Running Paizo Adventure Paths, with reference to Skull & Shackles

From https://www.enworld.org/threads/your-experiences-with-skull-shackles.667617/#post-7820742

Clarity & Presentation - Paizo write primarily for the reader on their couch, not the GM at their table. The material tends to be incredibly verbose, and often irrelevant to at-table play. I have learned over time how to treat the material as a buffet and not be bound by what's written down. Eg you get a great NPC with a few paras of backstory, who is "Remains in room - fights to death - suicides if captured". The GM can delete that last bit, take her out of her room, create links with PC(s), make her a cool part of their own campaign.

Balance - S&S is known as ridiculously deadly in the early chapters. There is a general issue that 3e/PF balance is very tenuous even to start with, without author 'errors'. I had a lot of trouble running Curse of the Crimson Throne in PF, with the 2 min-maxed PCs slaughtering everything with ease while the 2 non-minmaxed PCs were nearly helpless. I solved this by converting APs over to 5e and making/converting my own stat blocks, with the PF ones as a guide. This is pretty easy, certainly easier than using a multi-column PF BBEG stat block as written.
Re S&S balance in particular, I don't have an issue with most merchant ships being so outmatched they surrender immediately; pirates don't go in for fair fights! I think the main thing there is that pirating per se shouldn't take up a large amount of play time. In Queen of the Black Coast REH covers three years of pirating in a couple lines. The interesting stuff happens when things go wrong.

Minigames - Paizo are legendarily awful at these. My best advice is to ignore whatever mechanics they give you and run the situation the same way you normally would. Eg instead of a chase sequence mini game in Curse of the Crimson Throne, I used a battlemat of rooftops, and the standard rules for jumping, climbing etc. Players will thank you for this, trust me! Likewise, instead of a doing an actual tarot/harrow-card reading & trying to interpret the results, just improvise some suitable NPC dialogue from the reader suitable to the PC - "I see the queen & crown - there are great things in your future, Lord Zerda! But the snake means you must be wary..."

Overall, I find the better PF APs (prob including S&S) to be well worth using, but sadly they are probably least suitable for a new GM, and most suited to a very experienced GM who knows when to ignore instruction. For a newbie GM I'd recommend something like Adventure Anthology #1 at basicfantasy.org

Running A Game of Thrones

From https://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?41141-Rolepaying-in-Westeros&p=1104376#post1104376

I own the Song of Ice and Fire RPG by Green Ronin, but it doesn't seem very well suited to actually 'playing' the Game of Thrones. If I'm doing GoT I don't really want to play or GM a minor house squabbling with the minor house next door, I want to be playing the big cheeses, the major houses and the monarchy. Star Wars RPGs work because it's a big galaxy and your PCs can still do major stuff in the same universe as Luke Skywalker. It's a lot trickier in GoT and I haven't seen a great solution yet.

I guess a good approach might be: the PCs are from a junior branch of one of the major houses, and need to take it over when the canon characters are wiped out; so you more or less preserve the canon timeline up until a clear point of departure, then put them in an immediate crisis. This way the PCs get to interact with the canon NPCs and are not stuck in some bog in the Riverlands dealing with drainage in the lower field (which seems to be the kind of level the minor houses in Chronicle Starter are pitched at).

PCs could also be from several different major houses, which would give them each their individual stories running in parrallel with the official one, then a gradual divergence. In this case the GM would need to work with the players to ensure ties between the PCs.

One good thing is that the TV series cuts out so many characters, it is easy to take the TV series as your starting point then add back in characters as PCs! The TV series also shows how you can start with the books then deviate.