Since the topic adventure paths came up here recently I thougt I’d ask y’all what your best advice is when it comes to running them.
The thing I learned was read the whole thing. Best is if you manage to do this before the first session so you can help your players engeneer their background story along the adventure path.
A lot depends on the type of play you and your players are looking for. Surely reading the whole thing helps.
Having run Rise of the Runelords for 3 players (later 2, then 3 again), I have to say most of my efforts went into personalizing the experience. I did my best to change events based on players’ choices, shortened certain arcs and lengthened others (I had to get the guide to Sandpoint because they absolutely loved that little town, bless their hearts). I even re-wrote book 6, since it was too much of a dungeoncrawl (and I did not like the starting location of the book, it didn’t feel like it fit the narrative), after another huge dungeoncrawl that is book 5 (AMAZING).
But there were also sessions where I didn’t have to do much, just read through the pages, manage the encounters and go with the flow, because the books are pretty well written.
My biggest piece of advice would be to have organized notes. Both to keep while reading the adventure through, and while running it. It helps a ton to keep the players immersed if you as a GM are able to keep track of things and properly foreshadow events and enemies (especially enemies, that was an issue with RotRl)It doesn’t answer your question, but one thing I really love about the official Paizo APs is they come with a player’s guide, giving them advice on what they can do to fit their backgrounds into the story better, as well as general background information that they should be aware of.
