Adapting Pathfinder: Kingmaker to other fantasy RPGs

#1

I played through half of Kingmaker, the Pathfinder RPG adventure path in which the players explore a territory and found a settlement there.

I loved the settlement-building aspect of Kingmaker and would love to adapt it to another RPG system that isn’t quite so crunchy as Pathfinder.

Does anyone have any suggestions for such a game?

Freebooters on the Frontier and The Black Hack seem to be well-oriented toward sandbox exploration. I believe Stonetop has good settlement creation, at least at a village level.

I’ve also seen some Dungeon World stuff:

Perilous Wilds is a must-have for exploration support.

The compendium classes for settlement leader-type characters - such as the Householder, Landed Gentry, Merchant, and Shopkeeper classes from the Class Warfare book.

Strongholds from Dwarfare Games.

Anything else come to mind?

2 Likes
#2

If you like this stuff, Reign is right up your alley. The full game has an interesting fantasy setting.

The Enchiridion has just the rules for organizations - anything from a gang to an empire.

1 Like
#3

I’m another Pathfinder refugee: I love Paizo’s Golarion campaign setting, but I got tired of the extreme crunchiness of PFRPG. (And, honestly, PF2e doesn’t seem all that much better in that regard.)

I had a lot of success running a sandbox-style game set the the Pathfinder Campaign Setting’s region of Varisia, using Dungeon World as the system.

I’ve only read (not run/played) the PFRPG version of Kingmaker, but I think DW would be a very good system to use.

One thing that DW doesn’t do is the whole “kingdom-building” minigame that so many people love about Kingmaker. If your players like it, go ahead and just take that minigame out of Pathfinder and use it as-is. If not… you could just hand-wave it. If you want to split the difference, you could try your hand at making a small number of custom moves that deal with building a kingdom.

2 Likes
#4

No Country for Old Kobolds is a DW-inspired game with some nation-building rules you could adapt for this kind of thing.

I made an attempt at converting the Kobold horde rules back into DW a year or two ago, but never playtested them. I bet it would work pretty well.

3 Likes
#5

Similarly Stonetop has rules for building and improving your settlement (and also dealing with various seasonal changes and misfortunes).

1 Like
#6

Since it’s been brought up twice now, here’s the Stonetop steading playbook:

And here’s the (a little out of date) chapter that goes into the details:

It’s definitely oriented towards small-community building, like a village or a town. I imagine you could scale it up to city-level by treating each neighborhood or district in a city as a separate steading, but that’s hardly been tested.

4 Likes