You could switch from medium to slow progression. That will allow you to fit in a few more side adventures without advancing your characters too quickly.
Creative Director
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Subscription copies do ship out early, but the vagaries of the shipping method and all that make it an inexact science at best as for how fast the books get out. But you WILL get access to the PDF for free early, so even if you don't like running games with electronic stuff like PDFs, you'll at least get to read the adventure and familiarize yourself with what's coming and know if you can squeeze in a side adventure.
When we ship a subscriber's copy, the PDF becomes available to that subscriber the same day his physical copy gets packed in a box and put on the truck.
You could subscribe to the AP line. This would mean #26 would ship to you in the next few days, and you'll get the pdf immediately when it does. Subscribers generally get access to pdfs two to three weeks before a book's official streetdate.Seriously? If you're sure that it would ship that much earlier (sometime this coming week) I'd definately subscribe.
Welcoem to the boards, rakur. ~hands rakur some virtual cookies~
Also, subscribing to the Pathfinder Adventure Path has some benefits, the free PDF and the 15% off most of everything in the Piazo store being the most visible ones.
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Director of Brand Strategy
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You could subscribe to the AP line. This would mean #26 would ship to you in the next few days, and you'll get the pdf immediately when it does. Subscribers generally get access to pdfs two to three weeks before a book's official streetdate.Seriously? If you're sure that it would ship that much earlier (sometime this coming week) I'd definately subscribe.
This volume has already shipped to subscribers, so as long as there are no snags with your credit card I am pretty sure it would ship out fairly soon. Obviously the warehouse team could have other things going on that would cause a delay I don't know about, but it's worth a try. Even if this volume doesn't ship to you in time to run it for the next game, the next one will come a few weeks faster (on pdf at least) than it would if you wait for its streetdate.
Just want to say thanks to everyone that responded. I got my subscription going and they already shipped me the next par tof Council of Thieves. I was able to read through the PDF and start prepping for this weekend. I really appreciate the advice!
Just a followup thought then.
COT #1 didn't have a whole lot of meat to it. Lots of extra fluff about the city and about the AP in general, and a lot of that is useful for DMing the story, but just not much actual adventuring meat.
I have not seen #2 yet. But if it doesn't have, say, 2x as much mean, you're probably going to finish it early too.
So evaluate that. Think ahead. The easiest way to pace an AP is to add a little of your own meat, preferably right in the middle of one of the stories, rather than trying to sandwich it between issues.
-spoiler free-
Me, I took the early part of COT#1 and expanded it to more than a dozen encounters. I added new rooms rather than just using the ones they provided (though I used those too). Some of the encounters I added were roleplaying encounters. For example, I didn't think the torbles looked like a credible threat, and swarming them seemed too dangerous. So instead of having a combat that I felt would be mostly meaningless, I had the PCs encounter an apprentice wizard who was collecting them for his master. A brief bit of RP ensued - a nice change of pace from the hectic run-n-gun they party was undergoing at the time, plus a fun little introduction to torbles.
In fact, I expanded this section so much that we didn't finish it in the 4.5 hours we played this weekend. I am certain that had I left it as written, we would have made it out of there with time to spare. Next week, we finish that section and along the way are a couple more fights and a couple more RP encounters first.
How did I do that without giving them too much XP? No worries, those big story awards were a bit too big anyway, so I trimmed those down. Nothing to it.
My point is, I turned a 1-session bit of the AP into a 2-session bit.
You could have done something like that to draw out the first installment longer than two weeks, and you maybe should have, but that's water under the bridge.
But now you have a chance to do it for the 2nd installment. You have either 4 or 5 weekends to fill with this 2nd installment, and since the first one only took you two weeks, this second one better have 2x as much stuff for your party to do, maybe even a bit more than that, or you you will finish this one early too - maybe too early to even save it with the COT #3 PDF.
So meat it out. Add a little fluff, a little meat, maybe some RP stuff out in this big old city. Not just filler, mind you - your players won't like pointless filler. So make it meaningful, interesting, and contributing to the existing story, and they won't even know what's yours and what's Paizo's.
Hope that helps.