Kingdom Building Rules

There are a number of ‘extra’ rules buried in the kingmaker campaign material, and these will affect the game as we play it. Rather than encouraging you to dig through the modules looking for them, I am going to put summaries up here. This page will have a very brief overview, but will link to more detailed versions of the rules. Many of these things will operate in the background, and their implementation will probably differ slightly from the full blown rules published in this adventure path - but you I felt you should be aware of the basics as you design your characters.

Exploring the Wilderness

The Stolen Lands encompass an area that covers approximately 35,000 square miles—an area larger than Scotland and more than three times the size of Wales. A large chunk of the adventure path has the characters exploring and mapping the area so the overland travelling speed of your party will be significant. There are also a number of large rivers that cross the area, while there are a few bridges and fords …

Wilderness Exploration

Build Points

Rather than GPs, all grand scale projects (Kingdoms, Cities and Armies) are developed and maintained by using Build Points (BPs). A BP is an abstract amount of resource that is used to represent food, labour, gold, settlers, weapons or anything else needed on a grand scale. You get BP through running your nation efficiently and you can earn extra BP as part of the reward from different quests.

You can ‘donate’ money to the Kingdom from your personal wealth or from treasure found, at the rate of 4000gp to 1bp. You can also cash in BP at the rate of 1bp to 2000gp - however, if you cash in wealth that belongs to ‘your’ kingdom for personal use, it will make the natives restless.

It is, however, reasonable to assign some Kingdom assets to your personal (or family) use – and there is no reason why you should not have a Mansion, Noble’s Villa, Garrison, Caster’s Tower, Temple/Monastery or Temple/Chapter House given to you as part of your reward. The kingdom needs to build all of those things to function - who owns them isn’t particularly significant. Remember though, that not all BPs in the kingdom will belong to you – much of it will be private investment that comes in from outside and even though it is used as a measure of the Kingdom’s wealth and development – it doesn’t belong to the ‘Kingdom’ directly.

Building and Running a Kingdom

While I expect most administration to go on as a background activity, you will be the people who make the ‘on the ground’ decisions, because you will be the ones deciding where to explore and how to deal with situations. Those decisions that you make in the early parts of the adventure path will have repercussions later in the campaign. However the system as written has a few problems, so I have reworked the rules based on comments on the various discussion boards. Rules Rewrite Rationale

Your kingdom gets build hex by hex - you have to explore the hex then claim it as part of your kingdom and then choose how to develop it. Any given hex can be left wild, settled, developed as an active countryside hex or built into a settlement of one sort or another. Each type of hex contributes different things to you kingdom, but each has a cost as well - the trick is to develop in a way that you can continue to grow while keeping enough money in your treasury to deal with what ever crops up. While it is tempting to keep things small - there are advantages to have a big kingdom later in the game.

You should also remember that you are going to be miles away from any large cities, and the ones that are closest to you aren't always very welcoming. Unless you build a city large enough to produce ‘good’ magic items you are going to be somewhat restricted to what you find on your travels.

The Kingdom Sheet

Leadership Roles

Building and Running a Kingdom

Building a City

Building Chains

Types of Settlement

Wars

Whatever decisions you make, every new kingdom has to fight a war or two during its formation, if you don't step on someone else's toes and start a war that way then someone is bound to try and take what you own away from you.

Kingmaker has some simple mass combat rules, which are designed to resolve battles as a semi-background activity. However, you should assume that you will need to fight a battle or two at some point. The way you build your settlements will impact on the number of troops you can raise.

Last line of defence

Para-Military

Regular Troops

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