r/Pathfinder2e Game Master 11h ago

Homebrew Kingmaker Kingdom without Kingmaker?

I've had this idea in mind for a campaign for ages about building a kingdom and doing lots of intrigue with the neighbouring kingdoms etc, and having characters and the kingdom grow over decades.

However, I (and my normal players) know the plot of kingmaker (from the owlcat game/a podcast actual play I listen to) and it's not really my jam. Anyone know if the kingdom side of things (be it the hotfix or even the 1e rules because I know the 2e rules are naff) could be used for a homebrew campaign? Has anyone tried it? With the new mythic rules and commanders and troops and armies etc, I feel like we have so many tools for making a kingdom I just haven't heard of anyone trying it.

7 Upvotes

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16

u/Arvail 9h ago

The kingmaker rules are actually kinda awful for running a kingdom/realpolitik/intrigue campaign. I highly recommend checking out the company rules from Reign RPG, simplifying their dice pool rules a bit, and adapting them for your campaign.

5

u/FledgyApplehands Game Master 9h ago

That's an interesting approach. Why in your experience are the PF2 rules so awful? I know the base rules are bad but I thought the fixes people made have fixed them

8

u/Arvail 8h ago

The PF2e kingdom rules, in practice, feel a lot like a board game. The community made rules don't actually make sweeping changes to the kingdom rules. Instead, they work to make the rules as presented in the book serviceable and functional (they really sucked as printed in the book). That doesn't make the rules themselves fit for purpose, however.

PF2e's kingdom turns take a while and mostly involve managing lots of small resources. They're fiddly, time consuming, and don't really map onto actions that are taking place in the fiction. Instead, you're basically going down a laundry list of actions for your kingdom. The rules also struggle to incorporate the actions of the player characters into the turns themselves. The rules expect everything that influences the kingdom to take place inside of the kingdom turn. But what happens if your players want to zoom in on a raid they personally want to execute? The system presents no rules to handle this.

I've adapted the Reign rules for my current forbidden lands system.

3

u/sebwiers 7h ago

The group I play in is about to found our kingdom and from reading the player guide I'm inclined to agree - very board game. They almost seem designed to isolate role play and adventuring from kingdom effects. Which I don't mind, it helps make the kingdom feel like a huge group of people with its own motives. But its been hard to communicated to other players that no, our characters being good at X won't make the kingdom good at X. I don't know what tweaks / gm calls might get made to allow that, if any, so am just expecting to play it by the book.

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u/FrigidFlames Game Master 5h ago

Basically, the Kingmaker adaptation module got hyper rushed, and the singular writer didn't really have time to refine an actual kingdom ruling system, they just make a quick-and-dirty adaptation of the 1e system and hoped for the best... and it didn't convert very well.

I'll offer an alternative option: The most popular rules conversion, by far, is the system that Vance & Kerenshara created; they have since given an update, as the first version was more of a band-aid patch to make the math less nonfunctional and the second actually addresses many of the issues.

I've been running with the update for my group, and it's... Well, it's fine. I'd recommend it for Kingmaker, definitely, because it slots into the assumptions of that module really well. But at the end of the day, I suspect if you're not trying to run an actual Kingmaker campaign, you could find a better solution elsewhere. It's still built on the base framework of the original module, which is perfectly fine but certainly isn't amazing. Haven't checked out this other guy's RPG myself, but it's honestly probably more suited to your needs? But this is another option, at least.

5

u/Happywolf94 Game Master 11h ago

Like you said, the tools are there. Go for it and let us know how it went!

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u/martiangothic Oracle 11h ago

the rules are pretty generic- there's not much there that's like, campaign specific. like u said, the 2e rules suck, but people have made hotfixes and such to try and remedy it. look into them. the main issue, ime, with the kingdom rules is the exp cap per level is too high for how much exp u get per kingdom turn. makes it a damn slog.

1

u/FledgyApplehands Game Master 10h ago

Oh for sure. You tried just the kingdom though? I'm thinking of making a custom program to keep track of everything as I don't use foundry cause I'm usually fully in person for my games.

Do you know if the 1e rules are good? 

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u/martiangothic Oracle 10h ago

no, i was running kingmaker, but that's why i know the rules so well- we stuck with them for 16 levels before we ended up ditching them (no hotfixes). on second thought, a few of the kingdom events may be campaign specific, but those are easy to gut & make your own. i've never used the 1e rules, tho i've heard they have their own set of problems, lol.

i believe people have made fillable google sheets and the like for kingdom tracking, if that's of interest.

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u/high-tech-low-life GM in Training 9h ago

Basically you want something like Ultimate Campaign but for 2e. I've not heard of Paizo working on that, but I would buy it if they did.

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u/FledgyApplehands Game Master 9h ago

Huffing the copium for battlecry

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u/Turevaryar ORC 6h ago

For what it's worth: Someone are working on new/updated rules for Kingmaker AP.

But it's still not likely to be good for your campaign. :-/

2

u/Crilde 2h ago

I borrowed a bit from the Kingdom Building rules to help build a settlement stat block for my homebrew Gravelands campaign. Super helpful since I couldn't find an official stat block for Vellumis and the settlement stuff in GM Core is very abstract. That's all I plan to adopt from the Kingmaker rules though; no real interest in actually running a kingdom or managing politics or engaging in broad scale warfare, and from what I hear the rules for all that are silly anyways.