Some ground rules for creating characters:

This adventure starts at 1st level, with brand-new characters. Does it make sense for Lady Jamandi to be handing out settlement charters to random unknown schmucks off the street? No, not really. But she's doing it anyway.

You can use any official Paizo source (except other Adventure Paths). If I don't have something and it's not available on the Archives of Nethys, I'll buy it, but I have most of the common books. (Please, just make everyone's lives easier and pick stuff that's in the Archives of Nethys.) You can access Uncommon options if you make a good case for it. I wouldn't bet on accessing any Rare options.

I strongly recommend choosing one of the backgrounds described in the Kingmaker Player's Guide, mostly because these have useful plot hooks and Lore skills built in. You can take a background from elsewhere if you really don't like these (especially for INT-based characters, the choices are thin), and I'll try to tie it in at some point, but I can't guarantee it.

Social encounters and investigation sequences are pretty important in this Adventure Path. I wouldn't say they're more important than combat, but a character who can do nothing but chop up monsters will definitely be bored and possibly a liability at several points, including the very first scene. You will have a better time if your character is somewhat competent in at least one of the main social skills (Diplomacy, Deception, Intimidation).

However, make sure you're useful in combat as well. Seriously. The Stolen Lands are not a safe place.

Characters with interesting minor flaws are more fun, but don't make them crippling. The goal is to have fun, and your character shouldn't get in the way of that (for yourself or others). If some character trait is causing more trouble than entertainment, I'll ask you to tone it down.

Ultra-optimized characters risk overshadowing the rest of the party. If it seems like your character is stealing pretty much the entire spotlight, I may ask you to tone it down a little. That said, the kind of ultra-optimization that was common in Pathfinder 1E isn't really as much of a thing in 2E.

After the initial sequence, there will generally be plenty of downtime to retrain if you've decided you don't like some choices you've made. If a character turns out to be fatally flawed for some reason, we'll change it immediately, but that too is harder to do in 2E, so I don't really expect this to happen.

Nearly any character concept should be workable in this adventure path, but it will be easier if the characters share some motivation to be building a kingdom. Therefore, extremely anti-social or anti-civilization characters are not recommended, and while some amount of moral relativism or ambiguity is fine, outright villains will probably not be tolerated. Most (although not all) of the antagonists are very, very Evil, or at least complete and total asshats; it's best if these actually make sense as antagonists.
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:47, Fri 21 Oct 2022.