Let me give you a little history about campaigns I have run. A few years back, I ran a 3.5 Eberron campaign that lasted 1.5 years and took the PCs from first to 21st level. That campaign consisted of me cobbling together separate adventures and tweaking them to fit the personalities of the PCs and the storylines that I had interwoven into the overall plot. I’m actually using the same adventures in the Eberron PbP I’m currently running, tweaking them as necessary and swapping complete adventures out as I see fit.

After that, a friend of mine ran a short campaign before having to turn over DMing duty to me since he was back in school. I decided to run the Savage Tide adventure path. The first session should have been a clue to me since it was a TPK. But, no, I just reset the campaign and went on from there. It was the deadliest campaign I have ever run with the PC death rate numbering in the twenties by the time we quit. We bounced around between other folks DMing until 4E came out. Once again, I decided to run an adventure path. This one was Scales of War. Unfortunately, it was miserable and, partially because of the AP and partially because we decided we didn’t like 4E, we stopped after the third adventure in the path.

Fast forward to a few months ago and I was DMing again. I decided to try out Pathfinder and run the Rise of the Runelords AP. We found that we really liked Pathfinder and even updated the PCs after the final rules came out. But, just as with previous AP’s, we ended up not liking it and stopped playing it.

To be fair, part of that is, of course, my fault as the DM. While AP’s are a good idea, there are problems inherent to them that I was unable to overcome.

1. It’s a huge railroad.

This actually became an issue in the very first session. With the way that one of the character’s background was written, it didn’t make sense for her to go along with the plot. It wasn’t that she was trying to be difficult, it was just that the AP clashed with her background. In the end, she changed her background to better fit but I hated the fact that she had to do that. In fact, during the second adventure, another player announced “But why would we do X? So far, we have no motive beyond find the macguffin.” That’s paraphrasing, of course, but he had a good point. There really was no reason for them to do it beyond “the town is in trouble and the sheriff is gone and we need you to do this.” But the problem was that if the PCs didn’t go from point A to point B to point C, it could throw off the rest of the Adventure Path.

2. It’s very hard to tailor the campaign to fit individual PCs.

This is especially true if you play the AP as it is published. So if you start with module one before module two is published, you may end up changing something in module one inadvertently that has an effect in module two or in a later module. And even if you wait until all modules have been published, it will take a lot of effort to change things because so may pieces rely upon one another.

3. If the adventure sucks, you’re stuck.

The first half of the second part of Rise of the Runelords, The Skinsaw Murders, was awesome. The scene with the cornfield and the farmhouse was intense. And the Manor itself was incredibly well written. I had a great time running it and my players had a great time playing it. Unfortunately, a half does not make a whole. The rest of the adventure was meh at best. But, in order to advance through the AP, we were stuck having to slog through it, hoping it would get better.

So, yeah, we trashed it. We decided to start over and I vowed, yes vowed!, to never run an AP again. I’m going back to my tried and true method of picking individual adventures, making the characters more a part of the world, and tailor the campaign to fit the PCs rather than having to tailor the PCs to fit the campaign.

So far, the PCs are about halfway through Crypt of the Everflame, the first Pathfinder module based upon the final rules. It’s a fun little module and really gives the PCs a chance to become part of the community, rather than just write it into their background that “so and so really get along.” By the time they finish, they’ll be third level (we use the “Fast” leveling chart) so I needed to come up with a third level adventure. I also knew that I wanted to introduce the Pathfinder Society into the campaign. So I checked my resources and, lo and behold, I have an adventure that is not only really cool but it also has the perfect tie-in to get the PCs into the Pathfinder Society.

I’m still looking at other, higher level, adventures for the rest of the campaign, but the PCs haven’t established themselves enough for me to tell which ones would fit. But that will come in time and I’ll have fun trying to find the next “perfect” adventure for the group. As it stands, I’m more jazzed about this campaign than I have been in a long time.

Eventually, the PCs receive a note calling them back to the location of the fight in the woods. It turns out, if violence occurs within the elves territory, the creatures involved will be cursed. The elves have lived with this for years and assumed the PCs would not be affected. The elves wanted to see what would happen so they let them go, spying on them the whole time. Since they saw what was happening, the elves contacted them to come back. Note: Of course, you can have the PCs notice they’re being spied upon. It’s really up to the GM.

The curse was placed on the elves centuries ago by an old hag who lives behind a waterfall. The elves tried to drive her out but she cursed them in order to keep them from becoming violent towards her. Every time they try, the curse intensifies and they cannot get to her. The elves hope that the PCs, since the curse just affected them, won’t have their actions as harmed by the curse as the elves do. Note: It’s up to the GM whether the hag brought the wrath of the elves upon herself through her own actions or if the elves were the ones who started it all when the hag really just wanted to be left alone.

The PCs, hopefully, will go towards the waterfall and find that she lives behind it. They will take the tunnel, battling adversity along the way, and eventually find that the hag died long ago but her curse has been kept active by a goblin lackey who is keeping her dying wish alive. It is up to the PCs to convince him to stop it. Will the PCs kill him or will they talk with him? If they simply kill him, will that remove the curse or make it worse? Note: Whatever is still powering the curse after all these years is something the GM will need to make up.