Kingmaker begins

Rising from the ruin of our unfinished Blackmoor mini-campaign, we rush headlong into Kingmaker. No question, this AP is different from any of the others we've played. I've read it's very "old-school", but to be perfectly honest, I don't remember doing a lot of hex-mapping back in the day. My recollection is that we spent a lot of time underground, be it in the Tomb of Horrors, the Lost Caverns of Tsocjanth or the Temple of Elemental Evil. I suspect my 15 year-old self would probably have viewed this sort of systematic mapping exercise as a bit like homework, something I had little patience for if memory serves. However, that was before I learned the joys of turn-based computer strategy games like Sid Meier's Civilization, which bear a much closer resemblance to Kingmaker than anything I remember doing with AD&D.


There is one AD&D 2e campaign setting which does come to mind, however, when I read the player's guide for Kingmaker and that is Birthright. TSR started getting very experimental with 2e campaign settings, releasing oddities such as Dark Sun, Spelljammer and Planescape, but Birthright may have been the most unusual. It could be played as a straight-up medieval fantasy campaign, but it also had the option of playing as rulers of small kingdoms, battling to expand and develop one's holdings. There were cards for various military units that could be purchased to build your kingdom's army and rules for governance and economics. It was a remarkably well-done setting, one of my personal favourites, and won the Origins Award for the Best Rolepaying Supplement of 1995, but it never achieved much market success. There were just too many D&D campaign settings back then