To be honest, I find "the town is having a festival and you attend...oh look, something happens during the festival and you have to save the town" to be a cliche in fantasy campaigns.
Anyone started the campaign in a different way? I'm currently trying to figure out another way of doing this, but haven't come up with anything great yet. Partly this is due to not knowing my party make up or backgrounds yet...once those start coming in, I can probably figure out a different approach.
Still, always interested in other opinions.
Cliche? I thought it was an excellent start to the campaign!
It was a hell of a lot better than "you meet in a bar and the mayor walks up to you saying, 'Hail, brave adventurers! We need your services...'"
Really? Because every time I hear there's going to be a big festival I think "Oh so, something will go wrong and we'll have to save the day."
I started with a mini-adventure about the that had the group going to sand point for a specific reason (only tangentially-related to the festival, they were supposed to deliver something to somebody in town before the festival started) and dealing with some bandits en-route, arriving late the afternoon before the festival commenced... so it didn't seem like the party had simply gone to Sand Point for the festival, their arrival just happened to coincide with it.
Of course that party got TPKed at Thistletop... and the new characters made as replacements showed up because they heard there was problems with goblins in the area.