My friends and I used to play Pathfinder semi-regularly, but fell out of the habit. We recently picked up the Beginners Box to ease our way back into it. I ended up running the the BB adventure (first time GMing!) and we had a great time.
Now we're jumping straight from the kiddie pool into the deep end with the Rise of the Runelords Anniversery Edition. I'll probably just cover the first two parts of Burnt Offerings in our session tomorrow night.
Part 1 seems fairly straight forward with the raid and everything, but I'm worried about Part 2. It seems to be mainly a collection of story encounters as the PCs hang out around town. With this loose structure I'm not sure how to cover everything without just going down the list one by one. I'd like it to feel sorta natural.
Also, I'll probably only have two players. We were thinking they could havers their "main" characters, and then two others that they would run in combat. That way I don't have to figure out how to adjust the entire thing to balance it for two people.
Any advice on this or absolutely anything else that would help a new GM start Rise of the Runelords would be incredibly appreciated. Sorry for the wall of text!
There is a forum dedicated to RotRL further down the main messageboard page. There you can find several sticky threads dedicated to each book in the AP as well as an extremely well-stocked community contribution thread. And a host of folks who have run or are running RotRL who can answer specific questions. And several ongoing campaign journals from other campaigns...
There is no set order for those encounters, though the order presented should work. You don't even have to do them all pending how your players relate to the town etc. The key purpose of the encounters is to get the players engaged and attached to Sandpoint. If they have backstories that tie them in you need this less. If they don't care as much about role-playing you may need hardly any. If they think exploring the town would be fun, you may need more (and the community thread can help you there.)
Thank you for the reply! I didn't realize there was a more appropriate forum for the question, sorry about that. Thank you for the advice, and I'll head to the other board and see what I can find.