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Steven Robert
United States
Altadena
California
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The Kingmaker adventure path has become one of Paizo’s most successful series, taking a group of adventurers from 1st to 18th level or so and ultimately granting them rulership of an entire nation.
Obviously, seeing this story through requires a substantial commitment from the players, and a good deal of investment in their characters. Moreover, with such an approach – where the story is largely pre-programmed – the GM has few options to react to the players’ choices. It’s therefore imperative that the group be well-prepared for the story (and its mechanical challenges) and invested in seeing it through.
As with all of their paths, Paizo therefore releases a free Player’s Guide to bring the players into the story and guide their choices. The Kingmaker Player’s Guide (henceforth KMPG) does a moderately good job of this – but it misses the mark in other ways.
The Product
The guide itself is available as a free PDF. It is a 16-page full color PDF, though the text itself is only 10 pages long. The layout matches the Kingmaker adventures, and we also get a bit of art and a map of the starting country, Brevoy. Overall it’s a very impressive free product.
Background Information
The text begins with a one-page summary of Brevoy (which has some Russian influences but is fairly generic fantasy) and its politics – which provides the impetus to begin the adventure path, though it falls far into the background after that – and the opening of the first adventure. Most importantly, it provides a very brief overview of the known geography of the Stolen Lands, where the Kingmaker adventures will actually occur – an unclaimed wilderness south of Brevoy. This provides just enough information for the players to feel some context but not enough to spoil the future exploration.
The remainder of the text provides players with advice on designing characters that will fit with the region and the adventures. There’s a section on each core race and on each core class (including only those from the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook, as the later rulebooks weren’t available at the time this was released). Each writeup includes recommendations for local areas from which a character could hail. All of Paizo’s adventure paths aim to be inclusive of all character choices, and Kingmaker is no exception. The KMPG does a fairly good job of justifying most races and classes (with the exception of the monk).
Each writeup also includes specific mechanical recommendations for ensuring that your character has an impact on the game. This includes skill recommendations for every player (which seem to be hit or miss – you’d think they are right to recommend Knowledge [nobility] in this book, but it actually hardly ever comes up) as well as more concrete choices for each class. For example, clerics get guidance on deities that will be important to the story, rangers get recommendations for choosing their favored enemies and terrain, etc. These class-based choices are well-done and prevent players from unknowingly gimping their most important abilities.
The final section contains seven Campaign Traits, a subsystem in which each PC chooses a trait to tie them more strongly into the story. Here the traits largely represent the social class or regional heritage of the character. This is the most problematic section, because the traits are very closely tied to the human-dominated nation of Brevoy (even though the Races section implies that many demi-humans should instead hail from nearby lands). As such, it can be very awkward to fit a demi-human character into the trait system. Brevoy doesn’t really have gnomes, and my PC was neither a brigand nor a hardy pioneer, so I had to awkwardly connect him with one of Brevoy’s noble families in order to pick up a trait. I would strongly recommend treating these as optional traits, even if they offer an extra connection to the campaign.
What’s Missing?
The last four pages offer resources for the exploration and kingdom-building aspects of the game: a blank hex map for players to use while exploring the region, a “kingdom sheet” (basically a character sheet for your kingdom), a blank city map (which you fill as you build the kingdom), and a set of building counters for the city map.
One of Kingmaker’s innovations is the addition of a kingdom-building subsystem to the Pathfinder RPG, so that groups can play out the growth of their kingdom through the Stolen Lands. The KMPG would have been an excellent place to present these rules – after all, it is the players making all the choices, not the GM – but instead the rules themselves are in Pathfinder #32: Rivers Run Red, the second volume of the Adventure Path. If the system were light and fast, this would be fine – but it is not. It is an extreme exercise in bookkeeping and it’s very difficult to keep track of what’s going on even if you have the rules in front of you. It is therefore almost impossible to involve an entire group in the kingdom-building game unless they have a clear sense of the rules – which makes it very disappointing that they are not in the KMPG. (It’s worth noting that later, similar subsystems – like the relationship and caravan rules in Jade Regent – are included in the relevant Player’s Guide, so I think Paizo realized the problem as well.)
Because of the huge amount of bookkeeping, the kingdom sheet is essentially useless (I custom-built a spreadsheet to keep track of things; others are available in the Paizo forums). The maps are handy but largely fluff.
Bottom Line
The KMPG is free, so it’s hard to complain too much about it. It’s certainly required reading for anyone giving Kingmaker a try, and it provides useful guidance on character generation. The campaign traits are restrictive, but so long as they are optional they will still enhance the game. The focus on Brevoy makes sense as the path begins but is largely lost later on.
As a GM, though, don’t expect the KMPG to guide your players into selecting characters that work well in the adventure path. In my group, only two of us took the hints and built characters strongly invested in rulership.
The big “miss” is leaving out the kingdom-building rules. Including them might not have redeemed the system in my eyes, but it might have invested my group more strongly in the process.
Note: This is my thirty-second entry in the Iron Reviewer series.
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Kris Vanhoyland
Belgium
Genk
Limburg
@RetakeME3 - We deserve a better ending!
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Nice review! When I looked over the player's guide I was a bit baffled myself that it said little to nothing about the kingdom building rules, since it constitutes such an important part of the AP.
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