scevola44

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)

Idk, Mastodon is much bigger than kbin (I think we’re talking 10x at this point), and as far as I know it’s still running fine on donations through Patreon or the like.
But as long as it doesn’t change the way content is moderated/handled in the site, I’d still be fine with a sponsor or with ads (as long as there’s an option, even paid, to disable them).