I'm looking for input on creating a small AP


Adventures


I have been running games since about 1990 so I've pretty much got GMing down. However, I just made the update from 3.5 to Pathfinder (I know, finally, right?) after a brief intermission with 4E but we won't discuss that.

Well now I have the opportunity to dive in with a whole new group of players I have never had the pleasure of playing with before (experienced roleplayers, however) and I want to put together a little set of adventures for them. I'd like to run an AP but I'm not going to make that level of commitment to a group of players I have never gamed with before and may grow irksome or flaky. In addition I have never run nor have they ever played Pathfinder though we are all VERY familiar with 3.5 so that shouldn't be much of an issue.

I considered the Falcon's Hollow adventures as I ran Hollow's Last Hope as the kick-off of my last campaign but I don't want to bother with converting over to Pathfinder if I don't have to.

I read a bit about the Crypt of the Everflame > Masks of the Living God > City of Golden Death series but it just wasn't grabbing me as it seems a tad too dungeoncrawly for my tastes.

I'd like to start with Master of the Fallen Fortress because it seems like a basic yet decent introduction to the game for newbies and a simple run at that. The modules that are jumping out at me right now are Feast of Ravenmoor and Carrion Hill and I think I'd like to build this path with them included.

So I'd like some input for you fine folks that are more familiar than I about these modules. What should I put in to the beginning? Godsmouth Heresy perhaps? Maybe something 3.5? Are there mergeable characters or groups or themes I might make use of? Pitfalls that may crop up if not planned for? I'd like to maintain a tone similar to those presented in the two modules I mentioned above.

I run games in my own homebrew world so locations in Golarion are unimportant and I'm probably going to group everything into the same location anyway. I'm just looking for something fun and easy that tells a bit of a larger story than just the stand-alone modules.


Well I know you mentioned not wanting to commit to an Advenure Path for fear the group may become flaky...

But I would still heartily suggest checking out the AP series as many if not all of the Path installments can be run as stand alone adventures or you could use just one or two books and it would still provide a solid mini campaign arc.
Since you are using a homebrewed world the settings wont matter and they have excellent background and motivations for the storylines.
If you do decided to give them a chance my suggestion is look at Kingmaker, it is very not-dungeon crawly and the story can easily be broken up or modified into an existing campaign. Plus I find the prices pretty competative especially compared to the modules if that is a point of consideration.

I have not run Feat of Ravenmoor, but it is has high reviews and it sounds very good, and once again I feel it could easily be placed within Kingmaker and work very nicely. If you are trying to play straight Pathfinder I would avoid any 3.5 material, even though Pathfinder is backwards compatitable, I find that not everything converts easily and often taking straight 3.5 material will cause problems further down the line as CRs, XP, and stats become a little wonky due to PF changes.
My main thing to keep an eye out for was the classes are given a nice overall vs. 3.5 so characters will surprise you sometimes with their new or unexpected abilities. I hope this helps a little.
Have Fun!
Good Luck!

EDIT: I only now noticed how long ago your original post was "embarrassed face", read May vs. March- But my suggestion would still stand... and I hope your group had a lot of fun with whatever you chose ;-)


You could run the first two books of Rise of the Runelords as a viable minicampaign. Make the villain of #2 be the BBEG of the whole thing, and just run them straight. That gets the PCs from Level 1 to Level 7. You could easily work "Feast of Ravenmoor" as an interlude between them, as well. Depending on how fast you game, that would take three to eight months of real-world playing time.

Alternatively, there's the Darkmoon Vale/Falcon's Hollow series. That gets the PCs to I believe 8th level, but I've neither played nor run them, so I can't comment more on that.


The darkmoon vale series was really good, the final current modual d5 has alot of info from a room the pcs find that you could build te rest of a campaign on.

Sovereign Court

Haladir wrote:

You could run the first two books of Rise of the Runelords as a viable minicampaign.

I would agree with this. Additionally, it gives you then the option to either continue with the AP (which is a great AP IMO), or veer off into homebrew territory if you want to continue with the group (which are my plans for the 3rd running of RotRL I recently started).


I vanish from the boards for a little while and look what happens! :D

Thank you all for the suggestions.

I ended up finally retiring my homebrew world in favor of Golarion. Really, it is just easier to play in a fully supported world. I also ended up buying the Crypt of the Everflame > Masks of the Living God > City of Golden Death series because something about them was really grabbing me. Once I read them I saw that they were not dungeon crawley at all and looked quite fun.

We made characters and sat down and had an awesome first session... and then they flaked a couple times and I got a new job.

All told, we did one session.

It was a fun session though.

Owner - House of Books and Games LLC

EATERoftheDEAD wrote:
I ended up finally retiring my homebrew world in favor of Golarion. Really, it is just easier to play in a fully supported world.

It's funny.

As much as I appreciate the incredible work and detail that has gone into Golarion, it is exactly that which makes it so much harder for me to run in than my home campaign.

Unlike Golarion, where I have to memorize every piece of information, I made up pretty much everthing in my home campaign over the past 6 years, and as a result I have a pretty darn good handle on what's where without looking it up.

For Golarion, I have to pore over setting sourcebooks and the like in order to make sure I'm not contradicting written source material. Yeah, I know, I'm the GM, change it if I want, but that's not what I want to do .. if it's in a sourcebook I want to use it, rather than invent something and later on have to go "oh CRAP I got it backwards" and retcon it.

I'm running two campaigns right now; one is in my home campaign at a crazy level, the other is Carrion Crown, where the PCs just finished Harrowstone and just hit 4th level. You'd think the high-level game would be harder to prep for, but I have to spend just as much time pre-reading the existing materials for Carrion Crown as I do writing material from scratch for the high-level game.

Of course, that might just be my own personal obssessive nature coming home to roost :)


gbonehead wrote:
EATERoftheDEAD wrote:
I ended up finally retiring my homebrew world in favor of Golarion. Really, it is just easier to play in a fully supported world.

It's funny.

As much as I appreciate the incredible work and detail that has gone into Golarion, it is exactly that which makes it so much harder for me to run in than my home campaign.

Unlike Golarion, where I have to memorize every piece of information, I made up pretty much everthing in my home campaign over the past 6 years, and as a result I have a pretty darn good handle on what's where without looking it up.

Same. I've dropped a LOT of time in working on my setting, Finiens, between using it for campaigns and even a short-lived attempt to make a NWN server (that might be being revived shortly, who knows?) to using it as the setting for a book I'm writing. I have - intentionally - a lot of gaps in the history, that are slowly getting filled by new story ideas, campaigns I'm running or have run in the past, or other new ideas. I know it backward and forward and the things I forget I know pretty well how to find in the massive document of notes I've made over the past few months/year or so.


My homebrew world had been with me for a VERY long time but it just became too time consuming. I tend to play fast and loose with the setting, plus focus on little pieces at a time so it never becomes unwieldy for me. So really the material as written is mutable for me. I pull what I want and ignore other things. Working on a smaller scale makes it easier to not contradict myself later on.

I like having a prewritten setting so I can grab a map and be all 'this is where you guys are' without having to rearrange or rename things and so on. To each their own, obviously, but I just got too busy to continue developing my own world.

Owner - House of Books and Games LLC

It's actually a pretty good setting for that. While there's lots of places described on the grand scale, at the micro scale it's pretty wide open.

Take one of my favorite setting books, Isles of the Shackles. The Shackles are huge, and while the book describes a lot, when you get down to brass tacks there's far more that it doesn't describe than it does, which means you could create tons of material there that doesn't contradict a darn thing :)


gbonehead wrote:

It's actually a pretty good setting for that. While there's lots of places described on the grand scale, at the micro scale it's pretty wide open.

Take one of my favorite setting books, Isles of the Shackles. The Shackles are huge, and while the book describes a lot, when you get down to brass tacks there's far more that it doesn't describe than it does, which means you could create tons of material there that doesn't contradict a darn thing :)

It's this approach to world building that I love about Paizo. They seem to have catered to all styles of play, design, etc. I want to run a steampunk game, oh there's an area for that. I wanna run a cave man game, oh there's an area for that. I wanna run vikings vs ninjas, oh there's a whole AP for that.

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder Adventures / I'm looking for input on creating a small AP All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Pathfinder Adventures