Loosening my GM shackles

[Hmm]

I looooooove modules. I love them to bits, because in them, there is a lot less scripting and far more "just wing it" moments. Murder's Mark, Masks of the Living God, Doom Comes to Dustpawn and Feast of Dust all had wonderful bits that I could breathe life into and moments for character choice and discovery.

Now modules are long and as such, they're slightly harder for me to schedule. I either need to do them at my house in one long run as a private game, or I need to schedule them over two sessions at Dreamers. (Or I do them as PbPs, which are also fun for me.). Fortunately the Dreamers crowd of regulars are pretty reliable. So far I've lucked out at being able to get consistent parties for both parts.

I enjoyed Consortium Compact and a few other recent adventures for having moments of GM choice and the ability to adapt to players shenanigans and skill sets -- giving players a variety of ways to win. I was wondering, what other scenarios are there that are a bit loose? I cannot tell you how much it annoys me to "fights to the death" in the tactics of a routine minion or hireling, or a capricious fey, or someone else who might be wiling to otherwise take a PCs offer of a surrender. Sometimes I feel really locked in by a given scenario. What are the looser scenarios? Are there some good ones that give GMs a bit more room to maneuver and share a great story with their players?

Hmm

[Paz]

#6–22: Out of Anarchy sounds like the kind of thing you're looking for.

[Hmm]

Oh, that's a Calisro scenario! I'll have to take another look at that one!

[BigNorseWolf]

Night march of kalkamedes.

The characters WILL do something weird in the main part.

[Shinae]

Frostfur Captives! Was a lot of fun to gm as well. Scenario gives some guidelines, but still leaves enough room for gm to bring it alive. It actually requires gm to roleplay to be a good scenario.

Also Kalkamedes mentioned above was fantastic to play.

[Rei]

Murder on the Throaty Mermaid is a small sandbox, but it's pretty genuinely one. I always have fun running that one, even if running it tends to be leaning back and watching the characters brainstorm. The ending, however, is... a bit difficult to run according to how the scenario wants you to run it.

[Michael_Hopkins]

Oh, The Tome of Righteous Repose is excellent from the looks of things. So many choices, even as a dungeon-crawl.

[Slothsy]

5-22 Scars of the Third Crusade offers a lot of GM flexibility as well.

[The Great Rinaldo!]

Another recommendation for Frostfur Captives. There is a lot of room to really play with the the interaction between the PCs and NPCs.

Especially now that we don't have to run the faction missons, you have some extra time to really play around and enjoy it.

[Woran]

The Disappeared. You have a classic "Go from A to B". But the part between A and B is a giant sandbox. Players can get as creative as they want and its been different every single time I ran it. Its fantastic.

[Terminalmancer]

Frostfur Captives is also a favorite of mine. And it's fantastic for convincing new players they should play more Pathfinder... it does require some pregame goblin prep.

[Kerney]

Rigby Bendele wrote:

5-22 Scars of the Third Crusade offers a lot of GM flexibility as well.

I had a lot of fun with Scars of the Third Crusade. And ran it about four times with carried results, for example--

Spoiler:

Characters killing the Inquisitor versus character sharing a bed with the Inquisitor. Party with all cha dumped characters eventually breaking into the jail, fighting a Mexican standoff with the sheriff, Inquisitor, and townsfolk. They have a section called about town were you make up just make little encounters up. I had a bunch of kids playing "Crusaders and Pathfinders" were they are chasing one kid "pathfinder" and getting ready to burn her. Characters interview and the kids say it's fine "because she's fireproof". Kid turns out to be a tiefling and when questioned the girl says "Mum says it's better now because at least they'll let me join in." Decided she was the adopted daughter of the half elf half orc couple.

[RealAlchemy]

I'm prepping 3-21 Temple of Empyreal Enlightenment and it looks pretty sandboxy. Characters can go wherever they want, and I see a lot of chances for free-form RP.

[ScorchedOne]

That temple is positively a gas. My players still have nightmares.

Oh, also 8-01 Portent's Peril. I mean it's still an ABCD, but you can go BACD, CABD, straight to D (not recommended), but where you go and how you get there has options. There's a lot of great choices and options there, especially for RP.

[Alanya]

The Overflow Archives is one of my favorites to GM (Frostfur Captives being my other favorite), as the RP is hilarious; soooo many fun NPCs.

Another good one for RP is the first half of The Merchant's Wake. You can really get into the rivalry between the two NPCs, and usually the PCs are more than happy to choose a side and play along (though they'll probably enjoy it more if they've also played The Glass River Rescue, where said NPCs are first seen together).

Season 7 also had a ton of fun RP scenarios, as the OP is well aware (I love reading your experiences on the GM threads, HMM!). :)

[Wei Ji the Learner]

Let's see...

Horn of Aroden (if the players get 'buy-in' on the back half the scenario)

Merchant's Wake was mentioned above

Hall of Drunken Heroes (if you don't have players passively disrupting your table)

Blanking on others atm.