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Well, I guess it depends on what you consider the 'good stuff'. What type of campaign are you looking for? Are they big on the action or the roleplay? How do you like gobs of NPCs about? Each AP out there does good at focusing on a different theme, even if multiple ones are in Varisia.

A couple examples
We're partway through Jade Regent, and honestly it was great from the start. We gloss over a lot of the caravan stuff now, and skip random encounters, which helps keep up the pace. It is definitely Tian-Xia themed and even from the get-go hands out Tian treasures. There's also a lot of travel, especially in very cold areas.

I'm running a Crimson Throne group, and my players seem to be enjoying themselves. The first few chapters are really good, and there are lots of GM notes to help out for some of the 3.5 adjustments. It is heavy on the urban side for the first several chapters but don't be fooled, at least two chapters take you out of the city for some railroading.

A different group is playing Serpent's Skull and that's had quite a bit of fun as well. It's heavily jungle-based and very different from our Crimson Throne campaign.

Our group actually took a red mantis under our wing as a cohort. And GM allowed us to have LN as an acceptable assassin alignment. We're just finished with book 4, on to book 5.

Make a Half-Orc Barbarian with the Leadership Feat and a Half-Orc Barbarian Cohort. Look in the Orc Player Companion Book for two feats: Amplified Rage and Warleader's Rage. One increases their rage bonus by +2 for Str/Con. The other allows the orc/half-orc ally to enter rage for free when the other does while in 30'.

Also, if you want a Cavalier that can use it's mount anywhere, you pick a small class (goblin, gnome, halfling, whatever is fun) and a medium size mount. Our Jade Regent game has a gnomish cavalier/summoner on a frilled lizard. She climbs on walls and pokes things with her lance. Its actually the best use for a cavalier I've seen. Smaller means a bit less damage, but lances deal extra damage on a charge, and climbing on walls means less charge obstruction as well.

Our group of 5 has been playing Jade Regent and will complete chapter 2 after approximately 5 months. We play approx 2/month for 8-9 hours of actual gameplay (read that we start at noon and play to 11, but there's leveling time and dinner and joking and such). We do extra roleplay in this one, along with the GM likes to add adventures for us based on our background rolls.

Our smaller gaming group has been alternating between Serpent's Skull and Crimsone Throne for the last 15 months. CT just started Ch5 and SSk is complete through Ch4. We meet for 8-10 hour sessions, at least once a month, usually 2-3 times.

I think it is ok for a player to have a discussion away from the table with the DM in order to orchestrate something with his character without the other PCs knowing. This has happened at our gaming table before, and it has usually worked out ok. Then again the PC in question wasn't killing an NPC we were attached to. If this happens, I would expect the group to handle it in character.

That being said, and having read both threads now, I would recommend that if you haven't yet, to sit down with your player and talk it over. If you really don't want his idea to happen, drop a clue or three as to why her continued presence is vital in a way his character would understand, and how eliminating her currently would have severe negative consequences to their overall goal. Or, reward his vigilance with clues as to how he can use her to defeat the bbeg. Make her usefulness outweigh her liability.

Let us know how it turns out.

I'm going to just throw a couple thoughts out there and I will try to be spoiler free, as my group has finished up chapter 4 for Serpent's Skull.

You are going to be in the Jungle. A LOT. Anything with heavy armor the player's guide also warns is not a good idea.

Druids are really not that bad, depending on the build. My cohort is a Druid with a Dinosaur companion (Allosaurus). "Little Dino" is very at home. My main character is a half-orc barbarian. She is also very at home.

Honestly, you can never have too many fighter-types on the battlefield helping dish out the pain. Perhaps a rogue or ranger to compliment her fighter? I think as long as you pick a fighting style different from hers it shouldn't be too thunder-stealing.

Paladins don't have to worship a specific diety like Clerics do. They just have to be LG.

Our group has two magic item creators, and two others that assist in the creation process. As long as we had the gold, we were able to make anything we needed. I do agree that the amount of useful loot is kindof lacking, but the overall wealth level should balance, especially if you have a magic item creator in the group.

Our GM also found the 'waiting for the resupply trains' to be asinine so he dubbed if we wanted to buy something expensive outright that our camp had magic chest that could teleport items to and from Absalom in order to accomodate us.

Orthos has it. It's a lack of epic rules for the system, and the fact that combat and balance starts to break down at the higher levels.

Our group played Age of Worms through to 20th with 7 players. A combination of so much the characters could do, exacerbated by the number of players and their many cohorts, then add on the number of bad guys needed to challenge us and a single smaller combat could take up an ENTIRE gaming session. I'm talking 8hrs minimum. It was pretty ridiculous.

We've since instilled rules to mitigate a lot of these issues, but the moral of the story is that the rules begin to break down at those higher levels, and couple that with no epic rules and you can't make a BBEG strong enough to challenge the party.

And maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I feel like Epic should be just that....Epic. It's not something any schmoe off the street can attain. The actual # of epic-level creatures/npcs/etc should be extremely rare/low compared to the rest of the world. The great wizard Mordenkainen should be as awesome and rare as the Runelords. And just as hard to locate. There shouldn't be a whole adventuring party equivalent worth in one city.

Why does it have to be cursed?

Woo! I'm #12 now!

I think people LIKE playing paladins as Lawful Stupid.

I honestly played one to epic level in Age of Worms. With the Saint template from Book of Exalted Deeds. This was before they'd come out with the Paladin codes for Iomedae, so I actually went through all the trouble to build a paladin code (based on that 2E Paladin Book it IS good) and develop her with my GM. She was a ball to play. AND she wasn't stupid, though she did get bluffed once or twice by the Neutrally Aligned Necromancer/Cleric in the party. "Oh you'll take care of destroying that +1 Unholy sword? That's awesome!" (I rolled a 1 on my sense motive check) Best roleplaying ever was between my paladin and the necromancer, who were actually good friends in-game.

Well I would make sure that the cocooned things were in fact live prisoners. If they were in a huge spider nest and there's no guarantee how long they were there, then they could likely be dead or not even people but baby spider pouches. She may have done you a favor.

Otherwise, yeah its tough as a paladin to maintain group cohesion when the other players aren't also LG and get bored or decide to antagonize the paladin. Play it as your character would and explain to the players that you have to do what you would in-character. Hopefully everything will work out.

Yeah, they really don't have a huge impact on the main plotline, but what I would keep in mind if you're using it specifically for a prequel it may be fun to take a look at what information they give for each of the main NPCs in JR and how you can integrate that into RotRL, like acts of heroics and whatnot.

I think Tarloc is either an egotistical douche using this new war with the Equalists to get ahead in the world, or he is actually in league with Amon. Amon is obviously just using him to get ahead though, and Tarloc will get his justice.

Now, my theory on Amon. Each time Korra has had a close run-in with Amon (at the memorial and again after their championship match) she had a 'vision' of Aang and Toff and some mystery guy. I think Amon wears a mask not because of a fire bender, but because he was likely a former fire bender (sorry Orthos - still bad fire benders here) who was causing trouble and Aang took his bending away. He now nurses a grudge, and somehow figured out how to take bending from others as well.

There was no bad fire bender who killed his parents. There were no spirits telling him the Avatar failed. He is just a dude with a grudge, albeit a dangerous dude. He wears a mask because he doesn't want anyone to recognize him.

But what the mechanic is essentially doing then is punishing those who want to play a certain character type. If everyone in JR put their character together with the sole purpose of relationships, then everyone would be a charisma-based character, because especially at higher levels charisma score becomes key in actually making any of the checks. What we are concerned with is 'punishing' those who don't want to play a charisma monkey. When it comes to party dynamics, you don't want everyone the same. You want them to be able to shine in different areas so they each get their glory time.

If we ignored the mechanic completely, then we would have a wider array of characters and role-play opportunities, regardless of their 'charisma score'. Especially in certain class builds. I'm sorry, but a monk who already needs so many base stats can't afford to put many points into charisma, and with an AP recommending a 15-20 point buy, it gets even tougher. It's not really about min-maxing at this point.

I get rewarding high charisma characters, but when there's XP on the line, and it has the ability to drive big XP gaps in the party due to a special system (especially at lower levels) that rewards only one character type it really kinda screws the other types. What I don't want to see is someone who decided to play a low-cha character just sitting off to the side twiddling their thumbs saying, oh this is just peachy, while everyone else seems to be making friends and gaining in-game benefits from said relationships.

Example, we've had 2 sessions of JR so far. I (as the rogue) have 4 Friendships, and the Oracle in the party has 1 Fellowship actually making him the highest in xp right now. The Ranger who isn't as interested in role-play (not like the monk) has 1 Friendship. The current gap is 1200xp. That is a big XP jump for a 1st-2nd level character. At slow xp progression (which we're using) its the difference between being 2nd level and not.

I also don't fully believe that building relationships is all about the charisma. Just to throw a low-cha example out there from TV look at Dr. Brennan from Bones. She is a genius, she has many friends that are still friends even when she rubs them the wrong way due to her inept social skills. She has a low charisma, but she still got her guy. How? Not all through diplomacy for sure.

Now I know everyone who posts has an opinion as to min-maxing and rewarding charisma-based characters, etc. But what I'm actually interested in is hearing from people who have actually played through a few chapters of JR, and how their relationship levels seem to be working. Specifically, have your low-cha players seemed to have done ok with the system as-is (i.e. using their level bonuses and situation bonuses to do ok?) or have they kinda been dropped to the wayside, twiddling said thumbs? Have the high cha players started to run into an issue with the ever-increasing DC=Relationship Score to increase their levels with an NPC? Are the benefits/boons worth all the trouble?

The AP is about the story and the journey, and frankly probably lots of fighting. It shouldn't all be about a side-mechanic. What I want to do is find the balance so that it is easy to integrate those side-mechanics, without changing the way we play in the story as a whole. Make sense?

On yet another side note, has anyone tried making Korra for PF yet? We're thinking something of a psi-monk with elemental tendencies.

I've noticed there are some good suggestions out there for how to 'adjust' the caravan combat rules to be less broken. Our group will start to playtest them and see how it goes.

For the relationship rules, has anyone found any good 'adjustments' that seemed to balance with the Cha and non-Cha based PCs? It has been a conundrum for our GM as he isn't sure how to make it fair for even the monk who had to use Cha as his dump stat but is a good role-player and wants to pursue a relationship. For now we are going to go with the relationship rules as-is, with the possibility of awards for good rp.

If anyone else has playtested a good alternative though we are open to suggestions.

Second Option -

Advanced caravan jobs
I like the jobs system set-up but I think all of the jobs are kind basic. I thinking of add a second tier of jobs based on a higher skill requirements. Here are some of the samples advanced caravan jobs I was thinking of.

Hunter – Grants bonus like the favored terrain or favored enemy from Ranger class
Merchant – Greater income from trade
Warrior – Increases the caravan's damage output
Healer – Grants combat only fast healing to the caravan
Engineer – Can repair the caravan during combat and make custom upgrades the caravan
Thief – Increase income at settlement but has a risk of getting the caravan run out of town
Battle Mage – Increases caravan's damage based on caster level
Master Chief – Cooking providers morale bonus to the caravan
Defender – Increases the caravan's AC
Caravan Master – Increase the general effectiveness of the caravan.

All the advanced job will have around a +7 skill ranks or BAB requirement. This will limit the number of people that can fill one of these rolls. Also the players will not be able to easily hire someone to do one of these advanced jobs.

I'm still working on this concept and I know I have to post a lot of the math I'm thinking of using. I want to see everyone opinion on the concepts. I suspect I will be using some mixture of both of the option I listed above. This weekend I will be running a lot of trials and mathematical reviews. I hope to post some specific results next week.

@ArisRedWind: I like the idea of this concept. I too feel that the roles could possibly be improved upon as the caravan advances in levels. This would encourage players to improve their skills past the +1 base requirement for roles they wish to excel in.

@Mistwalker: Our group is going to playtest your suggestions to see if it helps improve the caravan play. Next session will begin our trek to Brinewall.