NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6582271" data-attributes="member: 5834">Why doesn't repetition make it less interesting? If something has been done five times, I find it less interesting. Why not go with the original that was done very well to begin with? Perhaps the difference is I found Saw to be an interesting movie, but Saw 5 not so much. Elemental Evil has been hashed and rehashed. Where are the new ideas? I don't think PotA is disjointed or random. I think it is uninspiring and boring.Rise of the Runelords progressed naturally. It's not a debate. It all tied together in a neat package providing progressive clues that lead from one place to another. The Sihedron Symbol was as important in the first module as it was in the last module. The mystery you started culminated in the last module. At the end of he day it comes down to personal taste as to what you might enjoy. But objectively Rise of the Runelords is a better adventure tale as far as design, coherence, depth of material, variation, interesting villains, settings, and just about everything that goes into a module. The level of detail of each isn't comparable. I read Rise of the Runelords as much for the fluffy bits as I did for the crunch. The story in each module was interesting and plentiful.In these new WotC modules, people are being told to "not skim over" this small piece of information that explains why something is occurring. You don't hear that in a module like Rise of the Runelords because it was impossible to skim over the background material for each module. The background material is as important to Paizo as the crunchy rule bits. They carefully craft backgrounds for their modules, NPCs, and set pieces to make them interesting. It is from that material that I draw inspiration. It has been light in these new modules. Not sure why we're debating this since if I were take Princes of the Apocalypse and Rise of the Runelords and pull from each the story information present, I would have far more to work with in Rise of the Runelords. [sblock]The halfling farm corrupted by the Earth Cult that is tasked with killing you, only to accidentally awaken a Revenant with their plan to lure you in. Stopping some thieves from selling a devastation orb in a race against time. Playing the ettin against itself by stealing rum from one of it's heads stashes and blaming the other. The air prophet "force choking" people with an invisible stalker.[/sblock]I don't find much of that inspiring. What I do find inspiring is a serial killer carving a strange rune into the chests of people and the PCs having to figure out why. I find inspiring a group of degenerate ogres that have turned a keep into a slaughterhouse interesting. I find an ancient hidden evil that whispers through the walls interesting. I find a haunted house with the strange impressions of its occupants left upon it, each tied to a historical cruelty in the house interesting. I can do a lot with the background information on the serial killer, the ogres, the haunted house, and the ancient temple.The stuff you listed is an encounter, not history. Why am I going to trick something the party can kill? Why am I going to worry about a trick the party will quickly figure out and kill? Nothing in there compares to haunts. That was an ingenious addition to the rules. Did you not do the haunts justice? Or modify the haunt rules so paladins didn't shrug at them? I did. I made that whole house an interesting encounter.We have very different tastes I imagine. I found Rise of the Runelords a smorgasbord of inspiring material that suited my tastes. Probably because I greatly enjoyed the source material it came from. I enjoy serial killer movies, thus I enjoyed running an NPC serial killer. I enjoyed Deliverance,The Hills have Eyes, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, thus I enjoyed running a deviant hillbilly ogre family. Against the Giants is one of my favorite modules of all time like many others. I liked that the standard humanoid tribe attack had a very interesting motivating force behind it that involved vengeance versus the standard reasons for raiding. A humanoid raid being used to exact vengeance by sacrificing the entire town was a cool reason for the attack. That's ok. That's why they make so much stuff, so each person can find something that interests them. Princes of the Apocalypse doesn't do it for me. I hope you enjoy running it. Sounds like it was made for your tastes.</blockquote>

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