Well, I've now finished all of the scenarios in Pathfinder Society Season #0, the beta test of the Pathfinder Society, which was basically the Paizo equivalent to the RPGA and it's Living Campaign series. I've read every adventure, and posted a brief summary of each—not like the summaries given in the wiki, but actual spoiler summaries with brief mini-reviews of some of them (mostly if they were significantly better or worse than the average.) While these scenarios were obviously written for a Living Campaign, well, a scenario is a scenario, and a regular old-fashioned home game could certainly make use of them as well. I'm actually not 100% sure what I hoped to accomplish by reading all of these, but given that they're significantly shorter than an adventure path modules, or even most of the stand-alone modules; varying from 15-21 or so pages in length (at least four and half or so pages of which are not module content, including cover, inside cover, OGL, and a document at the end that spells out the treasures and XP, etc.) Add a few maps, an illustration or two, and white space here and there, and these are all relatively short. Not only that, some of the content is the faction specific stuff, which I read, but which really kind of happens "off-line" from the module per se, except in one notable exception.
I'm not going to run these. I wouldn't turn them into fan fiction installments either. To do either, they'd have to be significantly fleshed out with more detail and some bridging sections that are handwaved and rushed over in the modules themselves. I might consider a much more loose adaptation of some of them into DH5 in such a way that it would qualify as one or the other of those, but I certainly have nothing more firm than extremely vague, "hey, that might be cool" plans in those regards.
In general, I find the following mostly consistent features: the modules are all really brief, but in many cases, the concept of the module is too big for the page count. This leads to inadequate treatment of set-up, surprisingly brief treatment of the adventure itself, little NPC interaction or drama possibilities, little in the way of action/adventure possibilities—if there's more than three or four encounters max, that's a lot. Not only that, you're rushed off into the adventure without any context or set-up, for the most part (and quite often, the context and set-up is the wrong kind of context and set-up; fan fiction that it's unlikely the PCs will ever find out unless you simply tell it to them). Now, to be fair, I'm totally OK with starting an adventure (or story, even moreso) in media res, but this isn't supposed to be that, it just kinda feels like it defaults to that... kinda. Every single time. I also think that the brilliant idea of the faction goals is, more than half of the time, overly contrived, forced and silly rather than natural. Too bad, because the idea is really good.
However, this very brevity makes the odd dungeon crawl actually acceptable, because it feels more natural than the completely bizarre and contrived "story of D&D", which is interesting. A dungeon crawl with only half a dozen or so keyed locations actually feels like the kind of place that monsters or villains might actually hang out in, rather than some bizarre clearing the levels of fantasy Nakatomi Plaza, except it goes down underground instead of up into the sky. I have mentioned plenty of times before how much I don't like dungeon crawls, right? Well, I'll let it go (for now) without beating that particular dead horse any more than I already have.
So, I'm still wondering what exactly I'm going to do next. Rather than decide, I'll probably just keep going with Season #1. In the meantime, I can figure out what this stuff all means and what (if anything) I do with it. If the answer is: "for now, nothing—just keep reading and summarizing them; that's sufficiently interesting in its own right," then so be it. I would prefer to do a little bit of something more with them, though. I just have no idea for sure what it would be.
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