honestly, i would love to run higher level stuff, but paizo should provide pregens for all their higher level adventures. it's hard to ask players to create 10th level PCs.
Paizo, please make Camilla from Wrath of the Righteous into a 11th level pregen character with the animist class :)
Would love having more direct or indirect sequel APs. Making a 10th (or higher) level character in second edition can be an ordeal, especially for newer players. It would be much easier to be able to bring old PCs over if the higher level APs had stronger thematic or at least locational connections. If I create a rootin' tootin' gritty cowboy for Outlaws of Alkenstar I might feel a little out of place if we end up transitioning to Curtain Call, but if I'm a newer player I might not have the system knowledge to create a high-level replacement. Or, on a more basic level I might not enjoy playing a character made for one genre and transferring them to another.honestly, i would love to run higher level stuff, but paizo should provide pregens for all their higher level adventures. it's hard to ask players to create 10th level PCs.
We can't get them to create PFS pregens for new classes, so there is no chance of this happening I suspect.
It's more work to create a high level character, but it's pretty doable if you work with folks. I've run Ruby Phoenix twice, once with a group of mostly PF2 newbies, and it was entirely doable with some hand holding and a character creation tool (like Pathbuilder).
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
A module in Vyre after Hell's Rebels would be a dream come true for me.You can check out Curtain Call, you do end up in Vyre but the player's guide mentions this is not an AP for the Hell's Rebels and not to rely on them for help as NPC's, "Curtain Call is not their story."
My local shop is getting the 3 books in for me next week!
(And I wouldn't want it to be a continuation of Hell's Rebels / I wouldn't want it to involve the previous heroes.)
I am VERY excited to read this adventure!!
My players pretty frequently talk about missing Vyre and wanting me to run an adventure that takes place there.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Strong, strong preference for both Direct sequels and to a lesser extent indirect sequels that can work as a standalone.
I love running 1-20 games and PF2E currently makes that very difficult for me to actually do since I don’t have time to go full homebrew and the only 1-20 with a foundry module (Blood lords) is one of the only 1-20s I’m not interested in at all.
Just a note though, indirect sequels as laid out in the OP oftentimes only work well for a fraction of campaigns. For example, Curtain Call only works if the 1-10 was in Avistan and the party members would be willing to abandon anything in their life to go work on an Opera. That honestly doesn’t feel very easy to use as a sequel to me. Ideally indirect sequels would have a widely applicable hook and be set up so that people from a wide variety of geographies make sense showing up. Of the current 11-20s, I’d argue Fists of the Ruby Phoenix is the only one that does that.
I’m glad to hear about the continuation section in Spore War, that kind of prompting is a good step forward should it continue.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
It's taken over 30 years to get some of the answers to questions that were laid out at the beginning of Warcraft and we're still not even close to done. It's exhausting.
You have roughly 5 years I think to put forth an answer to a mystery or to flesh out a faction you've prototyped in your fiction.
After that, the community has created its own answers, and they find them more interesting than whatever you can come up with. I think with TTRPG's, where GMs are constantly required to have answers to questions not contemplated by line developers, this is even more true.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
It's taken over 30 years to get some of the answers to questions that were laid out at the beginning of Warcraft and we're still not even close to done. It's exhausting.
You have roughly 5 years I think to put forth an answer to a mystery or to flesh out a faction you've prototyped in your fiction.
After that, the community has created its own answers, and they find them more interesting than whatever you can come up with. I think with TTRPG's, where GMs are constantly required to have answers to questions not contemplated by line developers, this is even more true.
Yeah, this is why I want to focus on the Inner Sea region and Tian Xia rather than go to Arcadia in the Adventure Path line. I prefer to resolve existing plotlines rather than expanding ever outward to brand new regions again.
I love running 1-20 games and PF2E currently makes that very difficult for me to actually do since I don’t have time to go full homebrew and the only 1-20 with a foundry module (Blood lords) is one of the only 1-20s I’m not interested in at all.
Just wanted to note that for the APs before that, the PDF to Foundry module can import watermarked AP PDFs (ie: the ones you get from Paizo) into Foundry. This isn't perfect and things may require some clean up, but as the work of one volunteer it's an amazing tool and will get you 95% of the way there in a few minutes. (There is another module for more recent adventurers that don't have a purchasable package like Shadows at Sundown.)
This is how I ran Extinction Curse and am running Strength of Thousands now.
Just a note though, indirect sequels as laid out in the OP oftentimes only work well for a fraction of campaigns. For example, Curtain Call only works if the 1-10 was in Avistan and the party members would be willing to abandon anything in their life to go work on an Opera. That honestly doesn’t feel very easy to use as a sequel to me. Ideally indirect sequels would have a widely applicable hook and be set up so that people from a wide variety of geographies make sense showing up. Of the current 11-20s, I’d argue Fists of the Ruby Phoenix is the only one that does that.
I’m glad to hear about the continuation section in Spore War, that kind of prompting is a good step forward should it continue.
I did read the Curtain Call Players Guide and I agree that it's going to be a pretty tough fit as a sequel to some adventurers. Ruby Phoenix handles this very easily.
I think Stolen Fate also works, but it basically has nothing to do with what happened in the first half at all and is basically "you're powerful and so you were chosen to do this completely unrelated thing."
None of it really fits a long campaign the way a 6 book adventure does. Hell, the amusing thing is that I've run Ruby Phoenix for two groups, and both were just "this adventure sounds fun", so they weren't actually run as sequels to anything. People made up backstory explanations to be there and off we went.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Yeah, this is why I want to focus on the Inner Sea region and Tian Xia rather than go to Arcadia in the Adventure Path line. I prefer to resolve existing plotlines rather than expanding ever outward to brand new regions again.It's taken over 30 years to get some of the answers to questions that were laid out at the beginning of Warcraft and we're still not even close to done. It's exhausting.
You have roughly 5 years I think to put forth an answer to a mystery or to flesh out a faction you've prototyped in your fiction.
After that, the community has created its own answers, and they find them more interesting than whatever you can come up with. I think with TTRPG's, where GMs are constantly required to have answers to questions not contemplated by line developers, this is even more true.
I've been excited about stuff teased for Arcadia in books published 6+ years ago. Why are those 'existing storylines' less worthy of being followed up on, compared to the thought of doing yet another Chelish or Varisian story?
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
In my opinion it's about spacing things out so each area gets enough depth before moving on to the next.
The current pace is too fast for me and leaves me less invested in Golarion.
When we get to a new area, I want to be immersed in it for a longer time. Not back to back APs, but more than one over the course of 3 years.
The reason I don't want Arcadia YET is that it didn't have any seeds / plot hooks in the World Guide, or Legends, or the Character Guide (although I concede it did in Monsters of Myth).
So let's say Paizo delays plots they set up in 2019 for another 2 years. After 7 years, like Leon said, I've moved on.
It's more urgent to resolve the Razmir storyline, and kick off the big wars of the Inner Sea.
I am very interested in Ah Pook, Arcadia, but not if it's going to have such a short release window and with limited adventure support. The setting is best utilized in my opinion when it can support many adventures, like how Lost Omens: Absalom supports Extinction Curse, Agents of Edgewatch, Abomination Vaults (I assume, as I never read or played AV), and Stolen Fate.
I want depth, so I can take my players into a micro region (Geb, Shenmen, etc.) and have more than 10 pages of setting material. At the moment, it just feels not deep enough, with each region just being quick flashes in the pan.
Ultimately I'm not in marketing, analytics, or sales, I'm just expressing my opinion as a customer.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I want depth, so I can take my players into a micro region (Geb, Shenmen, etc.) and have more than 10 pages of setting material. At the moment, it just feels not deep enough, with each region just being quick flashes in the pan.
Geb got large swathes of two Lost Omens books dedicated to the Impossible Lands, has Book of the Dead written by its monarch, and received a dedicated 6-book Adventure Path. I'm being sincere when I ask: what else could it possibly need?
Shenmen's in a similar boat; coverage in Book of the Dead and the two LO: Tian Xia releases, plus Season of Ghosts as its AP. There are definitely spots in Avistan, Garund, and Tian Xia that still haven't had the spotlight, but both of your examples have enjoyed plenty recently.
Arcadia excited me because Native-inspired stuff in TTRPGs has largely been a flat, racist mess for decades. Finally delivering on doing better by that after what's been a ten year wait since PF1's Distant Shores (2015) took us inside an Arcadian city? It feels overdue.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
No I'm using Geb and Shenmen as examples of a micro region (as opposed to macro like Impossible Lands). Ideally, Paizo can organize products around a theme (like Godsrain or Absalom) and have more support for regional adventures happening in that theme (setting book valid for more than 1 adventure) within a 2-3 year timeframe.
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Why are those 'existing storylines' less worthy of being followed up on, compared to the thought of doing yet another Chelish or Varisian story?
I think it's not about being worthy, it's just about what you are actually interested in. I kinda can understand where CastleDour is coming from, because I'm actually even worse, and in my ideal egotistical little world, we would have never left Varisia in the first place, because I love that region so much, while my interest in non-medieval European fantasy is pretty much non-existent. A bit of Arabian nights (which is, at least partly for historic reasons, still European fantasy) added to the mix, and I'm fine.
Which is, by the way, a completely hypocritical stance, because I have been very vocally critizising WotC for pretty much doing exactly that with the Sword Coast, while ignoring most of the other fun parts of Faerun. And of course I'm talking about the other European-ish parts of Faerun, not about Maztica, Kara-Tur or even Chult.
That said, I don't think it needs to be an either or. Especially with the shorter APs, they can cover more ground easily, and given that most APs are still Inner Sea APs, I think blaming an Arcadia AP for not getting exactly what I want would be kind of unfair. Especially when I don't even have the time to peruse all the stuff that looks like it is written with me in mind.