I have yet to finish an AP, but that's due to my rule as a GM of if there's a TPK then the adventure path closes for another one.
Farthest I've gotten is book 4 of RotRL before the TPK, but I'm bringing that one back after we finish playing Way of the Wicked, which I'm actually getting to play and it is awesome.
See Ive been hearing a lot about Serpents Skull, which is exactly my experience when it first came out and ran through it.
Book 1 was awesome, things started to rumble in book 2 and by the time you got to the city it was kaput.
I posted that on here when the AP was brand new and got jumped on by brainwashed fan boys about how I was an idiot and paizo can do no wrong, and the problem with the AP was me.
Curious that now years later, people can pee in Serpents Skulls cheerios with no backlash hmmm. We had a blast in the first book like most people said.
Nah, I'm pretty sure it was still you . . . I ran my players through the AP, and we had an absolute blast! ;)
Played SS for two years and brought it to a conclusion about midway through September. All my players loved their characters and really got into the exploration of the ruin.
Lets see...
Finished Shackled City, but by the last chapter the guys had just had it with 1) kill it, 2) take its stuff, 3) kill the next thing, 4) etc. so I essentially hand waved the planar stuff and took them to the final tower.
Finished a "homebrew" series of modules that took the players to 20th level.
Rise of the Runelords, fell apart after Mammy Graul (DM burnout, me!)
Finished a short campaign that was planned to end at level 9.
Finished Legacy of Fire.
Right now DMing, on Chapter 3 of Kingmaker, that is if they survive the end "dungeon" since they did not do any exploration, but took a straight line to the end battle and thus are a level down from where they should be.
Also right now, playing in Serpents Skull, in chapter 3 and the DM quite wisely told us of the problems, and we essentially are doing "one area" at a time, minimizing the city interactions so we can get out of this module. I thought both chapter 1 and 2 were very good.
--- david
papa.drb
I can finally post here! Well, our group just finished Shackled City. It may have been 4 or 5 yrs?
Played every 2nd wk with some hiatus..ses (Haiti? Plural of hiatus?) Start late, much OOC discussion, actual play maybe 90m - 2.5 hrs/session. The DM was very flexible - we got to try some odd prestige classes. Soft-interpreted a near-TPK. Played to lvl 20 and got to sling some 9th level spells. It did get complicated; our last 2 encounters were about 3-7 rounds of combat/session. Good times.
Every other week same group plays with a different GM. With that one we are enjoying Serpent Skull. Currently near the end of Vol 2 - Race to Ruin. Already we've had 2 near-tpks. Both were averted thanks to a loving GM: one was due to a stacked encounter, the other due to b*+##y dice for the whole team, excluding the GM who rolled solid box cars *all night long*. Still, made for a very harrowing trek through the Expanse. We've been playing that one for almost 2 yrs.
Still have a few weeks to decide what goes on after Shackled City.
My Saturday group finished Shackled City after... 4 and a half years of putting in 3.5 hours every weekend, and has since jumped into Kingmaker on what seems to be the same schedule (2 years and 3 books in).
I recently started GMing Legacy of Fire, which I'm planning to see through to the end, and has been going quite smoothly, although things did hit a SERIOUS snag tonight from one of those situations where the party came up with 5 different contradictory approaches to a situation and arguments ensued.