What I'm about to say is pretty insane, and I know it. Feel free to tell me it's not even worth beginning or attempting (I already know it'll never end).

Golarion as a setting is pretty fascinating to me. There's so much that's clearly just meant as analogs to Earth, yet presented in new and interesting ways. And the adventures can be really cool and well-written sometimes, and there's just so much to this setting.

A crazy dream I've had for years now is to have a very large group (so that not everybody would be playing at once, and potentially to even allow for multiple GMs), and run through all Golarion-related adventures: Pathfinder Modules, chapters of Pathfinder Adventure Paths, and Pathfinder Society Scenarios (potentially not actually using Society rules, but that's a conversation for another time), sequentially, in the order they came out/take place.

Obviously this is a pipe dream in any practical sense. Adventures take longer to run than to come out, if done well, so I of course acknowledge it's virtually impossible that this project could ever come to completion.

I actually fell out of Pathfinder for a while and sort of forgot about this dream of mine, but then 2e was announced, and it was suddenly reawakened. Potentially this could now even eventually be done with 2e, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, even if I know this could never end, I'd be really curious to see just how far it could get. Would anyone else be interested in that endeavour, or should I just give up?

This is not incredibly crazy, although for sure it's not easy.
On RPoL there are already similar games ongoing (in various worlds and settings, of course) and some have been ongoing for many years, with many tens of thousands posts. Now you know it is possible!
So... best of luck! ;)

This sounds like a job for Co-GM!

Seriously, though, each campaign and Adventure Path and sanctioned scenario? You could probably recruit one GM for each of these and have enough to keep everyone busy. I think there's even a timeline of when each of these campaigns occurs in the setting (they're all considered canonical events).

You'd probably have no shortage of people willing to run the major campaigns like Rise of the Runelords.

I'd help this come to life in whatever ways I could. You'll definitely need some help. This sounds like something Paizo should sponsor :).

Its an intersting idea, however I do not think the reality would work.

Heres why.

Im running Rise of The Runelords right now on this site. I started it in September of 2014 I think. (I archived and then deleted the first books threads so the post count is horribly off) Im about a 1/4 of the way through the 2nd book...and its April of 2018...so 3 1/2 years of player and GM commitment for just one ap. and we still have 4 and 3/4 books to play through...we will likely finish in 2032.......

and I have a great group of posters.

Ive had to drop I think 2 players during the course and pick up 2 others. but 4 of the 6 have been their from the start.

so now consider how many ap's there are... and consider youd have to find that many dms and players to commit to that length of game. Plus add in all the pfs scenarios...huge ammount...and sanctioned modules?

yikes.

itd be a healthy endeavor.

I saw an idea that might work for this today on one of the Facebook groups.

Instead of trying to play through the APs, etc., directly, you're playing the equivalent of timecops sent back to correct the course of history after someone else has mucked up the APs.  You don't play all of them, but rather the best bits of them where someone has knocked out the folks that were supposed to do the stuff or otherwise sabotaged it.

Here link to a message in another game you can find a thread discussing similar themes, with the intervention of people actually running really large games as proposed here.

*raises hand* I'd love to Play in a chronicle like this.

I’d be down!

Wow. It appears there was more interest than I thought there would be. I have taken all words into consideration.

Yes, there is canonical timeline, one that actually corresponds to release order, since real-world year corresponds almost precisely to the Golarion year 2700 years after.

Co-GMs would definitely be a necessity, as it's likely that multiple events would need to run at once depending on how much time in-game passes during any given adventure. People who play in one adventure could potentially co-GM another, but I'd have to figure out how that would work.

For now, I need to take some time to think about it. If anybody has some more thoughts to share, please do so.

I could potentially co-gm as well as play

Seconded.

I was a GM in a joint world at one point where GM's ran different games in a shared environment...3 problems arose

1. Each GM has a different view on character creation, what they allow etc...

There's a disparity in capabilities of characters between games.

2. Magic items. Once again...availability can skew power levels.

3. Favouritism...where certain DMS or players for preferential treatment.

I dropped because of this.

I questioned a character who was a DM in another game and had vastly different power than the other players inlet in...and I was called out for questioning him. And told to shut my yap I was new and he was allowed.

So I left that ensemble.


But if details could be hammered out for cohesion I'd be interested.

Maybe have a pool of characters that are created using the same rules to choose from

If going for multi-gm thing, look at Pathfinder Society and other similar things. Look at their player guides and rules and see what they address and how.

You might also consider vetting all other gms yourself. Letting them run a game for you, and see not only how they run, but also how well they accept constructive critism and can mold themselves to the shared experience.

In reply to Kelthas Dread (msg # 13):

In regards to the first two, if we play strictly by the Adventure Path rules, that shouldn't be an issue.

So 4 players 15 point builds.

No extrapolation as a GM

No extra encounters. No filling in

The issues I see ...

A. Players have played and read in them. No surprises no twists

If a player drops..the game comes to a halt.


I normally run 5-6 and beef up encounters and treasures...because if someone drops I don't want the game to faulted until I can get another player

I was under the impression the APs were written for 20 pt builds.

In regards to the first issue, I say "oh well" and have a good-faith rule of no metagaming. As to the second, it was suggested earlier that several paths be run simultaneously, and than not all players in the game would have to be playing in a path at any one time. If a player drops, we could give their character to a player who isn't in a game, or a player in a different path who's up to running two characters.

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l...the-APs-designed-for

Not that we couldn't set whatever we wanted. ;)

yeah, I mean even James Jacobs said that you could go 20-25 point buy depending on the expertise of the group and the challenge you wanted to make the game :).

I find this whole endeavor potentially fascinating and would want to participate in some way :).

Oh jeez guys, my apologies. I got caught up in a bunch of school work so I forgot about this post. I'll get to more specific replies later, but yes I'd definitely make sure issues like house rules and point buy and all that would be universalized.

The point-buy issue for APs is an interesting thing. They had supposedly created them (at least at the beginning) for 15-point-buy, but a denizen of the forums later proved that their math was off and it should really be 20. So I tend to use 20, at least for APs. Not sure how I'd handle non-AP adventures.

Regarding GMs, I'd definitely be vetting them to make sure we're all on the same page. I'm not sure yet how I'd be going about that, but there will definitely be requirements. This is something I'd like to hash out with all of you.

Let me know of any other concerns, questions, or anything. It's clear that there's interest, so while it may take a while for us to get things ready to go, it looks like this may happen. I'm taking a month-long trip from the end of May to the end of June, so we'll see how that plays into things too.

On the point buy issue, I'm with James Jacobs, the players have a much larger impact that how many ability points they get.

Players who are too focused on mechanics or not very creative will be at a serious disadvantage compared to more creative folks or those who see the world beyond the limits of mechanics, and changing point buy can't fix that.

Still in the thinking about it stages. Certain things will have to be discussed in more detail later, but another thing that occurred to me:

Some modules are not part of APs but also form an arc with each other, but also aren't necessarily continuous. We'll have to figure out how to handle the tie-ins and continuations.

For example, Hollow's Last Hope and Crown of the Kobold King would be the first two adventures we would run in this hypothetical mega-campaign, even before Rise of the Runelords. Technically they can both be run standalone, but they're better tied in to each other. But, the advice given by them is to completely disregard HLH's storyline and just use the encounters in an adapted form for CotKK. On the one hand, this means we lose a storyline; but on the other hand, things are set up such that if we just run one, then the other, it seems really odd. The dungeon in the two are hypothetically the same place, yet CotKK is below the ground floor seen in HLH. It would be really weird if players went to this dungeon, cleared out that ground floor, left, time passed, came back, and nothing changed and they went down to the next level.

Obviously at a base level that problem's easy to fix, just have the ground floor refill or something, but the story would flow very strangely. Some adaptations would have to be made if we wanted to run both modules straight as-written.

To continue the example: Revenge of the Kobold King came out about a year later, and is a sequel to Crown. But, whereas Crown is for level 2 PCs, Revenge is for level 5. If we don't want to have random sidequests, we'd have to figure out whether we want to use the same PCs and just level them up more, or create new PCs entirely.

We also have to take into account adventures that are hypothetically unrelated to these other arcs and adventures, but that share too many of the same elements to be completely separate. For example, Carnival of Tears also takes place in Falcon's Hollow like the above adventures, and obviously has many of the NPCs. It goes without saying that we'd need to take into account prior events and adapt them, but we'd also need to determine just how much tie-in we wanted, whether we wanted different PCs, whether other characters that were once PCs can appear in a different adventure as NPCs, etc.

Just a bunch of stuff to think about. If anyone has thoughts on these matters, feel free to post them.

You could also simply adjust for different PC levels. It isn't hard to adapt encounters to be easier or harder, so you can run the lvl 2 adventure with level 3s, have them return to town to resupply or whatever, level up to lvl 4s, then go right back to finish off the dungeon in the lvl 5 adventure. They'd be one level off in each case, yet the stories play back to back, and it certainly makes sense to clear a dungeon and go back the next day to explore it further.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 23):

That certainly makes a lot of sense, but it's actually a bit more complicated by the fact that if we stick to the original plan of timeline order (which corresponds to release order) they actually don't take place back to back. (Hollow's Last Hope is a level 1 adventure that ideally leads right in to the level 2 Crown of the Kobold King, but the level 5 Revenge of the Kobold King came out about a year later.) On the other hand, that would give us the excuse to say "they leveled up off-screen." This would also fit with a threshold-based, no-exp of leveling up, which would probably work better in this situation.

Anyway, thanks everyone for the discussion. Anyone with any more input should keep posting it, and anyone that specifically wants to work closely with me on putting this together can private message me (I know some of you said it in thread, but I don't want to put any of you on the spot). I'll try to get around to my little side project of actually putting together a spreadsheet that shows the ideal order these adventures would occur soon.

Some thoughts on this from a long-time RPOL player.

- The AP's themselves may be designed for a 4 people at a 15 point buy, but I don't think that's well suited for the nature of RPOL games. 4 players gives no wiggle room when there's inevitable player attrition. Pathfinder games starting at 1st level are the most common kind, many of them starting at 20-25 point buy with fairly open class/race options. Putting something at 15 points might come off as boring to prospective players. Higher point buys aren't really detrimental to the game, as they're more likely to encourage well-rounded characters with utility outside their specialty/role (great in a game format that wants to encourage complex characters), as opposed to the tendency for low point buy characters to be dump-statted and hyperfocused. You'll end up with more RTJs at higher power, and while some of those may be cheesy power gamers, ultimately it's a good thing to have a larger selection of potential players to weed through.