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Getting that GM itch again, so I'm soliciting opinions.
I tend to favor APs that:
- Make it clear early on what the ultimate threat is. ie: Curse of the Crimson Throne (largely) or Reign of Winter.
- Revisit locations or have a notable home base where the PCs can form longer-term relationships with NPCs
- Have a more serious overall tone.
So what APs would y'all suggest?
Doesn't necessarily have to include all of the above, just want to hear what people think. And a bunch of the AP volumes don't have a lot of reviews.
Would prefer a 2e one, since converting is a non-trivial amount of extra work.
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I had fun with outlaws of alkenstar, the bar is sort of a home base in that ap. Malevolence was also a banger with our table.
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In PF2 stuff, I've had the most success GMing Fists of the Ruby Phoenix. It's an over the top concept and it runs with that the entire way. There's lots of room for a GM to add things tailored to your players where it'll feel organic. It has some of everything. It also doesn't drag. I've run it for two groups and everyone has universally had a blast with it.
It's all but impossible to know about the BBEG until 2/3 of the way through, so take points off if you care about that, but aside from book 1 having a very compressed timeline (which I just address with a house rule to let people do some crafting during downtime so they could use that skill), I haven't had anything so universally well received aside for Curse of the Crimson Throne.
If you've played Curse of the Crimson Throne, play Shadows at Sundown. It's an excellent followup with a lot of callbacks and chances for a GM to reintroduce loose threads and familiar faces. I played the brother of my CotCT character and it was absolutely amazing, especially with how hard he had to work to be seen as anything other than "Yulia's brother". (And if you haven't run Curse of the Crimson Throne, do that. I think it's Paizo's best AP.)
Strength of Thousands is good, I'm running it now. It requires a party that is into the setting and the very long timeline. You definitely have a home and it's a place that you always return to and feels important. The BBEG again is hard to know about until farther in, though there's foreshadowing very early that something is amiss that will be a long term problem.
I feel like Extinction Curse is underrated, in that my group had a great time with it (including my son, who played it while he was around 9 years old). It actually DOES tell you pretty early what the problem you need to address is (in book 1), and who you need to stop (book 2 if your PCs think to use the Moonstone Pool, though the fact that Xulgaths are your main adversary becomes clear even without that). Funny thing is that aside from the circus itself, the actual plot is pretty serious in that it deals with the consequences of Aroden's actions and you're trying to prevent an ecological disaster.
The main problem with it is that the circus theme is prominent early and then really isn't, so if your PCs like the circus you'll need to work to add more of it (and deal with the circus rules being both kind of pointless and also half-baked), and if your PCs don't like the circus you'll need to work to minimize it before it fades away. Also book 5, while well written an interesting as a standalone book, really feels like a filler "we needed another book before the end" sequence of events. The NPCs that send you on it are basically also blocking you from a far more straightforward solution and my players were not super happy about that. (I offered to write something new if they wanted to try another method, but they decided to go along in the end and enjoyed the book content itself once they got into it.)
Kingmaker is the obvious "you have a home base and long term relationships" adventure, since you literally build that home base and spend years working with those NPCs. That said, the PF2 Kingdom Rules are a total mess and require significant house rules to avoid having a miserable time with them. The Kingmaker forum here has a lot of suggestions on that. Like, my GM had to just flat out triple all kingdom XP for us to even remotely pretend to have the kingdom level keep up with our character level and the plot, and that's just one of the problems. We rely almost entirely on Supernatural Solution to do things because the kingdom isn't good enough at basic things like building farms to do them any other way, and if we get an event in a skill we're bad at without a Supernatural Solution available we're basically guaranteed an awful outcome. Also it makes no damn sense that a village can't support farms since historically that was the basis of the surrounding economy, and that building farms gets HARDER as your kingdom grows and you build more farms is utterly baffling.
The adventure itself is better. It's much more of a hexcrawl sandbox, so there will be times when you basically have no "active quest" so to speak. If your players like that style of game, it will be great. If your players DON'T like that style of game and want a "this is the obvious threat you need to deal with" style of more linear campaign, they will struggle here. Some of the players I'm with are having challenges with that aspect as we sometimes have no real leads, or we have a thing we want to do but we're too low level and will get destroyed if we try, or we want to do something but an event happened and we have to stop everything to go do that instead.
Also, this is definitely a "the BBEG only becomes apparent late" AP. And it feels REALLY long because of all the hexcrawling, kingdom turns, and such. I've felt at times that it drags and feels slow (we started off using the camping rules but have recently stopped just to try to boost the pace). TBH with how highly rated it generally is, our experience with it really hasn't lived up to that, but I think a factor there is that or group is ill-suited to this style of campaign.
I've read but haven't played Stolen Fate, but it certainly LOOKS cool from that reading. It's another high level, high stakes situation in that you have to stop people from screwing with Fate itself. I don't like to review things I haven't played or run so I don't have a lot else to say except that from the reading I'm excited to run it one day.
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Three quick recommendations, based on your preferences. Caveat: I'm recommending these mostly as a player, and I haven't finished all of them yet.
Season of Ghost
-Willowshore is a great home base, full of NPCs to interreact with.
-Clear from the beginning what the basic problem is.
-Serious Tone
-Nice variety of social, skill, and combat encounters.
(I'm playing Book 3 right now, and this is probably my favorite 2e AP so far.)
Quest for the Frozen Flame
-The Following is like a moving base, full of NPCs to care about.
-Clear antagonist from early on
-Serious tone/survival adventure
-Good if you are looking for a low-level, wilderness adventure. If your group doesn't love the hexploration part, it's easy to streamline the adventure. Not a ton of subsystems to worry about, so a fun adventure to add things in and customize to your group.
Stolen Fate
-If you want to start at a higher level.
-No spoilers, but you get a customizable home base pretty quickly.
-Clues to the main antagonist early on.
-Serious, world-shaking stakes.
Some other adventures that fulfill part of your ask:
Fists of the Ruby Phoenix: So fun, but maybe more gonzo than you are looking for)
Blood Lords: I don't usually like evil campaigns, but I've been enjoying this.
Age of Ashes: You might want to tune down some encounters. Check the GM threads.
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Age of Ashes is an excellent AP with a really really really weak start and like all APs requires a bit of rewriting to tie things together, but since books 3-5 all tackle one enemy group directly, book 6 tackles their originator. And book 2 and 6 tackle the bigger overarching threat that created the reason for villains. Any decent GM can do a lot with it.
But boy the first book is just... bad, and the second really falls down a bit with the hexploration (but is an excellent setting). If I was to run it again I would simplify the first book, remove the goblin blood caves and have the party do an old fashioned dungeon delve to save the goblins from what came from below.
Also, the keep really needs a better map.
Also the next one I may be a bit biased towards because I am running / propping it atm. But if you treat gatewalkers and stolen fates as one big adventure where a motivation of twisting fate is fixing the negative aspects of the end of gatewalkers (and letting the negative aspects actually happen) it can work.
But gatewalkers does need a decent amount of fixing imo, firstly it isn't remotely an investigation xfiles adventure, secondly nearly all the villains are best served by removing "they are evil and unhinged" and leaning into nuance. Imo it is the best set piece adventure of the lot though and it has some really fun villains to play with.
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You know what's kind of wild?
I'm not sure!
For years, this question would be easy.
Age of Worms, every time. I love the villains, I love the theming, I love the first adventure. I love getting to focus a campaign on horror and danger and corruption and doomed prophecies. The adventures are really cool, and it's mostly pretty good at staying on topic.
And yet, lately? I don't know! Maybe it's because I'm currently on Book Two, an adventure with great ideas that was clearly hampered by irl time constraints. Maybe it's because I'm burnt out on obsessing over the same game over and over. Maybe it's because I'm now running Rise of the Runelords, and it's... really nice not to feel like I want to change everything? Like, my changes mostly feel much more additive than they do reparatory. I don't have to mod the adventure to make sure the town locals are relevant, for example. Of course, I'm still changing a lot, so maybe the real issue is "I'm better at making changes now than I was when I started modding AoW, so I like the changes I'm making to Rise of the Runelords better". But Sandpoint just feels more alive than Diamond Lake for me, even though I love Diamond Lake in theory.
Anyways, I've only ever run two APs, and I've only gotten any distance into 1-2 others as a player (Serpent's Skull and maybe Kingmaker). I didn't really like Serpent's Skull, and my Kingmaker experience was sort of sabotaged by some difficult players before we got anywhere.
I'm gonna say Rise of the Runelords. Maybe it's just the moss being greener on the fresh new thing, but I can't help that bias. RotRL is sometimes a pain to theme, but if I'm being fair, so is Age of Worms--a lot of the themes I've been exploring with Age of Worms just aren't as consistently emphasized in AoW by default. Sure, Book Five has some focus on the corruption of heroes, but only if I put in the work to make sure the players see those aspects. Book Seven could present the players with a great spooky story about the fear of death destroying a man, but that's not in the original text, I added it in.
tl;dr I'm picky and will never be satisfied, but I think Rise of the Runelords is the current favorite.
EDIT: Oh, whoops, I didn't read your OP and now I'm the fool.
Age of Worms introduces a piece of the final boss in Book One. The tone is tense and dark. That being said, Diamond Lake, the starter town, is explicitly somewhere the PCs want to get away from, and they only come back briefly later on.
Rise of the Runelords is... well, it's two out of three, too. The hometown is very highly emphasized in four out of six books, although a good chunk of the AP is spent elsewhere on missions. You have to do a lot of extra work to make sure the players aren't totally blindsided by the villain, is the thing; the villain is meant as sort of a twist. I recommend using campaign backgrounds to push at least one PC to be interested in Thassilon, so they can have pieced together enough to be like, "OH CRAP" when they find out. Have the barghest in Book One be sane enough to make some ominous allusions, for example. But it's probably just not the AP for you.
I liked Agents of Edgewatch if you want a fantasy detective/cop show/city guard campaign. I enjoyed the narrative and all the fun stuff you got to do.
Kingmaker PF2 is a great module, though the Kingdom building rules could use some punching up.
Abomination Vaults if you want a simple dungeon crawl with a loose story. Good for getting feet wet GMing in PF2.
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In retrospect, I probably should've mentioned what my group and I have done already.
We're currently in Age of Ashes, wherein we replaced most of book 1 with Fall of Plaguestone. We're currently in the aforementioned hexploration section and it's been kind of a slog. My wife GMs that game, and I co-GM a bit. (Unfortunately I happen to LOVE the big bad of that AP so I spoiled myself of the AP before my wife took up GMing, but I can separate out that knowledge decently).
I ran Extinction Curse online for some other friends online, up until near the end of Book 5. Wasn't a fan and lost motivation to keep going in that game.
I ran the entirety of Reign of Winter. Kinda what inspired my desire for a home base; the hut didn't really satisfy there. Pretty fun overall, but either book 3 or 4 could've been cut without significant loss in story, since they're both largely fetch quests.
The first long term GM gig I did was Jacob's Tower. I liked the successive dungeon levels plus hub location, though it was pretty story-light. I did some home brew to finish that game out.
The more I've thought about this, the more I want to convert Tyrant's Grasp or Strange Aeons. Mostly off themes, I think.
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Im currently running Stolen Fate for my home group. I've changed some of card hunting to fit my group, but you DO get a home base early, and my group loves that. The villains are present early, but there isnt real 'This is who we are' until later. And the stakes are essentially all of reality.
Kingmaker is also a solid choice.
I've really enjoyed Extinction Curse as a GM and Agents of Edgewatch as a player.
I love Kingmaker as well, but have not had the chance to play the 2e version yet.
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FotRP is the only AP I've enjoyed as a whole, even with a few rough spots. You get one base for the intro, then stick to the city for most of it.
Theme is simple, win the tournament and get a prize, except there's a twist to getting the prize. You could seed the twist before hand though, make it something players could work to uncover. My group was just all about crushing the fights then sitting around recovering during downtime.
You can socialize with the other teams and plenty of people in the city, try to find weaknesses of the other groups or just be a good sport. Find out about local issues and customs, uncover a few things.
Serious depends how you run things, play it up like anime tournament stuff or like people who have worked hard all their life for this moment, to either be the best or maybe they need something they know the Ruby Phoenix could give them.
You can also add in your own teams or replace certain teams if you want to add more drama stuff.
Also starting at higher level is just more fun IMO.
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I'm currently testing out my GM skills with Rusthenge, with the idea of running it into Seven Dooms if all goes well. If Seven Dooms works out, I'm thinking of taking it into Curtain Call.
I know this doesn't really allow for the whole "Know who the enemy is right away" the same way something like Rise of the Runelords or Reign of Winter would, but I think it works nicely as a way to build tension. Nothing wrong with piecing together something fun.
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I recently attended the American Library Association's annual convention, this year in San Diego. I told a couple of the librarians about Reign of Winter, and it blew their minds! I have the PDFs I should really read them, I only know the bare bones.
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I recently attended the American Library Association's annual convention, this year in San Diego. I told a couple of the librarians about Reign of Winter, and it blew their minds! I have the PDFs I should really read them, I only know the bare bones.I absolutely love reign. My players are having a blast with it!
A...wintery blast? *Cries in 95F PNW summer* I'll see myself out now. I'm glad to hear it's going well, though!
I recently attended the American Library Association's annual convention, this year in San Diego. I told a couple of the librarians about Reign of Winter, and it blew their minds! I have the PDFs I should really read them, I only know the bare bones.
I don't understand the relation.
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I recently attended the American Library Association's annual convention, this year in San Diego. I told a couple of the librarians about Reign of Winter, and it blew their minds! I have the PDFs I should really read them, I only know the bare bones.I don't understand the relation.
Librarians are cool…reign of WINTER. Seems pretty clear to me.
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I recently attended the American Library Association's annual convention, this year in San Diego. I told a couple of the librarians about Reign of Winter, and it blew their minds! I have the PDFs I should really read them, I only know the bare bones.I don't understand the relation.
Fair enough, I only gave you half the context. We were talking about one of the Advanced Readers those librarians were reading—some new dark fantasy with ties to Russian folklore. Then the Baba Yaga, then Rasputin, one or two Bartok quotes later, boom—Reign of Winter.
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* Strength of Thousands: none of my players want a Harry Potter AP
I long for the day that someone can publish a piece of media unconnected to Harry Potter in any meaningful way aside from the existence of a school that wizards attend without everyone assuming it's Harry Potter, but with [insert twist here].
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I mean, it's much more of "A Wizard of Earthsea" AP anyway. You can tell because all of the people are the Wizard school are themselves competent adults. It's grad school for magic, not high school.
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* Strength of Thousands: none of my players want a Harry Potter API long for the day that someone can publish a piece of media unconnected to Harry Potter in any meaningful way aside from the existence of a school that wizards attend without everyone assuming it's Harry Potter, but with [insert twist here].
Many wizard school books were published before Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone 1997, such as Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea 1968, Mercedes Lackey's Magic's Pawn 1989, and Jane Yolen's Wizard's Hall 1991, Other books deal with a school in a fantasy or science fantasy setting, such as Anne McCaffrey's Harper Hall Trilogy (Dragonsong 1976, Dragonsinger 1977, Dragondrums 1979) but those schools don't teach wizardry. Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic series (Sandra's Book 1997, Tris's Book 1998, Daja's Book 1998, and Briar's Book 1999) came out at the same time as the Harry Potter series.
However, Strength of Thousands does not meet Ectar's criterion, "Make it clear early on what the ultimate threat is. ie: Curse of the Crimson Throne (largely) or Reign of Winter." It follows the career of the students as they face many different threats. The final high-level threat has some evidence from the beginning, but the hints don't become a clear threat until later.
And the Magaambya Academy in Strength of Thousands does not resemble Hogwarts.
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I didn't use the Asset Forfeiture recommendation either for Agents of Edgewatch. I used a gear budget provided by the city that I calculated based on the numbers they would normally have from the gear in the book.
For 2e APs, I've GMed a good portion of Age of Ashes and Extinction Curse. For 1e I've run Curse of the Crimson Throne, Rise of the Runelords, Council of Thieves, Serpent's Skull, and am currently doing Jade Regent, played part of Shattered Star, and ran a Reign of Winter game that fell apart.
The 2e APs have been wildly different in quality. I'm a big fan of Age of Ashes. I think it does a great job in what it sets out to do: provide an introduction to the world of Golarion and the mechanics of PF2e. I love how there's a little bit of everything in the AP: some base building, some hexploration, mechanical RP systems, and so on. The locations are usually very interesting and the campaign feels epic. I love how there are multiple antagonists who are also opposed to one another. There's a lot to work with from a GM's perspective. The issues are that most of the cool stuff is in the back half of the AP, and that Book 1 is very, very weak and Book 3 isn't amazing either.
Extinction Curse was pretty bland in my opinion. Mechanically it was fine; I thought the first two books especially were pretty fun. But Book 3 was pretty dull and Book 4 also felt like filler. The stakes in the story didn't feel very interesting in the sense that the campaign's villains aren't presented with much nuance, and thus aren't very compelling. It would have worked as a 3-book AP but the 6-book version isn't worthe commitment.
For a ranking, I'd go something like:
1. Curse of the Crimson Throne (Best AP from top to bottom)
2. Jade Regent (my group is having an absolute blast with all the NPC interactions in that game; it's great if you want a mobile base)
3. Age of Ashes
4. Reign of Winter (I love the weirdness; it's very immersive and evocative)
5. Rise of the Runelords (didn't love it as much as its rep, good AP though)
6. Shattered Star (The dungeons are fun, but narratively limiting)
7. Council of Thieves (two good 3-book APs that don't combine well)
8. Extinction Curse.
(Gap, gap, gap, gap, gap, gap, lots more gaps)
9. Serpent's Skull (couldn't finish; this AP is borderline unplayable without significant GM additions to the extent that you have to homebrew most of the campaign)
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Reign of Winter is my favorite conceptually.
Curse of the Crimson Throne is one I love, but have tried to play multiple times and never got out of book 1 -- it is, indeed, cursed.
Jade Regent is the only one I've actually finished. I feel it is underrated.
Currently playing through Extinction Curse and Strength of Thousands. Would heartily recommend SoT, and mildly recommend EC.
But my favorite AP is Legendary Planet, from Legendary Games. I'm currently about halfway through running it in 1E, and it has been an absolute blast. (They also have PF 2E and Starfinder 1E versions.) It's a Sword & Planet AP with stargates, different planet every book (mostly). You get to a home base on a hub world by the end of the first book. The Big Bad is mostly known early, but their motives are deliberately obscure to the players for the first 2/3s. 1-20 AP with Mythic and some truly epic encounters.