Rise of the Runelords for New Players and DM

[MALPERCI0]

Hey there! I'm a new to tabletop RPGs and I want to run a Pathfinder game. I read some things about Rise of the Runelords and it sounds really interesting. I was thinking of running a game. I mean, it was the first of Pathfinder's Adventure Paths, so is it good for beginners? A friend got me a PDF of the anniversary edition. If it isn't good for beginners, is there anything you could recommend?

[PersonMan]

Rise of the Runelords is a good first-time AP; I'd recommend reading through it (feel free to skim some of the crunchier parts, I'm just meaning in order to get an idea of how the plot works, what happens when, what sort of stuff comes up, etc.) and then potentially going to places like the relevant Paizo forum and the Pathfinder reddit community to read what people have experienced/changed/had problems with when they ran it themselves. While not very active, the Paizo forums have a thread for each 'chapter' (that is, 1 - 6, rather than the sub-chapters within each part) that often contain a lot of information on minor questions people ran into while reading it, answered by people who worked on the AP. It also hosts a good amount of community-created content, like maps, which can potentially make your life a lot easier while running things.

[Calthropstu]

Paizo adventure paths can be BRUTAL, they can also be a walk in the park.

Read the entire chapter before running. Gauge the difficulty of the encounters vs your players and adjust as needed. As long as you stay on top of that, things should go smoothly.

Feel free to skip/alter encounters you think will be inappropriate for your group (If running for 12 year olds, might be inappropriate to run women throwing themselves at the pcs.)

Try to avoid tpk situations. Wiped out parties generally equal campaign over. If they need to run away, think of a reason for the bad guys to let them get away (caring for injured, reporting to boss etc.)