Non-railroaded adventure paths, no kingmaker


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I would like to GM an adventure path soon,

I'm looking for something that works without assuming the PCs will follow a specific course of action, allowing to access to later contents even if something goes wrong or is heavily changed along the way, and leaves the PCs with a lot of spare time to pursue their own goals.

Kingmaker I've heard is very sandboxy and can be paced freely, fast or slow, as needed. Unfortunately, some of the players are already playing Kingmaker in other groups.
RotRL is what we are playing now (I'm a player) so this one neither.

I've looked a bit at Way of the Wicked, and it doesn't seem what I'm looking for. If anything, it seems more constrained than most good campaigns.
I wouldn't enjoy GMing that.

What would you suggest?


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Things from frog god games. Rappan athuk, slumbering Tsar, cyclopean deeps, etc.


Nicos wrote:
Rappan athuk, slumbering Tsar, cyclopean deeps, etc.

I'm not familiar with any of these, but a quick search about Rappan Athuk revealed it's basically a huge dungeon.

If that's correct, then maybe it's not exactly the ideal environment to develop playr-driven stories

Grand Lodge

What sort of difficulty are you looking for? Frog God Games has some awesome sandbox material, but can be fairly deadly.

Bard's Gate, Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms, Borderland Provinces would give you plenty of material and hooks from level 1-10 from what I can tell. Sword of Air would let you go from 10-20. All of this material is set in the Lost Lands by frog god games.

Rappan Athuk, Slumbering Tsar are both basically massive dungeon crawls. Cyclopean deeps is hex crawl would could be an interesting sandbox.

Way of the Wicked is an awesome adventure, which I'm currently running, but it is not a sandbox. At all.


I'm not looking for sandbox for the sake of being sandbox.

What I want is flexibility.

It can be story driven, as long as Players can choose not to cooperate with the main storyline and after they choose this it doesn't end in a TPK, automatic failure, or "okay you wrecked the campaign now it's unplayable" but rather it can go on smoothly.

I want an adventure path instead of writing my own stuff because I'm lazy at creating content.

The more flexible the better.


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I would look into Razor Coast by Frog God Games. There is a lot of room for sandbox stuff. It really depends on what you and your players want.


As JJ has mentioned they are adventure paths. Fundamentally there is little to no choice, otherwise you run the risk of missing half a module

Contributor

Explore piecing together your own campaign with pre-published adventures and AP chapters. This will make your campaign more episodic (as-in: solve one problem (an adventure), break for downtime, take care of player-created plot lines, spell discoveries, magic item creation, etc, then seque to the next adventure) than a typical AP, which is *kind of* episodic, but carries greater risk of the overriding plot thread getting derailed.

You'll be amazed at how flexible things can be when you piece campaigns together this way, since you aren't tied down to that overarching plot, like, say, the awakening of a Runelord at a pre-set time or other such plot lines that are the necessary baggage of thematic Adventure Paths. You'll have the adventures--you'll just need to roll with the connective tissue between them, which your PC actions are going to help write...


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You can't go wrong with frog god games, really. Even ifyou don't follow the main idea of the adventure there are plenty of detailed encounters, areas, enpc, situation etc that you can plug them into whatever other campaign you are running.


*Rubs chin* Borderland Provinces or Slumbering Tsar, maybe?

An important thing to understand about Frog God Games' products is that a lot of them are basically intended for different styles of games. XD Borderland Provinces is a "Wilderness Exploration" book (which you can easily drop your own plot into), Slumbering Tsar is a "Ruined City Exploration" book (with lots of room to look around in different places), and those might be the best for what you want.

Fundamentally, any set adventure has at least some railroading to it, because that's how stories are designed. However, those two books are probably some of your best options for having a setting to inject your own plot into, and you don't need to inject very much as long as you can nudge your players into looking around.


Another option is EnWorld's "Zeitgeist" AP. It's more story-driven than some of the other options mentioned, but there's a lot of flexibility as to how the PCs deal with the various happenings. There's a bunch of different factions, and it's very possible for the PCs to join any one of them and continue the campaign - even if they ally with the villains.


The other Frog Gods games one you might consider is Sword of Air. It's not as much of a straight on megadungeon as Rappan Athuk. It does have a storyline, but there is not necessarily an expectation that the players will adhere to it.

I also really like the Tomb of Abysthor adventure material by Frog God games. It's not as daunting as Rappan Athuk, but still very open and sandboxy.


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Assuming you want to run Pathfinder and not D&D 5e, you could still potentially use Princes of the Apocalypse or Curse of Stradh. They are fairly sandboxy, but would require conversion to Pathfinder.

The thing is... If you run an open campaign where the characters have a lot of Freedom to do what they want then you are going to have to put in plenty of work, regardless of how much the campaign gives you up front.

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