I've found Outlaws of Alkenstar pretty great so far to run, although that may be because of the full Foundry module support being so good. The only poor part of it so far is one full level that seemed super rushed, and looking at the XP provided there is no way to reach the milestone for the next level using pure XP.
It all seems to fit together pretty well though, I don't see any discordant genre shifts. You can't really expect the large city in the middle of the mana wastes, wedged between Nex and Geb, in Golarion, to just have frontier west themes after all. That wouldn't make any sense.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So far I've been enjoying our run of Age of Ashes. We're also in a five person group so the rougher combats haven't been quite as rough as I suspect most get. We're currently on book three and just hitting a tough patch where we're suddenly under a perceived time crunch and having to deal with lots of difficult encounters but we're hoping it eases up a little after we're done with that portion.
Also, a tad off-topic but are you meant to get lots of downtime in AoA? I haven't gotten that impression from the AP so far, but that could be our GM not noticing that section more than anything.
For the most part, you can spend as much downtime as you want between books because there is no pressing danger at that time. Sure as heroes you want to save the world and resolve the conflict but there's no time pressure. There are also some points during books where there isn't necessarily a time crunch - book 1 after you resolve the initial conflict, most of book 2, book 3 is tighter on time, and book 4 has the option for downtime. I haven't played through books 5 or 6 but I have read them but I think time is a little tighter in those.