Serpent's Skull as a Three Part AP.

[Lord Fyre]

Heroes!

People familiar with Tarondor's Guide to Pathfinder Adventure Paths on Google Docs, would note that he suggests that this AP (Serpent's Skull) should have been only a three part AP.

Has anyone run it that way?
If so, what was the result?

[Bjørn Røyrvik]

Kinda-sorta.
We skipped most of book 2 and book 5, books 3 and 4 bleed over into each other, as do 5 and 6, so I guess you can say we did it in three parts.
Result: Ydersius was defeated and one more step on the Path to Immortality was achieved.

You can easily make it a three-part AP but making it a three book AP is harder.
Book 1, though popular, is not really necessary to get things under way. I do think it is a good way to introduce the serpent folk as the real threat early. Just make sure to tie the snake you meet as the final boss with the ones that show up later.

Book 2 is just a series of random encounters other than the very beginning and very end and the AP can easily be started with the PCs hiring on to an expedition (faction of your choice - existing or new) and just cut-scene most of the trek to Saventh-yhi, which will cut out two books right there. They will need to start at an appropriate level if you do it this way. Going through the jungle as Tarondor suggests is possible but the actual meat of book 2 is pretty damn boring and should be mostly rewritten, IMO.
Like Book 1, tying the serpentfolk here with the final boss is important. Change him from being an exile from SY to being part of the serpentfolk expedition to find it, left behind to try to stymie any other creatures that might be heading to the city.

It's hard to cut down on books 3 & 4. The city is big with a lot to explore, but it isn't big enough or detailed enough to be particularly fun as written. A GM really needs to add a lot to make it good. This will count as a single part, but it will be a pretty big part. You could drop the whole Vaults bit and just focus on increased exploration of the city proper and find some other way to get down below. This would be a good way to handle things for people who aren't a big fan of dungeon crawling, and in retrospect is what I should have done.

Book 5 can be mostly dropped as Ilmurea's locals aren't particularly interesting and it adds to the city's supposedly lost flavor if there aren't half a dozen factions that have discovered it centuries before you get there. Leave the place mostly empty and you've cut out a lot of basically uninteresting and definitely unnecesary stuff. I would probably move the degenerate serpentfolk down here instead of having them in Saventh-yhi (what I actually did was have the urdefhans be what the serpentfolk trapped in here became after the milennia).

Book 6 is hard to alter. The AP made a big deal of wanting people to gather a big army to fight the serpentfolk but my players didn't find them to be a particularly challenging foe. Granted we had 6 players and probably better ability scores and gear than most groups but it should be possible to a careful group to go through the final citadel without TPKing without the outide armies distracting the inhabitants.

[Lord Fyre]

Bjørn Røyrvik wrote:

Kinda-sorta.

We skipped most of book 2 and book 5, books 3 and 4 bleed over into each other, as do 5 and 6, so I guess you can say we did it in three parts.
Result: Ydersius was defeated and one more step on the Path to Immortality was achieved.

You can easily make it a three-part AP but making it a three book AP is harder.
Book 1, though popular, is not really necessary to get things under way. I do think it is a good way to introduce the serpent folk as the real threat early. Just make sure to tie the snake you meet as the final boss with the ones that show up later.

Book 2 is just a series of random encounters other than the very beginning and very end and the AP can easily be started with the PCs hiring on to an expedition (faction of your choice - existing or new) and just cut-scene most of the trek to Saventh-yhi, which will cut out two books right there. They will need to start at an appropriate level if you do it this way. Going through the jungle as Tarondor suggests is possible but the actual meat of book 2 is pretty damn boring and should be mostly rewritten, IMO.
Like Book 1, tying the serpentfolk here with the final boss is important. Change him from being an exile from SY to being part of the serpentfolk expedition to find it, left behind to try to stymie any other creatures that might be heading to the city.

It's hard to cut down on books 3 & 4. The city is big with a lot to explore, but it isn't big enough or detailed enough to be particularly fun as written. A GM really needs to add a lot to make it good. This will count as a single part, but it will be a pretty big part. You could drop the whole Vaults bit and just focus on increased exploration of the city proper and find some other way to get down below. This would be a good way to handle things for people who aren't a big fan of dungeon crawling, and in retrospect is what I should have done.

Book 5 can be mostly dropped as Ilmurea's locals aren't particularly interesting and it adds to the city's supposedly lost flavor if...

Let's see if I follow …

- Cut book 1 and most of book 2.
. - Make the PCs all Pathfinders from the start.
- Books 3 and 4 are essential, but cut the vaults (and Ruthazek?)
. - Get rid of the Urdifhans, and move most of the Serpent Folk (all of Area F) to the undercity.
- Finish with the battle against Ydersius.

So the "tough part" would be finding an appropriate starting level.

[Bjørn Røyrvik]

Basically yes.

Book one introduces the PCs to the existence of Saventh-yhi but is otherwise unessential to the story. You can cut it out easily.

Book two in some form another needs to stay for this to be a three parter. The PCs need to start somewhere and Eleder is a good choice. Whether you want the PCs to already be members of one of the factions in the book, hire on as mercenaries to one of them, or simply get an interesting lead to SY in session 0 and make their own party is up to you. If you want the first part to be of roughly equal length and importance as the other two you will need to add a bunch of stuff to the journey. i recommend playing up the jungle trek with environmental issues and not add too many more combat encounters. I would add minor encounters with serpentfolk and their minions early on to indicate that something sinister is going on. IMO this should be fairly short compared to part 2. I dropped the whole race of rival factions bit and just let the PCs be the first ones to find SY in a long time.

Book 3 is exploring SY and finding all the fun stuff, book 4 is the vaults and the Gorilla King. If I were to run this again I would expand on book 3 and basically drop book 4 other than raiding it for the odd encounter. Really play up the existence of the serpentfolk and make sure the PCs learn fairly early that something nasty is going down. Make sure that at some point the PCs learn of the history of SY, possibly through local legends or writing somewhere. Hopefully they will put two and two together.
This is where the meat of the bulk of the adventure should occur, IMO.

Book 5 can be mostly dropped, leaving Ilmurea basically a ghost town. The PCs can explore and find fascinating ruins and remnants and the odd undead but by this point the PCs should be well aware of the serpentfolk and their probably goal and be hurrying to stop them. Book 6 can be run mostly as is.

When I ran SS I had Ilmurea locked in a pocket dimension under SY so creatures couldn't physically enter or exit it except through the gate described in book 4. This would force serpentfolk to enter SY on the surface and find their way down in the same way that the PCs do. Serpentfolk would also likely dominate many of the locals to use as fodder. This virtually guarantees that the PCs will learn of the serpentfolk and the threat they pose before they head down.

[Lord Fyre]

Sounds like it might be easier to start from scratch, and just mine the AP for ideas.

Given that Serpent's Skull is itself an homage to I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City, that isn't as much of a stretch as it may sound.