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I recently had the realization that the AP I'm currently running, Serpent's Skull, seems to only have old (3.5-era) references to 3rd-party products. I'm interested to know, do more recent adventure paths have the same sort of time gap (4-8 years) between the product being published and that monster or other mechanic being used? Are there any pre-existing lists of such references in adventure paths?
Otherwise, to start one:
"Racing to Ruin" - page 18, kelpie, Tome of Horrors Revised (2005); page 30, geier, Nyambe: African Adventures (2002); page 39, spriggan, Tome of Horrors Revised (2005)
"City of Seven Spears" - page 24, kech, Tome of Horrors Revised (2005); page 29, amphisbaena, Tome of Horrors Revised (2005)
"Vaults of Madness" - I don't have this one yet!
"The Thousand Fangs Below" - page 52, gohl, Tome of Horrors III (2006)
"Sanctum of the Serpent God" - page 37, thessalhydra, Tome of Horrors Revised (2005)
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TL;DR: Serpent's Skull was published in August 2010, four months before before Bestiary 2. Paizo had to rely very heavily on third-party OGL content, as the Pathfinder brand was still young (and the Pathfinder Role-Playing Game was only a year old.)
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When Paizo lost the license to publish Dungeon and Dragon magazines back in 2007, they turned their attentoion to publishing their own Adventure Paths as a monthly subscription service. They called this product line "Pathfinder," and their first issue was Pathfinder #1: Burnt Offerings, the first volume of the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path. This was published under the 3.5 Open Game License. They followed suit with the next three APs: Crimson Throne (2008), Second Darkness (2008), and Legacy of Fire (2009).
Because these were OGL publications (2001-ish?), they could not use any closed-content material from Wizards of the Coast. That meant: no monsters, classes, races, magic items, or spells from any Dungeons and Dragons publication that wasn't released in the OGL... which essentially meant nothing outside of the Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, or Monster Manual.
That meant Paizo didn't have the rich collection of closed-content D&D monsters to use anymrore: They only had the monsters from the 3.5 SRD, so they had to rely on third-party content.
Early in the life of the OGL (2001-ish?), Necromancer Games managed to get permission from WotC to publish a large number of 'second-string' monsters from the AD&D days under the OGL. This opened up a whole lot of monsters from the old AD&D Fiend Folio (1981) and Monster Manual II (1983) into the OGL, which made them open for any other third-party publisher. (Specifically: WotC allowed Necromancer to use monsters from those sources that WotC itelf wasn't planning to publish in its own D&D 3e Monster Manual II.) These, and some original content, were published in Necromancer Games' Tome of Horrors series.
Green Ronin also had published two very popular 3.5 OGL monster books: the Advanced Bestiary (a book monster templates), and The Book of Fiends, a bestiary of evil outsiders.
Paizo didn't publish the PFRRG Core Rulebook until 2009 and the Bestiary until 2010. Before then, they relied exclusively on 3.5 OGL monsters. So, espeically in the early APs, you'll see a lot of references to the Tome of Horrors, Advanced Bestiary, and Book of Fiends, plus a number of other 3PP OGL sources.
You'll see references to the earlier OGL sources even if the content had been re-published for Pathfinder. For example, you'll note that in the OGL section of Pathfinder #65: Into the Nightmare Rift, there's a reference to the caryatid column from Necromancer Games Tome of Horrors (its original source for the OGL), even though the monster had already been published in Paizo's own Bestiary 3. I'm not a lawyrer, but I understand that is is part of the OGL license terms.
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You also have an odd monster pulled from other excellent 3PP sources, such as Nyambe.
As for references in OGL, well, because the weird way Necromancer Games built their open content statement in the first Tome of Horrors, every time you pull a monster out of that book you need to indicate every individual monster in your replication of the OGL. So, if you take 20 ToH monsters, you need to have them all in your OGL.
Mummy's Mask uses a few as well, and it's relatively recent.