I'm trying to figure out the timeline of that adventure, Curse of the Crimson Throne and Shadows at Sundown.
Academy has a cameo by Ileosa and seems written to take place slightly before Crimson Throne. But in Shadows at Sundown the adventure background talks about the events that occur there as happening a few years after the end of Crimson Throne.
My instinct is to side with the newer source, but I'm not sure if anyone has more concrete information
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There is a little tricksy-ness here for you to manage but it's pretty easy:
Curse of the Crimson Throne certainly came about a year in the timeline *before* "Academy of Secrets."
However,....
When Paizo published the hardback version of the compiled CotCT, well, it kind of maybe sorta tweaked the timeline. As though, you know, if you played through CotCT first, then a year later in the timeline 'Academy' -- then six months later in the timeline "The Green Market" -- then even two years later in the timeline "House on Hook Street" -- well, then you did what is the official timeline:
1) CotCT
2) Academy of Secrets
3) The Green Market
4) House on Hook St
But,.... if you decided to play CotCT only in hardback, well, you could decide that these events of CotCT take place afterward -- and may have to make tiny adjustments to Academy, Green Market, and House on Hook.
EDIT:
And "Shadows at Sundown" is over 3 whole years AFTER House on Hook St.
Creative Director
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When we reprint Adventure Paths as hardcovers, we don't "push them forward" in the timeline. The hardcover Curse of the Crimson Throne takes place at the same time as it always did—very soon after Karzoug's rise and fall. The Lost Omens World Guide locks in its date as starting in 4708 AR but doesn't hard-code an end date. These events are certainly long over by the time Shadows At Sundown takes place.
THAT SAID: During 1st edition, we had a pretty strong goal of setting ALL of our adventures, be they Adventure Paths or standalone adventures, in a "generic" time without the expectation that they'd occur in any order. When we did sequels, we took time advancement into account, but in a case like Acadamy Of Secrets, which is set in Korvosa but NOT a sequel to Curse of the Crimson Throne, the idea was "it takes place whenever you, the GM, want." The idea here was that a newcomer to Pathfinder could pick up any adventure and get started after reading the Inner Sea World Guide and NOT have to be "caught up" on an ever-increasing mass of canon created by adventures and lore books as they're published.
Gamers and customers and folks didn't really interact with the game that way, so that's why when we switched to 2nd edition, we changed this take and now the "start date" for each book and adventure roughly corresponds to the equivalent date to when it was published, which also means that the order in which adventures are published is generally the order in which those events are expected to take place in-world.
By the time we got to Hook Street, we'd already started to slowly make this shift, but Acadamy of Secrets was deep in the "everything happens at once and your GM gets to decide what order they take place in."
Fitting Acadamy of Secrets in to the world, I'd put it at happening several years AFTER Curse of the Crimson Throne, but before House on Hook Street, and would change that Ileosa cameo to a cameo by the new queen.
Korvosa talk summoned me.
Would it be feasible to scale Academy of Secrets down to fit level-wise between Hook Street and Shadows at Sundown? My table wants to run a second campaign at the same time as the first on a different day (I am a madman and agreed) and they all want to do CotCT for some good old fashioned Fighting A Corrupt Ruler for no reason in particular. It would be cool to follow it up with more Korvosa (I say, planning for YEARS in the future), but would Academy be too silly to be done by pre-11th level people, even if scaled down and converted to 2e?
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Creative Director
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Korvosa talk summoned me.
Would it be feasible to scale Academy of Secrets down to fit level-wise between Hook Street and Shadows at Sundown? My table wants to run a second campaign at the same time as the first on a different day (I am a madman and agreed) and they all want to do CotCT for some good old fashioned Fighting A Corrupt Ruler for no reason in particular. It would be cool to follow it up with more Korvosa (I say, planning for YEARS in the future), but would Academy be too silly to be done by pre-11th level people, even if scaled down and converted to 2e?
Thematically, I don't feel like it makes sense to make Academy of Secrets lower level. The events in that adventure kinda need to be high level in order to narratively justify why those events haven't happened yet, to maintain the strong presence of devils and related foes, and to make it feel like something a party has to work toward rather than just jump into.
I feel like it'd be easier and more thematic to boost Hook Street UP so that it starts at level 10 and ends with the PCs being 13th level, then keep Academy at 13th level, and then boost up Shadows at Sundown to run from 14th or 15th on from there.