I don't know much about SS, but COTCT is one of THE BEST APs - if not THE Best - that Paizo has ever put out. I HEAVILY recommend running it. It has some of the best plots, some of the best story, and some of the best characters in the entirety of Paizo's history. You will not regret it.
Afraid I can't help you there, SS is one of the ones I don't have. Good luck!
It just occurred to me that it might be cool to run "flashback" sessions of the Shattered Star prequels alongside that campaign.
Open each new installment of the AP with the players playing PCs of a related "prequel" module through a seminal scene in that module, and then move on to the "modern" day PCs running through the Shattered Star.
For example, the fight against Karzoug from RotRL 6 as a "flashback" before running Dead Heart of Xin.
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Curse of the Crimson Throne is the best AP they've put out, worth running even if you never do any of the others. Second Darkness is a bit rougher, in hindsight I like it a lot more running it than I did as a player but you need to give your players a really strong personal stake in the future of the Elves to make it work.
To be clear, I'm not asking if the prequel APs themselves are worth running, but rather it is worth running the prequels *before* SS. How much does running them add to SS?
CotCT is probably what I'm going to run, but SS looks really neat too (Magnimar and Kaer Maga are two of my favorite cities, whereas Korvosa doesn't grab me at all.)While I haven't read it thoroughly to be sure, I believe Kaer Maga does show up in CotCT.
That said, having read all the way through SS, , the reference to Second Darkness is minimal whereas the reference to CotCT is, effectively, an entire chapter, more if you count the time spent in Kaer Maga. The entire second chapter is essentially one long ode to Crimson Throne.
This is not a complaint by the way.
If you intend to run Crimson Throne at all I would recommend running it before SS. If you run it after, there is significant risk that your players may feel 'cheated' of some of the events in the AP, I.E.: They will already know that Queen Ileaosa is the 'bad guy' when they first are approached by her agents and other things.
It's mentioned at the beginning of A History in Ashes, as it's the main way to get up to the Shoanti regions from Korvosa. So the AP assumes the PCs will at least pass through en route.
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I agree Second Darkness isn't really required. It depends some if you have new players that haven't read any Driz'zt books, really. If they're not familiar with drow, running Second Darkness first would be cool.
I... should really pick up Curse of the Crimson Throne. The second module looks like it would be much cooler post CotCT, though.
Cheers!
Landon
You can run Shattered Star without having ran the other three APs. It helps to flesh the background and the main NPC's motivations, but it's really not an absolute necessity. When I GM'd ShS, we had only ran half of RotR and I roughly explained the outcome of CotCT and SD, keeping it vague enough so that we could play these at some point if we want.
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Yeah, one option is leaving things vague in Shattered Star, then running one of the campaigns as a prequel.
A lot of people know how Rise of the Runelords ends already, for example. So you're not really spoiling that. Then you can fill it in later.
Doing them first lets you carry specific player actions forward, though, which is kind of cool.
My Shattered Star group is going to be closely tied with the original group: a daughter of one PC and Shayliss Vinder, a niece of another PC, and a Magnimar guardsman inspired to join the Pathfinders by stories of them sorting out the Skinsaw murders.
Cheers!
Landon
I actually put together a group that knows nothing at all about RotRL, and I'm going to run them through it and work in three books from Shattered Star as well (#2, #5 and #6). With just a little re-write, the synergy should be perfect.
I wouldnt reccomend running the prequels solely for the purpose of later running Shattered Star. They are definitely worth running on their own merits though. If you want to run SS now, run SS now (although from personal experience as a player, SS is a tedious affair).