I would absolutely love a compliation of Season of Ghosts. But what I'd want more is a lvl 13-20 sequel.
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Season of Ghosts is my favourite Paizo AP of all time so yeah! 100%! I'd love a nice hardcover version, especially if it was updated for the Remaster. Any other updates to fix issues (e.g. buffing some encounters, maybe a touch-up on Book 4) would be neat to see, but absolutely not required.
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(currently GMing book 1, have read all 4 books) Season of Ghosts is IMO the best adventure that's been released for Pathfinder. A hardcover compilation would be excellent, especially remastered, with a balance pass to bump up the encounter difficulty a bit in the places where it needs it, and some additions/revisions in book 4 to address the commonly-encountered challenges there like MechaMaya noted (the first three books are all 10/10; book 4 feels to me more like a 6/10 or 7/10, and I think a revision could bring it up to at least an 8 or 9).
Smaller adjustments that might be nice could include: giving the GM a bit more info/RP suggestions about the local NPCs, doing a pass through the text to ensure each NPC's given name / surname format is consistent throughout, adding Kazuma Oono into a sidequest sometime in the first three books so that his role in book 4 is more meaningful, and adjusting the opening (either to not have the PCs wake up in a different place from where they went to sleep, or offer more of an in-setting explanation of how they got moved without getting woken up in the process, especially if there's a familiar/eidolon/etc. in the party who might not have even been sleeping in one of the straw mats). Oh, and establishing an actual Tian calendar with its own month names would be great... when the AP first came out without it I'd figured that would be in the Tian Xia World Guide, but since it wasn't each GM has really had to reinvent the wheel on that front.
But even without those smaller adjustments... this AP is, in story, setting, and characters, simply one of Paizo's best works, and I'd love to see more people get the opportunity to discover it.
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Yes please. This is the #1 Adventure Path I want to run once I have cleared room on my current GM slate.
Creative Director
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Season of Ghosts is my favourite Paizo AP of all time so yeah! 100%! I'd love a nice hardcover version, especially if it was updated for the Remaster. Any other updates to fix issues (e.g. buffing some encounters, maybe a touch-up on Book 4) would be neat to see, but absolutely not required.
At this point, pretty much ANY compilation we do of older Adventure Paths will be remastered. That's where we live now! :) (This will make some Adventure Paths trickier than others, and will influence which ones we choose, perhaps, to update.)
As for the encounters... having the encounters be "softer" is 100% a deliberate choice, made after reading so much feedback about folks saying that Adventure Path encounters were too overturned or too deadly. This being the first Adventure Path I was developing from scratch since Age of Ashes, I took that feedback to heart, and was much more deliberate in suggesting to the authors that they place the really hard ones toward the later part of the campaign or in areas where it was obvious that the PCs should prepare, and then relied on each author to infuse the horror of the story into the entire narrative rather than try to make the horror "mechanical" by making each fight a killer. Season of Ghosts is not a "survival horror" experience, but a brooding, moody, atmospheric one akin to so many of the Asian horror movies that inspired it in the first place. So if we DO remaster this, I doubt we'll "tune up" the encounters to be more deadly. We might include a sidebar near the start that tells the GM specifically that this is an intentional choice, though.
That said... ALL Adventure Paths we remaster go through an early step where the lead developer combs through all of the feedback we've gotten from that Adventure Path on the forums here, on Reddit, in reviews, and anywhere else we can find. In effect, whenever anyone out there plays one of Paizo's Adventure Paths and then posts about their experience online somewhere we can see... we treat that as playtest feedback when it comes to revising and repackaging the Adventure Path into a hardcover format. It's something I've done all the way back to the hardcover of the Shackled City Adventure Path before Pathfinder was even a thing, and something I'll continue to do and to have the other developers do going forward. Otherwise... we'd just reprint these things without bothering to do anything at all, 'cause what's the point of representing something like this in a new format without going back in to do all we can to make it better?
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Creative Director
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Also Remastered should be a must by now :DWell literally yes: any future Paizo publications will be under the ORC license as opposed to OGL and will need to be remastered by default. I saw James Jacobs mention elsewhere that part of the reason Gatewalkers got the remaster treatment was because it had relatively few OGL monsters etc that needed overhauling, and that the same bears true for SoG.
Season of Ghosts even more so. The whole OGL thing happened as I was partway through developing the first adventure, and for the month of January, when it looked like the OGL was going to go away forever, I chose to go back through the already more or less done first volume to strip out all the OGL content and replace it. Even after it became apparent that it wasn't going to be that bad, I maintained that goal going forward. I knew we wouldn't be able to fully make Season of Ghosts remastered since those rules wouldn't be done until after we had to start shipping these volumes to print, but I did what I could to make it forward-comparable.
So while a remaster would have to strip out all the alignments and replace spells and magic items with remastered equivalents... the overall task of remastering this would be, I suspect, pretty minor compared to any other OGL thing.
(I had to do the same thing with Rusthenge, but that one was even further along—and it included having to pay extra money to have the cover re-done to replace the rust monster on the cover with a cythnigot. In the end, I think Rusthenge is a MUCH better product, in this case, even though doing all that was super stressful! For sure, cythnigots are more spooky-photogenic than a rust monster, at the very least...
While it was on the borderline between pre and re master, I feel it is feature complete and recent enough that it would be more appropriate to remaster an earlier, messier, AP. Gatewalkers I understand prioritizing something considered a 4 and making it a 7 is more important than taking a 9 and making it a 9.5. I'd rather touch up something that's either super well spread(Abomination vaults) or could do with a bit of repair due to being super early. (Extinction Curse)
Honestly this is how I feel about it as well. Whilst I am sure Season of Ghosts will eventually get a hardcover rerelease. I imagine it more for like an anniversary given how well-received it was. For now I'd honestly be more hyped for a Age of Ashes or Agents of Edgewatch remaster than Season of Ghosts.
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Would people want this? Let us know if you do!
I'd buy the special edition in a heartbeat, even as someone who already owns the paperbacks. Preferably as a remaster rather than just a compilation, though.
I would also like a one-book hardcover like Abomination Vaults has. I also run my games on Foundry, but I find a book a lot easier to read through than in Foundry or a PDF. Also, I can grab a book when I work from home and read while waiting for a bit.
I'm pretty sure I will run Season of Ghosts eventually :)
As for the encounters... having the encounters be "softer" is 100% a deliberate choice, made after reading so much feedback about folks saying that Adventure Path encounters were too overturned or too deadly. This being the first Adventure Path I was developing from scratch since Age of Ashes, I took that feedback to heart, and was much more deliberate in suggesting to the authors that they place the really hard ones toward the later part of the campaign or in areas where it was obvious that the PCs should prepare, and then relied on each author to infuse the horror of the story into the entire narrative rather than try to make the horror "mechanical" by making each fight a killer. Season of Ghosts is not a "survival horror" experience, but a brooding, moody, atmospheric one akin to so many of the Asian horror movies that inspired it in the first place. So if we DO remaster this, I doubt we'll "tune up" the encounters to be more deadly. We might include a sidebar near the start that tells the GM specifically that this is an intentional choice, though.
In general, I very much agree with this change - fewer encounters per book makes them feel less grindy. Basically eliminating PL+3 monsters makes fights far less swingy and more "fair".
But I do still think some of the very climactic fights (chapter bosses, and especially book bosses) could easily stand to be tuned up in SoG.
Book 2 and Book 4's final bosses especially, feel a little too anticlimactic because they're just simply too low-level or understatted.
Following what Wonton mentioned about encounter difficulty; there's also some other things aside from the bosses. E.g., the jinkins in book 1 struggle to deal more than 1 or 2 damage per attack simply because (being tiny and without reach) their sneak attack hardly ever actually triggers. Those sorts of fights end up being so easy that it almost lends an air of implausibility to some of the invasion, since a group of simple level 0 dockhands (using the Gamemastery Guide stat block) would have little trouble beating a same-sized group of level 1 jinkins. Though perhaps the jinkin stat block being undertuned for its level would be better addressed as errata to Monster Core than as something changed in a compilation of Season of Ghosts itself, either giving them a reach weapon or some interesting ability (beyond just Feinting with their lower-than-moderate Deception bonus) to help get creatures to be off-guard to them.
I definitely wouldn't want to see encounters tuned to too higher of a difficulty; as James said, this isn't a survival horror AP... plus, it's an AP where it can be real tricky plot-wise to fit in a new PC if one dies. But I feel like there's gotta be a happy middle ground between 'crushingly difficult' (like some earlier adventures seem to have been) and 'trivially easy' like many of the encounters in SoG (at least the ones my party's gotten to so far, currently in chapter 3 of book 1). So far the only one that felt like a challenge at all was the fight at the teahouse, and that only because I specifically increased the difficulty of it by making the rokurokubi elite and having Stingy come down from upstairs during round 2 to join the fight. Pretty much every other encounter, including the other 'boss monsters' of the downtown, was over in a round - Gurglegut, despite me also giving him some buffs, didn't even get a chance to act since he got low initiative and was dead before his turn came up. It very much made things feel a bit implausible in terms of, like, how was the town guard not able to do more about the invasion given just how easy to defeat most of the invading creatures are?