How Well Does Return work on its own?

[Lonesomechunk]

Hello all, I've been reading over Return of the Runelords and I've been enjoying it immensely, there's a lot of really interesting material here and the way it involves elements of high level play with extraplanar travel and far-reaching consequences along with getting to travel around Varisia and take part in an exciting adventure leaves me wanting to run this for some of my players (just converted to 2e since thats our system of choice) however I wanted to ask how well this AP works even if my players haven't played through Rise or Shattered Star.

As cool as the previous APs are, I just don't want to run 3 APs to experience the Runelord Saga and this one seems like the best of the three to me, especially considering its effects on the world in 2e, so if i had to run one, it would be this one. It goes over the big event that is the runelords reawakening that was teased through the previous two adventure paths

Obviously they won't recognize as many NPCs and they'll be introduced to the concepts of Runelords and Ancient Thassilon for the first time, but it seems like it still works out well as an adventure, however I'm not sure if this is because from my perspective as the DM, I know all about what happens in the previous adventure paths and this one covers a lot more ground than either of the previous two. It seems like the biggest upside to having played through the previous adventures is being able to go "hey i recognize that name!" or "oh cool we get to visit magnimar again!" as opposed to the adventure needing prior knowledge of runelords or the events of previous APs to be fun, is this assessment correct?

[Bjørn Røyrvik]

Return works just fine on its own. It was designed to, after all. As you say, most of the benefit from having run Rise and SStar comes from knowing more of the background and NPCs. the biggest benefit to having run SStar first is you can bring in PCs from that AP and use them in Return.

[Lonesomechunk]

wonderful! I thought that might be the case, I just wanted to get a second opinion on it. Return looks really good, probably my favorite of the runelords trilogy overall so I hope it goes well when I eventually get around to it with my group

[YogoZuno]

I'm playing through in a group, and there are two of the 5 of us that have played SS and Rise. One of the players who played SS is playing an heir to that character, who is also an expert on the Runelords and Ancient Thassilon. That works really well, since the player is also quite knowledgeable on the subjects, while the rest of us aren't.

As a player who hasn't played the other APs, I'm still enjoying the plot.