Re: [Pathfinder] An incredibly crazy proposal
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.