Best Adventure Path to enter midway through?

[NewJeffCT]

I was running my players through some adventures and realized I wanted something a bit different. The players mostly like their PCs, so they'd be hesitant to start from scratch. I like the adventure paths overall, but wanted to know what fits best coming into the AP in adventure 3 out of 6 instead of 1 out of 6?

I was thinking of retooling Kingmaker as a higher level AP, with the players starting at level 7 and adjusting the first adventure appropriately and move up from there.

As a caveat, my current group is not oriented towards the social skills - definitely an outdoors/nature type with a shaman & ranger, plus a figher who grew up on a farm. (OK, they do have a bookish wizard, a fighter/wizard type and an elf rogue, but none are diplomats)

Thanks for any input.

[Steve Geddes]

Personally I think Kingmaker would lose a lot if you didnt play through the first couple of adventures. I'd recommend Serpent's Skull as a better fit for your group (although the latter half has received some fairly mixed reviews, it must be said - so I'd read some of the subforum and reviews first). Rise of the Runelords would be my second suggestion.

[NewJeffCT]

Steve Geddes wrote:

Personally I think Kingmaker would lose a lot if you didnt play through the first couple of adventures. I'd recommend Serpent's Skull as a better fit for your group (although the latter half has received some fairly mixed reviews, it must be said - so I'd read some of the subforum and reviews first). Rise of the Runelords would be my second suggestion.

Thanks, if I had run Kingmaker, I would have started from the beginning, but just upped the difficulty levels of the initial encounters and gone from level 7 to level 20+ or so instead of 1-18.

[Erik Freund]

All of my proposals involve "run the tail end of Book 3, then do the majority of Books 4-6". This is because many Paizo APs are written with a clear first-half and second-half, with a mid-campaign climax that serves as the transition-point between the two arcs. You want to preserve that climax in some fashion in order to bridge into the AP.

Carrion Crown:

Carrion Crown might be the easiest to enter late: reveal that whatever your PCs have been up to so far is really the machinations of the evil Whispering Way. And reveal that they are currently doing some evil ritual at Feldgrau (ie the warfields at the climax of Book 3, and you could really port that anywhere). From there, just run Books 4 through 6 as-written. The only change you might need to make is you'll need a different "friendly organization" at the beginning of Book 5 other than the Order of the Eye.

HOWEVER, it sounds like your group wouldn't do well in CC, since they are not social and prefer the wilderness. (And CC is an urban-investigation-campaign.) The other three APs below will work well for anti-social bushmen. :-)

Legacy of Fire:

Legacy of Fire can work 2nd best. Have them find the scroll of Karkishon somehow (maybe they have it already and don't realize it?), then run an abridged/adapted Book 3 (basically, have someone very powerful/mysterious try and steal the scroll; this doesn't even have to be set in a desert country). Then during Books 4&5 they learn about Javhul. Book 6 will lose a lot of resonance since the PCs don't know about Kelmarene, but you could re-locate some of the details.

Serpent's Skull:

Serpent's Skull is easy enough to enter late. Have them hear about the threat of the Serpent Folk, and they have to venture to some ruins to gain access to their city. The ruins (of Saventh-Yhi) don't even need to be secret in this version, only the Vaults. Slim down Book 3 (it's not that good anyway) and simply have it as a backdrop for the PCs trying to find the Vaults in Book 4. Let the PCs know from the get-go that their goal is to find the Serpent Folk, rather than it being a surprise. Then you can run Books 5 and 6 exactly as written.

Runelords:

Rise of the Runelords could also work. From Book 3, have the PCs visit Turtleback Ferry and its riverboat (they could simply be "on vacation" here, it works better if they aren't "sent") and then do the whole flood-thing and have that lead to the battle at the dam (that's nessecary foreshadowing). And then when you run Book 4, have the Giants attack either Turtleback, or some other place near-and-dear to the PCs (since Sandpoint won't be relevant to them). Then Books 5 & 6 can be run as-written.

Those are the ones that I think would work the best.

[NewJeffCT]

Erik Freund wrote:

All of my proposals involve "run the tail end of Book 3, then do the majority of Books 4-6". This is because many Paizo APs are written with a clear first-half and second-half, with a mid-campaign climax that serves as the transition-point between the two arcs. You want to preserve that climax in some fashion in order to bridge into the AP.

** spoiler omitted **

** spoiler omitted **

** spoiler omitted **...

Thanks - good information.

I may look into the first two of them.

[Grendel Todd]

You might try Second Darkness. What was a weakness for my campaign might actually be a strength for yours:

Spoiler:

The first two parts revolve around (or near) Riddleport, but leave there fairly swiftly with part 3. The AP does a solid job of encouraging a bunch of scoundrels, but with part 3 you have to drop all that to help elves, in part because (in theory) you've been tripping over Drow that keep mucking about in the surface world. My PCs never quite saw the point (and managed to miss most of the clues as to why they should care - they missed the Drow for the most part, too), doing their best to flee the island at the end of part 2 as soon as they could. The entire AP can flow quite easily with little to no tie-ins to the prior two acts if your party has any sympathy or contact with elves, either through the ranger Kwava (or even Shalelu) showing up and recruiting them, or perhaps having them stumble across the elves defending against the Forest Drakes near Crying Leaf village and making friends that way.

[NewJeffCT]

Grendel Todd wrote:

You might try Second Darkness. What was a weakness for my campaign might actually be a strength for yours:

** spoiler omitted **

Thanks - I'll look into that one as well.