Kingmaker!

Hey, I'm a player again - a Pathfinder player this time. One of my players who occasionally DM's has started up a Pathfinder game where he's running the Kingmaker Adventure Path and I am playing in it this time. It's been quite a while since I sat on the other side of the table but I had a lot of fun figuring out what kind of character to make and then even more fun actually playing it. For those interested I am playing a Cavalier in this and I'm going full-on knight when it comes to abilities and attitudes.

The part of "Sir Ivan Zhukov" will be played by Robert Taylor

I won't go into tons of detail - I am not documenting another campaign right now - but I will talk about the campaign in general.

It's obvious from the online activity that it's one of their most popular campaigns, maybe second only to their original Rise of the Runelords, and it's funny to me because Kingmaker's selling point is pretty much what AD&D was about.  The idea at high levels was to carve out a place for your character in the world, recruit some followers, and build a keep/base/tower/lair. The idea back then of being a perpetual dungeon-crawler was certainly around, but it was not the primary goal of most of the people I knew and it was not really what was shown in the books. Somewhere along about 3rd edition that difference in "higher level play" was lost and the standard expectation became 20 levels of dungeon hacking and I'm still not sure why they changed that.

The capabilities of a character in the double digit levels are so much more than loot-grabbing and fighting bigger monsters. What kept fighters and wizards more on par at higher levels in the old days? Well, among other tings was that the fighter often had an army!

Also, as much as people talk about becoming invested in a setting,well, there's not much more "investing" than trying to carve out a realm in said setting. One of the many things Pathfinder has done right is bring back some emphasis on that , first in Kingmaker and then later in Ultimate Campaign.

That's enough for now - I'll have more to say as we get farther into the campaign, but for now it's fun just to roll from the player side for a change.