Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Paths

I liked the format of what I did for Second Darkness, and thought I ought to go back to do the first two adventure paths of that format before I forget too much about them (way too late for Shackled City, Age of Worms and Savage Tide... although maybe with a good summary of each adventure I could still pull it off...)

Rise of the Runelords was Paizo's first adventure path after being cut loose from Dungeon Magazine and having to go on their own. Maybe for that reason, they went with pretty classic stuff, which is both good and bad. Runelords is generally considered by most to be one of the better adventure paths, and one of the ones remembered most fondly by fans. But, of course, being really "classic" means that sometimes it's not really very interesting, and it does predictable things. But not too badly. It really is a good adventure path, and honestly, I think Paizo stumbled across the right format when they made their own publication. The Dungeon Magazine ones were honestly too long. Savage Tide and Age of Worms, for instance, were 12 modules long and went from 1st to over 20th level. That might have been true for Shackled City, but then again, one or two of those chapters might have been added later when it was compiled into a single volume. I can't remember now. Six chapters, from levels 1-15 or so with each chapter being, admittedly, a bit longer than a Dungeon Magazine module, was the right format. 

In fact, I'd have gone even further, and had it be four chapters of two slightly slower levels each, but that's probably just me. I think most D&D players aspire to higher level, even if they don't actually play it much. I've done it and the experience has taught me that I don't really want to do it again.

Here's a slightly different take on Karzoug, the iconic runelord who iconically rises. I would have actually done another pass at him, but I'm out of images for the day on ChatGPT, and I like this take. I would just have changed the pattern of the gems on his forehead, and said that his topknot is coming out of a mohawk with shaved sides to his head, and his hair isn't that white; more salt and pepper. 

Anyway, what do I think of the various chapters of this AP?

Burnt Offerings: I've actually used the first act of this, combined with another Paizo stand-alone module, for a one-shot. I'm admittedly less interested in the final act; an "assault" on a goblin lair. I admit that it feels very iconically D&D, but not in a good way. It feels tired to me. That said, Sandpoint itself is a great setting, and the first two (of three) acts here are quite good. 

The Skinsaw Murders: This is one of my favorite modules period. I really, really like it, although I admit that I'm a bit less interested in the final act of it too, where you go to town and face a boss beyond the one in the haunted house. Naturally, adapting it to fit into another context other than what they intended you to use it for means that some of it won't make sense, and cutting much of the final act has been my solution. But it's just a great module. 

The Hook Mountain Massacre: This one is OK. Parts of it, again, are pretty good, while the hillbilly ogres kind of rubbed me the wrong way a little bit. The stuff up by the lake and the occupied ranger fort were pretty good for that kind of thing. There are elements of it I'd borrow, but it started veering into territory that I had less interest in, with more traditional D&D feels at times.

Fortress of the Stone Giants: I don't want to say that I kind of checked out on Runelords by this chapter, but I kind of did. By the time they're talking about how characters can travel via fly or teleport, I don't feel like I understand the game anymore, nor is it in the same genre that I really, really enjoyed in the earlier levels. The attack on the town by giants, and how the PCs can handle that was reasonably well done, I suppose, but it wasn't something that I was as interested in anymore, and the attack that the PCs make on the giants' own fortress just felt like a dungeon-crawl.

Sins of the Saviors: This one felt like a place filler; stuff that you needed to do, mostly in a dungeon, to get to high enough level to do the last module. Very little in this one interested me.

Spires of Xin-Shalast: Here, I'm kind of torn. The high altitude mountain survival stuff is really interesting, as is the Lovecraftian stuff at the destroyed city, which sometimes has the feel of a Mountains of Madness city lite. But it's also a relatively high level D&D adventure and dungeon-crawl, with factions in the dungeons to interact with, and a pretty predictable BBEG at the end. I enjoyed reading it well enough; I don't know how much I'd enjoy playing it, and I know I wouldn't enjoy running it. I did play partially through this campaign once years ago, but the GM got burned out and quit near the end of chapter III, so we didn't get to the final chapters. That was the same GM who ran us through all 22-23 levels, or however many it ended up being exactly, of Age of Worms. 

I think that I have certain patterns when it comes to the adventure paths: 1) I don't enjoy higher level play, so I tend to think that the last few chapters require special pleading to be interesting to me. 2) They're still too long, and should probably be cut by at least a third, with slower leveling. Ideally (obviously) I'd have preferred them to be compatible with E6, but I'm not shocked that they're not. 3) Usually around chapter III, IV or V the campaign takes a weird turn, probably on purpose to give it some variety, but it makes the whole section feel a little disjointed and out of place. Making the campaigns smaller would also make them more focused, because there would have been less perceived need to do this. 4) I've long been on record as not really liking dungeon-crawls, and Paizo does tend to include them. Those are usually the parts that I'm most likely to look at trimming out of the campaign.

And those obvious biases impact how I view these adventure paths. Without those biases, Runelords is even better, but for me, it does too many things that I'm less interested in and wish that it didn't. I tend to like the first third or so... maybe almost half of it, and some elements of the finale, and don't care about the big middle section in between them.

The second adventure path, Curse of the Crimson Throne is another very well-regarded one, and considered by many to be one of the best examples of a primarily urban-themed campaign (although not entirely.)

I actually didn't ask ChatGPT to give me all that cleavage. I guess it just assumed that that's what most people want. Which, honestly, is probably true. Otherwise, this is really close to how Paizo also described Queen Ileosa, one of the more complicated and interesting villains. Much more so than Karzoug or Allevrah—or, in most respects, than the even earlier forays with Adimarchus, a Demon Lord of madness (who's sadly not foreshadowed enough), Kyuss, the weird undead demigod or whatever he is, and Demogorgon, the Prince of Demons. Sure, sure, those are iconic villains. But Ileosa is someone you actually see and interact with from the very beginning, and her villainy is perhaps less cosmic and more villainous because of it. None of the adventure paths are perfect, of course, but Crimson Throne is considered one of the best ones for a reason. It was updated to the Pathfinder RPG itself (1e) in a hardback compilation, it was released as an audio drama, an adventure card game, and was even adapted to Savage Pathfinder (although Runelords was all of those things too.) Overall, this one comes highly recommended by me, and I'm actually thinking of how to adapt the whole thing, or at least use it as the backbone of an adaptation, much like how I did with Carrion Crown to Cult of Undeath.

Let's go through it's chapters then, shall we?

Edge of Anarchy: This first adventure is entirely urban, and while it starts off rather small and personal, it gradually gets you involved with the succession crisis and the intrigues and plots of kings and queens and the like. 

Seven Days to the Grave: Now firmly (well, I don't know about firmly) on the throne, Queen Ileosa must deal with her first crises, riots, plague and more! But all is not quite as it seems, and there's lots of skullduggery and intrigue to be had. 

Escape from Old Korvosa: Now, the Queen is clamping down and proving to be a very bad ruler indeed, and the people, represented by the PCs, can't help but notice that something is very wrong, and getting involved in it. These first three adventures are about as good as these kinds of adventures tend to get. They're well-written, thematically very consistent, and just very well done. The crime lord dungeon-crawl is the only part that I'd lose, but otherwise, I feel like this doesn't need a very strong editing hand to just be a good half campaign. Of course, that's when it decides to go do it's weird mid-point tone shift, which most of the adventure paths seem to have to do.

A History of Ashes: Escaping from the city, you have to essentially join a barbarian tribe to get more information from them. While not a bad idea; this is supposed to be an urban campaign, and this and the next chapters feel a little out of place. If you were to cut back on the length of the campaign overall, the information that you find out here could easily just be told to the PCs by someone in town, skipping the need for this adventure entirely.

Skeletons of Scarwall: Now, you have to go do a totally disconnected dungeon-crawl in yet another remote wilderness location so you can get the special MacGuffin sword needed to defeat Ileosa. Again, this could have been somewhere at the end of Old Korvosa, and you could skip this one entirely too.

Crown of Fangs: Now back in town, you find that things have gotten worse, and the the whole city is rising up against the intolerable rule of Ileosa. Not only is there this exciting uprising to manage, but the assault on the Queen herself, while admittedly kind of an exotic dungeon-crawl, is less intolerable than most, and actually kind of interesting. Somehow the whole finale is the most exciting of them I've read so far, because instead of relying on cheap thrills of doing fantasy stuff that's impossible, you do (mostly) things that are believable and grounded, but certainly in a high fantasy setting against an evil queen who's managed to get her ambitious hands on power that is well above her pay grade. 

Now, obviously, I still haven't read most of the adventure paths, but I really like Crimson Throne and suspect that in the end I'll have found it to be one of my favorites. 

Second Darkness Adventure Path

I finished--just a few minutes ago--the final pages of the Second Darkness adventure path, including even reading the Player's Guide before starting, which I'm now doing. (Why not? The pdfs are free, after all.) It's the third adventure path published after Paizo stopped doing Dungeon Magazine, the 6th adventure path in all, and the penultimate 3.5 adventure path. Next, although I'll read something else first, I'm sure, is Legacy of Fire, the last 3.5 adventure path.

While Second Darkness seemed to have elicited some excitement when it was new, because it brings the drow to Golarion, and still is the only major publication to feature them, I believe, it is also not seen as one of the better APs in retrospect, and when I asked ChatGPT to rank the APs, it put Second Darkness in the lowest, C-tier ("heavily flawed") with a summary of jarring mid-campaign tonal shift. That's fair. How about my quick summary of the six parts and the campaign as a whole?

Parts of the adventure path were actually really good. I doubt that any of the adventure paths are perfect; in fact, it seems to be a meme among fans that the 4th or 5th chapter is kind of an odd-ball that doesn't fit very well. Lower level plays out pretty classic, but as you get to higher level (5th and 6th chapters in particular) the characters are in the teens, usually ending at 15-16th level, so they're completely superheroes, and the game doesn't feel like classic fantasy anymore, it feels weird. The Avengers. Luckily Golarion isn't (yet) also the Muppets like 5e is, but it eventually gets there.

Anyway, here's the six parts, and my opinion (briefly) on each.

Shadow in the Sky: This is mostly an adventure of urban scum and villainy, hucksters, gangsters, pirates, were-rats, and the like. The vibe is very similar to Freeport, actually. While I don't really care for the casino employees gig that makes up a big part of it, it's certainly a serviceable urban adventure, and nothing at all is wrong with it. It ends with the reveal of the drow, which is supposed to be a big deal because they hadn't been revealed or described at all in Golarion up to this point. (Ironically, this adventure path was explicitly made "non-canon", I think it an effort to over-protect themselves in the wake of the OGL debacle, where they deliberately took OGL D&D concepts and made them either more generic or more specific to themselves... but no longer part of D&D. Now, it's not even clear that drow canonically exist in Golarion at all.)

Children of the Void: This is my favorite of the adventures; a treasure hunt that turns into a horror adventure of sorts, heavily based on Predator, Aliens, or any other adventure where you're trapped in a constrained space (a small island here) and under constant attack by alien monsters who are trying to turn you into a zombie. In fact, I'm going to explicitly adapt this into one of my two sailing campaigns; either Terror in Timischburg or Curse of the Corsair Coast.

The Armageddon Echo: Now, you're in the elf forest, and as agents of the elf queen, you are going to war against the invading drow in the elf forest. Quite the change from the piratey or criminal start to the campaign in a seedy, dumpy little town, but not a bad adventure, and one of the better "war-themed" adventures that I've read in a long time. Little bit hoaky finale, though. I'm not a fan of demiplanes as a constrained villain hangout.

Endless Night: I did not like this one. Here, you go undercover disguised as a drow into one of the drow households in the Underdark (er... Darklands) drow capitol city. The adventure is incredibly railroady, and the PCs have very little agency by design. Even when they're not being overtly railroaded, they're being deliberately hamstrung and put in a position where they can't do very much except be a spectator to the unfolding plot. I don't think I'd enjoy this one at all, and that's a much more significant flaw than any "tone shift". Getting jerked around by one girlboss NPC after another isn't anyone's idea of fun.

A Memory of Darkness: Another one that I did not like. You're back up on the surface now, going to a hold-out fortress in a demon-haunted section of the elf forest, but it's less of a raid and more of a visit where you're expected to go and talk to a bunch of people. It's also very railroady, and it feels more like you're a spectator rather than a "mover and shaker" in the story. Not only that, the adventure background gives the module very unlikeable context; the PCs are essentially manipulated by the girlboss elf queen, and there's an extremely transparent allegory of her being the feminist progressive "hero" and the whole point of the module is to go either convert or kill the traditionalist conservative elves who are the "villains". The module is all set up for the big reveal that elves who become "too Republican" turn into drow, which again, is supposed to be a big shocking reveal, and the module is set up as if it is, which isn't really a very appropriate way to structure a module, I don't think. I can't imagine running this one, ever. 

Descent Into Midnight: Finally, you go back to a weird section of the Underdark, fight lots of demons and drow at relatively high level, end the campaign. This is serviceable, but not particularly inspiring. The  Land of Black Blood should be cooler than it actually ends up being in practice, I found. It's a good idea that they do too little with.

Anyway, I didn't necessarily expect this to be one of my favorite campaigns. I knew ahead of time that it wasn't one of the more popular ones, and my AI ranking had it at the lowest tier at which it grouped 1e adventure paths. That said, I was pleasantly surprised by the first two chapters, the second one in particular.

Before I start Legacy of Fire I'm probably going to read Out of the Abyss, the 5e campaign that also focuses on the Underdark, drow and demons. It'll be interesting to see the same themes explored differently. 

I also ran another AI query of Google, asking it to rank the adventure paths, but I asked it to rank both 1e and 2e adventure paths. Thought I'd include that here for the heckuvit. Once again, I don't pretend to expect that my own rankings would match these. 

S-Tier: The Gold Standards

Universally praised masterpieces with exceptional writing, cohesive themes, and minimal required GM intervention.

• Curse of the Crimson Throne (1e): The ultimate urban campaign.
• Kingmaker (1e / 2e): The definitive hex-exploration and kingdom-building sandbox.
• Rise of the Runelords (1e): The quintessential high-fantasy Varisian epic.
• Season of Ghosts (2e): A masterclass in localized, atmospheric mystery and emotional storytelling.
• Strength of Thousands (2e): The premier roleplay-forward magical academy and diplomatic campaign.

A-Tier: Excellent & Highly Memorable - Silver Medal

Incredible campaigns that fully deliver on their premises, holding minor flaws or requiring light GM pacing tweaks.

• Tyrant’s Grasp (1e): A grim, high-stakes military survival campaign against the undead apocalypse.
• War for the Crown (1e): A brilliant, courtly intrigue and political espionage campaign.
• Abomination Vaults (2e): The gold standard for modern, multi-level dungeon crawls.
• Hell’s Rebels (1e): An engaging underground urban resistance and rebellion campaign.
• Wrath of the Righteous (1e): An epic mythic crusade against demon hordes (held back only by late-game 1e mythic rules bloat).
• Fists of the Ruby Phoenix (2e): A high-octane, cinematic martial arts tournament arc.
• Iron Gods (1e): Splicing sci-fi technology and crashed starships into traditional fantasy.
• Strange Aeons (1e): The definitive cosmic horror and amnesia-driven campaign.

B-Tier: Good Campaigns with Small Caveats - Bronze Medal

Fun, deeply thematic adventures that stumble slightly due to subsystem weight, repetitive encounters, or disconnected acts.

• Blood Lords (2e): Climbing the ranks of an undead-run magocracy; suffers slightly from enemy damage-type repetition.
• Skull & Shackles (1e): A phenomenal pirate simulator hampered by tedious ship combat mechanics.
• Stolen Fate (2e): A sprawling, globe-trotting scavenger hunt using the Deck of Many Things.
• Carrion Crown (1e): Classic gothic horror monster-of-the-week, though books feel narratively disjointed.
• Quest for the Frozen Flame (2e): Immersive prehistoric nomadic survival; wraps up its final act too quickly.
• Legacy of Fire (1e): Genies, desert exploration, and Arabian Nights tropes.
• Reign of Winter (1e): A wild reality-hopping portal-fantasy (including WWI Earth) with polarizing tone shifts.
• Return of the Runelords (1e): High-level fan service tying together decades of lore; best reserved for veterans.
• Hell’s Vengeance (1e): The rare "play as the evil empire agents" campaign; requires a specific table dynamic.
• Ironfang Invasion (1e): Gritty guerrilla warfare against an invading hobgoblin army.
• Recent 2e Additions (Wardens of Wildwood, Curtain Call, Triumph of the Tusk, Seven Dooms for Sandpoint): Solid, well-received modern adventures that generally provide targeted, fun genre experiences.

C-Tier: Flawed but Workable - Copper

Fascinating core concepts dragged down by pacing issues, lethal early-edition math spikes, or structural disconnects.

• Age of Ashes (2e): Plagued by early-2e difficulty spikes and a disjointed "world tour" plot.
• Agents of Edgewatch (2e): Great urban encounters marred by tonal whiplash and punishing tactical lethality.
• Mummy’s Mask (1e): Incredible Egyptian tomb exploration, but suffers from massive dungeon burnout by Book 4.
• Outlaws of Alkenstar (2e): Incredible steampunk bank-heist opening that derails into an uninspired wilderness trek in Book 2.
• Shattered Star (1e): A straightforward, nostalgia-driven dungeon-delving fetch quest.
• Giantslayer (1e): A long, combat-heavy martial slog fighting giant variants.
• Ruins of Azlant (1e): Island colonization hampered by clunky underwater combat rules.
• Jade Regent (1e): A legendary caravan trek across the north, ruined by terrible caravan subsystems and NPC spotlight-stealing.
• Gatewalkers (2e) & Sky King's Tomb (2e): Compelling paranormal/dwarven hooks that suffer from disjointed chapter pacing and missing maps.

D-Tier: The Fixer-Uppers - Feet of Clay

The weakest links structurally. Playing these successfully requires the GM to fundamentally rewrite portions of the plot or mechanics.

• Extinction Curse (2e): Famous for introducing a circus theme and then entirely abandoning it after Book 1 for a standard subterranean lizardfolk crawl.
• Second Darkness (1e): Starts as a clever casino/crime syndicate intrigue before abruptly shifting into a generic Underdark drow war.
• Serpent’s Skull (1e): Features an iconic Chapter 1 shipwreck survival sandbox, followed by five books of tedious jungle slogging and an empty faction mega-dungeon.
• Council of Thieves (1e): Lacks focus outside of one famously brilliant, interactive theatrical play in Book 2.

Paizo. Huh. What are they good for?

Not absolutely nothing, say it again. I've been reading a lot of the early Paizo stuff, partly as part of my trawl of the adventure paths (nearly halfway done with Second Darkness as of this writing, but you need to remember to add the three 3.5 adventure paths done in the pages of Dungeon Magazine before starting on the Paizo adventure path books.) I've also been reading the Paizo Adventures; originally called the GameMastery series, and I've still got a little over half a dozen to read before I get to where they spill out of 3.5 and become Pathfinder the RPG. I want to finish those and the adventure paths that were for 3.5 specifically at about the same time, so I've been reading a lot of the stand-alone modules to catch up, but now I'm going to slow down and pace them a bit. Ready to read the next one of the adventure path after having not read any of that in a few weeks.

Anyway, I thought I'd document which of the modules I'm reading I think are good enough that I'd potentially revisit them and adapt them into one of my ongoing campaigns. This will obviously be an ongoing effort; there were a lot of these modules published over the years, even just for 3.5, and there were at least twice as many published for Pathfinder 1e as for 3.5. Between the two, there were probably close to seventy modules published. I'll also talk about the chapters of the Adventure Path that I think I'd like to use, although I'll probably do a second post where I talk about the adventures from Shackled City, Age of Worms and Savage Tide. I should do some Freeport stuff too; maybe I'll even fudge it a little bit and post that under my new PAIZO REVISITED tag, which I'm creating specifically for this, since some of the modules, especially at the end, were published for the Pathfinder 1e system. All in all, I envision that the Paizo Revisited tag will be a nice little reference for me when I've done more of them in terms of what modules are workable to be adapted into one of my campaigns. I should attempt to adapt more modules into my campaigns after all; that's why I'm reading them, and although Darkness in the Hill Country and (maybe) Terror in Timischburg are not really adapted from anything at all, Cult of Undeath is largely (although radically) adapted from, mostly, the Carrion Crown adventure path, with some additional ideas inspired by the old 1e module "Against the Cult of the Reptile God" and another portion inspired by the H. P. Lovecraft story "Shadow Over Innsmouth."

Anyway, this isn't meant to be complete; I just want to document which modules I like while I still remember them well enough to do so. Maybe "like" isn't the right word; which modules have elements or even a basic structure that I'd think I want to potentially adapt. I'll bold and red the module titles so it's easier to pick them out when looking back at these posts later...

"Hollow's Last Hope", the very first stand-alone adventure, is pretty good, and pretty classic. While it isn't super innovative, and the whole "lumber barons" thinly veiled political statement is way too Seattle hipster for me, I never claimed I was going to run them straight out of the book. This module is sufficiently well-done that I could adapt it to a different setting, potentially with different monsters even and certainly within a different context, but the basic structure is sufficiently sound that I like it.

"Hangman's Noose", a low level haunted house, was a fantastic read, and is very strongly one that I want to consider finding out how to adapt it. I don't know for sure that I love the way that the characters were hooked into the adventure, but that's always campaign dependent anyway, and I don't hold that against an adventure, where they'd gotta think of something, but most likely you've gotta change it too.

"River Into Darkness" is a classic jungle river voyage, heavily influenced by The African Queen, the famous movie from 1951 starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. Although I haven't read it in a long time, I know that the first half of "Racing to Ruin" from the Serpent's Skull adventure path has a similar theme, and the two could probably be combined to give you plenty more options, if you wanted them. I dislike the anti-colonialism soapbox, or even the need to acknowledge that such existed because they absolutely cannot do so without presenting it as a propagandistic narrative, but if you switch out the wild jungle elves with convicted felons; maybe even the equivalent of Moslem rape-gangs from the UK and elsewhere in Europe, it works better, and the wild elves that are attacking the fort are, instead of justified anti-slavers, brigands and criminals in their own right who you can defend yourself against violently without feeling the least remorse. 

This is the most recent one that I've read, so I'll do any winners out of the remaining 3.5 modules in another post, maybe along with the D&D modules from the early adventure paths. I do want stuff that I can use in my newer southerly tropical and subtropical sections, like Baix Pallars and Porhomok and the jungle that separates them.

Meanwhile, from the Paizo adventure paths, I've combined "Burnt Offerings" with "Hollow's Last Hope" in an extremely abbreviated format before, and I think that they work quite well. There are other parts of "Burnt Offerings" that I like, but parts of it that I don't, so I'd certainly do some editing, if nothing else.

"The Skinsaw Murders" is one of my absolute favorite Paizo adventure that I've read so far, and I'd use the crap out of it. I'd probably change the context rather than have it be part of a campaign that has any resemblance to Rise of the Runelords, and I'd focus especially on the first half in the Sandpoint countryside, and maybe not even use the Magnimar section at all... although there's nothing really wrong with it.

I don't love "The Hook Mountain Massacre" as much as some fans do, but it does have some good material. I'd have to more liberally modify it, but as with "Hollow's Last Hope" I think that there's a good structure behind the module that I could still use. 

I'm going to skip Curse of the Crimson Throne entirely, because I'm going to hold back on that one and think about possibly adapting the whole thing more closely, as Cult of Undeath was to Carrion Crown, but of the Second Darkness adventure path, which I've not finished reading yet, "Children of the Void," the second one, which is a kind of riff of movies like Alien or Predator or even Jurassic Park in a way where you're stuck in a wilderness setting with monsters running amok is actually quite a good one, and I'm going to use the "magic ritual calling down a meteor" idea from it as part of one of my own campaigns, probably Curse of the Corsair Coast as well.

Finally, although not a Paizo adventure, I've also recently read most of the original run of 3e adventures, and of those, "Speaker in Dreams" is absolutely the stand-out one that I'd consider using.

When I revisit PAIZO REVISITED, I imagine I'll have finished all of the adventures, both adventure path and stand-alone, published for 3.5e D&D. I'll also read some summaries of the original three D&D adventure paths that Paizo wrote before they went on their own so I can remember a little better what those were like. I know for sure that at least some of those adventures would pass muster, but I don't remember which ones at this point. 

Adventure Path modules possibly need even more adaptation than stand-alone, to make them fit in a campaign of my own making instead of the one that they were originally written to take place in, as well as to level adjust any that are higher level, and to "context-adjust" them all out of a D&D context. This is more important for higher level modules too, of course, as low level D&D doesn't feel nearly as ungrounded and it is more like regular fantasy as you'd expect it to be. It quickly becomes a sub-genre of its own as access to more and more D&D magic because a given, which of course always makes these not work as well for me.