AP Organization

[hangarflying]

Hello all,

Just invested in the Ultimate license. I'm going to be doing Curse of the Crimson Throne, and I'm curious as to what others have been doing regarding the organization of the APs? Have you been converting all six chapters under one module, or do you keep each chapter as independent modules?

Thanks.

[Nickademus]

I plan to treat each chapter as a separate module for converting, but use the same campaign file. So basically, I would be converting sections of the campaign at a time. My AP GM doesn't do a chapter at a time due to time constraints but also prepares the AP in chunks using the same campaign file.

[damned]

How do you intend to play the game?
Are you going to be using voice?
Are you going to drop descriptive text into Chat Window?

Image and Map size is important to manage.
I havent played PF before but looking at a couple of AP books I have they appear to have close to an image or map every other page which means more than 40 images. Thats a lot.
I would definitely be wanting that to be in a module. I would not want there to 40x6 images by the time you reach the conclusion.

Looking at the AP in front of me - I would:
1. Get it in PDF format!
2. Suck all images out.
3. Nuke the quality (nuke might be too harsh) - 40% for jpg's shouldnt hurt at all.
4. Get all your monsters (with tokens) in.
5. Get all your encounters setup.
6. Pin them to the maps
7. Copy **key** story elements (particularly those that might contain something the party REALLY OUGHT TO BE TAKING NOTE OF) in ready to drop into Chat, and number them like 001 - Background, 002 - Rumours, 003 - something else, so they stay in the order YOU want them in. Use Tabs where appropriate and number your tabs to keep them in order too.
8. Pin them to the maps
9. Have a break
10. Export this as a module
11. Create your campaign and open this module. When you move to part 2, close this module and open the next.

Converting the whole book might take you some time - although if you are familiar with the story and have extracted images and played with resizing them before, you could knock over a whole book in 4-6hours. Then its yours if you ever need to re-run it. Particularly if you do it in module form.

If you do it this way - its definitely best to do the whole module before you start play even if that module will take you weeks to play through.

[Callum]

I'm running two APs, and I use the method Nickademus describes. That is, I make a "base" campaign with all the characters in. Then I create a new campaign for each chapter, bit by bit, and export each one to make a module. I then open the module for the current chapter in the base campaign, and I'm ready to play! This stops the base campaign from becoming too bloated. You seldom need material from earlier chapters when you're running the later ones; if you do, you can just open the relevant module again. And you can always copy across to the base campaign anything you need long term.

[Trenloe]

Yep - use modules if you can. By modules we mean a separate Fantasy Grounds .mod file that contains essentially a snapshot of the data for that part/section you have worked on. Use a separate "module making" campaign to put the story entries, maps and images, NPCs, encounters, etc. and then use the /export command in FG to export to a module - then load/activate that module in your actual game campaign.

And use the creature parser to get the NPCs out of the PDF into Fantasy Grounds: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...-Alpha-release This is specifically for Pathfinder so if you are running Crimson Throne with the 3.5e rules then this may not work too well for you. If you're running Crimson Throne with Pathfinder rules then the 3.5e statblocks will need little editing before using the parser - basically make the "Base Atk XX; Grp YY" line "Base Atk XX, CMB YY, CMD ZZ" and the NPCs should parse OK.

EDIT: Some additional info in this thread may be useful: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...antasy-Grounds

[hangarflying]

Thanks guys!

[Leonal]

Most of the stat blocks for Curse, that aren't already updated in one of the bestiaries, have also been converted on www.d20pfsrd.com. However, they don't always work well with the parser, so you will probably have to do some tweaking after you have copied the stat blocks into a text file.

I like to do as little as possible outside of preparing the plot and how to run NPCs: Strip images from the PDFs, NPCs through the parser, and maybe add paper tokens (though preparing them is time consuming).