I've posted a heck of a lot of kingdom rules on the wiki. This is based largely on Nathaniel Field's work on the Paizo forums, although I made a few additional tweaks in places I disagreed with his approach. These rules are mostly the same as the ones in the Kingmaker Player's Companion, but there are some significant changes:

• The bonus granted by Experienced Leadership is now called "potency", so that it doesn't have stacking issues with other effects. (In particular, almost none of the feats in the Player's Companion work as written, because the Experienced Leadership bonus will always be better. Feats now function as designed.)
• Feats are greatly expanded and heavily rebalanced (looking at you, Practical Magic). They mostly provide circumstance bonuses (like character feats do) instead of status bonuses as originally written; status bonuses (and penalties) are mostly provided by kingdom events.
• Leadership roles grant some benefits based on the skill training of the leader in question. The skills used are pretty generous, so everyone should be able to be fully effective in at least 2 roles, and possibly more. These are mostly circumstance bonuses, which means they play the same role as feats; consider choosing feats to shore up holes in your leadership's expertise.
• There are some new structures, and structure effects are somewhat rebalanced. In particular, the effect of expanding a settlement's purchasable inventory is streamlined and regularized, because it was extremely confusing.
• There are a few new leadership activities, most notably Take Charge (which allows you to try to trade leadership activities for civic or region activities), so that you actually have something to do with all your leadership activities every turn. Activities in general are expanded a little in order to balance skills a little better. It's not perfect (Boating is still kind of bad, although it has some neat tricks), but at least the balance across the four kingdom abilities is a lot better now.

I haven't done the army stuff yet but you won't really need that for quite a while. I'll get to it sometime next week. Please take a look, and start thinking about how you plan to build your kingdom! In particular, if you could settle on your kingdom's style of government relatively soon, I plan to update all of the leadership role names to match. (The mechanics will stay the same.) Additionally, Lady Aldori will be commissioning some unique magic items to serve as the badges of office for your leaders, and the forms these take will depend on your government. (I've been thinking about ideas for this for months!)

Let me know if there's anything that you just don't understand what it's talking about. I'm happy to answer questions or revise this if it doesn't seem to be working properly.
This message was last edited by the GM at 05:52, Sat 23 Mar.

I hope Wil doesn't mind me copying this here! Based on GM edit

I think we should also consider Free Kingdom. Going our on our own (story-wise) would be appealing to Sophia and no flaw (but lacking a second bonus) is appealing mechanically speaking I'd think.

Of course not.

I'm OK with a Free Kingdom, too.  What skills would you want to focus on?  I don't know if this is like character creation, where it is most important to have a couple of skills really boosted, or if it is more important not to have any dramatic weaknesses.  I guess it is unlike characters, where we are in a party of people who can balance our weaknesses.

This wasn't in the printed rules, but it's something that pretty much everyone who tries to fix them adds. Because you don't have a "backup kingdom" to fill in for your kingdom's weaknesses, all kingdoms get Untrained Improvisation. The one I wrote means that you're going to have a kind-of-difficult time with any skills that you leave completely untrained, but it won't be totally hopeless. Also, you get skill improvements every level, so you should have a few extras to spread around if it turns out that you need to be a little better at something.

There are other places that would be worthwhile to found your kingdom because they give you a free building in your starting village (Oleg's, the Temple of the Elk, and a spot in the southern Greenbelt that you didn't find are the main ones), but the Stag Lord's fort is definitely the best from a mechanical standpoint. It's what the computerized version picks automatically.

Additionally, something I mentioned to Wilkezag earlier: the Shrike River is not navigable all the way from the Tuskwater to Restov. So you won't be able to use Boating to trade with Restov or Varnhold, unless you take the Channel Locks feat to surmount the Crooked Falls and the Shrike Cascade. All of the rivers southwards are highly navigable (the whole region is called the River Kingdoms for a reason), which makes trading with Mivon, Gralton, Daggermark, Tymon, or even Galt or Kyonin much easier if you're good at Boating.

On the other hand, Agriculture is pretty clutch for a growing kingdom, too. People gotta eat!
This message was last edited by the GM at 23:19, Mon 25 Mar.

I guess I'm with you on not having a flaw.  Looking here https://wiki.rpol.net/?id=7766...ilities+and+Problems at the Abilities, I have to say that I hate the idea of being flawed in any of them.

I think we should start with a focus Economy, counting on our outside enemies not getting their shit together soon enough to threaten our stability.  (I'm somewhat meta-gaming, here.  They're not going to throw invaders at us in our first kingdom level.)  As much as Wilkezag would support Culture, I think it is the lowest priority of the four.

Basically, the Charter gives us a net of 1 Ability and 2 skills (which might be +2 abilities and one -1 ability, but since we get a bunch more, it doesn't really matter.


So I think we should finish with this from our choices.
Economy 4
Loyalty 2
Stability 1
Culture 1

With a plan to boost Stability at our next opportunity.

@GM:  Is there a list of skills somewhere that I've missed?  So far, we've seen these referenced, but no description of them or comprehensive list.
Intrigue, Warfare, Arts, Folklore, Magic, Scholarship, Engineering, Exploration, Industry, Trade, Wilderness, Agriculture, Boating, Defense, Politics, Statecraft

Also Feats, below.  As far as I see, our choice of Government is the only way we get a Feat, at least at first level.  GM has told me that Practical Magic used to be by far the best feat, but it has been nerfed to be merely one of the best.
Muddle Through, Practical Magic, Pull Together, Insider Trading, Fortified Fiefs, Crush Dissent

Do we get more feats at first level?  Do we get them when we level up?
This message was last edited by the GM at 02:22, Tue 02 Apr.

Feats and Skills and Skill Actions are both listed. Let me know if I can reorganize these pages to make them easier to navigate.

Your kingdom gets more feats, skills, and abilities as it increases in level, just like you do.

Also note that you'll get four more Trained (or possibly Expert) skills immediately from naming the PCs as leaders of the kingdom. The NPCs you name as the other leaders won't immediately be invested in their roles, although most will be relatively easy to get that way.

You won't be thrown directly into war per se as soon as your kingdom forms (no one is quite willing to offend Restov and Brevoy that blatantly), but the Stolen Lands are in no way safe, and you should not assume that your new kingdom has any kind of plot-based protection from the wilderness and other local dangers. Many have tried to form a nation or otherwise control the Stolen Lands, and just as many have failed. Ask Harrim; he can give you a long, long list.

We're getting close to having to make decisions, here, so I've been going through the many feats and skills, feeling completely overwhelmed.  I feel much the same way about choosing my spells as a bard -- I get to have 4 spells total, chosen from this list of 8743 spells.  Here we get only one feat, chosen from 70-odd in the list.

And then there are all these skills (https://wiki.rpol.net/?id=7766...m+Skills+and+Actions), which we have to choose 5 (and, I guess, 4 more according to GM's last note).  They all sound useful in one way or another, but I don't get a sense of how they come up, or how often, or if it all really matters all that much.  In a video game, this is where I would just choose more or less randomly, then I play only a half hour into the game and start over.

Also, I'm torn on whether we want to be really great at one set of abilities/skills at the expense of another.  It's not like designing a PC, where I can use strength and dexterity as dump stats, counting on Sophia to step in when those come up (just as an example).

Oh well.  Time to quit whining.  If we have 9 skills to choose from, I suggest these.  I'm not going by any deep research into what they are used for, just by their names.  I really have to get to work now, though.

Agriculture
Engineering
Exploration
Magic
Scholarship
Statecraft
Trade

One of
Politics
Intrigue

One of
Defense
Warfare

I do have farming lore if that helps. I am also terrible at it.

I'm not sure if our personal skills come into play at all.  But I supposed they must.  Anyway, we have these roles to fill:

Ruler
Counselor
General
Emissary
Magister
Treasurer
Viceroy
Warden


I would think that Sophia as General and Dubh for Warden are pretty obvious.  I make sense for leader, since I'm assuming Charisma and Intelligence will be the most important there (18 in both).  (And, again, I have no idea if it even matters.)  What would you be interested in, Telric?

In reply to Wilkezag (msg #9):

It looks like I would be terrible at all those jobs. Is there a job related to water or earth building?

Your personal abilities (Strength, Intelligence, &c) don't come into play directly for kingdom leadership, but your skill training does, as described by the Supporting Skills under each leadership position. This is something I added, so I tried to make sure that any skill had at least two leadership positions to which it could be applied, and three in some cases; any Lore specialization will have one. Note that it's not strictly necessary to maximize these potency bonuses, because there are two that apply to each Kingdom ability, and you only really need one of them to be maximized.

The Viceroy's job is to take the Warden's wilderness, and drive its conversion into the civilization so beloved of the Treasurer, Magister, and Counselor. In the course of this pursuit, the Viceroy oversees the construction and management of farms, irrigation, settlements, and other structures. I would consider Farming Lore an appropriate supporting skill for the Viceroy.
This message was last edited by the GM at 22:22, Tue 23 Apr.

In reply to GM (msg # 11):

From what I can tell, most of my crossover skills would be general, Emissary, or warden.
This message was last edited by the player at 21:45, Tue 23 Apr.