Planning to start Age of Ashes - is it a good idea?

[OrmEug]

I plan to start playing long campaign with my friends, and I'm trying to find a right AP for that.

We're willing to commit to longer(1-2 years) campaign so would be nice to have some diversity between books.

so far the best candidate seems to be Age of Ashes, but as many existing AP it's pre-remaster, so my question is - is it easy to play with remastered rules? Do I need to switch a lot of enemies?

Also, does it fit well into current storyline of Golarion?

Thanks, and feel free to suggest other APs for me to consider, of course

[Tridus]

You won't need to change much of anything, really. The remaster didn't impact creatures much. You'll have to change some resists/weaknesses here and there from ones that don't exist (like Good to Holy). If you run into a creature with Grab that doesn't have Athletics, you'll need to give it an Athletics score.

But that's most of it, really. It was not a major rule change on the NPC side of the table.

[Greg.Everham]

You'll be fine running it almost exactly as it is printed.

As for story, Age of Ashes is mostly a tour of Golarion. You'll walk through quite a few different regions and experience some of the changes from PF1e to PF2e as far as Golarion lore is concerned. A rather nice sampling of the goings on.

[Finoan]

Mechanically you will need to change very little for any of the Legacy APs.

You can ignore NPC alignment (or not if you feel the desire).
You will need to convert damage type dealt or damage resistance if a monster is referencing alignment damage (chaotic damage or resistance to evil damage and such like that).

As for creatures, you won't need to replace any of them. You should still be able to find all of the creatures from the Bestiary online.

However, you will absolutely want to replace any Golem enemies with their equivalent Remaster counterpart. Golem Antimagic is not all that much fun to play with, and the Clay Golem's curse is pretty unmanageable (the Clay Effigy curse is much more reasonable).

----

Also, to be aware of is that the difficulty balance of these early APs is a bit off.

To quote one of the AP writers of the time:

Michael Sayre wrote:

In addition to the first two APs not having full and final rules available to the authors and developers, adventure design itself really shifted. By the end, optimized PF1 characters were performing so high above the expected baseline that it was pretty common to have encounters that were weighted much more aggressively than you should ever do in PF2 just to keep the adventures engaging. So the first two PF2 APs are a lot more aggressively tuned even without sliding math issues, just because PF1 had taught everyone that people want aggressively tuned adventures (the reality of course being more that people want challenging adventures, which PF2 is much better at providing without needing to scale up to Severe or Extreme equivalents.)

So Age of Ashes, being one of those first APs, doesn't have any easy-but-engaging fights. It has hard fights followed by more hard fights punctuated with brutally hard fights.

[Dr. Frank Funkelstein]

I am currently playing it (with remastered rules), about 2/3 in, lvl 12.
Some fights were hard, some not, so far only a single one has stood out - a certain lich, loaded to the brim with damage spells and not even relevant to the story, where we avoided a tpk with a lot of luck and lost two characters...

Otherwise it has been a lot of fun, except for the idea that you have a home base that you never visit, and NPCs that you never meet again - an issue shared by other travel around the world APs.

[Perpdepog]

Finoan wrote:

However, you will absolutely want to replace any Golem enemies with their equivalent Remaster counterpart. Golem Antimagic is not all that much fun to play with, and the Clay Golem's curse is pretty unmanageable (the Clay Effigy curse is much more reasonable).

This especially. AoA's got a couple encounters, and they can be brutal if you haven't lucked into prepping the right damage type.

[Kyle_TheBuilder]

AoA is fine, it's one of my favourite. It has bad reputation becasue encounter difficulty is really above what "casual party that made some fun character concepts and met up on session 1 to start" can expect to sail through without potentially fast crashing. Especially since it was during 5e exodus and players still had mind set that individual character can achieve easy victory and totally didn't grasp core teamwork/combo system of PF2e.

My group blitzed through it with 2 Fighters, Maestro Bard and Starlight Span Magus but we optimized whole party and played super tactically. It was our first AP few years ago but we are bunch of optimizers from 3.5/1e. Now that's not required for AoA, however it's also not AP where random party wouldn't have to worry about TPK. Some encounters are REALLY hard for casual parties.

So I would recommend to: talk to players and recommend them to make party that actually works together. My baseline for new players in PF2e for first smooth experience is: 2 melee martials, one support (Maestro Bard always best) and one flex (can be skill monkey, can be second caster for blasting like Sorcerer, Animist or Druid) and make sure they understand that PF2e expects from them to combo. One melee martial build for Tripping, one buids for pure damage or grapples, Maestro Bard/support buffs and debuffs and actually pick good spells and flex actually patches some holes that party may have.

AoA is fine but if party would come up with Invesigator, Alchemist, Wizard and Warpriest I would seriosly tell them to reconsider if this is their first long AP. AoA has some encounters that really are "DPR checks".

[Sir Belmont the Valiant, II]

I played AoA many years ago and don't remember it all that clearly. The party had 5 PCs: wizard, cleric, 2x martial & 1 ??). I remember thinking some of the fights were pretty tough, but many seemed average to average+. And this was a random party that played all day for two days at a local convention.

My advice is to apply the young/weak template to one of the early fights and see how the weak/standard encounters stack up against your party. Then keep using the weak template as necessary. In other words, calibrate the fights to your party a bit.

[ValarakarU]

I'm a player in AoA and we are playing Remaster. We are most of the way through Book 5. Level 17. The GM is using the remastered versions of most of the monsters which are readily available online. We have not found it terribly difficult but we have 5 character party which helps. The GM is also using the various online stuff that help balance and tweak things to make some areas better or some story party flow nicer (or so he says). Check the forum for GM references or ideas. I would not fear running this campaign at all.

A couple words of caution:
* This AP is loaded with humanoid enemies that are nameless henchmen that keep up with the PCs. Your PCs may constantly question why they feel weak because they are going up against nameless henchman #324 who is a level 14 fighter when they are level 14. So I recommend maybe either naming some of the henchmen and trying to give each personalities (there are a lot so its hard), or try to mix in some lower level easier fights to remind them as they level not every no-name street thug is elite.

* This AP is loaded with Reactive Strikes. If someone plans on playing something like a melee Magus (or anything else whose main thing is manipulate), warn them, make sure they know to expect this a LOT. This ramps up as the campaign goes on so book 1 didn't seem bad at all. by book 5, I just assume everything has RS. I'm playing a laughing shadow magus and I didn't really know this was going to be a thing. I doubt it would have mattered even if I knew. Just letting you know.

* this AP is loaded with things that have immunities, in the Pre-Remaster. Someone above mentioned Golem Anti-magic. I highly recommend using the remaster of these creatures where you can because it can get a bit much at times to have characters just unable to hurt stuff at all and have to let the fighter just handle it. Note here there are some creatures which do NOT have a remaster (Aluum for example), which are basically immune to some characters.

As a player I have thoroughly enjoyed this campaign. So I do think its worth it if you know what to expect and have a GM who can make the small tweaks as needed.

[Moth Mariner]

The final Book 6 boss has an alignment based thing going on, but honestly it makes the fight too easy. Dropping alignment makes it better!

You can and should swap in remaster (and later-published legacy) versions of things very easily, except one magic item in Book 4.

You can find the Age of Ashes section of the forums here:
https://paizo.com/community/forums/pathfinder/adventurePath/ageOfAshes

And Kalnix has compiled a guide to running the AP here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQ-FigXIa1pZHpahAcTHamm5IzOPriB W4lqbK1Ht40v9Qp26hCXySHGvl4moym2PxyovFiCw1wUD-T0/pub

It says "fixing" but they're mostly improvements rather than fixes :)

[Kelseus]

My group is coming up on the very end of book 6 (I am a player). My biggest issue in AoA is that there are very limited opportunities to purchase or loot on level gear.

Book 3 takes place in a city that is level 7 (i.e. you can buy items up to level 7). Book 3 expects you to be levels 9 to 12. By level 12 the book math expects you to have a +2 greater striking weapon. Meaning you should be doing up to 5 dice per hit (3 for greater striking plus 2 weapon property runes). Makes fights really hard.

Book 4 (levels 12 to 14) is in a city that is only level 10 (if memory serves), but allows for weapons/armor up to level 14. This is good for weapons and armor, but by this level you need to be purchasing non-weapon items too.

At the end of book 6, not all of our martial characters have major striking runes and only one of the PCs have an apex item.

[Moth Mariner]

I can't remember the specifics of earlier books at this point, but I can say that in Book 6 items up to 20th level are for sale. Everyone should be able to nicely kit out before the finale.

Oh and even without that, PCs can usually order higher-level items to be delivered to lower level towns, as per the rules for Marketplaces:

GM Core wrote:

If a character's level is higher than the settlement's, that character can usually use their own influence and leverage to acquire higher-level items, as they convince shops to place specialty orders or artisans to craft custom goods, though it might take a bit of time for such orders to be fulfilled.

(or just take up crafting)

[Greg.Everham]

Moth Mariner wrote:

I can't remember the specifics of earlier books at this point, but I can say that in Book 6 items up to 20th level are for sale. Everyone should be able to nicely kit out before the finale.

Oh and even without that, PCs can usually order higher-level items to be delivered to lower level towns, as per the rules for Marketplaces:

GM Core wrote:

If a character's level is higher than the settlement's, that character can usually use their own influence and leverage to acquire higher-level items, as they convince shops to place specialty orders or artisans to craft custom goods, though it might take a bit of time for such orders to be fulfilled.

(or just take up crafting)

Book 4, as an example, is a great excuse to employ this. Custom crafts by dutiful artisans for everyone!