I'm thinking about running Strength of Thousands when it comes out but I have extremely limited experience with prewritten content. I've done some playtest stuff and two books of Carrion Crown, before giving up on it because it was too frustrating. I couldn't get around the feeling of giving a presentation with someone else's powerpoint. I felt like when running it there would be surprise spots where there wasn't enough info, like realizing a map lacked a key detail and I had to stop and figure it out, or it made assumptions that didn't track like assuming the party goes to a location at night.
I've run tons and tons of my own adventures and it never felt like so much work as running Carrion Crown.
Have APs changed much since Carrion Crown? How do you typically start off? What do you do to prepare and how long does it take? How much do you modify the adventure?
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I have run many APs in PF1 era. I havent run a single one of them as written. Close at times, but I always mix in my own thoughts on things and make a few edits here and there. So, I do a lot of prep work. I dont start an AP unless I have at least two modules of the line. I read the entire module before starting, so I have a good idea of how the game will unfold. I read ahead to know whats coming too so I dont bork anything too early. You never know how important certain details may be. Also, making changes now will require changes later.
I also check the Paizo boards specific forums for advice and ideas. Folks are great about sharing cool ideas they came up with to enhance the experience. They are also great at reporting difficulty in the AP with encounters, maps, NPCs, etc. This helps run the game smoother by avoiding pit falls (which all written adventures have, IMO).
I think the idea out there that, APs are easy because all the work is done for you, is very misguided. An AP is work just like homebrewing or modules or running any other type of game. The more you put into it, the better the experience. You are not alone, however, take advantage of the forums for advice is my biggest take away.
Probably my most helpful trick (other than visualizing going through the adventure myself w/ specific PC attitudes as I read) is to make a sketch of the map and fill in the sketch with scribbles of what creatures or traps are there.
As basic as it is, it brings home connections that might be too abstract in word form and gives me a better picture than just referencing the map as I read.
Using an ancient example, I did this with the AD&D Hill Giant G1 module and immediately noticed how battles were distinctly separated. The fights weren't haphazard like Gygax was just filling rooms. There was even a flow to the fights so a cunning group (who can hear the main boss's group, hence avoid them until prepped) could circumnavigate the boss and eliminate his support who isolated could be killed using few resources.
Paizo packs its dungeons, often to fit on a battlemat or flipmat, so it might not reveal as much, but the exercise will still give you one sheet which presents all the creatures which you can use to tweak difficulty as needed.
And remember the developers really don't want you beholden to RAW re: modules! If you've seen them run published material, you've likely noticed they never remain loyal to the specifics.
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Okay, one more thing which probably should've been my first tip would be to integrate your PCs' backgrounds with elements in the story.
Ex. I had an elf player who'd lost her younger sister who drowned.
I would be running a water-themed temple many levels later so tweaked it so the baddies (unknown to the PC) had drowned the sister. That integrated well with an elven undead spirit haunting the same dungeons!
So a tragic footnote became integral to how that PC interacted with the temple (once she learned) and with the evil spirit (redeemable?!?).
Or another player whose family had been wiped out, driving her to hunt them down. I asked if I could name them and she agreed so now the second module's pirates became much more relevant when she heard who the bosun was! (He escaped the destruction of the pirates, though she tracked him down and eventually forgave him, even recruited him as a dubious ally.)
Lots of non-tragic routes to go too, yet it is a fantasy, a genre where an inordinate number of characters have intertwined lives or families.
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My main fears with it is similar to yours. To make it good, it's probably going to involve a near equivalent amount of work to homebrewing, so why lose out on the ownership, familiarity and control that comes with homebrewing?
For my group(s), I've never been able to find players who give a rats azz about my homebrew worlds. They would much rather me make up a story in a setting like Golarion or Forgettable Realms.
For me, I'm not good at making things up out of nothing. I need a good foundation to get me going. The APs are wonderful for that and supply great seeds to grow my own stories.
I also feel like I'd get a tad perfectionist with it and spend even more time prepping, and that I'd get burnt out halfway through and then am unable to derail it without losing the point of running published adventures completely.
Not a good place to be. In my experience, when folks try and replicate an entire specific AP experience they usually fail. They start doing things like asking where they went wrong, or blaming the adventure writers, or hating their players, etc.
Not every scene or encounter is going to be perfect. Some will undoubtedly land with a loud thud. Others though, will take off wonderfully and your group will love it. Try too hard and it will be disappointing, don't try at all and it will be lifeless. You gotta find the pocket and stay in it. Dont let perfect be the enemy of good when running an AP.
The themes of almost all the APs so far *have* been really tempting though!
They do pick some good themes dont they?
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I spent the first 30 years of GMing running a mix of homebrew and published content (like Castilliano, I go back to the sideburns and bell-bottoms era). Then I spent the last 17 years or so running pretty much only published content because I was too busy to prepare my own.
I think the main thing you need to run published content is a different perspective. AP's and all printed adventures are backbones, not complete solutions. You will always have places where the answers aren't there because the writers and editors simply didn't think the way you do, and also because it's impossible to cover all eventualities.
Yeah, I -always- encounter "what were they thinking?" moments in any published adventure. "Why would this NPC not just do Obvious Thing X?" or "Where the hell are these stairs supposed to go?" or "Why does this refer to a magic item that doesn't exist?" You just have to roll with it. If the AP has a great story and one part doesn't make any sense without a large dose of suspended disbelief, you must either suspend disbelief or re-write it to suit you. I always tell my players that an AP is a railroad, but I promise that it'll pull into some cool stations along the way.
Another way to handle it, WatersLethe, is to read the AP, write down the major plot points, steal the NPCs you like and throw away the AP. Just run it like a homebrew but with the intended plot as a guide. Your players won't care and you might enjoy it better.
Hope you have fun! I'm watching Strength of Thousands with interest, too!
Lots of good advice here guys, thank you so much!
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I don't have a "typical" yet. I've done books 1-4 of Iron Gods and I was getting a bit burned out towards the end, and there are definitely things I'd do differently.
- Go through the AP looking for nuggets that you really like. It can be a town the players visit, an NPC, a spell, an item, a monster, an encounter setup, an RP scene or skill challenge, maybe even just really good artwork. Identify the bits you're excited to use.
- Think about what's missing. In Iron Gods, I felt like the Technic League were foreshadowed quite a bit but they really didn't do enough. They just kinda sit waiting in Starfall until you go there finally in book 5.
- More side plots. In Age of Ashes you got this wonderful base for the players but all you do is main plot main plot. It's like Deep Space Nine if they'd done only metaplot all the time.
Overall I think I'd weed out a lot of the main metaplot dungeons, trim them down from a dozen encounters to something closer to five-room dungeons. And I'd add a bunch of side adventures, so overall the amount of adventuring (and XP, if you use that) in between main adventures stays the same, but it's less crammed into a single dungeon.
I would also want to focus much more on the characters. APs by nature can't assume too much about the PCs, since the writer wasn't personally familiar with the eventual players. But you are. Especially with the side adventures, you can inject a lot more personal interest stuff, like quests related to the PCs' backgrounds and ambitions.
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I don't have a "typical" yet. I've done books 1-4 of Iron Gods and I was getting a bit burned out towards the end, and there are definitely things I'd do differently.
- Go through the AP looking for nuggets that you really like. It can be a town the players visit, an NPC, a spell, an item, a monster, an encounter setup, an RP scene or skill challenge, maybe even just really good artwork. Identify the bits you're excited to use.
- Think about what's missing. In Iron Gods, I felt like the Technic League were foreshadowed quite a bit but they really didn't do enough. They just kinda sit waiting in Starfall until you go there finally in book 5.
- More side plots. In Age of Ashes you got this wonderful base for the players but all you do is main plot main plot. It's like Deep Space Nine if they'd done only metaplot all the time.
Overall I think I'd weed out a lot of the main metaplot dungeons, trim them down from a dozen encounters to something closer to five-room dungeons. And I'd add a bunch of side adventures, so overall the amount of adventuring (and XP, if you use that) in between main adventures stays the same, but it's less crammed into a single dungeon.
I would also want to focus much more on the characters. APs by nature can't assume too much about the PCs, since the writer wasn't personally familiar with the eventual players. But you are. Especially with the side adventures, you can inject a lot more personal interest stuff, like quests related to the PCs' backgrounds and ambitions.
This is all really good stuff here. More specific examples of the type of thing I do for prep and changes I make to the actual AP material when running one.
I run Paizo adventure paths because if I created my own villains for campaigns, they would be too practical and mundane. I don't naturally think in the colorful evil that makes an interesting opponent. (This is also a weakness that my players will exploit. Get the villain talking and I start filling in details out of my own tendencies. Then they can try a diplomatic solution.) In addition, it is nice to have a pre-written adventure to fall back on during weeks when I was too busy (my pre-retirement days) or too tired (my post-retirement days).
Have APs changed much since Carrion Crown? How do you typically start off? What do you do to prepare and how long does it take? How much do you modify the adventure?
I think they are a little more flexible, providing details that can be used in player-created plot twists. I typically start with a Session Zero where the players learn the setting and theme of the adventure path, and the blurb of the 1st module, so that they can create characters that fit.
I don't run an adventure path exactly as written. I change about a quarter of it. Sometimes the module has contradictions. Maps not matching written descriptions seems to occur in at least one map per module. More recently, in our current module, Assault on Longshadow, the writers Benjamin Bruck and Thurston Hillman imagined Longshadow as both an iron smelting city and a major port on the Marideth River. I guess they never observed the large waterfall fifteen miles downriver of Longshadow, cutting it off from all other towns on the river except the lone small village Ecru upstream.
Other changes are my choice. I am converting Assault on Longshadow from PF1 to PF2, which forces changes in NPCs and monsters. I also do not make much effort to keep my players on the course predefined by the module. Their departures from the written path are better stories than a module can provide. Modules are written for generic, predictable characters, not the eccentric individuals that my players create.
Okay, one more thing which probably should've been my first tip would be to integrate your PCs' backgrounds with elements in the story.
Ex. I had an elf player who'd lost her younger sister who drowned. ...
I have been wary about incorporating backstories into the story ever since one of my D&D Dungeon Masters did it tragically. The party barbarian's sister had been kidnapped by slavers in his youth and he traveled civilized lands to search for her. At around 10th level the DM gave us a lead, we traveled to a foreign country with a creepy castle, and we found her there. Alas, the vampires in the castle had made her a vampire, too, so the barbarian killed his vampire sister to spare her a fate as an evil monster. We were all sad.
We had family background come up in my current campaign. The elf ranger Zinfandel was from the local region of Nirmathis, so the player looked at the map of towns in southern Nirmathis: Phaendar, Cavlinor, Longshadow, Redburrow, Radya's Hollow, Emberville, Platter Township, etc. She chose Radya's Hollow as Zinfandel's hometown, since it seemed close enough to the forest to have elven residents. Alas, Radya's Hollow shows up in Assault on Longshadow when the PCs rescue its last few residents who survived the Ironfang invasion. Oops, do I kill off Zinfandel's family, or include a few among the survivors, or let the player chose a different hometown in retroactive continuity?
Fortunately, the party was so efficient that they were weeks ahead of the timetable of the Ironfang invasion. I let them learn news of an army of the Ironfang Legion marching toward Radya's Hollow while they were still in the 2nd module, Fangs of War. They detoured to stop the invasion of the town. Zinfandel saved his parents and brother and the whole town. I had to create a full map of Radya's Hollow (I copied and modified a map of Crosswych from the Elder Scrolls Online game) for the battle, since the adventure path did not provide one.
WatersLethe's experience with homebrew campaigns will help them recognize when changes are for the best.
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Mathmuse,
Yeah, that GM undermined the Barbarian's "rescue the sister" arc IMO.
In the examples I gave, the player had introduced the tragedy, though I have done so after explicitly asking the player, "Is it okay if I rough up/sadden/exploit your backstory?" I don't give specifics other than emotions involved, and so far they've always said yes, though I've also only asked veteran players.
So for example, when a PC had a very similar family story to the first big boss, including the city, I asked if I could mess with his family. He agreed, and the boss became his sister. This brought her into the story earlier (to taunt him) and in turn he gained some data on her for his troubles. And with a disapproving mother around, he had troubles indeed, and it resonated with the other PCs who empathized, drawing them together.
I think I'm only going to echo a lot of what's already been said, but here goes. I used to write my own adventures a ton back when I was in school and my most taxing job was part-time work. Once life started to pick up, I found Dungeon mags and started running a ton of published content through to APs now.
I've run Age of Worms to completion, half of Savage Tide, Rise of the Runelords, Hell's Vengeance, Age of Ashes, and a smattering of half-finished campaigns (Mummy's Mask, Reign of Winter, Iron Gods). The biggest advice I have is that you're still telling a story, even if the story is written out in front of you. What I mean to say is, the story exists, but it's up to you to give it meaning and drama. The easiest way to do that is to tie things to your characters' backgrounds. The backgrounds that come in the Players' Guides are a good start, but talking with players and seeing what sort of story they have for their character helps you to sketch out an "arc" for them.
As an example, I had a player in Age of Ashes whose goblin barbarian grew up in a savage goblin tribe and had dreams of dethroning his mother to take control of the clan. Let me tell you, that doesn't really sit comfortably in the story's framework without some stretching. Well, after having the people of town treat him well and him doing some heroics, I started feeding him some red herrings that his family might have been behind some disappearances. He meets with them, sees they're innocent, but also notes that the tribe has swelled and is preparing for war. The AP continues normally (along with still feeding interacts to the other players at the table), and when the PCs return back to town, surprise-surprise, the goblin tribe has come calling to attack.
Up until this point, I haven't needed to do any actual work. Just think up a little story and let it play out at the table. The players then fight back against the goblin army, taken back the town, and the barbarian gets his chance to fight his mother and take control of the tribe. This was the arc my player wanted and got.
The real trick is to tie it in to the AP.
Now my player got what he wanted, got tied deeper into the story, has a vested interest in seeing his character develop and getting answers to his background. And all I truly needed to prep were a few encounters with goblins (and a custom monster for his mother). You can definitely go overboard and design the world, but hooking your players into the game world and making it theirs isn't as difficult as it sounds. Look for what they want, give it to them, and use it to draw them in.
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I've run one homebrew campaign and one AP is currently near the end. As someone fresh to roleplaying in general, for the homebrew campaign I was very grateful for the pathfinderwiki to read up on the lore. Then I thought of an overarching story, and made encounters 1-3 sessions in advance.
When I switched to running an AP, the thing is that it is easier, but takes the same amount of time. Where I would actively look for monsters and lore in a homebrew campaign, for the AP I could just read the book. It requires less creativity, but still gives the option for creativity by making changes to the AP and tying in player's backstory, etc.
So APs have my preference unless I have a very long creative spark.