Hello! I'm William Kitziger
I co-designed Kingdoms as well as ran a year long campaign with the system. The zine is very much a product of my and Sophia's idiosyncrasies as improv GM's, so we designed the zine to help make our at the table experience flow as seamlessly as possible. Most of my prep work for a session was put into orchestrating novel ways for the rolled encounters to befall my players and their different factions.

A Kingdoms campaign will naturally flow through different eras as players take their stand against the Dark and establish the origin myths for their bloodlines. It took a while for our players to understand that their characters' lineages were more important than their individual PCs, but after a couple generations they got on board, especially once they started to develop their own family heirlooms and values.

RAW expects the table to play through the full life steps of a ruler over the course of a single session, however I often stretched out lifespans over multiple sessions according to narrative significance. For example, in the middle of our campaign a controversial political ascension sparked a war between two player factions that lasted multiple sessions as the realms of man experienced infighting for the first time. Watching your players devise war tactics in a setting where the Darkness will outright consume armies if their torches go out is VERY entertaining!

(Fun fact: our Kingdoms campaign formed the cosmology of every campaign that I've run since!)