So far in my Adventure Path trawl, the longest and most complex of all the trawls that I'll do, and technically the one that I started first, although I've not been diligent about it until recently, I've read the three full adventure paths that appeared in Dungeon Magazine as Dungeon adventures. They were 10-12 adventures each of about 20-30 pages (including ads, illustrations, maps, etc. Maybe 10-15 pages of actual text... which includes long statblocks too, so maybe 8-13 pages of real actual text.) While Shackled City, Age of Worms and Savage Tide were the proof of concept and one of the most popular series of articles that the magazine produced, when Paizo had to go it on their own with their own Pathfinder Adventure path they had a somewhat different format.
I just finished "Burnt Offerings", the very first episode of this new format, so maybe it's a bit premature for me to be making this post, but of course, I've read the entire Rise of the Runelords before (in its Pathfinder single volume update format) and the entire Curse of the Crimson Throne before, and the entire Skull & Shackles and Carrion Crown and half of Strange Aeons, so I'm not exactly a complete neophyte to what's going on here. (I've also listened to the radio plays that were done for Rise of the Runelords, Curse of the Crimson Throne and Mummy's Mask.) Rather than 10-12 dungeon-style modules, the new Adventure Path format is ~100 page book, with a 30-40 page module included, and then also some setting development and other context around which the adventure runs, some additional monsters that are themed to fit as side quests or as subject of random encounters while out and about doing the adventure, or whatever. There's even some short fiction in many of them, although honestly I always felt like that was filler when that appeared. If I want fantasy fiction, an adventure module is not where I'd go expecting to find it. And while setting development in the supplemental material of the modules doesn't seem like a bad idea—it provides context to the adventure—in reality it mostly ended up being repeated when later setting products came out. Paizo released a lot of product in the day. I don't know if their volume of product is the same or not now, because I started slowly losing interest in much of it after a couple of years, but it was really, really heavy for a while there, and much of the setting products that came out over-wrote setting related stuff in the modules just a couple of months or so at most later. Even the module bestiaries were usually overwritten by the actual bestiaries. Pathfinder 1e had six full bestiary books, after all.
A "normal" module is usually about 32 pages or so. It's pretty slim, but sufficient for a few evenings of play, and probably a whole level in a modern D&D or D&D adjacent (like Pathfinder) system. The actual module portion of an adventure path chapter is at least 50% bigger than that, in most cases, maybe stretched to 100% bigger with better utilization of the page space at best. For my money, I kind of wish that they'd actually just printed them at ~50 pages, charged half as much for them, and left the rest of the stuff out, or packaged it as a separate product that supported the adventure path. But I don't blame Paizo for experimenting somewhat with the format, or for not immediately doing what I wish that they would have done. I'm not 100% sure that I'm really the type of gamer who's the normal target audience for this kind of thing anyway; my usage of adventure path products is not the same as people who order them specifically to run them as written in the setting as written, after all. That said, while the supplemental material, like an exploration of some of the NPCs and businesses in Sandpoint aren't going to make or break the module, they can be useful or silly (Sandpoint includes plenty of silliness—including the always dubious inclusion of proto-woke socio-political details, but there's some useful ideas there too.) Clearly, however, the real quality of the adventure path is going to be 90%+ driven by the actual module content, though. The rest of the stuff is, at best, a nice add-on that doesn't too meaningfully contribute to the overall quality of the book as a whole product. As I discuss the adventure paths, going forward, this is an important thing to keep in mind. I don't always dislike or not care about the supplemental product, but it will rarely have any real significant impact on the quality of the adventure path overall, so I'm mostly going to ignore it in my discussions. Oh, I'll read it, and really extraordinary stuff (good or bad, either one) might get a brief mention, but I'll really be talking about the adventures themselves.
So in that sense, Burnt Offerings is, charitably, described as "classic" and uncharitably as "borderline cliche." There's only so much you can do with goblin raids, after all, especially if you're trying to make it into a dungeon crawl of sorts. But they do OK. While it's not my favorite of the modules in this adventure path (that would be the next one) it takes a pretty classic D&D trope and does what it can to make it interesting. I watched some quick reviews of various adventure paths on YouTube recently, and he ranked each AP according to four categories: mechanics and combat, roleplaying opportunities, coherence of the overall path, and X-factor. I don't know that I care too much about the first two, because I can of course create my own opportunities for both that I like better than anything I've read for the most part, and x-factor is too vague to mean anything other than "did I like it or find the high concept intriguing enough" but I think that the third category is an interesting one... because he's right to suspect that many of the adventure paths aren't super good at that. In their desire to add variety and not have everything that happens be directly related in a thru-line to the metaplot of the adventure path as a whole, there are often whole modules that only barely touch on the actual plot at all, and the whole thing can feel like an extended side quest or tangent.
Which is generally assumed to be a good thing, at least in small doses, for RPG campaigns. And I'm not going to say that it isn't, but it's one clear example of how writing novels and writing adventures really are not compatible, because that absolutely is not a good thing for a novel or screenplay. Side quests and tangents usually have to follow the rule of Chekov's revolver; i.e., they actually turn out to be related to the main story after all. Or at least provide important character building moments. Honestly, I'd prefer games that did that more too; campaigns can be shorter and more focused, and they're usually better as a result. But Paizo, and others, are locked into the idea that their campaigns must follow a certain arc and certain pace of "leveling up" and most of them, and certainly all of them for many years, were designed specifically to take a couple of years to play and take characters from levels 1 to ~15 or so. Obviously how much "real time" that takes varies wildly based on a number of factors; how often you play, how long your sessions are, how focused you are during play, how distracted your group gets, do you roleplay shopping trips and interactions around town a lot, etc. But even at the fast pace of "modern games" leveling, it's hard for me to imagine playing an entire adventure path in less than ~150-200 hours of play. It's probably good to have some variety over that many hours... but it's probably also even better to condense the experience to half that or even less, compress it over considerably fewer levels, and have a briefer and more focused experience that trims out a lot of the excess side questing, the weird D&Disms like stupid traps, puzzles, and dungeon-crawls that are really for "the experience" rather than because they're necessary to drive towards the endpoint of the "plot."
And that's, of course, assuming that following a pre-written plot is the goal, which isn't always something that everyone agrees on, of course. Also, Pathfinder is a very tedious combat type game; any system I'd run these in now would have action scenes resolve much faster. And we don't play nearly as often as once a week.
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