Question: Are you the GM or are you a player?
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It has plot holes you can float the Titanic through, BUT I still enjoyed many elements of it.
I still remember having a Chevy Chase style rant at one NPC over plot. The NPC was around 9th level, travelling the wilderness, with a sending prepared. After we finally rescue his sorry hide, my warmage goes off on him.
You mean to tell me you are a divine servant of [somebody] and you had a sending prepared? You could have prevented ALL of this with a plain old flamestrike. Hell, even a mass inflict light wounds would have given you a fighting chance. You either would have won, or died and we could still be in town. But instead you hide in a closet casting sending FOR TEN MINUTES. Who travels with a gods damned sending?? Seriously! Are you sure Wisdom is your primary stat? You, sir, are either an idiot, or your god wants you dead. Either way, here's a dagger with one bullet in it if you know what I mean.
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honestly, every preprinted campaign will be railroady, it's just the nature of the beast. It is the job of the GM to obscure the tracks. Even Kingmaker, the "sandbox" AP, still had railroad aspects (i.e. the overarching plotline of the AP).
That said, not sure why your GM is not letting you buy a house in town, if that is the way you want to run. And PC actions should definitely have an impact, probably not on the greater plotline (as the PCs are most likely not interacting on that level until mid/upper levels), but should have an impact on Cauldron and the smaller stories going on there. It is possible there could be adjustments to the greater storyline from the actions on the PCs in the smaller storylines. The extent of the PC impact really depends on the GM and how they run the campaign. This is, of course, a rule for any campaign that a GM runs.
I am currently running the campaign (updating most elements to PF) for some friends and while it is early on so far, it is going well. I do plan on introducing some sidetrek items to tie into the PCs' backstories, which should help invest the PCs more into the story of Cauldron.
As to the bigger picture, there is an overarching plot, and the PCs should be receiving hints as they go along. If you have not been receiving hints as the story has progressed, that may be an issue with the way the GM is running the game, or you are overlooking the hints.
While there are some plot holes in the campaign (as there are within any campaign), as long as the GM prepares in advance these holes can be patched .
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Actually, Shackled City was Paizo's first adventure path (originally appearing in Dungeon magazine from 2003 to 2004, which Paizo published at the time under license from Wizards of the Coast).
To answer some of your concerns:
1) There is a plot, but a lot of it is going on "behind the scenes." Part of the adventure path is about uncovering what is really going on.
2) As the adventure path installments spanned the D&D 3.0 to 3.5 transition, there was a lot of emphasis on dungeons (many of which are very large and require days' or possibly even weeks' worth of exploration). Also, as the first adventure path, pacing and transitions were not always as well thought out as they could/should be.
It's really up to the GM to breathe life into Cauldron and its inhabitants. They should have at least a couple people they consider friends and allies, as well as some rivals and those that see the PCs as tools. One of the tacit assumptions is that the GM shouldn't go out of the way to screw the party over all of the time.
I agree that (1) the first bunch of adventures are pretty loosely connected and (2) there are way too many dungeon crawls for my taste.
Age of Worms and Savage Tide are definitely improvements, in my opinion (although Age of Worms still has issues with some of the adventures being only loosely connected). Shackled City is nice in the sense that most of it takes place in the same area, though.
2) As the adventure path installments spanned the D&D 3.0 to 3.5 transition, there was a lot of emphasis on dungeons (many of which are very large and require days' or possibly even weeks' worth of exploration). Also, as the first adventure path, pacing and transitions were not always as well thought out as they could/should be.
I don't think it has much to do with 3.0 vs. 3.5; it's more related to the desire to make each installment try to work as a stand-alone adventure (with its own dungeon portion of the adventure).
As you note, it was the first adventure path (although not the first multi-part adventure) in Dungeon so they were concerned about customers complaining about adventures that required too much knowledge of previous installments. By the time they published Savage Tide, they realised that wasn't a big concern.
I don't think it has much to do with 3.0 vs. 3.5; it's more related to the desire to make each installment try to work as a stand-alone adventure (with its own dungeon portion of the adventure).
2) As the adventure path installments spanned the D&D 3.0 to 3.5 transition, there was a lot of emphasis on dungeons (many of which are very large and require days' or possibly even weeks' worth of exploration). Also, as the first adventure path, pacing and transitions were not always as well thought out as they could/should be.
It's more that 3.0 was marketed as emphasizing a "back to the dungeon" play-style and adventures were dungeon-heavy at the time. After 3.5 was released, a trend started with using smaller dungeons and including other "outside the dungeon" encounters to get the same number of challenges for experience award purposes.
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Ah, so it strikes me that the lack of connection to Cauldron y'all are feeling really is more the result of GM style. It does take effort on the GMs part to ensure there are points of connection, beginning as early as PC creation.
Creating additional material can also work for immersing the player's into the city. For example, I put together the following items prior to our first game (the Gazetteer was inspired by some of the other similar works put out by other folks on theRPGGenius site for the AP).
I do plan to continue the Gazetteers as a regular element, partly to show the impact the PCs have, partly to help build up the rivalry with the Stormblades, and partly to introduce various elements of the city (via the "ads" on the sidebar).
I also expect the Gazetteers to aid in dropping occasional clues / red herrings (though we do have a sort of unofficial house rule that if the PCs are going off on a red herring in a major way, the GM usually works an actual red herring (or scarlet fish or similar imagery) into the plot, so the players are aware it is off the rails. Sometimes we have continued on the false trail simply for the fun of it, but mostly we end up backtracking to see what we missed.
I have some very fond memories of running Shackled City... then again, my group was very much on the same page for this stuff - they basically played a group of busybody Pholtan missionaries, on a mission to protect Cauldron and convert it away from that misguided faith of St. Cuthbert - but they were painfully nice about it all. But I did spend a lot of time linking things together and filling in the gaps - it helped that the PCs had goals of 'set up church, build connections with locals' in between the adventures.
I ran this start to finish switching to the hardback when it was released about 1/2 way through. To say it was fantastic for my group would be an understatement. They loved every minute of it and so did I. That said it has a very different feel to it than the AP's released now and those reasons are well defined by others in this post.
The biggest baddest reason to love this AP however is it's Grayhawk Baby! As much as I enjoy Golorion, GH will always be my first love and I miss everything Paizo did to bring her alive. So many stories left untold!
To the OP: I think you and the other players need to have an out-of-game chat with your GM and raise the concerns you raised here. It sounds like your GM isn't running the kind of game that you all want to play. As other posters have said, the city adventuring part of this AP is more up to the GM to write/improvise. It might also be better for everyone if the GM made the plot more obvious to the players: "Railroad"-style play isn't bad if the players willingly buy tickets!
honestly, every preprinted campaign will be railroady, it's just the nature of the beast. It is the job of the GM to obscure the tracks. Even Kingmaker, the "sandbox" AP, still had railroad aspects (i.e. the overarching plotline of the AP).
That said, not sure why your GM is not letting you buy a house in town, if that is the way you want to run. And PC actions should definitely have an impact, probably not on the greater plotline (as the PCs are most likely not interacting on that level until mid/upper levels), but should have an impact on Cauldron and the smaller stories going on there. It is possible there could be adjustments to the greater storyline from the actions on the PCs in the smaller storylines. The extent of the PC impact really depends on the GM and how they run the campaign. This is, of course, a rule for any campaign that a GM runs.
I am currently running the campaign (updating most elements to PF) for some friends and while it is early on so far, it is going well. I do plan on introducing some sidetrek items to tie into the PCs' backstories, which should help invest the PCs more into the story of Cauldron.
As to the bigger picture, there is an overarching plot, and the PCs should be receiving hints as they go along. If you have not been receiving hints as the story has progressed, that may be an issue with the way the GM is running the game, or you are overlooking the hints.
While there are some plot holes in the campaign (as there are within any campaign), as long as the GM prepares in advance these holes can be patched .
My players in King Maker chose to ignore the plot line mostly and stumbled back on it from time to time. I just ran the plot in background. Every so often they player would stamp out fire. They never even finished the AP. They quite enjoyed the game though.
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Actually, Shackled City was Paizo's first adventure path (originally appearing in Dungeon magazine from 2003 to 2004, which Paizo published at the time under license from Wizards of the Coast).
To answer some of your concerns:
1) There is a plot, but a lot of it is going on "behind the scenes." Part of the adventure path is about uncovering what is really going on.
2) As the adventure path installments spanned the D&D 3.0 to 3.5 transition, there was a lot of emphasis on dungeons (many of which are very large and require days' or possibly even weeks' worth of exploration). Also, as the first adventure path, pacing and transitions were not always as well thought out as they could/should be.
It's really up to the GM to breathe life into Cauldron and its inhabitants. They should have at least a couple people they consider friends and allies, as well as some rivals and those that see the PCs as tools. One of the tacit assumptions is that the GM shouldn't go out of the way to screw the party over all of the time.
All of this. I actually ran most of Shackled City for my group back in the day. I do agree there was a heavy emphasis on "crawling" that got tiresome.
Shackled City definitely has its flaws, being the protoform to what we now know as Adventure Path. There was also no guarantee they'd get to run all of it at all, meaning each piece needed to have the potential to function as a standalone like many of the adventures in Dungeon. (Sidebar: If you can get your hands on some of these old issues by Paizo and are OK converting to Pathfinder, there are a lot of wonderful one shot adventures. It's also not hard to use them to fill gaps in your own campaign; I adapted at least 3-4 over the years for home games).
But as many have stated, the story IS there and there are actually plenty of NPCs who can help convey it...if the GMs fleshes things out and the PCs engage. Otherwise, if folks are just looking to grind through chasing the bad guys, it will be fairly boring.
It sounds like the GM is making the NPCs particularly difficult to work with, for some reason. However:
This doesn't mean, however, that all NPCs should be jerks. If the players don't care about Cauldron, the whole adventure kind of falls apart.
Non-spoiler version: It's possible the GM is trying to set things up for later. However, even if that's the case, there should still be some friendly NPCs, as your party should care about Cauldron.
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FWIW, I really like the Shackled City, but it's truly an AP from another time. From a time when it was expected that the GM would do all the fleshing out and no one thought that just because a published adventure started at the entry of the dungeon, the actual game would start there as well.
As an aside, I remember a comment about the Age of Worms AP that got some criticism for exactly this scenario (starting at the dungeon's entrance). I think it was Erik Mona commenting on that they were kinda surprised by this feedback, because they were actually expecting the GMs and players to use the Diamond lake Gazetteer and other help material to use for starting the game. It was mentioned that Erik's game went over several sessions before even coming to said dungeon's entrance. So they had a totally different approach to use those adventures.
Back to SC. I wouldn't call it a barebone AP because in fact the GM gets a lot of background information he can make use of. But yeah it's still a lot of work to do to flesh it out because the designers at that time didn't assume that GMs would want to run an adventure as is without making it their own before.
minor pet peeve of mine:
It should be about the PCs, they should be the ones making the difference. I don't play RPG to be on the sideline.
It is about the PCs, it is about making the difference. It's just a question of scale, and just that there are movers and shakers beyond your power (for now) doesn't mean that you're on the sideline.
Just ask the children from the orphanage or those other people you saved, if you don't believe me.