Which AP Should I Run?

[Ouachitonian]

Ok, so, I sometimes run one-shots with my groups to relieve one of our two normal GMs, but I’m thinking I may step up and run a campaign when we finish Mummy’s Mask. Pathfinder’s what I know best, and running an AP is definitely preferable to trying to work up my own campaign. One issue our GM is dealing with this campaign is that we’ve, uh, kinda gone off the rails and broken WBL. We’re almost more a wandering magic shop than an adventuring party. One of the other players (our old hand, who’s played and GMed since 1e) is playing a crafter wizard and we’ve ended up delaying progress for weeks while he enchants stuff to sell to the rich of whatever town we’re currently in, etc. Our cleric and my alchemist have contributed as well, to a lesser extent (you just can’t make as much money selling potions as you can with Craft Wondrous. lol) So…what’s a good AP for a new GM, preferably one with a strong “we need to do this now” drive and/or one where you spend a lot of time away from civilization, to help me keep them on the rails. Our current GM has Rise of the Runelords and Reign of Wonter that he could loan me, though IIRC he and his wife (also in the group) have played arise before, so I kinda want to stay away from it. RoW might be a good one. I know Ironfang Invasion spends a lot of time in the wilderness. Also Giantslayer, IIRC? Other suggestions would be welcome.

(Mods, if there’s a better place for this please do move it.)

[keftiu]

Are you exclusively looking for 1e suggestions?

[The_Mothman]

Reign of Winter sounds pretty perfect for what you're trying to do railroad-wise. Unless they somehow get off track early in Book 1 they're probably going to feel compelled to follow the adventure to its completion. The adventure also mostly takes place in the wilderness, with a brief diversion to a hostile city. There also aren't any subsystems like in Ironfang Invasion that can be difficult for a new GM.

[Kasoh]

Tyrant's Grasp keeps you away from civilization for almost half the AP. However, it is also fairly dark in tone. I would use the word 'bleak'.

Wrath of the Righteous can be on rocket rails for timing, but there is civilization and time for crafting if the GM allows it.

Ironfang Invasion certainly keeps it low tech through the first half. By the time you've liberated a mining town, you're back in business really.

Carrion Crown involves chasing after a cult, so when I played it, I never really felt comfortable with taking downtime. I think the most we took was a week once.

Though, it sounds like the real solution to your problem is to just not have people enable the party's crafting shenanigans. "I'm not interested in your wares, but I do need some undead killed." Or ban crafting feats. Then the players know upfront what's on the table.

[Warped Savant]

I'm surprised the GM is having that issue in Mummy's Mask! (Unless they're fine with the PC crafting). There's a few different ways to push the PCs forward, depending on where in the AP you are. (First two books are self-explanatory based on the main events in book 2, books 3 & 4 have a different way, expressed in things from book 3, book 5 & 6 is easy to find way but would take work by the GM to write out the encounters.)

Wrath of the Righteous specifically includes downtime for the players to craft items and what-not, Kingmaker easily allows for it as well, so avoid both of those.
Reign of Winter isn't on a forced timer, but it could be done. I feel like that would be kind of weird though too as it's kind of a deus ex machina to enforce not hanging around in all the full places the PCs go. (And I feel it's better if they players do take the time to explore as much as they can.

Curse of the Crimson Throne is a really well done urban campaign and would be easy to force them in to action (and it's a good one for an inexperienced GM).
Ironfang Invasion is wilderness survival for most of it so limiting supplies the crafter can find would be easy enough to do. I don't recall the later books well enough but I think there's pressure to get things dealt with.
Strange Aeons is decently fast-paced, but is a weird one so might not be everyone's cup of tea.

[Yakman]

Do you have a particular theme in mind for a game you'd want to run? That's the most important thing.

As a DM, you can always tell players to stop some activity if they've gotten out of hand.

But for a "Wilderness" AP, where there's an enormous sense of urgency, I'd probably recommend Tyrant's Grasp [running it now, and we are in the middle of Book 4 and it's been just 7 weeks in-game], Ironfang Invasion [you can dictate pressure using the Legion's attacks to drive the action], Giantslayer [it's kind of a weaker AP, however], or Hell's Rebels [it's urban, but as the rebellion, you can push them with the oppressor's responses].

[keftiu]

I do have to say - if your group is having struggles with staying on-task, feeling narrative urgency, and not bogging down in system mastery-driven profit making, that's a conversation to be had as a table. In-game solutions to out-of-game problems pretty much never work; those GM frustrations should be something you all should be able to respond to as a group, rather than trying to engineer around with adventure choices.

[logic_poet]

Legacy of Fire (in 3.5 from before Pathfinder 1e) could work for this request, though to create the necessary urgency, I'd say that the party is going to need a bit of imagination and some guilt, as the nature of the threat that leads to the final boss is not really in your face. That said, the first adventure is on the outskirts of a town at the edge of civilization that needs to be reconquered; the second adventure involves going into the wilderness to the lair of the villain whose minions were the villains of the first adventure; the third adventure takes place right in Katapesh, a huge city, but could be played as an interlude of GM-determined length; the fourth adventure is right back into a wilderness with no contact with civilization while an enormous threat (the ultimate villain of the AP) rampages out of sight; the fifth looks urban but is in fact a megadungeon where the PCs are locked out of contact with civilization until the very end, when the PCs could free themselves and make a quick shopping run in the City of Brass before going back to Golarion; the sixth basically returns to the scene of the first and can be made to feel urgent with proper hinting and prompting to the PCs. Assuming the PCs pay attention in the fifth adventure, they will know just how urgent their task is, since it's not that hard to learn that the return of a spawn of Rovagug is a real possibility if they fail.

These adventures also did something that was unpopular and discontinued, in that the full measure of xp for getting from book to book wasn't in the main adventure, and each had a smaller large sidequest adventure included.

Serpent's Skull also has very little time spent in functioning cities, and one adventure is basically a race against a bunch of other factions across a wilderness. The main downside with this AP is that the third adventure is very rough, as they had some deadline problems with writing it, and the adventures after that tend to be big dungeons with lots of combat, but not much else.