always a success on kingdom management rolls and a 1 is always a failure. Failing certain checks increase unrest and if your unrest reaches 20… Game over.

A long running campaign brought to a screeching halt… all because someone rolled a fucking 1 at the wrong time. That’s great design!


The only stat your monarch cares about is CHA. Having a leader with high WIS or INT has no benefit. This instantly means the Fighter or Wizard are never going to be the king. Talk about killing classic fantasy concepts.

So even though Conan is the classical Barbarian King, according to this module, he should suck at his job. Fuck!

The other positions use two stats that the player can pick between. I was amused that your general can use STR, so they flex their muscles, and your kingdom becomes more stable.

The pages upon pages of modifiers is quickly starting to sap my will to continue. There are 10 pages of mechanics here. How each position you fill affects your kingdoms stats. How many build points each feature costs and what it does. Multiple phases and random events. Once again, I have to question if this complexity is desirable. I do admit it’s a group dependent thing, but I know my players would throw up their hands and ask for MTP instead.

Some of this crap seems like things that would better solved via adventuring than a kingdom building minigame. Like dealing with an increase in bandit activity. And of course, there is bullshit.

At the GM’s whim, using construction magic (such as a lyre of building or spells like fabricate or wall of stone) can reduce the cost of a building’s BP by 2 (minimum of 0 BP). This is a one-time reduction, regardless of the amount of magic used.

Magic only reduces the cost of building things if you suck the GM’s cock enough. Fuck this book. This type of anti-player agency bullshit is one of the reasons I can’t stand Paizo.

Step 2—Withdrawals: You can also withdraw funds from the kingdom’s treasury, but doing so runs the risk of annoying the citizens. Each time you withdraw funds, the kingdom’s Unrest increases by 1. In addition, you must make a Loyalty check (DC = Command DC + number of BP being withdrawn); a failure causes your kingdom to gain Unrest equal to the total BP withdrawn. Each BP withdrawn in this manner converts into 2,000 gp.

Failing this check can easily lead to a game over. 2000 GP is chump change at higher levels. How the hell do the shit covered peasants know when I’m withdrawing money in the first place? Is all this shit public record? Did they play test this garbage at all?

You’re heavily incentivized to care about these mechanics, because participating in the kingdom minigame gives you XP, which seems like a really bad idea. Now, I haven’t mathhammered it or anything, but let’s face it, do you think the actual designers did? You shouldn’t be able to get a fucking game over if you roll a 1 at the wrong time. That’s fucking stupid. If you’re going write all this crap, it better produce good results. Otherwise, why bother?


The next major chunk of the book is fluff, which I will skip, and then we get to the random encounters. They’re not as bad as part 1’s, but one of the options on the table is 2d4 trolls with an average ELC of 9! I remind the gentle reader, the party could be as low as level 4.

This chapter of Kingmaker feels like filler. Nothing really interesting happens and the boss of the module is a giant Owlbear. The kingdom management mechanics suck ass and the writing is only slightly better than Stolen Lands.


Next time, we’re headed into part three: The Varnhold Vanishing. At least the premise here is more interesting and the actual boss is much better. Let’s see how they manage to fuck it up…

[Grek]

Hilariously enough, while hitting 20 Unrest is game over for your kingdom, it is not game over for the campaign - you can totally just run your kingdom into the ground here, take over Varnhold in the next segment, run it into the ground, invade the guys on the other side of the smouldering ruins of your kingdoms, run their shit into the ground, and so on and so forth like you're a party of would-be Donald Trump impersonators. And honestly, come to think of it, I think a lot of groups would have more fun if they tried to do that instead of playing Spreadsheets and Dragons. Which our group actually did, in a google sheet that two of us half-heartedly edited while the rest of the group played Switch games during those parts of the game.

[Orca]

I don't remember ever being in a situation where rolling a 1 meant game over. You just don't take 40 000 gp out of the kingdom treasury at once. Though frankly we wanted a nice shiny kingdom and were putting more money in than out anyway.

Will'o'wisps weren't much of a problem the first time we met them because I was playing a sorcerer with glitterdust. Blind=lose dex bonus=shattered wisps. By the next time we'd picked up communal resist energy and they were a joke. The trolls and some dragony thing called a peluda met as a random encounter were much more of a problem.

The kingdom rules not being of interest to much of the party were an issue. That dancing lady dazing most of the party so the rest had to wait a couple of hours while the undazed PC wore her down, that was a boring session. Some of the other stuff our GM used as inspiration rather than playing as written which was a good thing. Our game fell apart just before the owlbear showed up I think.

[deaddmwalking]

Appoint yourself treasurer, make Grigori king, withdraw all the money and watch the peasants lead him to the guillotine.

If you fail the loyalty check, you still get the money, right? Is there a limit to how much BP you can convert to gold (ie, do you actually have to have the BP)? Or could you start by taking our 50 BP, blowing the check and taking unrest from 0 to 51 (and netting 100,000 gp in the process)?

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Hilariously enough, while hitting 20 Unrest is game over for your kingdom, it is not game over for the campaign - you can totally just run your kingdom into the ground here, take over Varnhold in the next segment, run it into the ground, invade the guys on the other side of the smouldering ruins of your kingdoms, run their shit into the ground, and so on and so forth like you're a party of would-be Donald Trump impersonators.

That's hilarious. I mostly say that your Unrest reaching critical mass = game over, because the module suggests it as the default. It halfheartedly mumbles that you could start a new kingdom, but that seems more like an afterthought.

I don't remember ever being in a situation where rolling a 1 meant game over. You just don't take 40 000 gp out of the kingdom treasury at once. Though frankly we wanted a nice shiny kingdom and were putting more money in than out anyway.

Depending on your current unrest, failing the check could take you over 20. 2000 GP is a drop in the bucket at high levels. But like I said, I didn't mathhammer this.

Will'o'wisps weren't much of a problem the first time we met them because I was playing a sorcerer with glitterdust. Blind=lose dex bonus=shattered wisps. By the next time we'd picked up communal resist energy and they were a joke. The trolls and some dragony thing called a peluda met as a random encounter were much more of a problem.

I find it odd that Glitterdust didn't prove to be just as effective against the trolls. But that said, I don't think Kingmaker was designed with the assumption that the players would be using good spells like Glitterdust.

Also, an annotate; my 3.5 group nearly got their asses kicked by a Will-O-Wisp the other day. It passed the save for Glitterdust and was trolling them with its 29 AC.

Appoint yourself treasurer, make Grigori king, withdraw all the money and watch the peasants lead him to the guillotine.

While that's a massively entertaining idea, the module is pretty insistent that the king be one of the PCs.

If you fail the loyalty check, you still get the money, right? Is there a limit to how much BP you can convert to gold (ie, do you actually have to have the BP)? Or could you start by taking our 50 BP, blowing the check and taking unrest from 0 to 51 (and netting 100,000 gp in the process)?

I'm pretty sure you still get the money if you fail the check. We haven't gotten to it yet, but there's a part of the adventure path that tells the DM to smack down the naughty, naughty players if they try to use their kingdom to get filthy rich. Or something to that effect.

[Thaluikhain]

But now we move into the wilderness portion of the adventure. The first encounter revolves around a hawt Dryad and her Satyr fuckbuddy. These two lovebirds want the party to kill an evil tree for them and they’re not afraid to use enchantment magic to get the party’s cooperation. Encounter number 2 revolves around some loggers that pissed off Nixie by cutting down her trees. Some Diplomacy checks can diffuse the situation, but each side will still demand compensation. The Nixie chick wants her trees to be replace and the loggers want trees to cut down. Because nothing screams fun like playing parent for two bickering groups of NPCs…

On first glance, those two encounters look like they could be made to cancel each other out. On second glance, well, if you become the local ruler, you'll probably have to deal with a lot of that.

Also...a terrible owlbear is threatening the kingdom? Seems an odd choice for a monster to do that.

[Kaelik]

This chapter revolves mostly around a pissed off Owlbear that will eventually attack the PC’s kingdom. Crazy Fey queen makes her triumphant return to backstory land and give a cursed Ring of Animal Friendship to some guy. She told him about a pair of Owlbears he could control with said ring but when he tried, the curse activated. Then the Owlbears went berserk, one died in the ensuing fight, and the other now thirsts for the blood of the civilized. No, seriously.

We befriended this owlbear with charm magic or someone raised by owlbears having a talk or something and then I read over the kingdom rules to ascertain that in fact, intelligence isn't required for being an office holder. General Owlbear was born.

Ah, good old Mint City. Thriving under the watchful wings of General Owlbear.

And Diplomacy won’t actually stop him causing trouble. We get some references to the kingdom management minigame that we haven’t gotten the details about yet, but this guy will fuck shit up if left to his own devices. At this point, the module seems to be under the impression that publicly imprisoning him for his dissent or openly killing him would be frown upon. Not sure how historically accurate that is, and I’m also not sure how much the players will really care. My prediction is the party will either assassinate his ass on the sly or arrange an unfortunate, “accident.”

Our kingdom was a theocracy dedicated to worshipping me, so we could have definitely killed this guy. I don't remember if we did, I just know we could have.

Encounter number 2 revolves around some loggers that pissed off Nixie by cutting down her trees. Some Diplomacy checks can diffuse the situation, but each side will still demand compensation. The Nixie chick wants her trees to be replace and the loggers want trees to cut down. Because nothing screams fun like playing parent for two bickering groups of NPCs…

We made this Nixie the ruler of our kingdom. What, you don't think any of us had Charisma did you?

Finally, we get another major set piece; some evil Fey have taken up residence in an old fort. The leader of this ragtag band is a hawt Lady Fey who’s basically a discount vampire. Someone on the design team seems to have a thing for sexy lady fey… But the first encounter in the Fey Fort is a Quickling, a weirdass monster that’s invisible while it’s not moving. The second Fey here is Grimstalker that keeps an Assassin Vine as a pet.

The Vampire Fey became the consort to the Nixie based on the fact that reading off the character sheet we have "The Dancing Lady" for consort.

The next major sidequest revolve around a bunch of Lizardfolk who are venerating a Will-O-Wisp posing as one of their ancestor spirits.

Pretty sure I dueled the Lizardfolk's god and when I won they were forced to convert and join our city.

Now for the kingdom building mechanics and the first thing that strikes me, is that the only supported style of government is a monarchy. This seems shortsighted, since explicitly not all the players can be the king/queen. You’d think you could set some kind of ruling council, since that’d solve that problem immediately, but no.

We solved this problem by making the Nixie Ruler, Dancing Lady Consort, and ruling from our positions as "actually capable of killing the Ruler any time" applying whatever bonus was best for our stat. In the long run most people dropped out of the council because my followers could apply larger stat bonuses for most positions.

The second thing I noticed is how many fiddly modifiers there are and how many stats there are. This sounds like a pain to keep track of and any players who don’t enjoy the mechanical side of TTRPGs are going to go play Smash Bros. during kingdom management.

I think it was very much a case of me optimizing the kingdom rules between sessions and everyone else ignoring them except to do very good jokes about our city.

The other positions use two stats that the player can pick between. I was amused that your general can use STR, so they flex their muscles, and your kingdom becomes more stable.

We started with an Owlbear General, but eventually switched to using Dread Warrior Advanced Ogres in every role that could just Strength. (I had some kind of undead leadership.)

You’re heavily incentivized to care about these mechanics, because participating in the kingdom minigame gives you XP, which seems like a really bad idea. Now, I haven’t mathhammered it or anything, but let’s face it, do you think the actual designers did? You shouldn’t be able to get a fucking game over if you roll a 1 at the wrong time. That’s fucking stupid. If you’re going write all this crap, it better produce good results. Otherwise, why bother?

You complain a lot about the kingdom possibly falling apart, and I'm not saying you are wrong to criticize the very bad mechanics, but our experience was very different. It was after the first couple turns, piss easy to win every check. Why? Because the primary limit on buildings was Improvement Edicts (basically one building at the beginning, then 2 eventually, ect), so you wanted to build smaller numbers of super good buildings, and one specific building added to all three stats. To that end, we just built a checkerboard pattern of houses and Mints getting bonuses to Stability, Loyalty, and Economy each turn. In the long run we also build aquifers and roads and mines once we got to the point where we made more BP each turn than we could spend building more Mints. Eventually we expanded to more settlements along with our expanding hexes and mines and roads.

I think the current rules on the website might even nerf Mints relative to what they were at the time.

In any case, yeah, they probably didn't playtest it.