Instead of hoping to sustain my gaming group through three 1-20 campaigns to enjoy all three Adventure Paths, I've been toying with the idea of compressing them all down into the essentials for a trio of mini-campaigns that can all be played consecutively by the same party.
Honestly, having to wait 20 levels to see the conclusion of a story line is a bit of a load with my infrequently-meeting gaming group, and I'm hoping that by compressing the Paths down they'll get to enjoy more pay-offs more frequently in their adventuring careers.
The general, vague outline is to start the party off in Cauldron (or, since I have a personal fondness for the Scarred Lands campaign setting, the volcano-nestled city of Hallowfaust) where they will spend 7-8 levels outwitting the Cagewrights and Adamarcus. After that, the nearby Spire of Long Shadows will lead them into a compressed adaptation of the Age of Worms to level 14-15. Come the end of AoW, one of the group will be the prince of a nearby city-state (Alhaster or something akin) which will take the place of Sasserine to see the launch of the final arc of the campaign, the Savage Tide.
Obviously this calls for a lot of adapting and pruning. Entire adventures will have to be cut from the Paths and those that remain may need to be whittled down a bit from their full size.
With that all in mind, I'm here to pick all y'all's brains for the events in each Path that you think are essential to each story line. What events are key to the developing plot or just played out so cool that they should be kept?
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I think the biggest hurdle you'll have to overcome, if trying to compress each AP into a third of its original size, is the process of converting the final bosses and the circumstances of their encounters into something appropriate to lower-level parties. Abyssal planes and demon lords are not really appropriate adventuring fare for 8th level parties (just as demigods aren't really appropriate foes at lvl 14) so to make those adventures plausible, you'll have to rewrite almost everything as you go.
I'm toying with a mixed Adventure Path, myself, but I know I'd never have time for such an extensive redesign of three campaigns. What I might do is try to transition from Age of Worms into Savage Tide during the course of the campaign. The plots of each might overlap, forcing the PCs to decide which threat to the world is more grave, and choose their course carefully. Perhaps they'll return from the Isle of Dread only to find Kyuss released and empowered with a legion of worm-ridden undead already marching across the lands, thus setting up an epic-level campaign as they clean up their "loose ends". The final battle might take place in Cauldron, thus bridging the three Adventure Paths in the final hours.
Or perhaps they'll choose to stop the Age of Worms, letting the Savage Tide happen in the process--in which case the epic adventure becomes a quest to reverse the Savage Tide and restore the region.
Or maybe, just maybe, they'll find a way to deal with both threats at once, either by traveling from one danger to the next with teleportation magic. or luring the masterminds of both plots into one location where they can be overcome together.
Who knows? But that's the way I'd approach a conjoined adventure path. If I was going to have to rewrite 9 out of 12 adventures to make them appropriate for my players, I'd just go the extra mile and write a whole new adventure path, just for them.
I think the biggest hurdle you'll have to overcome, if trying to compress each AP into a third of its original size, is the process of converting the final bosses and the circumstances of their encounters into something appropriate to lower-level parties.
Technically you're right, but that's only because the truly hard stuff for me is already done. Good plots and maps don't roll out of my brain very easily, so I'm very willing to swipe the premise and locations for the Adventure Paths to use as a skelington to hang some custom encounters on.
At level 4 my players won't be in any shape to face a glabrezu demon, but they could hold their own against a kyton with little change in the feel of the event. And if my 14th level heroes have to rush to Alhaster to defeat an ancient druid before he completes his ritual to become a god, that's still a satisfying conclusion for a story arc at that level.
My biggest concern right now is making sure I don't loose something important or amazing in the hefty pruning I'm going to have to do to squeeze them all in. For example, Crazy Jared is a great encounter and, while I'm cutting Zenith Trajectory almost completely, that encounter will find its way into a later adventure (probably as a step in tracking down Alek Tercival.)
Having never played the adventures, though, I could easily be overlooking some moments that need to stay for plot development or should stay just because they're a lot of fun.
Because the Paths are leading to a slowly evolving game world of their own, I'm keen on hearing how some elements from earlier Paths pay off later. Fer instance, meeting Celeste would be cut along with the rest of Zenith Trajectory if she didn't make an appearance in AoW. Does anything else, like the death of Todd Vanderboren, have any consequences in the Savage Tide?
I haven't read SCAP, so I don't know precisely how Todd Vanderboren's death fits into the story line or how he relates to the Vanderborens of Sasserine, but the story in STAP pretty much revolves around the relationship between Lavinia Vanderboren and her wayward and villainous brother Vanthus.
As for the overall dilemma of how to capture the goodness of each of the APs with less playing time, I'd advise one of three approaches:
1) Pick one and play it through, save the others for a rainy day.
2) Play each one through from 1st to 20th level, but cut out the many superfluous encounters. Ditch XP and just have the PCs level up at the right point in the adventure. Redistribute treasure from the excised encounters so the party has enough magic to kill the uber-boss-villains at the end. This way you keep the plot intact, enjoy all the most interesting and decisive encounters without having to do a lot of work on restatting and retooling.
3) Pick a segment of the AP that looks fun and run it as an adventure arc. For example, with minimal plot retooling, you could run AoW from Encounter at Blackwall Keep through the Champion's Belt. Set up an initial encounter that compresses the slowly developing hints about the worms and the Ebon Triad into one package--e.g. by having The Faceless One invade Diamond Lake at the head of some Triad cultists, a couple of Kyuss spawn, and the Ebon Aspect. Letters found on his body make clear TFO's cult affiliation and interest in the Mistmarsh as a source of more of the worms. Bang, you're off. The arc ends with the climactic battle with the Ulgurstasta and the party (hopefully) Champions of the Free City. This captures some of the coolness of the AP, a number of interesting encounters, and you get some nasty Kyuss creatures as enemies, but doesn't require extensive retooling, just a minor modification of plot hooks to create a different starting and denouement.
I think I’m doing something very similar to what you’re suggesting with option 3, Peruhain. Under this concept, the APs are seeing a lot of paring down with non-critical plot threads being eliminated entirely.
For example, in the Age of Worms, the Wind Dukes and the Whispering Cairn are cool (and useful) sidetreks, but they don’t forward the story of Kyuss any. For the 2nd third of this campaign, I’ll be cutting Whispering Cairn and Gathering of Winds completely. The Ebon Triad makes for a fine plot twist, but I’m having a little trouble working them into the Scarred Lands setting. (For those in the know with the setting, I’m considering a cult dedicated to combining the tattered remnants of three titans to create a new, living one, but that’s pretty spotty. It just seems anti-climactic to go from “Oh, no! They’re going to create a triply powerful titan” to “Nevermind, it’s just a single god. Whew.”)
For Shackled City, I’m a’gonna toss everything involving Adimarchus. The basic plot of a cult of Cagewrights trying to open up a gate to Carceri is good enough for me without the seemingly tacked on big-bad of Adimarchus waiting at the end. Asylum and Test of the Smoking Eye are both getting the boot. I’ll also skip Shatterhorn, allowing this arc to end with the grand battle against the Cagewrights and the collaring of the Tree of Souls thing.
You get the idea.