It's mostly linear. However, players do have a number of options in Book 4; if they want to be Evil, for instance, or are gullible and make some poor choices at the start of Book 4 they can end up working with the villains for a bit.
If I were to make a suggestion, you might consider investing in Hero Labs. It'll be a little bit of money to get the extra data packets you need... but it significantly improves playtime (especially when you import the enemies directly into the player's folder - the system can run initiatives and edit in hit points and the like on the fly... and then transfer looted equipment to the players). However, if you do that you might want to ask the players to chip in a few dollars toward it - you're looking at a significant investment.
Or you could just write up the data onto index cards to have on hand. It's extra work, but having everything before you helps.
While in APs 1-3 there are some towns and the like you can visit to sell equipment, in AP 4 there is a traveling merchant who if the players befriend will be able to do this while the players are away from civilization.
Oh. And I have not seen anything which would require Paladins to atone. This is a "Save the World" situation, and while you're out to stop Elvanna... there may be methods of doing this without necessarily helping out the Greater Evil when the end-game comes about.
Good luck! Reign of Winter (or as I jokingly call it, my "Skyrim" campaign) has reinvigorated my tabletop game. You guys will hopefully have a lot of fun. :)
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Spoilers obviously.
1) incorporating new PCs in the future - especially after they get the Mantle unless there is some means to grant the mantle to new PC characters.
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I'm also less worried about selling equipment than I am about how the PCs will get access to magic items other than what they discover (or the few items noted as being available for sale in a given area). While I am suggesting crafting - my concern is that there may not many moments of downtime for that crafting to occur.
The mercane merchant in Pathfinder #70 referred to earlier can both buy and sell equipment. He was placed specifically in that adventure so that the PCs would have access to a "magic shop" of sorts for the remainder of the campaign, so no need to worry - just make sure your players rescue him so they can take advantage of his services!
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Again, considering the Mantle is an involuntary benefit and geas, I don't think a Paladin would suffer from aiding Baba Yaga. In addition, while she is evil, she's not exactly the Greater Evil some suggest she is. I mean, think of it. She invaded a region... conquered a slice of land in 40 days... but didn't bother to seize the rest of the Northlands. She could have. It's doubtful anyone would have been able to stop her. But that wasn't her game plan.
She has also established a government that she ensures does not become over-powerful, by removing the head of state every 100 years and replacing her with a new ruler. From the sounds of things she also trains her daughters on how to rule... so the region in some ways is in better shape than regions where the ruler is selected on the basis of hunting down and killing something big and nasty. Yup. Like strength of arms is going to prove you're a good ruler.
And as far as the rest of the world is concerned, Baba Yaga isn't a vast threat. She focuses on one area of Golarion as far as most are concerned and for 99 years of her time isn't even here. Helping her and preventing her daughter from achieving her goal of world domination is in fact not an evil act. NOT working to stop Elvanna would be one, in my view.
Mind you, when the Paladin finds out what's happening to Baba Yaga's daughters, THEN is when the moral crisis will occur. But even then the Paladin could decide to rescue her and then ask as payment that she stop the activity in question that is so problematic. And hey, once they've found Baba Yaga... there's always the option of trying to take out Elvanna without freeing her. Probably wouldn't work, but it's an option.
Well said Tangent101:)
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Although, for the first three books in the AP, it is nearly a literal "breadcrumb" quest. I get the impression from my players that they felt things opened up a bit once they got to Waldsby (until the Pale Tower soldiers showed up) so it may give the illusion of being a bit more non-linear to someone not privy to the entire plot.
My players are having a blast of a time with this story, linear or otherwise.
I wonder if the three book bread crumb thing is a required convention for paizo ap design as runelords did the same thing.
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Here's the thing - all APs are linear. Some just do a better job of hiding the rails than others. Kingmaker feels like you can explore anywhere, but really, can you? Sure, if you go off the map in the wrong direction, you can encounter stuff way outside your APL. Head east into Varnhold at first level, and you'll probably be in big trouble the first encounter you run across. But what happens if you go north from Oleg's Trading Post? What do you run into there? Nobody knows but the GM, because the writers don't plan for you to do that. You can totally do that, if you want, but you're no longer playing the AP.
Reign of Winter's big problem, I feel, is that there's no real tie to Haldren. Rise of the Runelords and Skull and Shackles gave you some good ties to the communities you found yourself involved in, but Haldren? Heck, you don't spend much time there at all, and that's unfortunate due to the connection Haldren has later on in the first volume. I get that you're not going to be staying there long, and that's a strong reason not to detail things any more than was done in the book, but surely cutting some of the encounters along the way to the lodge could have been done in order to flesh out something in the village itself?
Helgren has the possibility of meaning something, but only if the GM so chooses to develop it as such. For instance, Gluttony has a RoW campaign in which at least one of the characters has lived in Helgren all her life (I'm not sure about the other two and I know the dwarf travels a bit). There's enough there so the town can be the homebase... and I could even see starting the players off at 1st level, having them do a few minor adventures in the area (fighting goblins or the like) and then suddenly the weird stuff starts happening with winter coming in the middle of summer.
While RoW has reignited my tabletop game and has inspired me... it's Runelords (which I'm running over Skype) that I'm truly enjoying. And I even want to run it a second time and take advantage of stuff I've read on the forums to make it better the second time around. Part of that is because Sandpoint is in many ways a living community. Helgren is just a dot with a name on the map.
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And that's kinda what I would have liked in the adventure, Tangent. If I had to do it over again, I'd toss out a lot of the stuff leading up to the lodge, and run some stories in Heldren itself before the snows hit. You have to establish what's normal before you can shake it up, after all!
Yeah, Sandpoint's an amazing creation, and it's probably not fair to judge a three page article on a tiny village in Taldor to that larger work. But man, there's some good stuff in there.
Same here. But then, I was transferring an existing campaign over that had 3rd and 4th level characters (which is why I'm upping the difficulty level of everything), so I had even less chance to build Helgren. Then again, Helgren is now occupying the space formally occupied by Thurmaster (as I was originally getting ready to put the group through Night Below, which I was busy converting to Pathfinder) so there was no real chance for me to build up the area (which they had just reached - I was using old Dungeon magazine modules up 'til now).
Really, the main reason my players are so enthused about it is because my own enthusiasm on running RoW... and for one player not having to hide his own memories of Night Below as he'd been in my previous NB campaign (the rest of the group are new players). And no one wanted to reroll new characters; they were already invested in the existing group. Still, I wish I could get the group together more often. Once a month isn't enough. ^^;;
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Again I see the problem of expectation management. Reign of Winter is essentially a "travel" AP - every single adventure takes the PCs further from their hometown. It's not an AP about saving the hometown, or about Irrisen and the machinations of the with queen Elvanna. It's about exploring new places in a classic quest for the Far Away Prize- this being Baba Yaga in this case- with the noble intention of using the prize to save the world.
Sure, you can change things as you want to fit your style (actually, you not only can but SHOULD do this - it's your game for your fun, the published material is just the baseline!), and I certainly agree with the sentiment that in order to make all the weirdness of the AP more powerful and shocking to the PCs you need to establish their hometown to be as normal as possible... but being disappointed that this is not the focus of the AP is pointless. Because the intentions behind the AP are publicly known and were stated many times, in various ways.
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I'm not worried about the travel aspects (I've described this as the Doctor Who Adventure Path - as a serious Whovian it is a main reason I wanted to run it) what I am worried about, a bit, is that the highly linear nature of the first book (and from what I've seen the next book as well) may grow boring for my players after a while - when they feel like there aren't many options for them to choose amongst.
Perhaps some of this comes down to the heavy influence of Nadya in book 1 and 2. If she wasn't there, or was there but in a reduced capacity, perhaps this would give the PCs more autonomy? Could this work?
Best Regards
Herremann the Wise
I made the mantle of the black rider literally that, his mantle. He tore it up and the PC's ate a square of it. If one of them dies I'm going to have it creep out of their throat and ruffle in their dying breaths.
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I'm not worried about the travel aspects (I've described this as the Doctor Who Adventure Path - as a serious Whovian it is a main reason I wanted to run it) what I am worried about, a bit, is that the highly linear nature of the first book (and from what I've seen the next book as well) may grow boring for my players after a while - when they feel like there aren't many options for them to choose amongst.
Would you mind sharing how far you've read, and how far your group has gotten? Also, please clarify what you mean by "linear". Do you mean that you feel events have to occur in a certain order, or that it feels to the players like their choices don't matter?
Book 4 is the least linear so far with all of the encounters inside of the Hut taking place in any order and then blowing wide open once the PCs are outside on Triaxus. The first person they meet could either be their guide for the entire book or maybe because of just one slight misunderstanding they kill her and her dragonkin companion and that's the end of her story. The PCs might then end up helping the "good guys", aiding the "bad guys", or helping neither and fighting off both sides in the skirmish. Expect to do some serious back and forth page flipping.
Overall, the entire metaplot is linear: Adventure, Hut, adventure, back to the Hut, adventure, Hut, ZOMG RASPUTIN, etc. etc., kill the queen I guess?
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By linear I mean literally in a line with limited flexibility about the order of encounters throughout the first section.
After the Lodge, the PCs have a choice. Assuming she's still alive, they can either escort Lady Argentea back to Heldren, then go looking for the Winter Portal, or they can turn her loose and go looking for the Portal immediately. Once they do go for the Portal, there is still a visible trail that leads from the Lodge to it, though it might have been covered up in the time it took to get to Heldren and back *wink*. The same caveat applies: if you want to change the order of things, you can, but there's no real reason to because the order isn't all that meaningful in the first place. The only important plot element that appears between the Lodge and the Portal is Thora.
Once through the Winter Portal, the PCs are presented with another objective they must reach: unless they get to Waldsby, they're going to be caught in a snowstorm, and their best bet is to make a beeline for the village. The intervening encounters are written to be totally linear, in that at least the third and fourth encounters are written under the assumption that the second has occurred. The encounters in Waldsby are also meant to be played in sequence, though they can lead to a pileup on the PCs if that's more your speed.
Once in the Pale Tower things open up a bit, since the way to Radosek is not immediately obvious even if the PCs have Hatch with them.
Tovarisch Ansel is right to say that Books 3 and 4 feel less linear. The route to Book 3's dungeon is pretty linear as written, but once inside the players are meant to explore and get a feel for the place's branching layout that can deposit them someplace new without it being obvious or warning them. Book 4 is written as three parallel adventures, and the players can, if they are clever enough, jump from track to track if they want.
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@Lord Snow: I get that RoW is a story about interplanar murderhobos, so giving a involved background for Heldren is unnecessary. If they had lovingly crafted this little hamlet as much as Sandpoint, I'd be wondering why they spent so much time describing a place that only exists for the first half of the first book.
My problem is with the encounters, and the way they are presented. If I had to do this again, I would rewrite the traits so that all of the PCs are natives of Heldren, and about the first session or two would be doing simple things around the environs (chase off the bandits, defend the farm from goblins, etc.). The last thing would be a short expedition into a cave to fight off a cult of some demon god or another. The actual reason they go into a cave doesn't matter, only the fact that they go underground for long enough for the winter portal to drop. They leave the cave to come out to find a full blizzard raging in the middle of summer. They can try to wait it out, but to no avail. They need to fight the environment to get back to Heldren. When they return, they find that the noblewoman has been kidnapped, and they need to go after her. They have an abridged version of the trip out to the cabin, and the path begins from there.
It's only my opinion, but I think this opening works better than the official one. It establishes Heldren without being too terribly central to the plot, gives PCs some time to grow into their characters, and is more engaging than "a monster jumps you on the way to the lodge." I think the story gets far more interesting once you get to the winter portal, but that's several sessions before you even get to the reason behind the game.
Short version: It's not a bad opening. It's just a bit on the 'meh' side for my tastes, and I'd like to try to hide the rails as much as possible from the players. If you don't see any problems with it, then you're free to run it as-is! I can only say what works for me and my particular group of players.
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My problem is with the encounters, and the way they are presented. If I had to do this again, I would rewrite the traits so that all of the PCs are natives of Heldren, and about the first session or two would be doing simple things around the environs (chase off the bandits, defend the farm from goblins, etc.).
I don't think the PCs all need to be natives of Heldren. One of the themes running through the AP is that the PCs have to get accustomed to exotic things over and over again. So why not have their original meeting be a chance-meeting, bringing together really diverse people? Heck, the Runelords PCs weren't all supposed to be natives of Sandpoint!
What's more, the adventure actually gives you some material to work with in establishing Heldren, in the form of the first gather information table. Take that, and rework it to take the form of a series of encounters. Maybe the PCs are in town "two weeks ago" when Lady Argentea's caravan passes through. Maybe Dryden Kepp hires the PCs to help him retrieve his traps, so they can get a look at the forest before the Winter Portal opens and the snows of summer descend. Maybe, soon after the Portal opens, Old Man Dansby hires the PCs to keep watch over his fields...and they wake up the next morning having been color sprayed into unconsciousness by the sprites, with only a vague memory of what they saw the night before, and a thin rime of frost on the crops that melts by noon.
The module has some good material on Heldren, it just puts it in an awkward place. By the time the PCs are trekking through the snow-clad Border Wood, the fact that the body they found actually belonged to Dryden Kepp or the farmer's sun is going to be the farthest thing from their minds. These things are introduced at the right time to be creepy, but too late to effectively aid in establishing Heldren.
Heldren worked as-is for me for one reason: I switched campaigns. Thus the group was slowly working their way to Thurmaster/Heldren and were even given warnings in Milbourne about the unusually cold weather near Heldren. The main reason they went there was to make a delivery (that they were paid for). And then adventuring hooks were deployed. ;)
I doubt I'll be running Reign of Winter a second time. This is not because it's not a good AP but rather because two of my players are in both my groups (one is Skype-based and the other a tabletop game with one Skype player). While RoW reignited the tabletop group, it doesn't quite have the same charm for me that Runelords (Anniversary version) does (which I WOULD run for the Tabletop group eventually... seeing it'll likely be two years before I run it again, the two players redoing Runelords would likely not recall that much, especially after I modified things).
Zimmerwald's suggestion would make for a better start for the series, however. Part of the reason Runelords works is players want to protect their new home. But RoW lacks that immediacy. Why save the world if you have no attachment to the area?
Saving the world is about more then saving one small town, thats why it can be stuck anywhere and why the players dont necessarily need to feel connected to the town, tho there is nothing wrong with either camp i'm just throwing it out there