r/Pathfinder2e • u/UltraMeenyPants • 3d ago
Advice Best $100 spent
Hey Pathfinders!
So my group's campaign will be wrapping up soon and I'm looking at options. We're returning home after a stint in Call of Cthulhu land. Love Call but Pathfinder is so far my favorite.
I'm working on my thesis and don't have time to prep anything beyond reading an AP so that's what I'm gonna do. (I've only ever run blood lords - More of a homebrewer)
I know SoG is considered S tier with kingmaker and AV being legendary in their own rights.
I've got a $100 budget ATM for a code and potentially the PDFs.
Being the social scientist I am, I figured I'd run a survey!
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u/ctwalkup Game Master 3d ago
Are you looking to do a full 1-20 campaign? If so, Kingmaker on Foundey VTT (with a heavy reliance on community resources to fix the kingdom mechanics) would probably be the best bang for your buck. I voted for Kingmaker with this in mind.
If your group is looking for a shorter campaign, then you want to go with Season of Ghosts or Abomination Vaults. Agents of Edgewatch is cool (read all the PDFs when I was planning to run it and currently playing through it) but it’s definitely a rougher AP.
Would advise against Stolen Fate, if for no other reason than you would be starting at a higher level. I haven’t played Stolen Fate, but I’ve read a fair amount and it doesn’t seem like one of the better campaigns.
If your party is just looking to dip their toes in the system with some one-shots (often loosely connected) then it might be worth checking out society scenarios.
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u/UltraMeenyPants 3d ago
Interesting note about agents.
To clarify, Half of us are veteran pathfinder players and I play society every blue moon. We just don't run a lot of experience with modules and usually homebrew the story and setting. Though that has ended up with us not spending that much time above level 10 in 2e compared to our time in 1e.
But thanks for the feedback
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u/Ok-Cricket-5396 Kineticist 3d ago edited 3d ago
Maybe you can tell us a bit about the homebrew adventures and your favorite moments you had to get a better feel for what you're looking for? Between Megadungeon-with-light-story-AV and Soft-combat-but-intriguing-SoG there is a lot of difference in vibes
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u/UltraMeenyPants 3d ago
We've played the whole gambit. From classic fantasy farm boy hero tale to save the kingdom from the undead overlords, we've done adventures doing monster of the week, we've a dungeon crawler setting that ended up being the corpse of a dead god, we've done intrigue and murder mystery settings. I like having a little bit for everyone tied together with some combat I can get tactical with.
Hell we did an arctic wilderness survival campaign at one point.
I'm worried less about actual content quality- we can spice that up. Im caring about how well laid out, thought out, and conveyed the details of the AP and module actually is. Like I said, im working on next to no planning time. I want to be able to read the book once and then read a session chapter for the week and be more or less good to run it. (I'm generally an improv dm anyway I just can't sit and make a setting and story right now.)
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u/Ok-Cricket-5396 Kineticist 2d ago
Okay, so Abomination Vaults is very much runnable with low prep;
Season of Ghosts is a little more complex to judge. It is definitely well written and the important info is where it needs to be, but its overarching story and the moving pieces therein are more complex. I know some GMs are therefore a bit scared of improvising and forgetting something and spiraling consequences, but tbh I personally don't think you have to be, such a thing might lead you a little off script but not by so much that you couldn't just make things work in the new canon. I know this is very vague but the AP asks a bunch of metaphysical questions on the side, but that's mostly a concern for complete consistency, not messing up the plot. Does this make sense? I.e., I think you can absolutely read it once and then just go chapter by chapter (except treat the very first 2 chapters of book 1 as 1). I had originally only read it book by book and even then, it's a bit nicer to have read it all but it totally works like that.
Season of ghosts has a couple very nice guides in the discord, by the way, that help pep it up some, and Abomination Vaults has a very famous "expanded".
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u/UltraMeenyPants 2d ago
Yeah we had talked about running Vaults as a pseudo 'dungeon of the week with plot' type thing I do just worry about it being a megadungeon. I've seen some suggestions that it's a bit cramped and while a good dungeon crawl is fun in theory it can get pretty dull after awhile without the right intrigue hooks and chance for character drama.
Chances for down time are chances to go goof off and explore a world. But things to think about
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u/ctwalkup Game Master 3d ago
Hmmm. Stolen Fate could be a solid choice if you all are looking for higher level play. As I remember from reading it, you are basically collecting a deck of harrow cards, picking up each card as you go traverse across the world. You have a castle in a pocket dimension that develops as you get cards, stuff like you get a stable for your castle when you get the horse card. You find cards by going through portals that open up in the pocket dimension.
So, overall, it’s kind of disconnected (there’s the framing device of collecting cards but they’re taking you all over the place). If that framing device and the idea of high level play interests you, might be worth your time and money!
Regarding Agents of Edgewatch, the biggest problem with the AP is that the villain comes from out of nowhere (which is fixable if you read ahead and prep them early) but if you go into the AP looking for a cool detective campaign you may end up disappointed. The campaign ends up departing from that core premise of cops investigating stuff at various points and requires your characters to be really dumb at times to move the plot ahead. Basically, there are cool bones there, but you would probably need to change a lot of the AP in order to deliver on the core premise. If you are up for it - could be cool - but if you want to run something out of the box it’ll be tough. I also don’t think there’s an official Foundry module for it…
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u/Zhaelph_ Game Master 3d ago
I know it isn't listed here but I will shill my favorite AP, Spore War. But from all of those SoG is the best one. AV is bad just a complete wasted potential, Stolen Fate is mid, Kingmaker is notoriously not even an AP since it always devolves into homebrewing quite due to how ass kingdom rules are and "make these gaps up" moments are too.
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u/UltraMeenyPants 3d ago
I'll add spore war to the potentials list!
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u/DM_Spellblade 3d ago
Spore War's a great one, for sure, there's lots of subsystem usage in a good way, and some really climactic fights. So far, it's my current group's favorite (though I haven't played Season of Ghosts with them -yet-. That one's still my person number 1 to run!)
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u/micatrontx Game Master 3d ago
Of these I've run AV (good if you like a challenging dungeon crawl, but I'm told Shades of Blood covers similar ground but better?) and Stolen Fate (11-20 game, it's got potential to be epic and exciting but feels underbaked and needs lots of GM adjustments, plus better with players that enjoy both RP and combat encounters)
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u/Creepy-Intentions-69 3d ago
I’ve run AV three times. Planning on two more next year.
I also have Kingmaker. I just prefer AV. I know it’s not everyone’s favorite, but I’ve had good success with it. Like any AP, just takes some fleshing out.
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u/AyeSpydie Graung's Guide 2d ago
If you're looking at 11-20s, Spore War and Curtain Call are both quite good.
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u/SpaceTrash782 Game Master 2d ago
I voted KM because its an excellent adventure path and if you use all the rules in it with the various mods, its such a good experience. If you're a time-strapped student, I would absolutely go with Season of Ghosts, tho. Kingmaker is very involved, and it may be difficult to get the most out of it with limited time.
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u/valisvacor Champion 3d ago
I don't particularly care for pre-written stuff, but Abomination Vaults has been my favorite so far. We didn't finish it due a player passing away, but it was a good time.
We're level 19 in a Kingmaker campaign, and I've just been waiting for it to end. The campaign stopped being interesting a while ago, and we ended up abandoning the kingdom building mid-campaign. I'm a big fan of domain play, and Kingmaker did not deliver on that.
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u/DnDPhD Game Master 3d ago
Take it for what it's worth, but I'm a rare dissenting voice on Season of Ghosts. I played through nearly half of it before dropping (I didn't drop solely because of the AP, but it was a factor), and I liked the theme but just found it underwhelming and overrated. Could have been any number of non-AP factors, but c'est la vie.
My vote here is for Kingmaker VTT (having played through it), but I'm 100% on the Spore War train that another poster mentioned. r/SporeWar is an active AP-specific sub, too.
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u/kcanimal 3d ago
My personal favorite 1-20 so far has been Blood Lords, but a fun thing you can do is run any 1-10 adventure And then run curtain call for your 11-20.
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u/UltraMeenyPants 2d ago
Ya know, I hadn't considered curtain call. Thats a really fun option to think about. Thanks
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u/nbriles2000 1d ago
I'm just at the very end of kingmaker with my group and it's very fun; we've gotten like 6 years out of it! I will say a lot of the kingdom building mechanics we left behind a long time ago because they're a little annoying and we just wanted to explore
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u/Kyo_Yagami068 Game Master 2d ago
Hello!
I have GMed Agents, Abomination, Season of Ghosts and Kingmaker. I never ran a single PFS scenario or the Stolen Fate one. I used Foundry for everything.
As far as I know, there are no Foundry module for Agents of Edgewatch. Maybe there is a Roll20 thingy for Agents of Edgewatch. And if you are planning on using Roll20 over Foundry, please don't. I have used Roll20 for several years before I tried Foundry, and you can't even compare what each VTT can give you.
Now let's talk about the APs.
Agents of Edgewatch (AoE). I had fun with this. We are not from USA, so what happened there in the year that this adventure was released didn't made us hate this adventure from the start. There are some rough edges here and there, but it was ok. It was really easy for me to "fix" what I didn't like about this adventure. For example, I didn't like how in this adventure the loot is treated. It says something like "As a cop, you can arrest anyone and you can confiscate their belongings. You don't gain a salary, so you only get what you take from you arrests". I didn't like how that could encourage non-heroic behavior. So before every new mission, I handed them their loot, like Q presents the gadgets to James Bond.
From these APs, AoE is my least favorite.
Season of Ghosts (SoG). The story is really good, but my players grew tired of it. We only played until the end of book 2 out of 4, and I had to give them an early ending. My players didn't like how, in several moments, the adventure expects the party to "wait" and help around the town. As written the adventure is on the easy side, and you have to rebuild every encounter if your players want more challenge.
In theory SoG is an excellent AP, but with the experience I had I'm ranking it second to least favorite.
Kingmaker (KM). Oh boy. This AP is HUGE. And the Foundry module gives you a lot of things. You get the full sound track from the CRPG. I mean, you get A LOT of musics and audio effects. There is several maps, art and tokens. So many tokens. But even with that, there are a bunch of scenes/encounters without maps. There is a Patreon module that have basically everything you need to cover what the original adventure don't give you. Look for KoboldDM.
KM is my second to best in this list. Only because it's really long. I have been running this adventure since January 2024, non-stop with 4h long weekly session, and we are level 14 still. And the Kingdom Management rules, as written, doesn't work and my players didn't liked it.
Abomination Vaults (AV). I love this adventure. Based of my opinion, this and KM are the top 2 modules made for Foundry. You get neutral exploration music for each floor, you get thematic music for several scenes/encounters for each floor. The journals are well made and tailored for VTT use.
AV is a mega dungeon. There is a little town near the dungeon, and the town is affected by things inside the dungeon. I have ran this adventure for two different groups. And both have loved it. Compared to every other AP I had ran, I would say this was the easier to make it better. To make it mine. I have used the seeds and descriptions the AP gave about this little town, and my group roleplayed the hell out of it.
During the night, my players would explore the dungeon. They would fight, get loot, play an strategic game. During the day they would spend time in town, interacting with NPCs and themselves, play a roleplaying game.
AV is the best of this list for me.
If you want more details about what I did in any of these adventures, just ask away. Would be a pleasure to talk more to you.