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To the OP: as the developer of the Pathfinder Modules line, I wanted to address your concerns personally. Since you clearly took a lot of time to compose your thoughts and post them here, that seemed the least I could do.
I mean this as an honest criticism, so please forgive me if this sounds harsh (it is certainly not meant as a personal criticism of anyone) but the Modules line, as it stands today, seems like little more than a proving ground of sorts for adventure authors that Paizo is vetting or possibly grooming for bigger things.
That role is covered more these days by the Pathfinder Society Scenarios line, which, as a PDF-only product line involves less production cost for the risk, and the difficult nature of designing a tiered adventure for organized play allows us to really test people in a crucible of design difficulty.
Let me explain. First, it is a well known fact that the opportunity to write a module in the PF Modules line is the grand prize, if you will, of the RPG Superstar contest. So, one out of six of the adventures that we'll see in a year of the PF Modules line is written by a newcomer to the industry, and that's a good thing. Cultivating fresh talent is critical to the future health of the gaming industry that we all (presumably) love. However, it also means that Paizo is accepting a certain level of risk. This is, after all, the professional maiden voyage of someone who won a contest, which leads me to my second point.
That's true; it is a risk for us. That's why we only offer it to the winner. But that's a risk we're willing to take to give people the incentive to participate. You'll note that the runners-up were offered Pathfinder Society Scenarios, which have smaller word-counts (and thus less pay) and are less prominent as they're never printed and sold in stores. But one module a year by an untested author is an ok risk, as far as I'm concerned, in order to promote RPG Superstar and to truly reward the person who lasts to the end and comes out on top.
The Pathfinder Modules line is bi-monthly. I believe that a two month gap in the line is intentional because many of the developers in this line are not full time employees of Paizo and thus there is the risk that the initial drafts, reworks, etc might not arrive on time or at a level of quality that Paizo is comfortable with. I'm guessing that the two month gap between adventures is a safety net to allow Paizo time to recover from an adventure author who drops the ball for whatever reason.
I am the primary developer on the Pathfinder Modules line, and I am a full-time employee at Paizo, so that isn't the reason for the bi-monthly production schedule—not directly at least. While I work on this bi-monthly line and handle all the outlining, assigning, art ordering, revisions, and general freelancer back-and-forth as the adventures are written, I'm also doing the same same thing with the Pathfinder Society Scenarios line, which involves two scenarios a month. Thus, in a two month period, I'm personally overseeing, from start to finish, five adventures. To add another 32-page module on top of that would simply be more than I (or anyone, for that matter) could have time for and maintain both the high quality we strive for at Paizo and a semblance of sanity (not to mention a marriage and social life). Paizo is growing, and it may be that we take on more developers as time goes on who can help with some of the workload and enable this line to go monthly, but that's not something we have specific plans for at the moment.
Third, the PF modules line has been, at least up to now, a 32 page softcover. I believe that this, again, is by Paizo design as an intentional risk management firewall against a new or inexperienced adventure author getting in over their head with a project too large for them to handle. And, of course, poor sales on a 32 page adventure is a more easily absorbed loss than a 96 page super adventure that sells poorly.
This comes back to the same issue as above. Development of the adventures in our Pathfinder Adventure Path line (which usually come in around 55 pages, on average) are a full-time job for my fellow Developer, Rob McCreary. Doubling the size of the Pathfinder Modules line would necessitate the hiring of an additional person to take on development of it, as that amount of work is enough to occupy someone's plate all the time. As Vic pointed out above, it's also not something we can vary from month to month, and even changing the product length (and thus price) on people who have been subscribing for going on 5 years no would likely result in more cancelled subscriptions than it would net. That is the real risk with making changes to the format of the adventures, not a fear of a freelancer dropping the ball. We trust all of our freelancers to be professional and turn in the absolute best material in the industry, and we wouldn't assign someone to a project if we didn't think they could do it.
Or, to put it another way, I understand that there is great reluctance (justifiably so btw) in making any significant changes to the very successful Pathfinder AP formula (6 adventures, monthly, starts 1st level, finishes at 13th-17th level), but why can't the PF Modules line be more dynamic in its content, format and even release schedule?
As I said above, our subscription model means we can't be dynamic with the format of books that belong to subscription-based lines. You'll notice, for example, that our forthcoming Rise of the Runelords hardcover is not part of a line, as it wouldn't fit within what our subscribers tend to expect from month to month. That said, I feel the content of recent modules has been very dynamic. Adventures such as The Harrowing and The Ruby Phoenix Tournament are stories and types of adventures that we haven't done anywhere else, and that, at least internally, really excite us in terms of non-standard adventures we'd like to run or play. Coming up, we have The Moonscar, in which high-level PCs travel to the moon to face demons in an outer space jungle. That's pretty non-standard if you ask me, and not something we could do with any of our other product lines. The Modules line, as a relatively low word count line of one-off adventures is actually the perfect place for us to do weird or experimental adventures that might not be everyone's cup of tea. After all, if something doesn't interest you, you aren't committed to running five other adventures around it, and can simply not use that single adventure.
Hollow's Last Hope, Crown of the Kobold King, Revenge of the Kobold King, Hungry are the Dead, Tower of the Last Baron and Treasure of Chimera Cove were loosely connected, but that trend seems to have stopped in the modules line for the past year.
With only six adventures a year, one of which we're committed to having as the annual RPG Superstar module, that leaves only five to work with for linked adventures. And if the level range or concept of even a two-part arc isn't to people's liking, that's a third of our annual production run that we risk having lower sales on, as opposed to the normal sixth that we risk with any product. At the moment, there are no plans for other linked modules, but I wouldn't rule it out as something we'll never do again.
What we have done this year, however, is link a module (this month's The Ruby Phoenix Tournament) to the metaplot of our Pathfinder Society Organized Play campaign for the season, thus synergizing the two product lines and adding an additional level of continuity to the world as a whole. If folks like this, we may do other crossover modules down the line.
The most obvious, to me, is the mega dungeon crawl. Most of the ones that I've seen done well (ToEE, Ruins of Castle Greyhawk, Undermountain) are not going to fit into a 32 page module, but nor are they likely going to be your entire campaign. Rappan Athuk Reloaded and Slumbering Tsar from Frog God Games are two exceptions of mega dungeons that are, IMO, full campaigns but they include more than just dungeon delves in a specific site. The dungeons listed in the book 'Dungeons of Golarion' would make good candidates here.
I agree. These would make awesome adventures, and we've said for a long time that we'd love to do a megadungeon book. But as stated above, it can't be part of this line, as people didn't sign on to the subscription with that as a contingent. If we were to do one down the line, it would likely be handled like the Rise of the Runelords compilation coming out this summer. But until we have such an adventure that we're ready to publicly announce, we could always handle it differently.
'Sandbox with walls' areas, as I call them, are also good candidates. This is a valley, or a kingdom, or a forest, or some other geographic area that will have numerous encounters and sites for adventure in it, but it is designed specifically for a limited range of levels. 'The Valley of So-and-So' details 50 different encounters, for levels 7-9. It won't fit into a (single) 32 page module but it also isn't something that merges nicely into a themed Adventure Path. Nor is it necessarily an area large enough for an entire campaign. Falcon's Hollow is a good example; not coincidentally, the area around FH made for my favorite series of adventures in the Modules line to date.
That's actually an interesting idea. I think we might be able to do a series of adventures in the same region to do this sort of thing, similar to how the early adventures in the line were often set in Absalom or Falcon's Hollow, to provide a number of unlinked adventures for GMs to pick apart and use as they needed in a sandbox-style campaign in the same region. It's not really something that we've discussed since I took over the line, so the suggestion is certainly one I'll bring up in our next long-term Pathfinder Modules planning meeting.
Also, there is the 'event' type of adventure. Something significant is going to happen, or should happen, and the PCs either have to make sure that it doesn't or that it does. The event, whatever it is, is big enough that 32 pages isn't going to allow for enough detailed coverage of it, but an entire AP centered around the idea is going to end up stretching the PCs' patience (I felt like this by the end of the Age of Worms AP....cripes show up already, will you, Kyuss?).
Event-based adventures are really hard to pull off, even by experienced authors, and that's one reason we haven't done a ton of them. This month's The Ruby Phoenix Tournament is sort of an event-based adventure, but perhaps it's time to do another one in the future. It has been some time since we did one.
Maybe this is an area that Paizo has consciously decided to leave to third party companies. Certainly Frog God Games has scratched this itch for me up to now. But, when Paizo has enough confidence to branch out into online games and comic books, I have to believe that it can take a calculated risk on the Pathfinder Modules line in order to get it to that next level.
I'll note that both our online and comics products (as well as our various minis lines) are licensed to other companies, meaning they take far less resources than something produced internally. I too want to see the Pathfinder Modules line rise up your excitement ranking and this sort of feedback is exactly what we need to do that. Thanks for taking the time to post such extensive commentary.