I"m looking for some advice on which AP to run for a group of my friends, three of which I've been playing with since high school (almost 35 years now) one of which has an attention deficit problem, another who has been playing for over 20 years, and one of my friends wives who is brand new to roleplaying.
We tried playing Kingmaker but the sandboxy nature of it and the wash, rinse, repeat of the exploration factor soon had them bored. So, to that end I'm looking for something a bit more railroady. Given the nature of the group I'd also like to avoid anything with a sub-system involved with it (ala Kingmaker).
I was thinking Mummy's Mask or Shattered Star might be a good fit but wanted to see if I'm overlooking any other AP's that might fit the bill.
I"m looking for some advice on which AP to run for a group of my friends, three of which I've been playing with since high school (almost 35 years now) one of which has an attention deficit problem, another who has been playing for over 20 years, and one of my friends wives who is brand new to roleplaying.
We tried playing Kingmaker but the sandboxy nature of it and the wash, rinse, repeat of the exploration factor soon had them bored. So, to that end I'm looking for something a bit more railroady. Given the nature of the group I'd also like to avoid anything with a sub-system involved with it (ala Kingmaker).
I was thinking Mummy's Mask or Shattered Star might be a good fit but wanted to see if I'm overlooking any other AP's that might fit the bill.
Dotting for future
Shattered Star definitely has a "Roll" playing aspect, lots of dungeon crawls in the first two modules, haven't gone farther than that yet. I would imagine Emerald Spire would be a good option too.
I think Shattered Star is pretty much the AP for this. Lots of dungeons, and you could cut out all the intervening connections between them to make it really hard railroady instead of just mostly railroady.
I agree, shattered star. that being said, every AP comes with some kind of sub-system, so maybe just expect to have one and maybe try to work around it
Castle Ravenloft.
Thanks for the suggestions. We've already done RotRL, LoF and CotCT in 3.5, so those three are off the table as well. As I said before the reason I want to avoid any sub-systems (Mythic, as well) is because one of them is brand new to roleplaying and I don't want to muddy the waters too much and have them be overwhelmed.
As an example of what I'm dealing with here I once asked them for backgrounds for their characters only one of them did and what I got was a re-telling of Superboy's origin from Young Justice, only substituting a Wizard for Superman.
Age of Worms.
I also vote for Age of Worms, with Savage Tide in second place.
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Perhaps something non-paizo, like Rappan Athuk, Slumbering Tzar or something else from Frog God Games?
It sounds to me like you'd be better off with a dungeon generator or dungeon crawl style book than an AP. Those by nature have both combat and socializing.
+1 for the Emerald Spire.
I can say that my delve into Emerald Spire seems to have a fair bit of Roll playing, complete with "Okay, we KNOW there are traps around here, so let's take the 10 foot pole and prod the floor until we find them" moments.
You can convert the 3.5 "Expedition to Castle Greyhawk" hardback and run that. Not a lot of roleplaying in that one, from what I've read so far.
I am massively confused by people saying Strange Aeons is just a dungeon crawl. I'm running this AP for some folks and there is massive amounts of roleplay and character development not only baked into the story, but intrinsic to the plot and required for advancement.
Sure, you can cut it all out by removing puzzles, problems, encounters and NPCs to make it just a dungeon crawl, but by standard every AP can be just a dungeon crawl.
Pretty much every AP I am familiar with can fit. Our group tends to be more on the Roll-play side and we have had a lot of fun with Savage Tide and RotRL. As the GM, just count on them to do less free-will decision making and push them towards the right places.
Of the large campaigns I am familiar with, I would put Emerald Spire at the top, like many others here. There is some crossover tie-in with nearby Thornkeep if you wanted to branch out some and bring some of that into play too.
It's hard to judge this as a player in an AP, because the amount of RollvRole can vary a lot from group to group. I just started playing in Giant Slayer and we're getting a lot of "role" in, and I've played in Hell's Rebels which should be a lot of "role", but we mostly just treated it as a dungeon crawl. But I've had equal amounts of fun in both.
I am massively confused by people saying Strange Aeons is just a dungeon crawl.My bad. I should have said, the *first* module in that AP is a big dungeon crawl. After that, yeah, it mixes things up a lot and there are a lot more NPCs and interaction. Point.
Doug M.
Even book 1, despite all taking place in a single building, is dripping with RP. There are page long write ups for NPCs, roleplay conversations, and ways that the party can roleplay with hostile monsters. As written, you can't even access part 3 of the book without RP.