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Hi,
I am planning on running my first adventure path for Pathfinder, and it looks like a bit of a daunting task. I have not GM'd for many a year, never anything as long as an adventure path, and was hoping to get some tips on how best to prepare for the campaign.
The adventure path I am thinking of running is Reign of Winter.
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Let me be the first to say: Welcome to the fold!
You already took the single best step you can take: You signed up here and are looking for advice. As long as you are willing to put some work into the campaign to make it a fun experience, it will!
To be a little more specific: Reign of Winter is a good choice as a first AP to run. Its individual parts are fairly disconnected and you can get away with not knowing the entire path by heart.
So I would suggest to take it one book at a time and focus on each individual part without worrying too much about foreshadowing future events.
That means your first stop should be the Snows of Summer GM Reference thread. Find out what did and didn't work for other people.
Then ask yourself how those parts would resonate with your own group. If you don't know your players' preferences, ask them! In general terms of course.
Here are two examples from Snows of Summer that I would consider to sort of make or break having fun with it. I will put it in spoiler tags just to be safe.
Why save a witch?
The encounter with the Black Rider is supposed to offer the hook for the entire adventure path to the PCs and it does so in the most heavy-handed way possible: a geas. [sad trombone].
This point is fairly important if you want to keep your players engaged. Some players will be perfectly happy to go along with the plot and won't second guess it too much. Others will feel like their character has no motivation to save a legendarily evil witch or a far-away winter kingdom. Carefully find out what kind of players you have and adjust accordingly. The geas should be your absolute last resort. Everyone will have more fun if they feel like their character does it of their own free will.
To get less motivated PCs hooked, play up the threat that Elvanna and her world domination plans pose and drive home the point that Baba Yaga at least kept the terrors of Irrisen within that country's borders. Use NPCs to communicate that to your PCs.
The Road to the Rider
The adventure does a good job creating a strange, grim fairy-tale atmosphere but it does so with a string of scripted combat encounters that give the PCs very little agency. It is literally just a path in the woods with seemingly random monsters to fight. This may work for your group or it may not, so find out how much they enjoy fighting exotic creatures for the sake of fun combat and consider skipping some of those encounters or turn them into narrated or semi-interactive cut-scenes.
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hmmm..contrary to Nullpunkt's advice I'd recommend, in preparation, reading the whole AP once to get an idea of theme, story, plot and possible problems that might come along. Not in detail, but as an overview.
Then, with all you have learned, return to the first book and read it again. Take notes where you think you might need them, don't be afraid to change things a little bit to customize it to the needs and preferences of your group.
And yes, always have a look at the Reference thread between sessions or before you start. The hive mind of GMs that all went through the same adventure is extremely helpful.
Also, try to find out how other groups went throught the AP and what worked for them and what didn't. The GM Reference thread is an excellent start, but campain journals that can be found online and play-by-posts games are livelier to read and you might ge something out of them that the Reference thread couldn't provide. An afternoon spent reading one or two of those does wonders in envisioning and planning, tailoring the AP to your group's preferences.
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Greetings,
Don't be afraid to go off script a little to suit your group. I find some folks get aggravated if they treat APs like they must be run page for page. Just come up with a plan to keep things going in the right direction and the fun will follow.
I'd recommend taking full advantage of the AP sub-forums here onsite. There are going to be moments you want to clarify things or maybe folks will point out something you missed. Also, folks add cool ideas like music and whatnot for you to check out.
Good luck on your first AP!
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Read the whole thing.
Then, go back and see where you can change or add in small things that act as foreshadowing for future events. Try to make the narrative more connected. That's where APs tend to suffer the most.
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Read the whole thing.
Then, go back and see where you can change or add in small things that act as foreshadowing for future events. Try to make the narrative more connected. That's where APs tend to suffer the most.
Seriously.
All these great NPCs - and often the Big Bad - don't get any screentime until the last module or two, and the AP story suffers.
One of the reasons that Hell's Rebels and Curse of the Crimson Throne work so well is that the Big Bad is right there, front and center, from the first module.
Others... well... that's not done well. So, unless there's a mystery that's not knowable to the PCs from the start, think about having some role for these villains earlier on, to help build up the tension and give the party a reason to keep going.
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A good thing to remember that APs are a big time investment. Which means that you may end up running for the same people for the whole thing, or real life may interfere, and you may end up changing your players or characters throughout the course. I just finished book 5 of two APs within three days of each other. For one of them, I had the same 5 players for the whole thing, with only one character dying and getting replaced. For the other, we were reflecting that only one of the characters is the same as the character that started. Yet both of these have been very successful APs.
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I'm going to argue with everyone.
Don't read the whole thing.
Do read the whole thing.
Both are right, and both are wrong. I skim an entire AP before I run it, then I "prep" a session's worth of material a couple days before game day, then refresh myself right before.
Thing is, that's a lot of work for a new group. A lot of things can happen in the year or two it generally takes to run an AP. Frankly you might get in a book or two and the campaign fizzles. If you spend a bunch of hours wrapping your head around six books of material and the campaign ends early, that's a waste. You could've spent that time really nailing down the parts of the game you did play.
At the end of the first book there's a decent summary of what happens in other five books. The opening section gives a campaign overview as well.
Honestly, unless you've got a long-term gaming group that you know well and can predict their investment, I wouldn't kill a lot of time on The Big Picture. Adventure Paths are nicely written so you can pick them up and run them (mostly) linearly.
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I would say its a good idea to read the whole thing first but maybe not pay too much attention and get an idea for the direction of the path and things you can foreshadow.
Look for things that it might have been a better idea to put in the first book rather than at the end of book 3...
I'm specifically hinting at the weather chart at the end of book 3 in Skull and Shackles.
Glancing over the whole path also gives you a chance to find big holes in the plot (like traveling from Magnimar to Turtleback Ferry, or crossing the roof of the world) so you can either find a plug-in adventure (legendary games does some good ones for a lot of paths) or plan random encounters.
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I agree that it makes most APs better if you read the whole thing first. But have the advocates of that here actually read Reign of Winter?
Especially for someone taking on the daunting task of running an entire AP for the very first time, I would very much recommend focusing your time and effort on each individual chapter of this path.
I am curious to hear how others have improved their Reign of Winter game by foreshadowing events from future installments, though.
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For me it's not about foreshadowing, but it is about knowing what the likely themes are and what kinds of characters will 'fit in' with the overall path - the first issue is often quite different from the path overall.
I agree with you and Anguish that the majority of the effort should be devoted to the upcoming installment, but I think knowing what's coming will help.
So in Reign of Winter, for example, if player decided they wanted to build a shop and use the downtime rules extensively through the campaign as they adventured "around" that focus, I'd just flat out suggest they pick another AP for that (one with a central home base).
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I think it also depends on what AP you are running whether you should read the whole thing. If you're doing Hell's Rebels or Curse of the Crimson Throne, for example, it's good to read the whole thing first, because later books flesh out stuff that may come up in earlier books. (That said, I DID run the first couple of books of Hell's Rebels before the whole thing was out with only a few frantic posts begging for spoilers.) For RoW, I think it's far less crucial.
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Split the difference and read the summaries, but not the entire chapters. Really, storyline is where you could go so far off the path that things get sketchy. I will admit there has been a few times a key NPC died or did something they probably shouldn't have. Not the end of the world, but you need to know how to write back around that to make the whole thing cohesive.
Cheers!