Favorite? Curse of the Crimson Throne. Hell's Rebels may supplant it (too early to say), and it certainly has its flaws (I really didn't see the burning need to have the campaign leave Korvosa to go traipsing about with the Shoanti), but this, for me, remains the AP to beat. And despite being part of the unwanted detour, Scarwall is an AWESOME dungeon.
Dead last for me would be Second Darkness. Random curious types (who own a bar! YAY!) wander off to a fallen celestial body, fight aliens, end up blandly hopping around with elves and facing drow. Just felt like a bit of a mishmash above and beyond the norm.
I don't have the APs, but I have been following PbPs of all of the released ones (except too early for Hell's Rebels, although I intend to look for a good PbP of this as soon as I get a break from work). I have followed campaign journals of a few of them also. So I have some knowledge, although this tends to be heavily biased towards the early parts, since the only one that I saw to the finish was Council of Thieves. But one thing is abundantly clear: A LOT depends upon the GM. Even the worst AP can be made awesome with enough GM work . . . and it has been done sometimes.
Rise of the Runelords: Not my favorite but not my least favorite either -- somewhere in between. That said, this AP gets new life in the following campaign journal -- but first read Prologue 1 and Prologue 2 and THEN start into the campaign journal itself, and be sure you don't miss sidebars occasionally linked from this (for instance, one linked from post #8)
Curse of the Crimson Throne: I have been following both a really good PbP of the AP apparently more or less as written (unfortunately now defunct) AND a campaign journal of an awesome heavily rewritten version (I'd like to think of this as a well-in-progress prototype for Curse of the Crimson Throne Anniversary Edition).
Second Darkness: The PbP to follow of this that I found on the first try (unfortunately not be in :-( ) seems really awesome. I could see how the bait-and-switch could bother some people, but this AP is SUPPOSED to have a bait-and-switch in it.
Legacy of Fire: Not the best but not the worst either.
Council of Thieves: The only AP I have seen to the finish, in this PbP, which was fortunate enough to have a string of great GMs when it could not retain one -- and the later ones seem to have gone to significant effort to maintain the plan of the first one, which included rearranging some chapters, in a way that should probably be done in Council of Thieves Anniversary Edition.
Kingmaker: Grand. I can see why some people nominate it for a favorite, and I don't disagree with them.
Serpent's Skull: Same GM running the PbP of Kingmaker, but Book One of Serpent's Skull just seemed to go on FOREVER with no progress. I know that the GM was good from the Kingmaker PbP, so it isn't all the GM's fault, and I can't see much that the players did wrong either. But maybe somebody else could make a go of it.
Jade Regent: Unfortunately, has suffered from PbP infant mortality, but on the latest attempt seems like it might turn out okay.
Skull and Shackles: From the cheesy railroad start and the factor of this as written being an Evil AP in all but name, I was inclined to put this one down as a least favorite. But remember where I said above that even the worst AP can become awesome with enough GM work? Well, DM Barcas' Skull & Shackles: Freedom of the Seas did that work, even though this PbP is unfortunately now defunct. Party Theme: Awesome. AP Book One rewrite: Essential. End result: Consider this a prototype for Skull & Shackles Anniversary Edition, Book One and the start of Book Two. And I found it specifically by searching for a PbP that DIDN'T have the cheesy railroad start. (I don't mind a railroad -- in fact I'm rather fond of them -- but I at least want a railroad to have an interesting track layout, rather than being like some branch line stub in Skankee, Missihoma.)
Shattered Star: Unfortunately, has suffered from PbP infant mortality, but on the latest attempt seems like it might turn out really good.
Reign of Winter: Pretty cool theme, but I have to say that the way that the PCs seem to be expected to accept Baba Yaga's sponsorship leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth -- somebody has to make a pact with Evil. I don't object to the concept altogether -- it is just that this acceptance seems to be made pretty clearly a pinch point in the adventure progression, with no possibility for a workaround. If they come out with a Reign of Winter Anniversary Edition, I'd like to see the possibility for some workarounds.
Wrath of the Righteous: Suffers from a cheesy railroad start as written, s I searched specifically for ones that DIDNT suffer from this, at least to as great an extent as written. Unfortunately, this AP REALLY HAS SUFFERED from PbP infant mortality even when the PbPs seemed to be good and even when I have tried following multiple ones SIMULTANEOUSLY, but I seem to have found a good one that has a decent chance to survive.
Mummy's Mask: The default assumption in this AP seems to be that the party is going to be going in with the style of Indiana Jones in a tomb raiding rush, which leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I'd like to buck that and have a party that really tries hard to be careful archaeologists, trying to recover things properly and transport them to a safe place for the beefit of all (including the people of Osirion, even if the safe place is not actually in Osirion), with the overall goal of starting the Andoren Geographic Society to compete with the comparatively unscrupulous and secretive Pathfinder Society. Dissillusioned Pathfinders could be very good recruits for this party. But this would require buy-in from the GM AND the whole party; I have yet to find such a thing for this AP, but if it can be done for Skull & Shackles (see above), it can be done for Mummy's Mask as well
Iron Gods: This seems to be another AP that REALLY HAS SUFFERED from PbP infant mortality, so I'm following several of them, with mixed results. I like the overall theme, though.
Giantslayer: I wasn't expecting this one to be very interesting, but so far one of the PbPs I have been following seems to be surprisingly interesting.
Hell's Rebels: Haven't yet started following this one, but I definitely want to.
Hell's Vengeance: Not released yet. I woder what people's take on it will be?
Strange Aeons: Not released yet, but sounds like an interesting theme.
Kingmaker
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Of the paths that I have run or am running I rank them like this..
1.) Rise of the Runelords: The sheer amount of community created content almost runs this path for you. It is certainly the one I had the most fun running because I could spend more time thinking of interesting things to do with the story and less about how to present things.
2.) Carrion Crown: I ran this first and have fond memories of it. The later part of the path lost out to Rise for me. Personal preference.
3.) Skull and Shackles: I'm running this right now and I love the theme. I am struggling with ways to make the ship to ship combat make sense... and as we head toward the finale of book 2 I am starting to wonder whether I should have just gone strictly with the path rather than changing things.
4.) Giantslayer: The path just hasn't grabbed me at all.
Played
17th) Wrath of the Righteous
I had a bit of fun to try and see what the ‘consensus’ on AP’s might be – and, using the average review score for each part of each AP (from Runelords up to Giantslayer) here on the Paizo website, I calculated an average rating for the entire AP…
The top three were:
1) Skull and Shackles (4.58)
2) Iron Gods (4.5)
3) Reign of Winter (4.42)
And the bottom rated were:
Joint 13) Jade Regent and Carrion Crown (3.42)
15) Giantslayer (3.38) – to be fair, there are much fewer reviews of this AP and hence its ‘score’ is not statistically very sound!!!
16) Serpent’s Skull (3.33)
…as to my favourite, Shattered Star is turning out to be a bunch of fun – Magnimar, supported by AP materials and the Campaign Setting book, makes for a great urban base for the adventures… and, whilst each part of the AP does have significant dungeon exploration, those dungeons are distinct from each other and, for the vast majority, great fun…
No question about it Kingmaker!
Second best Kingmaker; The Next Generation!
Worst - Second Darkness.
Of all APs ever, I'm going to say Age of Worms.
Of all the APs I've ran or played in that are Pathfinder, I'm going to say that its a tie between what I'm playing in (Kingmaker, we're about to hit book 6 with a really good DM.) and what I've ran (Rise of the Runelords).
I also really like Carrion Crown though as has been said, it feels like a guilty pleasure running it, especially because half of my group are former LARPers who know and love the associated horror tropes, from Cthulu to Dracula. The lethality of the AP is also appealing to them. My players loved playing Council of Thieves; I hated running it because of the ton extra work required to keep it coherent. I rather enjoyed Legacy of Fire, but that's because I ran wild with some of the themes of Lamashtu, Rovagug, Gnolls, Katapesh, and Denizens of Leng. Sometimes a little railroad is nice for a quick and easy to run AP, yet one where expanding upon anything there works really well. Sort of like how the Devil's Platter is detailed in Runelords; its world-building which is important to make a setting feel populated.
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I'm not familiar with all the APs by any stretch but...
Favorite: Curse of the Crimson Throne.
The combination of Logue, Schneider and Pett for the first three books managed a consistency of style, tone and narrative that I've not scene in any other AP to date. But then, as I said I haven't seen them all :)
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I love Age of Worms, its first part is my favorite adventure of all time and I've run and played in it multiple times.
Of the later APs, Kingmaker has a fantastic scope for any party. It is terrific.
I'm running some of Giantslayer in the next few months and I have high hopes for that too.
For all the naysayers against Second Darkness, it has one truly memorable encounter when the zombies push the tower of the hill. Unforgettable.
Cheers
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Iron Gods.
Resistance is futile.
All will be assimilated.
1 Wrath of the Righteous
2 Second Darkness
3 Legacy of Fire
Skulls and Shacles
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I've run or played at least part of the following: Council of Thieves, Kingmaker, Serpent's Skull, Wrath of the Righteous, Iron Gods
1) Kingmaker
I love the hexploration and kingdom building, and the general departure from the hard railroad of most APs is something I greatly value. To be fair, I'm a huge "player agency" person. 10/10 would play again.
2) Kingmaker
I'd do this one a second time before any of the others. I'd love to try it out with an evil group who make suboptimal decisions due to that evil, like destroying cities, or taxing the crap out of people. Like I said, 10/10 would play again.
3) Wrath of the Righteous
This is mostly just due to the complete dial-that-s*%^-up-to-11 aspect of mythic + demons. The actual plot is kinda weak, but the NPCs are interesting enough.
4) Iron Gods
Little bit of guilty pleasure here. I feel like this one is so solidly techno-DnD either you love it or hate it. I love it, but miss some of the pure ridiculous of the previous two. The theme is a bit over-the-top, but the actual gameplay seems pretty grounded and standard.
5) Serpent's Skull
Good lord, book 1 sucked. Summary: wander around a deadly island trying not to die, with no direction but to leave this island which is reputed to be impossible to leave. Oh but wait, there's plot to be done here! Stop trying to leave death island because there's something mildly interesting to investigate. Wait, why does my character care? This adventure starts to pick up with book 2, but mostly by trading out a bad sandbox for an acceptable railroad. Didn't have quite enough of the plup/Indiana Jones I was hoping for, but still a bit of a scratch for that itch.
6) Council of Thieves
In all fairness, we only played a few sessions of this one. The initial set-up was very weak, and didn't improve with any speed as we played the next sessions. It might get better later, but you gotta get a hook in early, and this AP failed at that.
We actually skipped S&S because I was running my own homebrew game with a similar "get a ship and adventure on the high seas" theme. It also had planar invasions and a chaos cult, so it wasn't really a parallel though. Might have to try the AP since it seems highly liked.
To be fair, older APs have more time to become favourites. Here is an overview about favourite votes in this thread (only 'number 1' votes), in comparison to the age of the AP (1st, 2nd etc.):
1st Rise of the Runelords: 5
2nd Curse of the Crimson Throne: 11
3rd Second Darkness: 1
4th Legacy of Fire: 1
5th Council of Thieves: 0
6th Kingmaker: 12
7th Serpent's Skull: 3
8th Carrion Crown: 4
9th Jade Regent: 2
10th Skull & Shackles: 4
11th Shattered Star: 1
12th Reign of Winter: 3
13th Wrath of the Righteous: 3
14th Mummy's Mask: 0
15th Iron Gods: 4
16th Giantslayer: 0
17th Hell's Rebels: 1
Now I am tempted to start one of the two most appreciated sooner or later...
My favorite are
1) Iron Gods
2) Reign of Winter
3) Skull and Shackles
4) Hell's Rebels
5) Mummy's Mask
6) Kingmaker
7) Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition
8) Shattered Star
9) Jade Regent
10) Serpent's Skull
Curse of the Crimson Throne would replace any of them except the top three, if only it was updated for PFRPG...
I am genuinely surprised (and a little dismayed) at the lack of love for Carrion Crown :(
It's a bunch of reasonably solid-to-great individual adventures strung together with more of an eye to hitting specific horror tropes than maintaining internal cohesion.
And the BBEG feels like a bit of a JV-version of who you REALLY want to go after.
I am genuinely surprised (and a little dismayed) at the lack of love for Carrion Crown :(It's a bunch of reasonably solid-to-great individual adventures strung together with more of an eye to hitting specific horror tropes than maintaining internal cohesion.
And the BBEG feels like a bit of a JV-version of who you REALLY want to go after.
Seconded.
We're currently on Book 5, and while the individual books are fun as self-contained adventures, the Great Gothic Tour of Ustalav is a bit less involving than more tightly bound stories, such as Runelords or Crimson Throne. My GM actually threw away Book 4 (though they loved it, they just couldn't stomach trying to shoehorn it into the overarching plot), and made up a homebrew replacement.
And the BBEG really needs to be introduced earlier, or at least foreshadowed (Tip for GMs) before Book 6.
Put me down for Kingmaker.
I am voting for Curse of the Crimson Throne but may actually have to do more with the fine players and GM that ran it.
Rise of the Runelords. No question about it. Runelords rocked.
I'm for Kingmaker too!
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Curse of the Crimson Throne.
Why? Interesting and memorable NPCs that supported a well developed city and environs in which to play around. A solid story that depended on the PCs being heroes, but left room for NPC actions as well. A BBEG that had clear motivations, and clearly needed taking down, but was an understandable person for all that. Lots of non-combat resolution of conflict in the urban parts.
Runner-up: Serpent's Skull. I just really like the whole vibe. Ended up with big, almost army-sized battles in the 3rd book. (I'm surprised I've never heard this from anyone else.) I hacked out huge parts of the underground stuff towards the end, though.
Context - I mix and match in my home campaigns, and I've swiped more parts from CotCT than any other. I have read every single AP book since the Dungeon days.
Carrion Crown is my favorite by far. Ravenloft and Call of Cthulhu were the first two RPGs I ever played so I loved the gothic horror setting.
My favorites so far:
-Mummies Mask
-Iron Gods
-Jade Regent*
*I really loved the TianXia part and setting, but the start in the Inner Sea and the caravan stuff and that dragging cultures over is really bad.
A new TianXia AP with only TianXia or very closely related stuff would be awesome.
My top three are
-Jade Regent
-Wrath of the Righteous
-Rise of the Runelords Anniversary edition.
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A political & intrigue style AP like curse of the crimson throne with some kingdom building set in TianXia might be a real good thing^^
Age of Worms.
Hell's Rebels, Jade Regent, Wrath of the Righteous, Mummy's Mask, Giantslayer, Reign of Winter, and Second Darkness are my top favorite ones (although to be honest, I actually like them all!)
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Okay, so I voted for Crimson Throne earlier in this thread. Yesterday, I received my digital copies of books five and six of Hell's Rebels.
My vote goes to Hell's Rebels from here on.
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1: Rise of the Runelords, anniversary edition
2: Wrath of the Righteous
3: Carrion Crown
Okay, so I voted for Crimson Throne earlier in this thread. Yesterday, I received my digital copies of books five and six of Hell's Rebels.
My vote goes to Hell's Rebels from here on.
Not gonna lie, Hell's Rebels has been the only other possible contender to the number one place in my heart...
Praise like this makes me eager to see what comes next!
1. Curse of the Crimson Throne (As others have said, the only thing really wrong with it is that it hasn't been updated for PFRPG.)
2. Reign of Winter
3. Jade Regent
4. Wrath of the Righteous (I've read complaints that the mythic rules implode toward book 6, but I've never gotten that far in play, so caveat emptor.)
5. Rise of the Runelords
Honorable Mention: Everyone loves Kingmaker, but it never really grabbed me personally. Maybe it's the sandbox thing.
Shattered Star might be on here someday, but we've only just started book 2. And I reserve judgement on Hell's Rebels until the whole thing's released, although I like what I've seen so far.
Honorable Mention: Everyone loves Kingmaker, but it never really grabbed me personally. Maybe it's the sandbox thing.
It's definitely why I try not to speak ill of its quality, but always maintain that it's not my cuppa.
As of this moment, I have to go with Wrath of the Righteous. I'm a sucker for redemption stories, and there are a lot of possible redemptions in that path. Hell's Rebels is a very close second.
Hmm, does this include the Pre-Pathfinder days (shackled city, age of worms, savage tide)? Probably not I suppose.
1. Kingmaker
2. Jade Regent (mostly because it goes to the other side of the world)
3. Runelords
4. Carrion Crown
5. Shattered Star
6. Skull and Shackles
Least Favorites probably would be
1. Reign of Winter (felt REALLY on rails...too much on rails)
2. Council of Theives (our first anti-feminist and very bigoted AP that almost threw my entire group [which were all women at the time] into chaos/rebellion).
there have been no rules, i say have at it, list what you want. :-)
Favorites
1. Savage Tide (great start that built to Plane-Hopping, epic battle fun)
2. Carrion Crown (though it goes at a steady pace, has a great Castlevania feel)
3. Giantslayer (loved the build-up of this one, had a cleric of Thor that ruled)
4. Skull and Shackles (love how the party members have to scrounge for gear at the beginning, great pace with lots of freedom of movement)
5. Reign of Winter (great paced game, I expanded on the Baba Yaga's Hut interior segments, Baba Yaga's Funhouse!!)
6. Mummy's Mask (great Egyptian based campaign, lots of undead to slay)
Good Mentions
Wrath of Righteous (love all the Demonslaying, hate the mythic rules)
Serpent's Skull (love the beginning, the exploration parts tended to drag)
Hell's Rebels (really liking this one, haven't gotten all the books yet)