Most Renown Pathfinder 1 Adventure Path?

[Currently DMing]

Greetings!

I have recently joined a new group who play Pathfinder 1st Edition, but I am a longtime 3.X gamer.

I have put forward the idea of running an adventure path for them but with having so many choices it seems overwhelming.
What would be the best choice to give the PCs a wide range of challenges but also has some good role play moments?

One side note is that I might also be interested in running the game online here in the forum also, so maybe keep that in making suggestions.

Thanks!

[ckdragons]

Rise of the Runelords is about as renown as you can get, especially for Pathfinder. Its a great AP with a many elements, including dungeon crawls, town sieges, role-playing, and investigations. It's so popular that Pazio released an anniversary edition on its 10th year anniversary, updated to the current Paizo rules and good changes to the encounters that make better sense.

A bit of history... the first few Pazio APs were released under the 3.5 rule set. 2 APs have since received a hardcover update since then: Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne. These 2 APs were probably the most popular out all of the APs. Those were updated to the Pathfinder ruleset, along with some quality of life improvements, many recommended by the community.

Regardless, you can't go wrong with any AP. The best option would be to read the intro to each to determine what would be the best for your group.

[Kasoh]

Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne have collected editions in Pathfinder 1st edition. These have all the material to run the AP in one book. Rise of the Runelords is a popular one--The AP specific section will have a lot of information to help you and player generated maps and whatnot to pull from.

Curse also has a good reputation. I find Curse to have more RP in than Rise because you spend most of the AP concerned with a central location.

I think Hell's Rebels is one of the best APs Paizo has produced. Dungeons, intrigue, party scenes, underwater combat, trips to hell. Its a complete package.

If you know more about the group you're running it for, it'd be easier to tailor the suggestions to what kind of content.

Horror: Strange Aeons or Carrion Crown
Heavy Metal Album Cover: Wrath of the Righteous
Yo, I heard you like dungeons: Shattered Star
Outdoors: Kingmaker, Ironfang Invasion

and etc.

[GeraintElberion]

If you like the theme, Serpent’s Skull and Mummy’s Mask are both incredibly tight, well-written adventures.

[Steel_Wind]

Currently DMing wrote:

What would be the best choice to give the PCs a wide range of challenges but also has some good role play moments?

While I don't disagree that among Pathfinder Players, Rise of the Runelords probably has the most play throughs, being the oldest AP and the first one that made it to Anniv Ed in hardback form helps. A lot.

Beyond Pathfinder players, the AP with the most "renown" isn't RotRL though -- it's Kingmaker. That's the AP that had both a PC and console game named after it - and based upon it, too. And yes, a hardcover version of Kingmaker for both PF2 and 5e is coming later this year (it was funded via crowd sourcing in 2019).

Kingmaker has some great moments, though it suffers from front nine/back nine duality. The first three volumes in that AP are all much better than the last three. Who knows, perhaps the PF2 version will leverage the better system for high level play that PF2 promises and break that perception of Kingmaker's deficiencies under PF1.

[keftiu]

Saying that Kingmaker had a PC and a console game is a touch misleading; it has one game that released first on PC and was then ported to consoles.

The same folks are decently far into making their Wrath of the Righteous game now, which should follow suit.