Ok, I haven’t posted in a bit, real life kicked off. I haven’t been writing, but I have been reading. My reading was spurred on by my desire to make a setting/adventures, as discussed before, and I wanted to take a look at the PF Core Kingmaker AP. Unable to find any OGL material on said document, I looked into purchasing the AP itself. I just couldn’t bring myself to pay that much for a product(s) that I wouldn’t use whole cloth. On further searching, I found Jon Braser Enterprises’ Book of the River Nations – Complete (BotRN) on RPGnow.
Why was I so excited to get it for $5.99, for the PDF? Well, based on the fact that I wanted to do an E5 kind of PFBB as a complete game, I thought it interesting that the Kingmaker AP started the process of land ownership off at 5th Level! It almost screamed, “5th Level is the equivalent of ‘Name Level’ in my BECMI”, mind’s eye. It has dominion founding, mass combat, and a myriad of other rules goodies in it. It basically IS the OGL data of the dominion rules of Kingmaker, plus some. Now what am I going to do with it? Well incorporate it of course!
But how? My first knee jerk reaction is to create my setting with it. But that is kinda going against start small and grow tenant. I do want to experiment with it by doing a regional map and starting off a handful of NPCs within it just to see how they fair taming the wilderness. This would give me a chance to flex the system and try several courses of action on domestic settings.
Mathematically, I may have to do some tweaking to the rules to make it E5 compliant, as well as taking a look at converting the hex scales. In BotRN, the hex scale is strangely described as, “Each hexagon of land has sides 12 miles long.” Typically I find hexes described as X miles across, or from one side to the opposite side. It does mention that each hex is roughly 375 square miles, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of three 12.5 square mile hexes, the scale that I prefer. I think I can live with that, but will have to see how it pans out when I start crunching the numbers.
Anyway, that’s about it for now. Maybe I’ll gen up a rough regional map using Hexographer in preparation for future post before I go to bed…
TB
The Banes Blog 
The idea of level 5 being name level in E5 is nicely put. I suppose that would make TSR D&D E9 with special options for caster progression?
I would be interested in your impression of Book of the River Nations. It sounds promising.
Brendan, thanks for stopping by. And, as always, glad to see you stopped long enough to comment.
E5 PFBB is really hitting some kind of symetry for me. I can’t put my finger on it, but when I do, expect me to post.
I suppose if I was going to do something like an E6 for TSR D&D, E9 would feel about right. I would have to go back and take another look at what spells caster got by 9th Level in it, as E6 kinda stops where it does because of the Uber spell cut off. But, as for raw ‘power’ I would equate a 9th Level TSR character with an E6 3.5 character, and/or an E5 PF character *… on initial reflection at least. I would also do away with demi-human level limits too, I think.
Book of the River Nations seem sound on initial read-through, but it will take some “play testing” as I work through my setting for me to have any kind of definitive opinion. It is what I bought it for, but how well my idea pans out remains to be seen. Not too sure how well a PDF will work either, but at initial blush, the hyperlink bookmarks seem adequate… but yes, it appears promising.
TB
* My gut tells me that a 5th level PF character is on par with a 6th level 3.5 character, but testing would be needed for me to testify to it.
5th level has a nice kind of symetry for me as well, as does 10th level. IMO, a D&D-ish game should cap at either 5th level or 10th level. When you go up to 20th level (PF) or 30th level (4E), things just get ridiculous.
Yeah, 5th is nice. The old Expert set went up to 14th (or lower if you were playing a class with a level cap), which is probably the max I would really enjoy playing. And it’s really still sort of E9 still, since you accumulate fewer hit points at those higher levels. Though, as someone who started playing with Second Edition, there is still something vaguely magical sounding about a “20th level” character.
I think what I am really getting into as I start thinking about developing a setting for PFBB is that I no longer, as a DM, have to scale the NPCs as the PCs level. I am trying to find an old breakdown of how NPCs level by age and had something like; 1st level is best in a thorpe, 2nd best in a town, 3rd best in a city, 4th best in barony, 5th best in the kingdom… etc. Not sure how I want to work this out. The standard NPC demographics breakdown for 3.5/PF really don’t make sense capping level at 5th, so I will need to get that figured out before I detail settlements.
Off to think,
TB