Pathfinder 1E Have you played or run Paizo's Adventure Paths?

[Kyuss Knight]

I tried running Shackled City from the hardcover as my first foray into DMing. I was overwhelmed and scrapped running it after the first adventure.

A year later and a lot more DMing experience has given me the confidence I need to give Savage Tide a go. I absolutely fell in love with the story and can't wait to run it. Hopefully we'll start two weeks from Saturday.

 

[Atavar]

I am currently running the SCAP hardcover for my players, set in Eberron, with Cauldron set in the jungles of Q'barra. I think we've been playing for about a year in real time (about every other week with 5-hour sessions), and they are about to wrap up Test of the Smoking Eye.

The adventure recommends six players, and we only had five, so I decided to start the characters at 2nd level for the first adventure. By the time they finished the first adventure, though, they were already a bit tougher than required for the third adventure, so I totally skipped the second adventure (Drakthar's Way). They are around eleventh-level, now, and usually kicking monster butt.

My only caveat (and this is a general warning, not a SCAP-specific warning) is to be very careful about allowing non-core elements in the game for pre-published adventures built from core only (this advice is apt for the Gamemastery modules and adventure paths as well). We have a warforged warblade (or whatever that class is called from Book of Nine Swords) as well as a sorcerer lobbing rays of dizziness left and right. I ended up banning ray of dizziness, it became so bad, and the player of the warforged voluntarily gave up one of his powers because it was just too powerful.

Sure, a DM could put in a lot of extra work to make the monsters use this stuff, too, but for me the big advantage of using pre-published stuff is to reduce my prep time, not make it worse.

We're all having fun, though!

Later,

Atavar

 

[Festivus]

Age of Worms
I ran this series first, with my Friday night group, all the way through. My basic impressions were that it started with a lot of potential in Diamond Lake, abandoned that potential, ran into some plotting issues, and then began to get back together when the group travelled to Greyhawk.

The Hall of Harsh Reflections allowed me the most opportunity to customise the adventure, as it involved a lot of wandering around The Free City (of Greyhawk), a place I've run adventures before. So, that was fun. Champion's Belt works as a logical successor to this, and A Gathering of Winds manages to provide a very solid adventure and tie-up to the Diamond Lake threads.

That these three adventures hit the "sweet spot" of D&D - levels 7-12 - and were also my favourite adventures to run probably means something.

The Spire of Long Shadows hits a wall very quickly: a lot of really tough monsters. To survive it, you really need to follow the 9:05 plan - battle, rest, battle, rest, battle, rest. It'd probably be the most improved by a 4e sensibility. Of course, it's also trying to pack too much XP into too little adventure. The "vision then XP" thing is ridiculous when used to the extent it is.

Things got back on track with The Prince of Redhand, which manages to ignore the problems encountered with high-level 3e play by being a strong-roleplaying experience. The Library of Last Resort is a mixed bag, with the first wilderness adventure not paying enough attention to the fact that the PCs can fly, as well as some too-complex encounters. OTOH, it's got some great moments.

The final trilogy of adventures deteriorate in quality; I felt confused running Kings of the Rift as I didn't think it gave the PCs enough guidance on where to go (my players not being in the habit of casting "commune with plot"); Into the Wormcrawl Fissure had things looking up, but Dawn of a New Age wandering into the realms of "we hate the rogue" too much, despite some strong set-piece encounters.

Cheers!

Spire of Long Shadows pretty much killed my AOW campaign with a TPK and frustrated players... even with the baiting from me that a) it was really going to be very tough, and b) the next leg of the adventure would be much more roleplay intensive. We moved on to play a freeform campaign set in Ptolus.

I have a second group running very slowly through Age of Worms, and I will be making a lot of changes this second time through.

 

[kenmarable]

My biggest problem with the first 3 adventures in the series - well, more Drakthar's Way and Flood Season than Life's Bazaar - is that the dungeons are too big. They really feel like "oh, the PCs need to gain 2 levels, so we need this many encounters, so here you go"... and given the time limitations on the quests, it makes no sense whatsoever to have the PCs go in, fight a few battles, then retreat. It makes even less sense in Flood Season given the location of the major dungeon. When the PCs rest for the first time, why don't the villains escape?

I have only played through the first 3 Shackled City, but we didn't have this problem. Our group tends to be a "we'll rest when we're done" kind of attitude. It can be rough, but we haven't had a problem (did rest before delving into the Malachite fortress, but that's pretty much a second dungeon).

Unfortunately, it was a first time DM seeing if she liked DMing... and found out she prefered being a player. We dropped the campaign after the 3rd adventure. I still haven't brought myself to read the rest of the adventure path, though.

I've run 1.5 adventures from AoW in a separate campaign (yes, they are portable!) and they were fun. Probably won't run the whole thing though. Not that it's bad, just too many others out there that I prefer and not enough time to run them all.

Savage Tide is in the top 2 slots for what I want to run next. The only thing that might delay running it is that my own campaigns tend to grow into sprawling epic monstrosities and I'm leaning towards doing some disconnected "Hey, let's just wander and adventure" stuff for a while. The GameMastery modules are high on my list for that. But when I do want to run a full-on adventure path next, Savage Tide is top of the list.

 

[Hunter In Darkness]

have ran 6 or the STAP . whole lot of fun only had 4 deaths .i love this one they guys at paizo did a hell of a good job on it.

 

[Steel_Wind]

I ran Age of Worms until the end of Spire of Long Shadows. I created a fairly lengthy lead in adventure module to Spire of Long Shadows, using parts of the Spell Weaver lab and puzzle detailed in Shackled City so that the party could gain enough XP to survive SPOLS. So it was about 8 modules in total that I ran to form my AOW campaign

At the end of SPOLS, I ended the campaign for reasons detailed elsewhere in my recent rant against the video gamey nature of RAW 3.5.

I would agree that SPOLS required "9:05 resting" to complete it - and a lot of it - which my players dutifully used to their best advantage by casting Rope Trick about a dozen times during the adventure. More or less until I was sick of it.

Combined with some raising of the dead within the party and the death of the Spell Weaver lich at the end of SPOLS, I thought it best to end it there. They just wiped out a 17th level Spell Weaver lich for god's sake. Is there really a lot more to do after that?

I was facing 18 months or so to finish off the campaign in what was quickly deteriorating into a tabletop wargame. Which is not to say that the AoW is defective; simply that high level play in D&D 3.5 can easily devolve into that sort of game without determined effort by the DM to avoid it - and my determination to avoid it was commensurate with my enthusiasm for high level play - which is to say, not much determination at all by the end of SPOLS.

For all that, there were some memorable adventures in the campaign. I loved Whispering Cairn and the Champion's Belt. HoHR ended up being far more of a meat grinder than it appeared to be and two PCs fell to the Invisible Stalker encounter (far more deadly than it appears to be). It was a lot of fun up to the end of Champion's Belt. It's at that point that the Superheroes without Capes nature of RAW 3.5 took over and my enthusiasm waned considerably.

I will come back to an AP again in the future, but I think given that I run on average only about once ever 3 weeks, a full campaign to 20th level is out of the question for me in the future. A 1st to 12th level campaign, otoh, would be just fine.

 

[Zurai]

I'm running the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, does that count?

 

[freyar]

Would love to run or play in one of these. My current group is a bit too newbie for STAP, which I loved on read-through, but I'm pillaging it for ideas and encounters I can make a little bit easier.

 

[Morrow]

I'm currently playing Age of Worms. We just started Spire of Long Shadows, which, if the reports here are any indication, may be the end of us.

I hope to run Savage Tide sometime in the future. We've never played Shackled City, but I've lifted a fair amount of material from the path for use in my current campaign.

 

[airwalkrr]

I ran Shackled City a little more than halfway to completion some years back. Our schedules eventually became incompatible and we were forced to abandon it. We had one character death in all. But we were starting to get stretched to our limit.

I did actually run a group all the way through the Age of Worms. Best of their APs imho. However we did not end with the same characters who started. There was a TPK in the second adventure so a second adventuring party was forced to follow in their footsteps. By and large, most of the heroes from the second adventure made it all the way to the end.

I played a character in Savage Tide to about 8th level, then he died. I played a second character from 8th to 10th, but then I had to move so I was forced to leave the campaign. That campaign was fraught with character death, but never a TPK.