u/BusyGM

To make this absolutely sure: This is a humorous post, the title is not meant to be taken seriously, I just want to jokingly rant about my experience(s) with Paizo APs that seemingly love to have PCs murder each other.

A week ago, our group had a climatic boss battle against a powerful foe. It was part of an AP >!(Strength of a thousand)!<(Spoiler because I will rant about a mechanic), and part of the boss fight was a mirror that had shadows grasping for the PCs. If you fail a saving throw, these shadows would have grasped you, pulled you into the mirror and... released an evil shadow duplicate of yourself. The way we played it, our GM straight up told a player about to get pulled in "well, you have your character sheet, now use it to obliterate the party".

This is not the first, but the SECOND time this happened, and BOTH TIMES it was a GODDAMNED MIRROR. Back in first edition, there was an AP >!(Rise of the Runelords)!< that had you navigating a tremendously big dungeon searching for items that you needed for plot reasons. One of the passages (which, of course, you HAD to pass) included a mirror that created an aggressive copy of every PC that looked into it, ready to roll initiative. It was the first and only time our group almost TPKed, because our tanky oracle went first, the mirror copy rolled high initiative and blasted all of us to hell with a prismatic spray (and some poor saves on our side). Our GM had a literal deus ex machina intervene after my character (who was late because I was late to the session) came into the passage, found the massacre and offered literally everything he had to whoever would listen in order to save his friends (because as a barbarian that I was, I couldn't really cast resurrection spells or carry them all back to civilization and have them revived).

So when we entered that powerful foe's chamber and our GM described the mirror just standing there menacingly, cold sweat broke out. I literally flew into a panic when they took the player into another room to "just talk to them". I was sure that NO ONE of us would get out alive.

So, what's the takeaway from my story? Clearly, Paizo loves enabling PvP and does so by including cursed mirrors in their APs that make PCs (or their copies) murder the party. It can't be a coincidence that this has already happened twice in the four or five APs I've played!

On a more serious note, the "fight against oneself" is a classic concept for narration, but one I've never found to be working in TTRPGs. I don't know why some authors are seemingly hellbent on including it, one way or another. Anyway, despite two near TPKs, we lived to see the end of the APs, so perhaps the true friends were the mirrors we smashed along the way. I hope you guys had fun, and love to all the Paizo people actually reading this! You're doing a great job and I wish you only the best!

With the removal of everything OGL-related in favor of ORC, Paizo has made a clean cut for PF2e. Now I've been wondering. If I remember correctly, Paizo has explicitly disallowed anything Golarion-related to ever be published again in accordance with 1e rules. I might be wrong about this, though. So if I were to publish a 3rd party AP set in Golarion, could I still do that using PF1e?

It's more of a thought experiment right now, but I've actually been thinking about trying my luck in the future.

After some discussions with my friends, we came to the conclusion that many adventures published don't seem to have that consistent of a storyboard. This seems to be doubly true for any adventure that consists of multiple smaller adventures, like D&D's Hoard Of The Dragon Queen -> Rise Of Tiamat or Pathfinder's Adventure Paths. Very often, parts of the plot are forgotten, rewritten or become unimportant in later parts of the story, ideas are picked up only to be dropped again, and concepts are introduced to then never be followed up.

Now, we know that this is partially due to the nature of TTRPGs - unlike with games or movies, the very core of TTRPGs is the somewhat emergent storytelling that the table provides. However, adventures (unless they're more of a sandbox scenario or extremely well-written) tend to follow more of a traditional railroady structure, which kind of has to be the case, because you can't really follow up on all probabilities once you've introduced some choices to the PCs in your book.

We came to the idea that making a story board for any type of bigger adventure - perhaps even with designed empty spaces for GM and group improv, as long as it doesn't encompass key elements of the campaign - might be a good idea. However, I'm not a writer, and I've not yet dabbled in these arts.

So my question to you is thus: Do you know any tools to create a storyboard that ideally also capture the uniqueness of TTRPG story structure? Or do you perhaps have any tips for someone who has never done a story board before? Any tips and discussions are welcome!

Edit: To clarify, I want to write an adventure, not to run one.