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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6584075" data-attributes="member: 37579">I didn't say I didn't find the asylum interesting. I didn't say it wasn't an enjoyable piece of the adventure. I didn't say there wasn't interesting opportunities for roleplaying or unique ideas.I simply said it was padding. That it didn't strongly connect to the main plot or advance the story in a meaningful way. Especially with the potential combat(s) at the asylum, when it could easily be a much more straight forward roleplaying situation. (I found the asylum especially useful. My group opted to head straight there, bypassing the farms, and then declared their intentions to stay at Foxglove Manor (as it was closer than Sandpoint), since they had received an invite to visit. So I used the asylum to plant some of the story elements they were missing by skipping the farms.) It is problematic even from a player perspective. My players were continually trying to mesh the events of that story with the larger picture and trying to figure out how the events were connected. Which wasn't possible as there's no easy way of discovering the backstory to the adventure. Now, I love Burnt Offerings. It's an excellent module. A fantastic introduction to the town and a fun story with a bunch of neat locales. But it's pretty much stand alone. You could segue from Burnt Offerings into several different stories, such as jumping into the later parts of Jade Regent or Feast of Ravenmoor or even some Pathfinder Society. Which is both a strength and a weakness. It likely encouraged people to buy the first issue of Pathfinder and try the adventure, knowing that even if they hated the rest of the Adventure Path, they could run the module and go in their own direction. Remove the Sihedron medallion from <villain X> and there's no apparent tie. So long as the player's don't know the name of the AP, otherwise they'll know that Runelords will rise. Not that the title is accurate; it should really be Rise of the Runelord. Singular. My players kinda expected to wack all seven. Still, the quality of the module was never at issue. RotRL is excellent, and I was using it as a positive example of how a good adventure can still have padding and awkwardly justified monsters. Because there are a lot of superfluous encounters.</blockquote>

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