Pathfinder Adventure Path Changes - They're Quarterly Now

 

I bought a lot of Adventure Path books during Pathfinder's 1st edition. A quick count says I have at least 10 complete AP's, plus the various supporting themed books and map packs and possibly card decks if I really liked one ... it's a lot of material at 70+ books. They started out at $20 for a 96 page full-color softcover adventure with some supporting material. Typically there were six books in each series taking Pathfinder characters from level 1 to somewhere in the teens, possibly all the way to 20. These were released monthly and if you subscribed you got the PDF for free which was a nice touch as not everyone did (or does) that.

One thing that I think is often overlooked is that by doing this Paizo established that a company could sell adventures regularly and consistently - which was not something we really saw much before and for the last 25 years has been stated to be a non-viable type of product for a larger RPG company. They showed everyone it could be done.

Good things about the AP approach:

• You got a nicely presented adventure with locations, maps, NPCs, a new monster or two, and some information on the part of the campaign world (Golarion) where it was set. That's a pretty decent package.
• The 6-part format meant that the adventures were connected and - ideally - focused on a larger situation than you might find in a one-off adventure. The format also meant that you had a guaranteed long campaign if you wanted to stay with it.
•  Making it a known monthly effort also meant that you knew there was a new episode coming and eventually a completely new path a few months down the road if you didn't like the current one. They were very good about describing each one well in advance, at the very least something like " a big pirate adventure set in X part of Golarion", or "an AP where advanced technology shows up along with robots and a crashed spaceship", or " an adventure set in an Egypt-like land with pyramids and mummies."
• They also put out a free Players Guide for each one early on describing some of the big concepts and how different races and classes and alignments would fit it - or how they might not fit in particularly well. This was a big help in getting players lined up for a new campaign.

Not as good things about the APs:

• Seeing a description about a new AP gets the DM excited. Part 1 comes out and looks good so you start a campaign. However you haven't seen parts 2-5 yet and so it's hard to lay any groundwork for the future, bring in or emphasize certain NPCs or organizations, or local features. I mean, it's my game so if I want the local druid circle to be a factor then I can do that regardless but it's still usually better to know the big picture before you start. In that case you end up waiting six months for the whole thing to come out and you may or may not be ready to run a new campaign at that time.
• To get these things done on schedule different authors wrote each part. Sometimes one would write two parts, like #1 and #4, but even if they did there could be dissonance between parts, seeming misunderstandings about the overall focus of the thing, plot points and NPCs disappearing completely along the way, and just a lack of coherence in some cases. A good DM can fix a lot of this, but many of them did need some work to really tighten them up.
• The fixed nature of the "six parts per AP" sometimes meant we got filler. Not every adventure needs this many pages ... but it's going to get 500+ pages regardless because that's how it works. I think the thieves' guild oriented one ended up around 11th-12th level while Wrath of the Righteous was trying to pack in a 1-20 run across other planes and including a bunch of Mythic stuff along the way. Not every concept was a great fit for this format.
• If you don't like the concept then you get to wait six months for the next one. This was not always a bad thing as it was extremely unlikely you were going to be able to complete one of these in a six month window - so they start to stack up on the shelf.

Now I did like them most of the time so I have quite the pile on the shelf and I will probably end up adapting several of them to PF2E or some other game like Savage Worlds. I haven't bought one since the first one that came out for second edition. "Age of Ashes". The reason I stopped was because I wanted to do my own thing with the new system. I did, and then we stopped playing and have yet to hit it again in any serious way. 

In the interim they went to a new approach of 3-segment adventure paths. I believe this began with Starfinder and then was carried over to Pathfinder. This made a fair amount of sense to me as it lets you do more different things. They mostly covered levels 1-10 with some covering 11-20 and a few doing odd level ranges like 5-14. I think most people liked it as you still had big adventures covering the entire Pathfinder level range but you could change them up more easily. it also gives a DM some fun in connecting different paths and laying some groundwork and rumors about what else is going on that the players could decide to pursue. So this seems like a good move.

Last month though they announced another change to the format: Instead of monthly, they are going to quarterly releases that will cover material comparable to 3 monthly releases in the old format and instead of softcover they will be hardbacks. 

Now that's a big change and the primary concern online seems to be cost as instead of 3x$30 purchases a month apart it's going to be a single $80 purchase every three months. I get that it's a bigger chunk at once but it is technically less overall and it's a nice sturdy 256 page hardback. it seems pretty reasonable to me and this feels like less of a change than the prior one - this is just a change on format, the original switch to 3-book APs was a real change in approach. Additionally they have been publishing hardback collections of many of their more recent APs and those seem to sell well so why not just make them "hardback collections" from the start?

This also addresses a lot of my negatives from above, starting with having the whole AP on hand from the start. Considering it's what WOTC and a lot of 3rd party publishers do for 5E adventures, why not give it a try? 

I may have to look into these again now. Not sure about "Hellbreakers" yet but I will be looking them over.

And if you're interested in a description of all of the adventure paths someone has put together a pretty serious breakdown of all of them here.