I'm dumb and accidentally posted this multiple times. My apologies.
I am currently starting to DM a Pathfinder 1st edition RPG game, and could use some feedback on how to improve the plot outline I have. I have only been a DM once before for a completely different system and am not the most creative person, but I know the system the best, so I ended up as the DM.
So the basic idea is this. The PCs start in a small village, as villagers, which is under attack by a horde of orcs and goblins. They have to venture to an abandoned monastery which is the hordes base to deal with the threat. While they are at the base, the horde launches a surprise attack on the village which is destroyed in the process. The PCs come back from the monastery only to find that the village has been destroyed, but the horde managed to be wiped out by some of the surviving village guards, and a group of adventurers who are passing through. The group of adventurers upon hearing of the PCs clearing out the monastery, offers to talk to their employer a person named Lord Wilhelm about getting the PCs a job. The party then travels to the capitol city after having some adventures along the way to the city.
Lord Wilhelm is an archaeologist who recently lost both his legs in a dungeon and wants to employ the PCs to gather artefacts for him as he is no longer physically capable of such a task. Wilhelm then gives them some sort of test to prove themselves after which he assigns them to go to various dungeons throughout the world gathering artefacts for him, each one more dangerous then the last. The artefacts seem unrelated, but Lord Wilhelm is gathering them to perform an occult ritual, to summon and bind a demon lord to him, which he then plans to use to wipe out a certain nation who wrongly executed his wife and children (the PCs don't know of his motives). Each artefact that they gather provides a small hint to his plan, and he finally reveals his true plans to the PCs (in hopes that he can gain their loyalty to go along with it) after he has them go into hell itself to retrieve a crystal that is the last artefact to use in the ritual. The PCs then have a choice to support him (or at least pretend to support him) or actively work against him to try to stop the ritual or to corrupt the ritual and bind the demon to the PCs thus giving them godlike powers to shape the world as they see fit.
The problem with the plot as I see it, is it involves a lot of fetch quests, and doesn't give the players a lot of choices. It is also very heavy in dungeon crawling , and I want to give PCs who are the face of the party, and who picked classes that aren't super suited to dungeon crawling things to do. Also I would just like to add some variety.
Thanks for your input.
If you get the party to go off to do something and the immediate result is their complete and utter failure, expect them to be very wary of similar situations (to going off to attack the horde base) in future. Also they may be unwilling to form bonds with NPCs for fear of you killing them off. I'd rethink the start there.
That's a good point, I didn't really think about that. I don't really need to destroy the village, the PCs could even just encounter the adventurers mopping up parts of the horde outside the intact village.
Some further information.
I wasn't really detailed enough in my explanation. They are going into the monastery to assassinate the leader of the horde, and to attempt to wipe out the horde itself, as no one knows its true size and the towns folk suspect it is a group of a couple dozen since so far the horde has just been making surprise attacks in the night. The PCs will also find a mysterious artefact in the monastery of odvious value but unkown purpose. I was actually planning on having one of the NPCs being in the employ of the lord and recognizing the artefact, I just forgot to put it in the post. What I could do with the binding the demon lord part of the plot is have the ritual simply summon the Demon Lord, perhaps the Lord Wilhelm could be arrogant enough to think he could control the demon when in actuality he couldn't.
With the kind of characters that my friends play, actually going through with the ritual itself is a likely option.