They will be the first players in history to be given total freedom to explore the Pathfinder setting: the biggest fictional world ever. No other players have ever had this pleasure, because no previous game has offered it.
What will players need to know to play the game? What will be the starting ruleset?
- First off, read the tutorial linked above. Once all 7 days are played, the full text chat from Discord will be copy-pasted in that thread, and it will contain many additional explanations from me on top of the actual mechanics used for those turns. Think of it as a FAQ on top of an actual play log. Additionally, it will be lore! It will be part of world history, what I call Ultimate Lore or Dynamic Lore, to be explained in depth in a future Ultimate Edition chapter.
- As for the actual ruleset players must learn, the tutorial confines itself to pages 74-131 in Ultimate Campaign, the chapter titled "Downtime" (which we rename to "Adventure-strategy"). The full game however, starting from Day 8, will use far more rules than that.
- For starters, it will use the next chapter as well, "Campaign Systems", on pages 132-195. These sections introduce many vital mechanics to the game. For example cross-hex movement, that was omitted from the tutorial, can be found here in the "Exploration" section in pages 154-159. These are the same hexploration rules originally introduced in the Kingmaker Adventure Path (maybe expanded, I am not sure, I haven't compared them yet). The next section titled "Honor" introduces yet another form of capital alongside Gold, Goods, Influence, Labor and Magic: Honor. And on it goes.
- Then the next and final chapter in the book, "Kingdoms and War" in pages 196-251, is an expansion of the same mechanics originally introduced, once again, in the Kingmaker Adventure Path. They're all part of Master of Heroes, but you can skip them to start with because it'll be a while before they come into play. (Though note that they'll be activated in Kingslayer almost from the get-go, because that's the entire point of that campaign, being an expansion of Kingmaker, so you might want to take a look at these rules if you plan to be joining that campaign when it launches later this year.)
- And that's it for "Ultimate Campaign". However, this is where Ultimate Kingdoms starts, and note that the ENTIRETY of that book is included in the starting rules, in contrast to "Ultimate Campaign" whose first chapter, "Character Background", is too detailed for adventure-strategy layer heroes and will be used only with roleplaying layer characters. Note however that Chapter 9: "Sample Kingdoms & Organizations" has been removed from the players' copy for obvious reasons, and you'll be encountering those kingdoms and organizations in the game. Apart from those missing pages, the entire rest of the book is in the rules, including the new general and hordelord classes, which are now available in all layers of the game.
And that's it for the two books. But this is only the beginning, and there will be more books. How many more? I have half a dozen I am looking at lol. But don't worry, they'll be very gradually introduced.
None of this material is required reading to play the game. None. You can play without having read anything, not even the tutorial. If you know nothing, I will give you a few basic options on your first turn, and you can choose between them. As you play more and learn more, I'll be giving you more options, and moreover you'll also be observing the other players and learning from them, so the game will be opening up more and more for you the more you play.
I do not expect anyone to read EVERYTHING before their first turn, and make optimal play choices (Confession: I haven't read everything either). Even I can't do this at this point. The rules are just too much, because they were never intended to power a strategy game: they were intended to be selectively injected into roleplaying campaign downtimes to add some color to them: that is all. I am sure it never even occurred to the designers that someone would try to use these rules for a multiplayer PVP persistent 4X game, so the whole "system"—if we could call it that, because it's not really a system—is surely hugely imbalanced. And it will be our goal to balance it. It's also full of holes with multiple systems missing to create the full 4X experience, and it will be our jobs to devise and add these systems. I am already well advanced in this work, as you will see by reading my tutorial commentary and also my Alpha 2.0 posts.
Ultimately, what you need in order to start playing is a couple of simple commands. The simplest you can use is menial, unskilled work that pays 5 SP per turn per hero, with no check involved. So if you have no idea what to do on your first turn, just put your heroes to work in the starting settlement generating a bit of gold for you, and take it from there. A few turns down the line you will have observed other players playing more complex commands, and you can just copy what they're doing. Little by little we'll grow our knowledge this way, and a few months down the line we will have mastered the starting rules. And that's when I'll add more lol.
As always, whoever reads the ENTIRE books linked above, cover to cover, should bump their player thread and let me know so I can put a tick next to them in their Battlegrounds Profile. Why would you want to read every last page, even the boring unit/org/room/building descriptions? Because that's how you learn what is possible in the game, that's how you get inspired to try stuff out. To give you a recent example, I was inspired to devise the Claim Buildings mechanic by reading the Crypt description in "Ultimate Campaign" and remembering that the title of the first Master of Combat Scenario we played was Skeleton King's Crypt. So I believe that in order to enjoy the game to the fullest you will, at some point, have to read the entire rulebooks concerned. But you certainly don't have to do it from the start, or for a long time, or even ever, if you just can't be bothered to. You can learn on the job, so to speak, and I'll be there on Discord playing along with you and giving you all the help you need.
See these rules as more of a restaurant menu than a strict game ruleset. Yes, you can't play chess unless you know ALL the rules pretty much, but this isn't chess. This is life, pretty much. It is conceptually as complex as life. Not in the details, but in the breadth of what is possible. And we don't learn about life all in one go: we learn our whole lives long. So try out a couple of simple moves first, then later some more complex ones, and so on, as if trying out different dishes in a restaurant. And eventually you'll find your niches in the game, the ones that fascinate you the most, and you can spend your time exploring them.
It will be unreal. Wait until you have some holdings and see them rendered in Dungeondraft, or later on in full 3D VR, and fully zoomable from the overworld, from cosmic level all the way down to the secret exit from your basement. There's nothing else like it.
Dungeondraft Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYTHVRpihKg
