Video Game / Pathfinder: Kingmaker

The Kingdom is a Companion

There is a world of adventure waiting for you to explore. It’s a world that needs brave and powerful heroes. Countless others have come before, but their time is over. Now it’s your turn.

— Pathfinder Core Rulebook

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is an isometric Role-Playing Game developed by Owlcat Games, based on the Pathfinder tabletop game's "Kingmaker" Adventure Path. The game includes writing by Chris Avellone, and was released on September 25th, 2018.

The game is modeled quite heavily on the tabletop experience and in the style of classics such as Baldur's Gate, with combat in Real-Time with Pause (a turn-based mode emulating tabletop Pathfinder was added in a patch). The game focuses on the player building their own barony in the wilderness and facing many threats, like in the corresponding module.

Three pieces of DLC were released. The Wildcards (December 14, 2018) adds a new playable race and class, and a new companion with her own storyline. Varnhold's Lot (February 28, 2019) casts you as the Hyper-Competent Sidekick in a neighboring barony, sorting out some big problems. This story runs parallel to and can be referenced in the main campaign. Beneath the Stolen Lands (June 6, 2019) has you fighting through a Mega Dungeon where there's perhaps a deeper threat than what lies at the bottom.

A sequel, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, was announced on December 2019, based on the Adventure Path of the same name. A Kickstarter campaign for the game launched in February 2020, and concluded on March 11th of that year, having raised $2.05 million US dollars (more than double what the Kingmaker Kickstarter did).

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Pathfinder Kingmaker contains examples of:

• 4X: Kingmaker is a hybrid of this and a traditional isometric RPG: the construction and expansion of your kingdom, from town planning to making policy decisions, comprises a significant chunk of gameplay, though the "explore" and "exterminate" parts of the 4X genre are mostly handled on the RPG side.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: A Vorpal Sword, both necessary for the genre, and thematically appropriate considering what particular creatures you end up facing. Snicker-Snack.
• Action Girl: You get four female party members in the base game, more in the Wildcards DLC; two in fact. All of whom are exceptionally skilled at fighting and murder in their own ways, and your player character can be female as well.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts:
  • Anything you want to sell will always net you 25% of how much you would pay to buy it, even when buying back something you sold. On the bright side, market saturation isn't a thing, nor are there any caps on how much vendors can afford to buy: you can pawn off the thousands of regular weapons and armor and low-tier magic gear you will be looting from the scores of mooks you kill and nobody will object.
  • Played for Laughs with a lone Goblin merchant, whose wares are all inflated, but particular note is a "Masterwork" Club that he's offering to you for 123,457 gold. For comparison's sake, most masterwork weaponry costs in the low hundreds.
• Adaptational Badass: The original Adventure Path was balanced for four player characters (controlled by individual players), not six player characters all coordinated by one mind. Most of its enemies (especially the Arc Villains) have drastically increased power as a result.
• Adaptation Expansion: The original Adventure Path was somewhat notorious for not even hinting at Nyrissa's existence until near the end (at least in the player-facing narrative; the GM was made aware of her existence in the very first book but was given very little, if anything, for her to do and no detailed description of her character) and having something of a Random Events Plot. The game integrates her into things right from the beginning... but in the process removes or alters a number of characters who originally had completely independent motives.
• Adaptation Name Change: The spell gravity bow from the tabletop game is renamed hurricane bow in the CRPG for no apparent reason.
• Adorable Evil Minions: Not only are there a fair amount of kobolds, goblins, and mites around (and you can make friends with as many of them as you wish, though your citizens might not appreciate it), but you get to recruit an adorable evil goblin minion of your own (regardless of your own personal alignment as the player character).
• Alchemy Is Magic: The alchemist is one of several classes you can choose from when starting the game or when leveling up your character. It focuses on infusing chemical reagents with magical energy, creating potions, poisons, mutagens, and incendiaries. Its ultimate (20th-level) ability is the "grand discovery", which can take numerous forms, including immortality or the creation of a philosopher's stone. Alchemists also take on a Jekyll & Hyde vibe by using transformative mutagens to power up.
• Alternative Calendar: The game uses the standard Golarion (the planet where the game takes place) calendar. Said calendar is just like our own, only with the names of the months changed (they are called after the main gods of the setting).
• Androcles' Lion: Zzamas, a non-aggressive Primal Spider you find in the Varnhold area. If you save him not only he gives you a small cache of treasure, but also joins one of the battles in the final chapter fighting by your side.
  • The Young Dweomercat, whom you meet early in your travels and save during a random encounter. For a while, the Dweomercat will pop up during random encounters to save your low-level party members. "Claw thee, claw me!"
• Antagonist Title: Possibly, depending on who the title refers to. A "kingmaker" is someone who makes others into kings or, less literally, into authority figures in general often with the implication that the kingmaker is the one wielding the real power. As such the PC, who takes open power themselves, doesn't qualify. Nyrissa on the other hand...
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • An unlimited (in size) shared party stash only capped by the amount of total weight that the party can carry.
  • A lot of skills have been consolidated or removed to ensure that new players won't wind up taking skills that have no purpose in gameplay.
  • When camping or resting, any party member with healing abilities will expend them before regaining their daily uses, saving you from having to heal your party manually.
  • When you attempt a skill check with your entire party selected, the most skilled character will be the one attempting it without need to select them individually.
  • Reaching Farnirras the Pensive requires that you kill 45 mini-bosses throughout the Stolen Lands - thankfully, this is retroactive.
  • Cleric storekeepers sell scrolls of atonement, which allow you to quickly reset your Character Alignment invoked to where it was at character creation, just in case you manage to alignment-drift to the point of losing access to class features.
  • Buying Building Points required you to go to a vendor just outside the Keep - a later patch allowed you to do so from within the Kingdom Management menu, making it a lot easier to keep from accidentally overspending.
  • You can hire mercenaries who level with the rest of the party and can fill any council position, albeit at a -4 DC penalty that non-mercenary advisors don't face. Nifty for filling the Treasurer office early on, or having a backup Councillor in case you miss or kill off the three unique candidates for the office, or if you drove off an old advisor by ignoring their advice too many times. The other downside is that you can't make choices during the rank up events; a mercenary will automatically pick the most "neutral" option.
• Anti-Grinding: With the DLCs it's possible to hit the (unmodded) level cap of 20 before endgame, but enemies don't respawn on area and dungeon maps, and the time limits on storyline quests discourage excessive exploitation of Random Encounters.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You're limited to six characters in your party at once. Thanks to Leaked Experience, even those you don't take with you on every adventure stay viable (though this can be turned off for a more Baldur's Gate-like experience).
• Armor and Magic Don't Mix: Like the tabletop game, using armor and trying to cast arcane spells (without the specific ability to do so) incurs a percentile chance of having the spell fizzle. Bards can cast in light armor, while magi begin able to cast in light armor and later gain the ability to cast in medium and heavy armor. Divine magic is not restricted in this way, barring Ecclesitheurges (like party member Tristian) who lose their ability to cast spells entirely if you equip them with armor or shields (which, haramaki not having been implemented, costs a feat or multiclassing anyway).
• Ascended Extra: Maegar Varn and Varnhold are referenced only a little in the Adventure Path, serving mostly as a friendly neighbor and the launching point for Chapter 3's main conflict. In the game, not only is it possible to rescue Maegar Varn and have him join your kingdom, impossible in the adventure path, but there's an entire DLC related to playing Varnhold's story.
• Automatic Crossbows: Due to the video game's design, crossbows function exactly like shortbows and longbows when it comes to additional attacks due to Base Attack Bonus or additional attacks from feats and status effects, instead of tabletop where they have to be reloaded between attacks. This makes crossbows optimal for ranged builds that don't rely on using a composite bow with a decent strength score, relying on the crossbow's improved critical threat range on a attack roll of 19 or 20 (17 to 20 with Improved Critical feat) and improved damage dice to keep pace with composite bows.
• Avengers Assemble: Near the end of the path of the True Ending, there's a small cutscene of the various people you've helped marching into the portal to your Capital to fight the armies of the Lantern King. And there's even more people in the camp and fighting in the final level.
• Bait-and-Switch: Depending on your choices, an encounter with some cultists can turn into this. Menacing robed figures approach you on the road, the high priestess in charge telling you that "Lamashtu herself has called upon us to track you down and deal with you as you deserve". If you dealt with the cult of Lamashtu peacefully earlier, what she actually means is offering you a very handy permanent buff. Of course, if you decided against tolerating the cult, the encounter plays out a lot more like you'd initially expect...
• Being Good Sucks:
  • Striving to always make the Good, or at least least-Evil, decisions will result in you missing out on three extremely powerful artisan masterpieces while gaining you nothing. Additionally, while both Good and Evil barons get buildings that help them resolve problems, the Evil one is both much better and much cheaper. Good guys can be a Paladin, but the mandatory Lawful Good alignment is notoriously slippery to hold onto as the game goes on.
  • This is even more prominent if you're Neutral or Chaotic Good, as Lawful Good baronies at least still get access to the very helpful Bulletin Board and Courthouse buildings.
  • If you destroy an evil idol dedicated to Lamashtu, the goddess will punish you and your party by lowering your constitution.
• Bittersweet Ending: The organic nature of the ending means you may get some sections of this depending on how you resolved certain quests or events, for instance:
  • Convincing Jubilost to accept the gift of immortality from Shyka the Many will make him so enamored with the First World that he starts neglecting and eventually abandons all of his business in the Material Plane, until he leaves for an expedition he never returns from
• Bottomless Magazines: Your bow and crossbow users don't need to keep track of arrows, though magic quivers which give an unlimited supply of enchanted arrows are able to be found.
• Brick Joke: In the very first journal entry, Linzi writes: "Linzi the...note to self: when I come up with a fancy nickname, add it here". In the last page of the epilogue book, she refers to herself as "Linzi-who-never-picked-a-fancy-nickname".
• Broken Bridge: Each chapter has a border you can't cross until you solve its issue:
  • In Chapter 1, the fog covering the Stolen Lands prevents you from leaving the Outskirts and South Narlmarshes until you kill the Stag Lord
  • In Chapter 2 and 3 you can't cross the Sellen River due to pirate attacks (even if you're toting an army and a party that could mop the floor with any pirate) and can't freely explore Dunsward since it's under the rule of your Friendly Rival Maegar Varn.
  • In Chapters 4 and 5 patrols threaten you out of crossing the border with Pitax.
• The Cameo: Besides Amiri and Linxia, Kyra makes a minor appearance in the icon for the Angelic Aspect spell.
• Cannibal Clan: One of these can be uncovered in the Varnhold's Lot DLC. Amusingly, by the time the party gets to them, they've already been killed-and-replaced by a small band of lycanthropes who never even realized the people they killed in self-defense were notorious serial killers.
• Canon Immigrant: The Player Party members who were original to this game^i.e.everybody except Amiri, a Pathfinder Iconic, and Jubilost, who is an NPC in the original adventure path were converted to tabletop in the Kingmaker Adventure Path Companion Guide, an optional add-on to the AP's Pathfinder Second Edition re-release. Several NPCs and game events important to their character arcs made the jump to tabletop in the same volume.
• Character Class System: Being based on D&D, it has the classics: Bard, Barbarian, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Wizard. It also has some prestige classes and classes from other sources (Alchemist, Inquisitor, Kineticist and Magus).
• Character Shilling: Subtly done, but when the Defaced Sister in the Kellid camp explains what she is, Tristian (if he's there) chimes in to say how honorable their sacrifice makes them in an admiring tone, even though everyone else in the camp hates her. They've both been coerced to work for Nyrissa.
  • Alternatively, he was probably being sarcastic. This is evidenced by the Sister reacting in a rather angry tone when he says his line and the fact that he knows very well what "higher power" she is working for and that it's far from benevolent.
• Chekhov's Gun: Several.
  • Tartuccio gives you a Pitaxian signet ring at the beginning of the prologue, then at the end of the prologue tries to use your possession of it to frame you as a Pitaxian spy and the cause of the massacre. If you bring that ring to the Rushlight Tournament you'll get a special dialogue option at the conclusion that bypasses several Diplomacy checks and lets you embarrass Irovetti in front of the whole tournament by revealing him as the one responsible.
  • If you keep the charm the Guardian of the Bloom gives you at Oleg's Trading Post at the beginning of the game and carry it around with you, you can skip having to do a kingdom project during War of the River Kings. Linzi will comment on its presence or absence.
  • For one in Nyrissa's story rather than the player's, if you give the First Crown to Shyka the Many during War of the River Kings Shyka can exploit the fact Nyrissa trapped the king's soul inside it instead of killing him to screw her over at a critical moment, killing her without a fight during the finale of the game. Shyka will admit this is exactly why they want it if you ask.
• Collection Sidequest: You can find oddities like ancient weapons and exotic coins lying about pretty much everywhere, which the Storyteller in your throne room will buy from you. Some are part of a set that will reward you with a bit of lore, a good chunk of gold and experience and sometimes an artifact if you manage to get them all.
• Common Place Rare: You can find a single shovel and it's not even in a shop, but in the wilderness of the Stolen Lands. Most players will disregard the shovel and sell it, while it can be used in the last chapter to dig up a unique magical item.
• Could Say It, But...: Exploited by one of the Defaced Sisters if you choose a Good-only dialogue option. Since she's forced to obey the person she's working for she can't tell you their plans, so she instead denies those plans in a way that makes the truth extremely obvious, then encourages you to do something in such a ham-handed way that it's clear you should absolutely not do it.
  Defaced Sister: "The power that sent us wishes... you... g-g-good too... D-don't worry about my S-Sisters. All they tell you is truth, and they are n-not plotting to kill you."
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Many Chaotic Evil choices let you attack NPCs unprovoked, some of whom may be simple commoners who will go down before they can even draw a weapon.
  • Tristian can be at the receiving end of this if you choose to take the Oculus of Abaddon from him by force. A single unarmored cleric is hardly a match for your party after you have crushed two Stone Golems and a Defaced Sister to get to him. If you gained control of the Iron Golem in the nearby room, you can even let the construct curb stomp him itself.
• Cursed with Awesome: Later in the game the Player Character can get cursed by Lamashtu. However, since she's a Goddess of Monstrosity and Horrors, the curses you can get are fairly benign, or even beneficial.
• Defeat Means Friendship: A number of bosses can be befriended (provided you have the correct alignment), but the one that portrays this trope most solidly is Armag, the barbarian warlord, who will declare you blood-siblings if you spare him.
• Demoted to Extra: Baron Hannis Drelev of Glenebon serves two roles in the Adventure Path - He's a baron who serves as Irovetti's catspaw and he's a traitor who serves as the secondary antagonist of Chapter 4. In the game he plays neither of these roles, with new characters Tartuccio taking the role of the catspaw baron-wannabe and Tristian taking the role of the traitorous secondary antagonist of Chapter 4. As for Drelev, it's possible to go through the entire game without knowing who he is.
• Destructo-Nookie:
  • The Optional Sexual Encounters with Kanerah, a tiefling kineticist, can result in post-coital comments that the two of you will have to be careful not to accidentally set the whole house on fire.
  • In Varnhold's Lot, the PC can seduce explorer Willas Gunderson while investigating him. After the Fade to Black, the bed is completely trashed and the innkeeper complains about holes in the ceiling.
• Developer's Foresight: Not based on reactivity to the plot, but in addition to having multiple recordings of companions' various quotes for acknowledging player orders, spotting hidden objects, unlocking doors, and disarming traps, characters also have another set of those quotes which has them whispering while they're in stealth.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • The unique longbow Devourer of Metal you can find during the "Troll Trouble" chapter. Despite being only a +2 weapon, it has a powerful acid damage enchantment and like Amiri's bastard sword it hits with the force of a Large weapon, and therefore remains competitive even into the endgame.
  • From the very start of chapter 2, it is fairly trivial to sneak by the crag linnorm at the Bridge Over the Gundrin River area by using an invisibility spell. The body it guards contains a bounty of treasures - including a +2 Flaming Earth Breaker, a powerful weapon for that point in the game with an enhancement that is excellent against the many trolls encountered in the chapter.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: The Reveal that the Lantern King himself posed intermittently as a mad prophet that you meet en route to the Stolen Lands, a helpful gnome stuck in the First World, and one of Nyrissa's own servants, all because he wanted front-row seats for the fun.
• Duel Boss: Fredero for Valerie, Armag for Amiri. Nok-Nok versus the Goblin Chief can be one as well, though played through cutscenes and skill checks.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?:
  • No matter how high your position is, you're still asked to go out and fix the problems of your country by hand, though you can dictate some issues to your advisers to deal with instead.
  • Averted with crafters: Allowing them to set up shop in your kingdom and dealing with the occasional hitch in their plans will make them pay you regular tribute in the form of magic weapons and items (and eventually a unique and otherwise unobtainable masterpiece).
• Dwindling Party:
  • Possibly inverted in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Nyrissa splits the party and kills off your companions one by one, but if you resolved their personal quests favorably, they can survive and rejoin you.
  • In Lostlarn Keep (final dungeon of Varnhold's Lot), Varn is parted from the others early on, sent back to Varnhold through a portal. Cephal is left on the other side of a cave-in after protecting the rest of the party from falling rocks. And finally, at the very end of the dungeon, the Horned Hunter unceremoniously kills off the remaining party members other than the General.
• Early-Bird Boss: A room in Vordakai's Tomb, which Tristian strongly advises you not to enter, is home to an astradaemon and two thanadaemons—an extremely difficult battle at this point of the game, which you'll have to win if you want to loot the two Cabochon Rubies (which fetch for a truly massive amount of money) from the statue in the room.
• Early Game Hell: In the early game enemies tend to not only outnumber you, but even the basic mooks have absurd amounts of hitpoints compared to a PC of the same level while doing just as much weapon damage. They also tend to have mages in their party that cast fear effects all over the place, letting them pick off your weaker party members while the tanks are running around; meanwhile, a good PC who isn't a caster themselves will have no magic support outside a low level bard.
  • And once you take charge of your barony you're expected to deal with several monthly problems with only four advisors. A couple Failures or Disasters on events may dip your kingdom stats below zero, which will start undermining your kingdom's stability.
  • Making a character with low hit points, especially a less combat-focused one, amplifies this as the tutorial can become absurdly hard. Your two first party additions are a fragile bard and an even more fragile sorcerer and you're fighting groups of rogues who can drop anyone in the party with a single critical hit or sneak attack, turning the tutorial combat into a game of Rocket Tag. The first character you get with any kind of resilience is the fourth one (who is undead and therefore immune to sneaks and crits) and you get your off-tank/healer and main tank fifth and sixth/last, respectively.
• Elemental Variation: The levels of the Tenebrous Depths have various elemental themes, which includes their monsters getting matching templates. For example, level II makes all the monsters "Acidic Creatures", granting increased acid resistance and making them inflict extra acid damage on each hit, while level VI makes all the monsters "Fiery Creatures", the same thing but with fire.
• Epic Fail:
  • Random luck and an advisor's low ability can make it so that engaging with a problem or opportunity actually makes it worse than if you'd left it alone.
  • Rolling too low when disarming a trap will set it off in the disarmer's face.
  • This goes for the enemy as well. It's possible for an enemy to roll so badly they fall to your Instant Death spells.
  • Early-game spellcasters aren't especially concerned with friendly fire, which can lead to cases of bandit mages disabling their own front line with Color Spray while you're unaffected. And in the fight with Tartuk at Old Sycamore, he uses a lot of Fireball spells, which not only have a tendency to blow up his own mooks, but even potentially Tartuk himself (especially if you Charge him to get to melee range).
• Even the Loving Hero Has Hated Ones: Tristian, the party cleric, is a sweet-natured follower of Sarenrae (one of her angels under a Forced Transformation curse in fact), and in keeping with her philosophy of redeeming evil will almost always press the Player Character to spare the lives of defeated enemies. But even he will occasionally tell the PC to just deliver a Coup de Grâce if he believes them unrepentant and irredeemable.
• Evil Versus Evil:
  • You can be any alignment on the grid, including Neutral Evil, but that doesn't mean that your evil enemies and your kingdom's evil enemies will give you a pass.
  • This is the core of Enneo's crusade against followers of Urgathoa. He doesn't hesitate to murder innocents or set them up to die for his hunt. It says something when siding with the sadistic undead is the Neutral Goodinvoked option.
• Exact Words: During Nok Nok's personal quest, you face a demon who's been sent to hunt you until "one of the allies of the Pretender to the throne of the Stolen Lands lies beneath my feet, and their blood feeds the ground". By passing an Arcana check, you can get Nok Nok to nonlethally cut himself and let the demon pin him, which fulfills the task— and the demon is instantly teleported back to the underworld.
• Failed a Spot Check: Be sure to invest points in the Perception skill on your party or else you won't notice all those lootable objects lying in front of you. Perception is also needed to locate new areas on the map. If you fail, you have to come back later when you level up.
• Failed State: The northeastern region of the River Kingdoms where the game takes place, known as the Stolen Lands, are so named because no attempt to establish more than token settlements there seems to survive for very long between monster attacks, bandits, pranks by local fey, and natural disasters. The name refers to a local superstition that the region has been "stolen" from humanity. There turns out to be a reason for this: since ancient times, the elder nymph Nyrissa has been propping up one civilization after another and then arranging its destruction, in order to win a bet with the Lantern King and get her heart back from him.
• Familiar: Certain classes get familiars, but they're only represented as stat boosts, not visible in the game.
• Fantasy Pantheon: Over 20 of the Pathfinder setting's gods can be worshiped by your player cleric, and more are mentioned by NPCs. The most popular gods in your neck of the woods are Erastil (god of families, hunting and agriculture), Abadar (god of cities, laws and wealth) and Lamashtu (goddess of monsters, outsiders and disfiguration).
• The Fair Folk: A major theme in the game. There are lots of issues that come up between your citizens and the fey that you have to solve, not all of them violently.
• Fake Difficulty: A problem initially before patches fixed things. Still pops up in some places.
  • In a game that is otherwise fairly free-form with combat and allows for a great deal of tactical maneuvering, several fights will force your entire party to a set position for a cutscene robbing you of your ability to position. Additionally, these short ingame cutscenes cannot be skipped and spell timers continue to run during them. Most notable is the fight with Irovetti since this repositioning happens in the middle of the fight and pulls you into a dangerous aura he likely cast in the first part, only to have a fairly lengthy scene during which most of your short-term spells will expire.
  • How you're supposed to fight swarms was initially only seen in a loading-screen tip, making the ones in the Fangberry Cave a huge Guide Dang It! that required you to buy or hoard specific items you otherwise had little use for. Now that information is both given to you by the person who tells you to go there (along with some anti-swarm weapons) and pops up right before you see your first swarm, and the Cave was expanded so you don't need to fight the swarm to finish the quest but instead get some nice loot if you do.
  • Previously, getting certain random encounters early on (the werewolf was especially infamous) could kill your entire party through no fault of your own. It was also possible to get random combat encounters two or three times your party level. These have been toned down repeatedly in patches.
  • The various difficulty adjustments used to interact strangely with one another and could produce enemies that were nearly impossible. This was clarified and shifted around a bit to make it more apparent what affects what.
• Fantasy Gun Control: The game does not include firearms or firearm rules despite the Pathfinder RPG system including a Gunslinger class. This is particularly jarring since you interact with the country of Numeria (who is your north-western neighbor) and Technic League agents, which in the original setting often use high-tech guns as their weapon of choice. (Similarly, none of the rules for refurbishing hi-tech weapons are in the game, and you cannot play as a Technomancer.)
• Fatal Flaw: Pride is the defining flaw of over a dozen major characters, ranging from significant NPCs to several companions to most noteworthy antagonists. Most of the game is spent observing, managing, and dishing out the consequences of misplaced pride.
• Fisher King: Your barony-turned-kingdom will take on your alignment at the time of its foundation, and the type of NPCs roaming around your capital and their idle banter will reflect it. For instance, a Lawful kingdom will have Hellknights standing watch in the streets and merchants trying to solve customs issues with the guards, while a Good kingdom will have citizens do some random acts of kindness to one another.
• Fission Mailed: It is impossible for Amiri to defeat Armag in the duel in the barbarian camp in "The Twice-Born Warlord": Armag either beats her unconscious, or a Defaced Sister immobilizes her once Armag gets below roughly half health, and either way the quest stage is always marked as failed. But this doesn't break the quest.
• Flaming Sword: A common Enchantment. The paladin and magus classes also both have the ability to give their weapons this ability as well.
• Forced Transformation:
  • Baleful Polymorph is a 5th level spell on the druid, sorcerer, wizard, and magus lists. It turns the target into a small, harmless animal.
  • In one of Jubilost's companion quests, another gnome casts a spell on the rules for a contest run by fey, turning anybody who reads it into a frog. The gnome's own siblings both got hit by it by accident, and Jubilost potentially can, too.
• Foreshadowing: Happens a lot, sometimes in obvious ways, other times in subtle ones.
  • The Stag Lord unknowingly but clearly outlines Nyrissa's entire modus operandi when he dies, making it obvious she's doing the same thing to you. And Irovetti.
  • There are two companions who will obliquely refuse to leave your party rather than asking why you want to kick them out. Linzi, the narrator, and Tristian. One would think that this character is just particularly dedicated your cause, but the reality is that he is integral to the plot.
  • On a second playthrough, notice how many times Tristian is said to look down while talking to you. It’s The Tell that he’s lying.
  • Jubilost takes a lot of verbal pot-shots at Willas Gunderson when he shows up, mostly in regards to his overestimating himself, and the quest he gives show he's far too quick to jump to conclusions and doesn't put a lot of thought into things. Both foreshadow his role in the destruction of Varnhold.
  • Camp dialogue may have Tristian note that Linzi is so focused on her book it feels like she's trying to put a piece of herself into it. Linzi winds up having a lot more than piece of herself in that book after the House at the End of Time.
  • The Defaced Sister you meet in the Kellid camp during Chapter 4 has a unique positive interaction with Tristian since they both have the same mission.
  • And then there's the curses. Even as early as Chapter 2, potentially, it's clear something is going on in the Stolen Lands, even beyond what your companions and court initially discuss:
    • When you hear Ivar's backstory during "The Lonely Hunter". Riven with guilt over accidentally causing his family's deaths, he "cursed" himself at their graves, screaming that he's a monster... and this turned him into a werewolf. Anyone familiar with Pathfinder will immediately sit up, because this is not how lycanthropy works in-setting at all. No matter how great your guilt, you can't just get really sad and angry and turn into a werebeast; it takes a very powerful curse spell, almost on par with a Wish or Miracle, to forcibly lycanthropize someone outside of spreading the curse via bites or whatnot. This is an immediate red flag that something powerful is at work in the Stolen Lands.
    • On a similar tack, the whole story of the Scythe Tree deep in the Narlmarches. It used to be a dryad queen, who was transformed into a scythe tree via what appears to be a local curse superstition wherein you place a curse on someone by throwing a coin in a well. This same curse has forced multiple individuals into undeath, as well. Even another local NPC in-universe will point out that, by most magicians' experiences, this is total nonsense; that's not even how proper curses work in-universe, the creation of undead of that power isn't even usually the domain of curses regardless, and in particular permanently turning a dryad queen into a damned scythe tree, against her will, is pretty much the exclusive domain of the most powerful 9th-level or Mythic magic. Although she doesn't speculate further, the NPC herself points out that something a hell of a lot more powerful than some wisps in a well have to be at work to make something like that happen the way it did.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: The Lantern King is this to the rest of the Eldest due to his destructive sense of humor and Disproportionate Retribution. Magdh, Shyka, and the Lost Prince have no problems helping the player deal with him in the secret ending.
• Fungus Humongous: The Shambling Mound is basically this. There's an absolutely horrifying encounter with one where you can read the notes detailing its creation. Who knew that the process of creating a giant humanoid fungus monster was so unsettling?
• Game Mod: The game is compatible with Unity Mod Manager and a wide variety of mods exist. Several classes and archetypes that made it into the sequel first appeared as mods for Kingmaker.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • "Book events" let you choose different kinds of action that will succeed or fail depending on your (and your companion's) abilities and skills. Similarly, some options are only available if you're a corresponding alignment - they'll be invisible and grayed-out, otherwise.
  • Some enemies are labeled more vaguely until they reveal their abilities. For instance, a Bandit Alchemist will be simply named "Bandit" until they throw a bomb or use an extract, presuming you don't have the Perception to guess their profession (or in the case of creatures/monsters, the appropriate lore stat) at a glance.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • A segment of Act 1 involves a war between tribes of kobolds and mites, both small-sized, weak, typically evil species. The conflict is depicted as evenly matched, with the player acting as the deciding factor in a Kingmaker Scenario. However, in game terms (and observed play), it should be an easy win for the mites - they have Damage Reduction to ordinary weapons, and the kobolds don't employ firebombs, poison, many spellcasters, or the Cold Iron that mites are weak to. Realistically, the player taking the Sootscale Tribe's side is the kobolds' only chance for victory.
  • The final stage of Valerie's questline has her put through a church trial over the circumstances of her quitting the Church of Shelyn. Should you talk your way through to the "good" ending where the goddess Shelyn forgives Valerie and removes her scar, the paladin leader will lose his temper and attack you. On tabletop this probably would have made Shelyn revoke his magic on the spot for violating her paladin code and/or ceasing to be Lawful Good,invoked but since this is the only situation in the entire game where such a mechanic would be relevant, Owlcat probably didn't consider it cost-effective to write code for, and you have to fight a fully-powered paladin.
  • King Irovetti has an army of armor-wearing trolls, enormous golden golems, a small army of lycanthropes, and a large contingent of guards in his palace, and yet he retreats into said palace, expecting the fall of his regime when a handful of his guards are beaten in a skirmish in the streets of Pitax, even though the forces seen in-game still loyal to him vastly outclass all of the in-game forces arrayed against him put together. If he had used all the troops and creatures still loyal to him all at once, they'd very likely outclass the party and every rebel faction in Pitax combined, going by what is seen in the gameplay itself.
• Gold–Silver–Copper Standard: Averted like on most Infinity Engine games.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Some mechanics aren't very well-explained, such as establishing your first settlement - once you've claimed a new region, you have to build one by selecting a marker in the region on the map screen.
  • In a general sense, all of the relics you can collect and craft into gear or get a story (and XP) from. Finding them without a guide can be an exercise in frustration, especially if you have only one more left to find but can't remember which ones you've already obtained.
  • The same thing goes for the key to unlock Farnirras the Pensive. It requires that you defeat 45 specific monsters - but once you get down to the final few, trying to figure out which ones are left is an exercise in frustration.
  • The "Lost Child" quest has a few possible outcomes, but to get the "best" one you have to know exactly what you're dealing with, and have exactly the right spell prepared, and pass a DC 20 Knowledge (Arcana) check to get the dialogue option to use the spell to appear. A more obvious option that sounds like it will lead to the best ending only will if you've talked to the named lizards in the village and picked at least one Good-aligned dialogue option with them; otherwise going through with it actually results in the child dying. The reason is that talking to the villagers calms their fears, which are what give the creature strength.
  • The final romance option available is Nyrissa herself, but accessing it is so convoluted that entire guides have been written to help. Particularly frustrating is that getting the secret ending on this path requires dialogue options with bosses - Tartuk, Vordakai, and Armag. Tartuk and Armag (whose dialogues are interchangeable) can die without you being able to talk to them, and the check for Vordakai? It requires an Arcane Knowledge check of 21 or higher to even access it, is absolutely required, and it's completely hidden! Compounding this Vordakai likes to use death spells on your weaker party members, like the ones most likely to have that skill, and if they're not alive at the end of the fight (you don't get time to heal them before the conversation comes up) you can't use their bonuses.
  • In Jaethal's final quest, you can convince her to spare her daughter, but it requires making several choices before. In her first quest, tell Jaethal to kill the girl she has turned undead. In the next quest, learn Tanaka's secret and protect Jaethal. Finally, when you face Jaethal's daughter, protect Jaethal and then, in the aftermath, remind Jaethal about her pride in her daughter. After making two choices, Jaethal will tell Urgathoa she must disappoint her - which leads to Urgathoa killing her. This, however, allows you to later meet Jaethal in the House at the End of Time as a friendly NPC.
  • A handful of sidequests give directions which boil down to little more than "meet some guy in the woods". Sometimes the player is meant to revisit a zone, sometimes the quest will advance as a "random" encounter while traveling, and occasionally a hidden node will spawn when the party walks past on the world map. Good luck figuring out which is the correct option without a guide.
  • It is possible to end up without a Councilor for Kingdom Management, which will force you to use one of Anoriel's helpers for the role, and incur the penalty to Councilor actions from such. Specifically, of the three potential candidates, Shandra must be selected at the very start of the game, without any indication what function she could actually serve (and the protagonist's main sponsor recommending a different aide), Tsanna is a Chaotic Evil priestess who is likely to be killed or arrested long before there's any indication she's recruitable, and Tristian betrays the party and may be fought and killed as a result.
  • Saving Nilak during "The Twice-Born Warlord". When "Hour of Rage" becomes available, you must go there before doing "The Betrayer's Flight". Then, when the time comes for Amiri to infiltrate the camp, she must use an alternate path to reach the center of the camp so she doesn't engage in combat with anyone except Armag himself. A Chaotic player can instead make the Tiger Lords throw a riot, bypassing the stealth mission aspect. Oh, and to top it off, doing this permanently ends Tristian's Romance Sidequest: you have to do "Betrayer's Flight" first to continue it. This was so hated that Owlcat eventually removed the requirement to do "Hour of Rage" first.
  • In order to recruit Jubilost, you need to go to the Ford Across the Skunk River area after the Troll Trouble questline begins. He won't appear in the area if you go there too early, so if you decide not to travel through that area while completing the questline you can just plain miss him, which will cost you a useful Treasurer, especially if you either don't have some of the DLC or you're a good-aligned character who spurns Bartholomew's experiments. There's no indication in the game that you need to go to this area.
• Gone Horribly Right: One of the first hints that something is seriously wrong in the Stolen Lands is that even mundane acts of spite or self-hatred can create horrible monsters and eternal, unending suffering, which is very much not how curses work in Golarion without divine intervention (or, in this case, First World intervention).
• Hair Memento: A lock of hair was used to create a ring of bestial friendship. This Cursed Item will cause the animal to run in a rampant rage. Eirikk received it from his potential lover, and used the ring to enchant an owlbear as a means to impress the lover and to further gain control.
• Harder Than Hard: The aptly named "Unfair mode" which double the damage dealt by monsters and traps. Enemies will also have increased power and deliver critical hits more often.
• Heel Realization:
  • In the first chapter the main character can hand a few of these out to some of the named bandits working for the Stag Lord. Kressle can have one if the player is Good-aligned and talks her down and Akiros can have one as well if the player sneaks up on him with a Mobility or Athletics check then passes a Knowledge check to guilt-trip him by pointing out which faith he used to follow.
  • A Good-aligned character can invoke one during the third chapter, when confronting one of the Defaced Sisters, pointing out just how many had died while she remains cryptic. She's more forthcoming with information after that, and abandons her sisters rather than head back to the barbarian camp to rejoin them, dropping a hint or two about their true intentions in the process.
• Hero of Another Story: You're not the only big shot in the Stolen Lands, nor the only one with a tale to tell.
  • Jamandi Aldori, especially if you support Restov against Brevoy or turn in the Restovic set to the Storyteller.
  • Maegar Varn, whose story you can play through in the Varnhold's Lot DLC.
  • Darven, the Designated Hero of the Deal with the Devil kingdom quest.
  • Blakemoor the Wizard, an NPC you can meet in the vicinity of Pitax.
• Hobbits: Lawyer-friendly "Halflings", as in Dungeons & Dragons.
• Hub Under Attack:
  • Midway through Chapter 1, Oleg's Trading Post (which serves as the player's hub, where they can rest safely and dump vendor trash, throughout the chapter) is attacked by bandits working for the Starter Villain.
  • The climax of Chapter 3 has the barony's capital city come under attack by a horde of monsters summoned from the First World by hidden portals, capped off by a gigantic owlbear. Depending on your choices immediately beforehand, one of two recurring NPCs (either Kesten Garess or Jhod Kavken) can die here (defending the city or trying to enter the chapter's dungeon, respectively). The owlbear's pelt is made into a rug in the city tavern afterwards.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: There are two difficulty settings in the game.
  • Gameplay difficulty.
    • Story mode.
    • Easy mode.
    • Normal mode.
    • Challenging mode.
    • Hard mode.
    • Unfair mode.
  • Kingdom Management. You can also set it to Auto, but you won't be able to disable it once the game starts. This also locks you out of all artisans, their sidequests and their monthly gifts including their masterpieces.
    • Effortless
    • Easy
    • Normal
    • Hard
• Idle Animation: Depending on the class, the PC and your party members will either kneel and pray, drink from a bottle, cross theirs legs and float in the air or play with their sword (even if they don't have one).
• I Know You Know I Know: This exchange
  Octavia: Well, now we know where Janush is waiting for us. He knows we're coming, of course... but we know that he knows, so that gives us the advantage!
  Regongar: But does he know that we know that he knows?
• Improbable Power Discrepancy: A lot of the enemies you encounter, especially later in the game, have been drastically increased in power from their tabletop equivalents in order to provide a better challenge. An example of this is the Mature Leopard you encounter in the Trail in the Hills (an early game exploration location), which is a 10 HD animal as opposed to the 3 HD leopards have in the tabletop.
• In the End, You Are on Your Own: You get torn apart from your companions as you enter the final dungeon. And if you didn't complete their personal quests, it will stay that way.
• Inherently Funny Words: In Jubilost's quest to the Inconsequent Debates, another gnome there enchanted the posted rules as a prank. The center sign forces anybody who reads it, including a crusader contestant and potentially Jubilost, to say "tentacles" every few words.
• Interface Screw: If your main character gets Dominated, you will see enemies outlined as allies and vice versa.
• I Know Your True Name: Can bite you in the ass in the Valley of the Dead. Every time you reveal your or one of your companion's names within earshot of Horagnamon (who constantly attempts to taunt you into doing so) a soul eater, which must be fought alone by that character, is summoned right before the confrontation with Vordakai. Unfortunately, your companions grab the Idiot Ball Horagnamon tosses them and reveal their own names if you don't. Your best bet is to voluntarily name companions who can hold up against ability damage—notably Jaethal, who once again is immune to it because she's undead, or Kaessi (a DLC companion), since that isn't her true name.
• Kaizo Trap: When exiting the Verdant Chambers after defeating the last Sister and rescuing Tristian, there is one last trap right in front of the exit which if not evaded or disarmed will wallop your entire party with Energy Drain, potentially killing a few members instantly. Ouch. A particularly thorough player with very high Perception can stumble upon the trap much earlier, as it's right in front of a Door to Before, but Erastil help you if you trigger it by mistake.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Barring the occasional Teleporting Keycard Squad or guard made to protect one specific stash, nobody will bat an eye at your characters freely invading private property and taking everything not nailed down, including your own citizens.
• Knight Templar: Hegend, a paladin of Shelyn who appears during Valerie's companion quest. If Shelyn forgives Valerie and removes her scar, Hegend completely loses it and orders his fellow paladins to kill Valerie in the middle of the temple. Not only do he and his followers die fighting your party and the other Shelyn worshippers, but the bloodshed desecrates the temple rendering it unusable. Averted with Fredero Sinnet, the other paladin of Shelyn who appears in the quest chain, as he turns out to be more reasonable and will attack Hegend when he goes nuts if Shelyn forgives Valerie.
• Land of Faerie: The First World, as in the tabletop game, is full of The Fair Folk, who have Blue-and-Orange Morality due to their immortality. If the player rescues Evindra when dealing with Pitax, they can learn that the veil between the First World and the Stolen Lands is surprisingly thin, to the point that any Fair Folk that die there will simply go back to the First World instead of dying for real. Thus, many mythical creatures are drawn there out of curiosity, explaining a lot about why so many are present in the King/Queendom.
• Laughably Evil: Per the setting, the smaller Evil monsters, mainly mites, kobolds, and goblins, are generally Played for Laughs: tribes of small, idiosyncratic critters that talk in You No Take Candle and think they're a lot tougher than they actually are.
  • There's a war between tribes of kobolds and mites in the first chapter in which you can intervene. The kobolds in particular are dupes of the Starter Villain Tartuccio, and if you treat them with mercy you gain the ability to construct a special "Kobold Quarter" building in any Town or City you own, which offers some nice boosts to your barony's Espionage stat.
  • There's an entire subplot in the "Season of Bloom" chapter involving the local goblin tribes. They think the plague of magical parasites turning humanoids into monsters is a sign from Lamashtu and keep trying to domesticate the monsters—usually getting eaten for their troubles. One of them, Nok-Nok, can actually join your party and be a pretty effective Rogue, and you can get an achievement for partying with a tribe in a storybook event. At the same time, they are kidnapping villagers and trying to force-feed the monster seeds to them, and unlike with the kobolds they got the idea in their heads all on their own.
• Lawful Stupid: The game's portrayal of the invoked Lawful Good alignment has a few issues at times, though it is usually good at sticking to both the Lawful and Good part instead of being glorified Neutral Good. In particular, the Nazrielle-Sartayne sidequest regards arresting Sartayne for sabotaging Nazrielle's magical weapons to ruin her reputation, in order to get revenge on her for ruining his father's as a Lawful Evil action for some reason, even though a lot of innocent people were endangered by this. You'll also find yourself commonly taking Neutral Good or Chaotic Good actions for lack of a Lawful Good counterpart.
• Lightning Bruiser: Barbarians have a bonus to their speed and are one of the hardest hitters in the game.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Historically enforced by D&D and the games based on its mechanics.
• Limited-Use Magical Device:
  • Scrolls and potions are single-use items with the same effect as various spells.
  • Wands and staves have several charges of a certain spell or metamagical effect.
  • Normally scrolls, potions, wands, and staves cast spells or produce spell-like effects at a fixed caster level and its minimum DC. However, there are three exceptions: Magi may learn to use their intelligence modifier instead of the minimum value for spells cast from wands, Alchemists may learn to treat potions as spells cast using their Alchemist level as their caster level, and Wizards of the Scroll Savant archetype learn to apply their intelligence modifier to the DC of spells cast from scrolls and eventually also to apply their Wizard caster level to the spell as if they had cast the spell normally.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: When you run the game on early chapters things goes smoothly. However, as you progress further and further, loading between areas will slow down to a crawl. Saved games that just took a couple of MB rise up expansionally to several GB. It's highly recommended to play the game on a SSD. While the console versions are better when it comes to file size, it’s not any better when it comes to load times as the game progresses, down to the once-miniscule loading from resting.
• Loyal Animal Companion: A class feature for Rangers, Druids and certain clerics and sorcerers (including the companion Ekun). They are good for tanking.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Critical hits that reduce enemies to 0 hit-points cause them to explode. Useful in the case of trolls, since they need to be either damaged by fire or acid or be gibbed like this to stay dead. Counterproductive with many animals and magical beasts, which can be skinned for their valuable pelts if they aren't gibbed.
• Marathon Level: Vordakai's Tomb features two entire floors with death traps, encounters with groups of undead cyclopes, undead that can damage or permanently drain your ability scores and levels, hordes of ''dozens'' of zombies at a time, a fight with soul eaters that you and up to two party members will have to fight one-on-one, and tops it off with a boss that, at the very least, is mercifully straightforward. Oh, and the exit seals itself after the first encounter, so you have to complete it all in one go. It also got infamous as That One Level, so much that a patch added a few camping supplies just outside the boss room so the players wouldn't be forced to fight him completely drained of all their resources.
• Medieval Stasis: While the source material has early modern technology like firearms, Kingmaker does not feature any of this and sticks to a medieval tech level. Partially because the Stolen Lands are so wild and untamed, that there isn't any chance to develop technology, and within the game's story, not enough time passes for more advance technology to be worked in.
• Modular Difficulty: There are several preset difficulty levels that can then be further customized with sliders for damage differentials for the Player Party and mobs, whether the mobs can inflict critical hits, whether a party member being reduced to the negative of their Constitution score is actually killed or only badly wounded, etc.
• Mood Whiplash: A bundle of notes in an abandoned cabin in Lake Silverstep Village starts out very heartwarming, describing how Ivar had wooed his wife, Lissa, and entertained their children with his penchant for tall tales. Unfortunately, it ends in tragedy because his children believed those tales, specifically one about climbing a hill on a moonless night, during which they slipped and fell to their deaths, with Lissa dying from grief not long after.
• Money Sink: Selling off common and basic magic items will get you more gold than you know what to do with - but that gold can then be used to buy Building Points, which are essential for expanding the Barony/Kingdom and constructing buildings within it.
• Mugging the Monster: A Cannibal Clan comes to a sticky end when they try to kill some seemingly hapless travelers... who turn out to be disguised lycanthropes.
• The Münchausen: Blakemoor the Wizard. He has a large array of impossible tales, but there are hints that he's not making any of them up. His First World tale is fantastical but not out of character for the Lantern King, and if Amiri is in the party she'll actually verify part of his tale about the North. You'll also get attacked by his Arch-Enemy Siroket if you help him, lending credence to his most recent tale.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: Averted. If you put someone in charge as an advisor and keep acting contrary to their personal beliefs, they will eventually quit.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules:
  • The games takes certain liberties with with various aspect of the Pathfinder ruleset. Probably most infamously is the Silky on the Bald Hiltop who has access to a version of "Hold Person" that can hit multiple enemy targets, yet is distinct from Mass Hold Person. Enemies, even NPCs who are otherwise using PC classes, have bonuses to their stats. Particularly HP well in excess of what their level (and thus hit die) would imply. This is especially visible with Wizards encountered early in the game. Their HP should be so low that any but the weakest attacks should one shot them, yet you'll find them consistently taking an amount of punishment that puts the Player and companions to shame.
  • Vordakai uses a familiar holding a wand in its talons to cast spells, a classic tactic in the tabletop game but which here is unavailable to players, whose familiars are purely a stat boost and don't take actions.
• Nerf: On the tabletop, any character can attempt a combat maneuver at the risk of attacks of opportunity from threatening enemies; the "Improved X" feat just removes the attack of opportunity. In Kingmaker, characters have to spend a feat on a combat maneuver to be able to use it in the first place, and another on the improved version.
• Nintendo Hard: Most of the negative reviews that aren't about bugs cite a mix of this and Early Game Hell as the game's biggest problem. It has little concept of fairness and pulls absolutely no punches. Even though Normal difficulty tilts things in the players' favor, the average Pathfinder veteran (to say nothing of people unfamiliar with the system) is going to die a lot and many people think this is what the original Kingmaker Adventure Path would look like if run by a Killer Game Master. Perhaps in anticipation of this, the game includes an extensively customizable level of difficulty to let people tone it down to something more reasonable.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: Characters reduced to 0 hit points fall unconscious. They die when their hitpoints equal their Constitution score as a negative number, though on Normal difficulty and below they will instead suffer a 'mortal wound' the first time and have to be killed again before they're down for good.
• Noodle Incident: Early in Varnhold's Lot, Maegar and Cephal both refer to a past adventure hunting a witch named Noose. The rest of the DLC has numerous moments where the two, and even the General, can reference past exploits, usually being described in this trope's way.
• Notice This: A chime and a quip will play when one of your characters find a hidden object. In the case of a trap the game will also autopause (by default) so you have time to stop before walking into it.
• One-Time Dungeon: After defeating the Stag Lord and establishing your own barony, the Stag Lord's Fort gets renovated into your capital city; its incarnation as a dungeon cannot be revisited to gather any loot left behind.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Lake Silverstep Village has Ivar, whose children died from falling off a cliff after he'd told them a fanciful tale about how they could see a silver dragon from it during a new moon.
• Overflow Error: You can use a Game Mod like this one to raise the Absurdly Low Level Cap to 29 from 20. There aren't enough available Experience Points in the game to get higher than about 24, and even if there were, getting to level 30 without also modding the leveling curve would require a greater amount of XP than the 2.15 billion limit of a 32-bit integer.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: The default behavior of just about every prominent figure from Pitax, especially at the Rushlight Tournament. They all hate each other and/or the Baron, but have to be polite for the sake of appearances. The Baron has a chance to engage in it with Irovetti at the end of the Tournament.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: The eastern bank of the Sellen river might give you random encounters against high-end monsters like Athachs and Bloody Bone Beasts. Not only they're worth a good chunk of experience but they might even have some magic items on them (like +4 Belts of Strength) you're not supposed to have access to until you actually have to cross the river.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • If you choose a (usually obvious) bad option in a character's personal quest it will often end the whole chain early. This means you can't use that party member in the Finale. In a twist on this, getting the 'best ending' for Jaethal's personal quest means you can't use her until the finale.
  • Previously, doing Betrayer's Flight before Hour of Rage automatically failed Amiri's personal quest but doing Hour of Rage before Betrayer's Flight ended Tristian's romance. This made it impossible to complete Amiri's personal quest if you were romancing Tristian. The fan dislike for this was so strong that the developers eventually changed it.
• Player Headquarters: Fairly early on, you get your own barony (later Kingdom). It's the whole point of the adventure. You can assign important positions of power to your trusted companions, complete kingdom projects and deal with threats to your people.
• Player Party: Your main character plus up to five other companions for a total of 6.
• Plot Armor:
  • Some enemies which you are supposed to encounter multiple times will be impossible to attack as they will stay green (like friendly NPCs) and be immune even to area-of-effect spells.
  • Linzi has a ring of plot armour that automatically saves her from death. This is because, as the one who's chronicling your story and writing down in your journal, she can't be permanently removed from your party.
• Polyamory: Possible in two ways. In the base game, you can romance both Octavia and Regongar, thus joining their existing relationship. If you have the "Wild Cards" DLC, you can romance a pair of tiefling twins who can't exist in Golarion at the same time.
• Prestige Class: The game has a selection of advanced classes that mostly serve to combine the benefits of two classes more efficiently than leveling them separately.
• Proxy War:
  • Your barony in the Stolen Lands becomes essentially the Third World in a conflict between your patron, Lady Jamandi Aldori, and House Surtova, currently the rulers of Brevoy. Jamandi funds several adventurer expeditions, including yours, to develop the Stolen Lands in hopes of gaining an ally in Rostland's eventual bid for independence from Brevoy.
  • Somewhat more seriously, the lands of your barony/kingdom are where a proxy conflict-via-punishment has been going on for millennia between Nyrissa, the Lantern King, and the other Eldest; you've managed to arrive right as either Nyrissa or the Lantern King, depending on your precise actions, are getting ready to make their big play.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: If you recruit all available companions, your party will eventually include a peppy halfling chronicler, a rebellious ex-paladin, a scrappy barbarian, two freed Numerian slaves who are spell-casters of various sorts, a kind-hearted cleric, a grumpy and nihilistic dwarf, an arrogant genius gnome, a goblin who thinks of himself as the chosen of a monstrous goddess, and whatever personality and background you give to your main character.
• Railroading: To some extent inevitable, but the 'Deal with the Devil' quest is on such obvious and aggravating tracks that it's widely complained about. To wit, any attempt you make to stop or kill Linxia before the quest's resolution results in her being simply aggravated and walking away, coming back to torment you later as if nothing happened.
• Random Encounters: You are periodically ambushed on the road, or when resting.
• Real-Time with Pause: Originally the only form of gameplay during combat, until Turn-Based Combat was added in a patch due to fan demand (and an incredibly popular game mod implementing it). Like on the Infinity Engine games you have options to control the autopause (including to pause every 3 seconds, one "round" in-game to simulate a turn-based experience).
• Replay Value: Aside from the multitude of possible class options and other choices that can be made with varying alignments, a lot of the plot elements uncovered later in the game are nicely foreshadowed early on.
• Romance Sidequest: Four options—Valerie, Octavia, and Regongar for males, Tristian, Octavia, and Regongar for females. And a fifth, hidden option for both genders—namely, Nyrissa herself, though it crosses into Guide Dang It! territory. The Wildcards DLC adds Kaessi as another bisexual option. The Varnhold's Lot DLC has Maegar Varn for a female General and a one-night stand with Willas Gunderson for both.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Your Main Character becomes first a Baron then a King (or Baroness and then Queen). This doesn't stop you from going out and murdering the entire population of bandits in your kingdom personally.
  • This is also a point that Jubilost makes when writing his report on the Barony - that he not only was saved by the Baron/ess him/herself, but that they're taking an active role in protecting their subjects from harm.
• Sadistic Choice:
  • What will you choose: send the militia to protect your helpless citizens or secure the merchants' trade routes? The former are innocent civilians and contribute hard to your community. The latter are the backbone of your economy and it will collapse if you don't help them. Of course, you can always delegate someone else to make the decision.
  • Happens in the third part, where you have to choose to either assist Kesten in storming the Womb of Lamashtu and abandon the capital to be sieged by the monsters, resulting in the death of Jhod Kavken, or save the capital but leave Kesten to die. Being Lawful allows you to Take a Third Option, ordering Kesten to protect the capital, while you can either accompany him or storm the Womb alone. A possible bit of Loophole Abuse involves saving one or the other but not talking to them prior to saving the other one as well. Doing so will also spare both men, though this exploit has since been patched out.
  • Prior to this, dealing with the cult behind it has you decide whether or not Olika, the widow of a merchant whose body you'd found during Troll Trouble, should be allowed to receive Lamashtu's "blessing" to save the life of her unborn child, knowing full well what a blessing from the Mother of Monsters could entail. If you let her, the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue states she was killed by an angry mob.
  • The end of Jaethal's companion quest line, especially for non-Evil players - either pull a Grand Theft Me on her daughter, or kill her and raise her up as an Undead. While she can Take a Third Option depending on prior choices, this option kills Jaethal, as she effectively tells Urgathoa to go pound salt. Urgathoa responds with a Bolt of Divine Retribution that strips her of her undeath. This is actually key to getting her best ending, though: during the endgame, Pharasma turns out to have restored Jaethal to life afterwards as her own inquisitor.
• Save Scumming: Highly encouraged by the community and even loading screens to the point it warrants a mention here. While a human Dungeon Master can choose to be merciful in the interests of keeping the game going and making sure the players have fun, the game cannot do this and thus relies entirely on the fickleness of the Random Number God. Most infamously, getting the secret ending requires passing a Knowledge Arcana skill check in a conversation you can only have once - If you fail to get this prompt you're locked out of that ending unless you do this, or the next level of editing the save file manually.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • Early on, you can stumble across a camp at the Old Sycamore that is strewn with corpses, and checking it lets you see there are enough supplies to sleep there for one night. Considering the monsters in the rest of the dungeons are fairly weak and easily fought off kobolds, you might be tempted to camp there just to see what happens. Doing so brings out Viscount Smoulderburn, a CR 14 enemy who liberally applies fear effects.
  • During Valerie's Romance Sidequest, she fills the Baron in about the only other man she'd felt comfortable around, and how that led to a physical relationship. The possible replies are a Declaration of Protection, a Love Confession, or a crude joke. Guess which option prematurely ends the romance?
  • You get an oddly large number of chances to introduce yourself by name in Act 3. There's a loading screen tip which you've surely seen a dozen times by now that warns you this might be a bad idea, but some people will do it anyway to be polite or intimidating. Subverted; avoiding your name doesn't actually help. If you don't say it someone else will.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: While storming Irovetti's palace, you run into a group of guards in one of the side corridors who blatantly lie that they're just servants and make a run for it rather than try to fight the Player Party.
• Screw Your Ultimatum!: If you drive the priestess of Lamashtu out of your lands in chapter three, a subsequent random encounter will have you be accosted by several clerics of Lamashtu who threaten to curse you for disrespecting their goddess unless you make amends. Three possible responses, including the Lawful Goodinvoked option, consist of you saying something along the lines of "the hell with that" and attacking them before they can attempt any such curse.
• Shop Fodder: Gems, trinkets and various household items have no purpose other than being sold in bulk for some profit (the vendor dialogue helpfully provides a single button to select all of these at once). Non-magical weapons and armor become this as well later in the game.
• Shout-Out:
  • Linzi, the adorable Halfling Bard, was inspired in part by Lindsey Stirling, as well as the heroine of Kidnapping, Caucasian Style.
  • When you turn the capital into a city, a library will appear on the new map. The head librarian is apparently the Tenth Doctor in disguise:
  Head Librarian: "Sssh! Silence in the library. And best not blink.
  • There's a Shout-Out to Warcraft II in the Back Room of the Kingdom's Tavern. If you click on one of the citizens enough times, he explodes, revealing a non-hostile fae dragon.
  • The host of the Inconsequent Debates has a chance to reference Dragon Age: Origins if you ask her for a good pet name.
  Host: Since 'Barkspawn' is already taken, I suggest 'Sharkprawn'.
  • One of the kingdom upgrade projects is titled "It's a Magical Place", which is the same phrase Agent Coulson utters whenever someone mentions Tahiti.
  • Your captain of the guard mentions his guards spending too much time reading guard-themed literature by a dwarven author named something along the lines of "Baldric Zebras" or "Garlic Tundras".
  • One of the participants in the Rushlight Tournament is helpfully described in a tooltip as a "Sexy Shoeless God of War".
  • Both the looks and personality of the "Honest Guy" acting a vendor outside of the Tenebrous Depths bear a very close resemblance to Patches, a recurring character in FromSoftware games.
• Spiritual Successor: Part of the Western CRPG renaissance. Successor to the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, etc), and by extension Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 (which adapted the same D&D 3rd Edition ruleset that Pathfinder itself is derived from, and the latter of which also featured writing by Chris Avellone).
• Split Personality: Farnirras the Pensive. Contrary to the usual iterations of this trope, Farnirras is a despicable man and wannabe (and eventually de facto) lich who conducted inhuman experiments until one of his victims cursed him with the threat of "his worst enemy", triggering a good split personality who sabotaged his experiments and eventually made a suicide gambit to trap him(self) in a prison only the most talented adventurer and monster slayer could enter. Enter you.
• Stealth Insult: Emphasis on "Insult" during the Rushlight Tournament, as King Irovetti "compliments" your fledgling kingdom while describing in laborious detail just how screwed up it is, and insinuates that you'd killed a member of a wealthy family who was passing through. With a high enough Bluff skill, you can turn this around by mentioning a fact or two that Irovetti would prefer keep quiet, interrupting your speech with a coughing fit. The same can be accomplished by utilizing a Chekhov's Gun.
• Stupid Evil: A lot of the Chaotic Evil options are just murdering allies or other characters for no reason whatsoever beyond feeling like it; for example, while talking to the head of the Academy during the Rushlight Tournament, you have the option to attack her out of the blue, saying something along the lines of "Down with schools and teachers!". Rarely is a Chaotic Evil choice actually smart in a way that isn’t an alternate excuse for something a different alignment would also do, and even fewer of those choices have any semblance of self-preservation for you and your kingdom.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option: In Vordakai's Tomb, even warned as you are by the tooltips and possible in-game knowledge (such as speaking to Kaessi about it), it is impossible to make your companions keep their mouths shut and avoid spawning more soul eaters during the halfway point. The smartest option is for the Player Character to pick the characters best suited for dueling a soul eater whenever prompted by Horagnamon (Jaethal in particular is completely immune to ability drain because she's undead)—or, if using Kaessi, name her because that isn't her true name and thus an attempt to send a soul eater after Kaessi will fail. It is also impossible to avoid giving Horagnamon the player character's name thanks to one of The Nameless Sisters.
  • Of course, you can avoid telling the sisters anything by just entering the tomb based off of information found in Vordakai's journal, but there's no tooltip telling you how, and while the books indicate that you need to use the spell Darkness, that spell was never implemented. The real spell you need to use is Bane.
• Straw Misogynist: A lot of the Six Bears (Amiri's old tribe) fall squarely into this trope. Even the other barbarian tribes aren't shy about calling them idiots for it.
• Super Boss:
  • Blakemoor the Wizard's Arch-Enemy Siroket will show up if you help him and attack both of you. She carries one of the game's best weapons and she knows how to use it.
  • Kill 45 or more minibosses from all around the Stolen Lands and find the key inside the old well (once your capital advances to the rank of City) and you will be able to challenge Farnirras the Pensive, a lich with some of the strongest spells in the game. In his treasure stash are some godly-tier weapons and accessories.
  • Failing to dispel the curse inflicted by the Cloak of Sold Souls on its wearer twice in a row will summon the Bane of the Living, a level 31 astradaemon.
  • The final level of the Tenebrous Depths (added in the Beneath the Stolen Lands DLC) is home to the Spawn of Rovagug, whose hard mode (which requires you to find all quest items across the dungeon's 16 levels, causes Xelliren to fight alongside the Spawn, and is required to obtain the Skin of the Rough Beast) is one of the most difficult fights in the game.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity:
  • The game stops just short of forcing Jubilost into the party (bottlenecking at the river crossing where he can be found and having Linzi gush over his work as an author). He's an alchemist, and comes equipped with a daily supply of acid bombs at the very beginning of a chapter where almost every encounter is rife with trolls who can only be killed by fire or acid. He's also one of the Treasurer candidates, a role you need right off the bat, meaning he's practically mandatory for kingdom management. On a lesser note, you'll likely recruit Ekundayo before reaching Trobold, which is very helpful if your party didn't already have an archer to make use of the oversized, acid-tipped magical longbow Devourer of Metal hidden in the trolls' fortress.
  • Lostlarn Keep from the Varnhold's Lot DLC thrusts vast quantities of scrolls and permanent stat boost items on the party shortly before removing Cephal from the group and killing off the rest of your companions other than the General. Justified as the entire dungeon is one big centuries-long prank on the part of the fey.
• Talking The Villain To Death:
  • While some villains can be convinced to part amicably after fighting them, you can avoid the fight entirely with one of them — namely, Nyrissa.
  • In Varnhold's Lot, the Breather Episode after dealing with the City of Hollow Eyes sets the General against a Galtan agent provocateur stirring up trouble in the town. With the right skill checks, the peasants he's riled up will knock him on the head and apologize for bothering you.
• Take a Third Option: Many dialogues will unlock extra options depending on various factors, from passing a hidden check to having certain class abilities or spells on hand. Not all of them are necessarily better than the others.
• Take Your Time: Averted. All major quests must be tackle before the time limit or it's Game Over. This goes the same for your companions' sidequests, as taking too long will result in failure. If you save kingdom projects for later or stall the expansion of your kingdom for months or even years, you'll pay for it dearly during the last to second chapter.
• The Storyteller: Besides the Blind Seer with the same name as this trope, there's also an artisan named Shaynih'a who tells a variety of...interesting stories that totally happened. The quest associated with her is even called One Thousand and One Questionable Stories.
• Tie-In Novel: Chris Avellone composed a tie-in tabletop Pathfinder adventure called "The Puzzle Box" that is available in the PC version's DLC stores.
• Timed Mission: Some quests need to be addressed before the time limit expires. In Act 1, you must defeat the Stag Lord within three months or you lose the game. Furthermore, there are certain events that build up while you manage your Kingdom, and if you don't address the problem in a timely fashion, it's Game Over.
• Trauma Inn: Sleeping in a proper bed on normal or lower difficulty will cure whatever ails you, including permanent ability damage, which otherwise only cures with restoration spells or at a rate of one point of ability damage cured per day of resting.
• Troll: The Lantern King is an especially malevolent one, and Shyka the Many floats between this and The Gadfly.
• Turn-Based Combat: Originally unavailable on launch, but was eventually added with the Definitive Edition patch. It can be used as an alternate to the default Real-Time with Pause.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable:
  • Some end-game Kingdom events have a difficulty check of 40 - if you don't have an advisor that can handle it, it's effectively a Non-Standard Game Over. The designers did implement a workaround by having the Kingdom be "invincible", but it's still frustrating.
  • It's also possible, through Stupid Evil means, to kill every possible candidate for some advisor posts rendering the kingdom segment unwinnable without making it invulnerable. This can border Unintentionally Unwinnable given how much of a genocidal lunatic you have to be to kill or fail to recruit all of them, but Councilor is extremely easy to run out of candidates for. Tristian can be killed at the beginning of Chapter 4, Tsanna can be killed multiple times throughout the game, and Shandra Mervey never shows up if she's not chosen in Chapter 1.
    • Fortunately, any mercenary you hire can be placed in any advisor position, though they receive a flat -4 penalty. Rarely the ideal choice, but always an option.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: In Candlemere Tower, there is a message left by someone driven insane by Yog-Sothoth.^note  This would've been a Shout-Out, except the Outer Gods and Great Old Ones actually exist here. Sort-of justified, considering it has nothing to do with the story at all, but is still strange that no-one, not even Jubilost, ever brings it up.
• Useless Useful Spell: Taking the Spell Focus: Universalist feat seem amazing. This would increase the DC of all your spells. At least until you realize that they are NO SPELLS in the game that are considered universal, making this feat a complete waste.
• Vancian Magic: Appropriately to the game's use of relatively closely followed Pathfinder rules (which are in turn based on those of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Edition), Wizards, Clerics, Druids, Magi (except for the Eldritch Scion archetype), Rangers, Paladins, and Rogues of the Eldritch Scoundrel archetype must prepare their spells in advance, whether from a spellbook or through prayer. Additionally, Alchemists do not technically cast spells, but rather prepare potions and bombs, but their potions and bombs are prepared in advance like spells and most have the same effect as spells. Magi, however, can downplay the limitations of Vancian Magic as they can spend points from their Arcane Pool to recharge spells even outside of rest, letting them pull out an extra use or two of a spell in a pinch. Other magic-using classes (Bards, Sorcerers, Inquisitors, and Magi of the Eldritch Scion archetype) avert this trope and are referred to as "spontaneous casters". Spontaneous casters instead prepare a certain number of undifferentiated spells of each level they can cast each time they rest and may cast known spells of that level in any combination. In exchange, spontaneous casters generally aren't allowed to know as many spells as classes that have to prepare their spells. A multiclassing character may have multiple lists of prepared spells, both spontaneous and prepared spells, or multiple pools of spontaneous spells.
• Video Game Caring Potential: invoked Most Neutral Good options veer on this theme, but resolving your companion's personal quests and bringing them closure on their problems is completely possible, as well as attempting to generally be a do-gooder with your subjects and allies. Sometimes it even affects their alignment: Regongar can shift from Chaotic Evil to Chaotic Neutral if you play your cards right in his companion questline.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Comes hand in hand with the options to choose (and shift towards) an Evil alignment:
  • You can "solve" pretty much any problem in your kingdom by executing people for even minor offenses. In some cases you can even arrest or execute the one who accused the culprit for wasting your time.
  • You can willingly ally with or enslave some of the villains after defeating them, including Hargulka, Tartuk and Vordakai.
  • You can kill Tristian after he finds out he's been duped by Nyrissa and begs you for forgiveness.
  • You can also choose to kill Jubilost and Ekundayo as soon as you meet them, for no other reason than they annoy you.
  • Octavia and Ekundayo are kind-hearted and altogether pleasant people. With certain choices during their personal quests, you can corrupt them into becoming cruel and selfish for the former, and hellbent on revenge for the latter.
  • Companion quests in general give a chance to be a total jerk and sometimes shift your allies towards that mindset. You can have Valerie prove her resolve to leave Shelyn's faith resulting in the goddess forgiving her and allowing her to part amicably, or assist her in a bout of murderous, vengeful rampage against her former order. You can shift Jaethal towards being somewhat merciful and avoiding unnecessary bloodshed, or encourage her idea that power comes first whatever the price.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: The Sadistic Choice in the Twice-Born Warlord chapter no longer makes Amiri and Tristian's companion quests mutually exclusive, and has instead been turned into this. You can now accomplish both if you hurry, but only if you don't put petty vengeance above helping fight off an army of invading barbarians. Trying to do it the other way around gets you a What the Hell, Hero? from Jamandi, and a permanent failure on Amiri's companion quest.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Maegar Varn and Cephal Lorentus in the Varnhold's Lot DLC. The one is a invoked Chaotic Good rogue and a naturally gifted tactician but bad at seeing the big picture. The other is a Lawful Evilinvoked wizard (and worshiper of Asmodeus) who is a very gifted manager, but often overly suspicious of others' motives. They argue in every scene, but they're best friends. Parodied late in the DLC's major dungeon, where you observe illusory versions of Maegar and Cephal arguing about whether to build a hospital on a cursed cemetery, or to put a mill on the cemetary and the hospital in a plague-ridden wasteland.
• We Cannot Go On Without You:
  • In the main game, if the Baron/ess dies, that's it, it's an immediate game over and you have to reload a save. This can be particularly frustrating if you have, say, Tristian at level 9+ with a Raise Dead memorized, or have a Raise Dead scroll in inventory, or any number of other ways of raising the player right there without even leaving the map. What this is probably meant to reflect is the nature of your curse, ala how Kanerah demonstrates it with her diabolic contract: the instant she "died", the contract was annulled, despite the fact that she was returned to life (albeit with conditions). Similarly, the nature of your curse means that when you "die", your barony/kingdom is instantly doomed, even if you get restored to life through some means. That situation isn't clear until more than halfway through the game, though, when you've probably had access to even directly-casted raising for a while, particularly if you've been diligent on sidequests.
  • Similarly, if Varn, Cephal or the General die in Varnhold's Lot, it's an instant game over, though this is likely more to do with "well the story's over if they die then", since Varn and Cephal have specific fates to meet in their chapter, and if the General fails to stop Illusia and meet with the Horned Huntsman, things get much, much worse and probably unmanageable for the Baron/ess.
• What Measure Is a Mook?:
  • The game's treatment of its kobolds, mites, trolls, goblins, and even human barbarians can be seen as a deconstruction, depending on your choices and the Player Character's Character Alignment. invoked They are all capable and guilty of 'evil' acts, that evil may seem intrinsic to their culture, but the way they live and act is significantly influenced by the fact that they're treated as disposable monsters and mooks rather than thinking, feeling beings. The kingdom of Trobold, despite its early stumbles, can grow into a peaceful ally — but it requires the Baron/ess to possess a Chaotic alignment, to be willing to challenge convention and take what the game acknowledges is a fairly serious risk. It can pay off in the ending, where Hargulka's trolls and/or Tartuk's kobolds can become peaceful allies who actually rush to your aid in the final chapter.
  • The kobolds and mites of the Old Sycamore and the goblin tribes of the eastern Dunsward can also become allies, or at least cordial neighbours, through picking the right options (requiring a Neutral alignment for the former and doing Nok-Nok's quest for the latter). This allows the player to build lairs for goblins, kobolds and possibly trolls in the capital, making groups of them a common sight when you walk its streets. Chief Sootscale and Queen B'daah will also rally to your side in the final chapter alongside their tribes.
• What the Hell, Hero?: In "The Twice-Born Warlord", if you choose to complete "Betrayer's Flight" before "Hour of Rage", you'll come in for a positively vicious one from Jamandi Aldori: Your delay to go after Tristian (formerly required if you wanted to complete his Romance Sidequest) meant the Restovan army had to fight Armag's barbarians without your reinforcements. They suffer severe casualties winning a Pyrrhic Victory, and Jamandi's adopted son Kassil (one of your potential advisors) is killed fighting in her bodyguard.

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Get ready. Get scared. Learn. Listen.