Pathfinder 2e
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If you want an actual play podcast recommendation I can't recommend Tabletop Gold highly enough. It is fantastic and they play the adventure fairly close to as written. I listened to it before starting the adventure and it gave me a really strong sense of where the key moments are.
I also recommend you use the official AV module rather than the PDF to Foundry. The official module is amazing. Blew my mind coming from 5e. They do all the dungeon prep for you.
I'm not using the optional research system, but you're right that it's good to find ways to drip feed info to players. There is a journal they get at the end of book 1 which explains some stuff, and the NPCs in town are a great source of info. There are a couple who explicitly have lots of info about some narrow topics like the Roseguard or the town history. The research system always struck me as not being particularly fun.
One thing that worked really well for me at the beginning was I gave my players two rules for character creation:
The first rule makes the motivations for the characters to want to go on the adventure more natural, since the adventure is all about an existential threat to Absalom. The second rule provides easy fodder for how the players arrived in the town and what would put them on the path to exploring the lighthouse in the first place, as well as how to hook them into the adventure.
I do have some other tips but I don't want to spoil the adventure in case someone else comes into this thread since it's not tagged as having AV spoilers. Feel free to DM me though.
I highly recommend picking up the Abomination Vaults Expanded as well to help flesh out both Otari and the Vaults themselves. A lot of good material in the 80+ pages, as well as how to integrate AV with both the Beginner’s Box and Troubles in Otari. I’ve been running a group for about 1.5 years and they’ve just hit level 7 and are on the sixth floor of the vaults. We’ve had a TPK as well as several partial ones, but it’s been a lot of fun. Second on the official Foundry module as it makes prep so much easier.
Yeah I have AV expanded, as well as Ron Lundeen's GM guide to the AP. I'm not using all of the stuff in either of them, but they were great jumping off points. I also came up with a lot of the same stuff people have suggested adding to the adventure on my own. For example, the party just finished the fourth floor, and the next major task on their to do list is to go to Absalom to meet a collector who is in possession of the spellbook they need to proceed. Also, when the party hit level 2, I integrated the adventure from Troubles in Otari that gives them a home base near the town.
I'm curious how you handled a TPK. I personally have come up with this idea for a party of rival adventurers who can get the PCs out of a sticky situation before that happens (see my post history to see what I mean, my last post was about the rival party)
The party actually came up with their own reasons why their follow up characters had come. One was the sister, another was a bounty hunter, the third was an apprentice, etc. Made my job easy. I had considered trying to prevent the TPK, but it happened earlier enough that the party weren’t too attached to their characters. It also helped reinforce the deadliness of both AV as well as 2E in general.