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Gamemastering / Basics from the Core Rulebook

Published Adventures

Source PRPG Core Rulebook pg. 396
Published adventures are your friend. As a Game Master, you’re going to be spending a lot of time as it is preparing for games—and when you don’t have time to come up with an adventure, a published adventure can be a godsend. By studying how published adventures are put together, you can hone your own adventure-creating skills. And by running a published adventure for your group, you leave the details of invention and creation to the adventure writer, giving you time to focus on the game play itself.

The most important thing to remember when using a published adventure, though, is that the writer of the adventure doesn’t know your group the way you know your group. If you know your players are particularly paranoid and assume all helpful NPCs are out to get them, then a published adventure about a kindly cleric who’s actually a shapechanged demon probably won’t work well for your group. Feel free to change published adventures as you see fit, either while you’re reading them or during play. If, for example, one of your players has written into his character’s backstory that his father was killed by an orc warlord and he became an adventurer to someday get revenge on that orc, go ahead and change the hobgoblin warlord in the adventure into an orc. Adapting adventures to your group and your play style in this manner is an important part of running published adventures, since it customizes the experience to your group and makes it all the more enjoyable.

Paizo Publishing offers a large variety of published adventures in its Pathfinder Modules line and complete campaigns in the form of its monthly Pathfinder Adventure Path installments. To learn more about these valuable GM resources, please visit paizo.com.

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Published Adventures