Okay, where to start? We've been at this campaign, Rise of the Runelords, for several months now... due to real life demands, we can only gather together every other weekend. We do get a full 8-hour session out of it though, and usually get quite a bit done. Anyway, the players seem to like it... me too for that matter!
Let's see... originally, we were set up to play with the existing D&D 3.5 rules, just like all our campaigns since 2003. We actually had 7 players at first: Tarsus, human warlock; Pomari, human Fighter; Whistle, female gnome Rogue; Anthius, human Paladin of Sarenrae; Pondius, human Cleric of Sarenrae (and the paladin's brother); Toren, human Ranger; and Barnabus, dwarf Wizard. They were more colorful than that cardboard description of course... the warlock was a Chelaxian seafarer running from some serious gambling debts, the fighter was a clumsy but gentle giant amongst his Varisian clan and woke one morning to find they moved on their little gypsy caravan without him, and the brothers were albinos who'd been dumped at local abbey and raised by a religious order of Sarenrae. But the bare bones will do for this thread. It's assumed you've either played or read the Rise of Runelords campaign, because there will be many spoilers and I'm not going to mark them all.
The first session consisted of the whole Swallowtail Festival. The party arrived in town the day of the festival for their own individual reasons and spent the first several hours familiarizing themselves with the town or buying equipment. The goblin raid went off pretty much as written... because the group was so large, I increased the number of goblins substantially. I've almost always done that when my team goes above the recommended size of 4 and I'm very good at matching the opposition to the party's strength and ability... Call it a gift of mine. Anyway, the goblins still struck in small groups of anywhere from 1 to 4, never bunching up too much, so the party was able to handle the mob pretty well. The goblins sang their little songs and burned a few household pets, dove off of rooftops into rain barrels (sometimes they missed... ouch!), hid under burning carts, and chased a girl scout troop with burning torches. The party took some bumps n' bruises but generally did well, with only the dwarf suffering any major wounds at first. The goblin bard songs made it slightly more difficult for the party, but nothing they couldn't handle.
By the time the party discovered Aldern hiding behind a barrel and yelling for help while his hound took on the goblin commando, they had just formed into a loosely defined team, using the buddy system against the goblin raiders. They launched themselves against the mounted commando and his 6 hench-goblins and gave a nice account of themselves, several of them using either flanking or aid another tactics. Too late to save Aldern's doggie though... awww.... *sniff* Aldern thanks the party and invites them to attend him on a boar hunt on the morrow. They spend the rest of the day getting situated in the Rusty Dragon, and revel in being local celebrities for "turning back the Goblin Horde."
Next day, the boar hunt goes off as planned... they startled a sleeping fire pelt cougar who snarled at them and went away, and then they found some boar tracks. I used a 25 hp boar from the MM, and although the ranger and fighter were wounded, no one was hurt seriously. Aldern spent the day pestering both Anthius and Toren about their heroism and what it takes to become a hero.
The final event for that first session was the goblin in the closet... the party was unwinding at the Rusty Dragon after a hard day of boar hunting but was called away by a tear-streaked mother screaming about goblins in her son's bedroom. The party arrived swiftly but elected to scout the area for more goblins before rushing in to save her husband, so unfortunately for him, the starved goblin commando had eaten most of his face by the time the party got upstairs. The goblin was dispatched but more than one player glared at me for my use of brutal tactics. "That goblin wasn't funny!" was tossed at me by the gnome. Which I guess means mission accomplished... I didn't want them thinking the goblins were harmless clowns, after all...
The second session came two weeks later... the party again familiarized themselves with the town of Sandpoint and met the ranger Shalaela (yes, I know it's supposed to be Shalelu, but I liked this better). She tells what she knows about the local goblins, including their tribes and locations and the existence of some local goblin "heroes." That last bit surprised the party to no end, and they had all kinds of follow up questions about the heroes that I hadn't prepared answers for. Advice to fellow GMs: In case you didn't already know, your players will always do the last thing you expect. Come prepared! Other events in town included the gnome getting sick at the Hagfish by trying to drink from the tank, and Pomari, the Varisian Fighter, getting lured into her daddy's basement by a teenage Lolita, Shayliss Vinder. This last one was extremely funny... for me, of course. The player wasn't so thrilled and didn't really know what to do. He handled it like a champ of course, and a gentleman, gently rebuffing the daughter and scoring a nat 20 on a Diplomacy check to defuse a fuming father. Ven Vinder still doesn't like Pomari, of course, but at least he wasn't hauled before the guards on statutory charges.
The party wound up reading enough into Shalaela's reports that they decided to explore the marsh on the eastern side of the river, and spent a whole day looking for goblins in the swamp. When they didn't find any, they accused me of misleading them. Upon returning to Sandpoint though, they followed other clues and discovered the signs of the stolen corpse of the previous chapel priest. This led them into some Gather Information checks and learning a little about the late Father Tobyn and his presumed-dead daughter, Nualia. After Hemlock left for Magnimar to enlist more guards, the party used their new semi-deputized status to set up watch patrols and actually put into motion a new fire control system in town, with more buckets and rain barrels, and organizing fire marshals among the citizens of Sandpoint. Guess the torch-wielding goblins put a scare into them.
A few days later, they discover that their new friend Ameiko Kaijitsu, hostess of the Rusty Dragon and former adventurer, is missing. They explore her quarters, find the letter from Tsuto and by mid-morning are picking the locks on the Sandpoint Glassworks. I doubled the goblins upstairs, 16 in all, and the party lit into them. The extra goblins allowed me to use some comical or far-fetched tactics against the party, to further show their extremely chaotic natures. In battle, the goblins used tongs dripping with broken glass, threw panes of glass like improvised starknives, and wasted time trying to piece together broken dogslicers with molten glass as glue (it didn't work very well). One high point was when three goblins tried to grapple the large human, Pomari, to throw him into the glass furnaces but instead wound up hanging from him like twisting, snarling Christmas ornaments. Pomari has an 18 Strength, you see. It turned out that he didn't appreciate their motives and so managed to hurl two of the little fiends in the furnaces themselves... the last ran like bloody murder and wound up leading the party to the basement. There, they encountered Tsuto and were caught in a pincer movement between Tsuto and his 5 goblin bodyguards.
This fight was a little more brutal for the party, in part because of wounds already taken, in part because the wizard was out of spells, and also because Tsuto had a stunning fist attack and knew how to use it.