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My players decided to retire their 15th level plane-hopping party to start back at 1st. (combat was just eating up the nights). I've wanted to try an Adventure Path for a while, so I told them to vote on one. The vote was nigh-unanimous: Carrion Crown.
Turns out they were big fans of Ravenloft back in the day...
Trouble is, we game fairly often, so I was wondering just how "close" the adventures in the path are tied together. Can you "wander off the path", and run other adventures in between the official adventures without over-leveling the PCs? Is there room to fit modules like Carrion Hill?
I also missed the subscription cutoff for the first AP+PDF package (and I'd really rather wait for the print version), so I'm not going to have Carrion Crown pt.1 here in time for our next session. Would there be any plot problems if I ran an unrelated 1st level module beforehand?
Thanks!
I don't see a problem with it. The only potential issue I can see is outlevelling the begining content.
One of the things you could do is use the slow advancement for XP. That'd allow you to run modules or filler adventures around the AP. I'm playing CC and not running it so I'm not sure how the pace is set between books but I imagine there'd be room to do other things if you want.
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All Paizo APs over their 6 issues will take a party from 1-~18 on the Medium experience progression table.
They used to include set piece adventures which were mini optional things, but those were removed to add more meat to the main part.
If you want to weave a few extra things in, but aren't confident making all the necessary adjustments on the fly to up the difficulty to keep up with your PCs, you could consider bumping the experience progression to slow. That will give you lots of room to add your own content and stay on task with the AP.
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I haven't had an issue with "filler" material in the AP's thus far.
That being said, I did away with XP a while back (Curse of the Crimson Throne was the last time we used actual XP numbers, if I remember correctly), and just level the PC's when the time is right.
If your players are not into such an arrangement, I would recommend fewer "combat" or "trap" type encounters and more "investigation" and "conversation" type encounters. They can get the same kind of XP values (assuming you set CR's for overcoming said noncombat encounters) but the actual time spent will likely be greater. Thus, you "stretch" out your play time a bit.
If that won't work either, I recommend using the "Slow" XP progression, and run Carrion Crown as a desperate, horror-survival game where danger (likely not overwhelming CR, but still danger) lies around every corner and the PC's must constantly strive to overcome it.
This makes it less "Ravenloft" and more "The Walking Dead" but hey, zombies are fun!
As far as time dilation / space for "extra" content, I throw in extra encounters all the time. Kingmaker is especially forgiving of this practice, but you CAN pull it off with any of the other AP's with a little forethought. That being said, it works best if you have the full path in front of you to read. This way, you won't have to retcon decisions made early on, while you still didn't have all the details.
Cool beans. Do you know if previous APs have had room between the adventures? For example, does Carrion Crown #1 take players from 1st to 4th, or is it assumed that the GM runs material between the issues?
I don't believe extra time between mods is a "design feature" of APs. When the PCs are done with THoH they should be 4th level. The next module of the AP picks up there and continues the story. Taking a side quest or two won't break anything, especially at higher levels where you need 20k or more exp for the next level, it just gets them a little closer.