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GameMastery Guide / Running a Game / How to Run a Game / GM Considerations

Personalizing Published Adventures

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 51
It’s not easy to be a Game Master; of all the roles in the game, the GM has to put in the most work, and sometimes you’ll want to relax and use a published adventure instead of creating your own. While many such adventures are ready to go straight out of the box, so to speak, the key to integrating one seamlessly into an existing campaign or setting is adapting the adventure to suit your campaign and your PCs, and this means you have to recognize whether or not the adventure is a good fit for you and your party.

Presuming the theme or feel is suitable for your campaign, you need to look at the game mechanics in the adventure, particularly the monsters and how they compare to your PCs’ abilities. It’s possible that the party composition may make an adventure too easy—a party with a paladin, good cleric, and good necromancer is going to blow through an undead-heavy adventure with little trouble (though that isn’t a bad thing, as letting the PCs feel powerful is nice now and then). You should always feel free to adjust the power level of an adventure’s monsters (using the simple templates in the back of the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary is the easiest way) or swap them out for other monsters with similar CRs.

What it comes down to is that you have to make the adventure your own—whether a Pathfinder Module, a one-session Pathfinder Society Scenario, or a third-party adventure. If you’re lucky and choose well, you can save yourself a lot of work. Make changes to the story if you have to, embrace tangents the PCs introduce, and always feel free to point the story in the general direction of your campaign’s primary plot if the PCs decide to abandon the story in the published adventure.

Archives of Nethys

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Personalizing Published Adventures