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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kurtomatic" data-source="post: 6091556" data-attributes="member: 85486">This is a bit of a derail, but I'll take another bite and attempt to re-track.The fundamental problem of all APs is they are too long for a single story arc. Even Kingmaker is only really sandboxy for the first 3 or 4 books, and even then each book is a silo'd sandbox (not that it would be hard to mix'em, but that would be harsh on the PCs for sure). Most Paizo APs offer some flexibility within each book, but the whole storyline is always book 1, book 2, book 3, etc, in order. Epic story arcs are cool, but a single, linear arc for 14+ levels? Not so much.Here's what a lot of creative PF DM's do with the APs. They run multi-arc campaigns by selectively merging elements from 2-3 APs by cross-threading them in various ways. There's always one or two weaker books in any AP; cross-threading gives both the DM and the players more room to move around in their respective spaces.So, for example, Curse of the Crimson Throne is primarily a city campaign set in the land of Varisia, which is like home base for Paizo's house setting. There are several APs that feature Varisia in one form or another (frex, Rise of the Runelords), and a metric butt-load of separate modules for this region. In a multi-threaded approach, you can have two or three main arcs, and players can jump between them according to mood. So when the party is in Korvosa, they'll become embroiled in the local crises, and maybe they'll pursue that (CotCT), or maybe they'll try to escape the city and go back to dungoneering in the lost ruins (RotRL), or whatever.The trick is, you have to be adept at aggressively re-leveling content and re-purposing the Paizo-scripted narrative. I've considered compressing CotCT down into a Reader's Digest/Greatest Hits version at levels 6-12. In this scenario, at level 1, if the PCs enter (or start in) Korvosa, old King Whatshisname is still around, and only later after establishing significant relationships with local inhabitants (some 5 or so levels later) does the excrement hit rotating air recirculator. That would really ramp up the emotional impact (pressure) of the opening events. You've got whole chapters hitting the operating room floor when you do this, but there plenty more flesh where that came from.Okay, so similar to S'mon, I'm thinking of running a 3.5-era campaign; in my case it's Ptolus. Now this city campaign is not an AP, per se. It has included adventure material 1-20, and there are at least two epic story arcs going all the way to level 20 (real save-the-world stuff in some cases). There are also a slew of shorter arcs, various conspiracies, agendas, and conflicts laying in wait. You could run a couple of linear APs out it if you really had to. Better is using all these parallel and crossing plot threads to create a mult-dimensional narrative landscape, and then let character advocacy and a dash of protaganism self-guide the campaign through that landscape. That's my subtext while participating on this forum thread.So similarly, I think APs can be done the same way, but you need other story lines (or some strong protaganism) to weave into the campaign besides the stock plotline.</blockquote>

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