If it's a valid candidate, add my vote to Savage Tide. That single campaign has the best of everything there is to offer from D&D: dungeon exploring, urban adventures, plane-hopping, kingdom building, sea-voyages, wilderness exploration, etc.
It also had the best supporting 'Savage Tidings' articles whose usefullness to PCs in the campaign has not been equaled by any of the articles included in the Golarion APs or Player's Guides.
+1 for Savage Tide. Probably the most epic and awesome campaign I ever ran.
I'd say it's a statistical dead heat between Savage Tide and Age of Worms (because I like the phrase "statistical dead heat").
First, a disclaimer. I played in:
Shackled City - Gnome Transmuter/Earth Dreamer/Archmage
Council of Thieves - Half-Elf Paladin of Abadar
Kingmaker - Half-Orc Ranger
I DMed:
Savage Tide
Legacy of Fire
Carrion Crown
Of those three APs I played in, we didn't finish any of them (various reasons, but DM burnout mostly). We're still playing Kingmaker, though. But, we're halfway through the second chapter after 7 months, and the whole campaign is going downhill, so I don't think we'll be finishing it.
Since I'm still DMing Carrion Crown I can't speak for the whole of it, but I think that when I finish it, I think I'll like it more than Legacy. But, for now, my vote goes to Legacy of Fire.
But, for what it's worth, I think CC has more potential than LoF, and definitely lacks the problems that LoF has (5th chapter utter disapointment).
As for Savage Tide... Problem with those 12 chapter APs is that there are too many filler/dead chapters and whole story seems a bit disjointed, but overall it's a nice AP. Too long for my taste, though. If you removed a lot of filler chapters, it would have made a great 6 chapter AP.
So, from a DMs point of view:
1. Legacy of Fire
2. Carrion Crown
3. Savage Tide
As for the ones I played in... I wish I had a better DM.
All I can say is I ran half of Runelords, played first 2 of CoT, and I'm currently running CC. LOVE CC and RotRL. CoT wasn't for me so much. Just giving my 2 cents, mostly to dot the thread.
I'm surprised that Council of Thieves rates so low. I must admit, I haven't read the AP books, as I am a player in this AP, but we are very close to the finish line of the last adventure, and I've been having a lot of fun. I especially like the setting of Westcrown with its petrified government and nobility and its urban decay. The breakdown of city operations in the final third of the AP even reminds me of the Baltimore depicted in The Wire, which is a good thing.
I am currently considering what to run for my Legacy of Fire group once that campaign is finished (we are in chapter five currently), and Council of Thieves is my current favorite. (I'm also running Kingmaker and Serpent's Skull with other groups, I have already run Rise of the Runelords, and I'll be playing in Jade Regent myself soon.)
I don't like what I've seen from Carrion Crown very much, the whole AP seems rather disjointed, ushering the characters from one location to the next on flimsy excuses to encounter the only very loosely connected next adventure. Besides, I'm not really a fan of horror adventures anyway, and so, all in all, Carrion Crown is rather low on my list of preference.
I'd like to run a city-based AP for a change, as this allows the GM to play a long-running cast of NPC's over the duration of the whole campaign, which I think can make for more interesting role-playing than NPCs that are only on-screen for one adventure and are never seen again afterwards (as seems to be the case with Carrion Crown).
So, it's either Council of Thieves, or Curse of the Crimson Throne. The latter has been consistently rated higher here, and is certainly interesting, too. Personally, I think Westcrown is a more interesting backdrop than Korvosa, and I'm not really happy that a full third of the AP takes place away from the city, and both A History of Ashes and Skeletons of Scarwall don't seem to be fun adventures to me. They don't fit the whole flavor of the AP and appear more or less random. And while the PCs are away on these adventures, its NPCs that do the actual revolutionary work at home that would be so much better suited for the PCs, I think. This is a flaw in this AP I'm really not too happy about and if I were to run Curse of the Crimson Throne I'd want to remedy that, but it seems like a big operation.
I admit, Curse of the Crimson Throne certainly has the more interesting villain than Council of Thieves (and also than Carrion Crown), and it's very nice that the villain is on-stage right from the beginning, whereas in the other two named APs it only becomes clear who the villain is at a rather late stage.
I'm torn. :)
I only readed through the latest four. My rating (that changes 1/week :) ) is:
1. Council of Thieves. IMHO, underrated. Excellent plot and some really wonderful chapters (2,3,4). The first adventure is a little bland, and the latest required a really skilled GM for shining. Suffer the absence of a Westcrown dedicated sourcebook.
2 (or 3). Kingmaker. Nice twist with kingdom-building and management rules. I find the first 3 adventures not much interesting plot-wise. I know it is a sandbox, but I think that you could have sandbox and a more interesting plot. I find the Stolen Land (as setting) not so charming.
3 (or 2). Serpent's Skull. I really like the idea of ancient cities and big archeological expeditions. Perhaps a little bit too much dungeon crawl in the second half.
4. Carrion Crown. I don't like the main plot that much and even if you want to do an horror AP, I don't think you really need to have Haunts, Frankenstein, Werewolves, Lovecraft, Vampire and Liches all in the same campaign and symmetrically divided in 6 episodes.
Curse of the Crimson Throne.
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Curse of the Crimson Throne (though 4 and 5 were a bit weak). I consider Seven Days to the Grave to the be the best adventure book put out by paizo between all the AP issues and modules.
Carrion Crown second (though we aren't far into it, this is mostly from what I know from the blurbs about them)
Shackled City/Runelords are third but I've so heavily modified them for my own campaign they're barely distinguishable from the published material. Hell in my latest runthrough of Runelords I never used books 3-6.
