So, the initial opening of the AP is that the goblins of Brinestump Marsh, aka the Licktoads, are causing problems. That's fine, no problem there. An investigation as to why they're suddenly so bold is fine.
The problem is the execution for me... literally. That is to say, the Sheriff putting a bounty on goblin ears. This wasn't the intent, I'm sure, but... It feels, to me, WAY too similar to situations where bounties were put on ethnic groups in genocidal situations. In particular, the various colonial conflicts with Native Americans, where bounties for scalping Indigenous people were offered by colonial governments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars). In combination with the Licktoad village section, ultimately it feels to me like you are encouraged to genocide the goblins for money. It feels especially uncomfortable to me given these poor sods feel kind of like victims, given over half their people were already killed.
I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking it, but I still feel like this could have been done better. Perhaps making Old Megus an actual encounter, rather than an already dead red-herring, promoting her to the villain of the first part. Certainly, one could still investigate the goblins as a hook. There's no problem with that in theory...
But the goblin ear bounty just... sickens me. I am glad that Paizo walked away from the Always Chaotic Evil trope in 2e.
It's one of those things that most people accept, if only because it's RPG tradition. "Go and collect 17 kobold spleens and I'll give you a +1 pauldron."
Slightly more of a problem when modern RPGs are going from, "Goblins are innately evil," to fleshing them out as a culture.
Alternative initial quest: "Kill the goblin chief who has been murdering travellers with some kind of mysterious fire magic."
(The adventure as written starts out just telling the players what the goblins' new weapons are, but I find it works better if you hold that back as a secret to discover along the way.)
I did not begin chronicling my Jade Regent campaign, Amaya of Westcrown, until the 2nd module, Night of Frozen Shadows, so I have to go on old memories. I do not remember ever mentioning the bounty on goblin ears to my players. It would have been quite inappropriate given that one of the PCs was a goblin fire bomber.
Instead, Ameiko Kaijitsu had learned of the attacks on the trade caravans coming up from Magnimar in her role as tavernkeeper. She organized seven adventurers who frequented her tavern to investigate the Brinestump Marsh, but then ended up called upon for a more difficult adventure herself, because I planned to swap out Ameiko for her half-sister Amaya. Nevertheless, the local tavernkeepr organizing the party still made sense. They encountered the goblin fire bomber on the edges of the Brinestump Marsh, since a goblin would not have been welcome in Sandpoint. He was an exiled member of the Licktoad Goblins who had learned how to read. The human ninja and the goblin fire bomber immediately got into a philosophical argument about racism toward goblins.
That goblin's player could play only for the 1st module, so the party set his goblin up as the new chief of the Licktoad Goblins. Rather than raiding caravans, he opened up a coffee shop along the caravan road to earn wealth through business.
As for the blatant racism of treating goblins as bounty fodder, the earliest Paizo modules copied a lot of crude fantasy roleplaying tropes. They got better.
Sandpoint originally appeared in Burnt Offerings, the 1st module of Paizo's 1st adventure path, in 2007. It used Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition rules, because the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game was not invented until 2009. Paizo writers and editors decided to change the standard D&D goblins into energetic maniacs with their own zany customs, but they were not yet ambitious enough to change the standard human attitude toward goblins. Furthermore, Sandpoint has an excuse to be hard-hearted toward goblins, because in Burnt Offerings the goblins had almost united into a war band that would wipe out the town. Jade Regent is set only 4 years after that near-disaster.
The zany goblins became Paizo's mascot, so popular that they introduced goblins as a playable race in 2012 in the Advanced Race Guide. That meant that racism toward goblins would cause hostility toward goblin PCs, as it did in my Jade Regent campaign.
The Paizo people decided that goblins were multicultural. Some were horse-hating pyromaniacs living in primitive huts but other goblins were fine living alongside humans and elves in their cities. When Paizo released Pathfinder 2nd Edition in 2019, goblins became a core playable ancestry, as central to the game as dwarves, elves, gnomes, halflings, and humans. There could be lingering racism toward goblins in places like Isger, which had been ravaged in the Goblinblood Wars, but otherwise treating goblins as lesser beings was recognized as bigotry.
I usually play Paizo modules several years after their release, so I modernize them to current Paizo attitudes for more comfortable gameplay.
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Owen Stevens wrote an alternative opening to Jade Regent that makes for a bit more of an interesting start, which I used as the opening for my 13 year epic.
You can find the first session here
Sadly I didn't keep up on the Campaign Journals, but you can get the gist.
By opening the adventure with an ambush of irresponsible firework wielding goblin bandits, the PCs can clearly see what threat the goblins pose. By providing a couple of Tian-Xia themed treasures in those encounters and utilizing a little bit of Ameiko mystery and Koya Fortune-Telling you give the players a reason to head into the swamp, confiscate any fireworks and find artefacts tied to their friend's history.
Since the Goblin Ears are part of the treasure reward just provide a lump-sum reward equivalent to what they would have received from the bounty to the party if they prove they have successfully confiscated the fireworks from the goblins to the Sherriff.
As others have said, this AP was written back in the days when goblins were little more than violent xenophobes that delighted in killing and mayhem. Pretty much everything Paizo had written about goblins in those days boiled down to "kill on sight". If you read through the OGL version of Rise of the Runelords, there's a little sidebar that puts this into perspective:
the PCs should come to think of goblins with equal parts dark humor and worry; sure, they’re comedic in some ways, but they also eat babies. They’re vile monsters, and it’s no good to have the primary villains of an adventure be nothing more than a laughing stock.
So there you go.
Times have changed. Paizo is shying away from painting an entire species with a broad brush like this. So Goblins are now the Paizo mascot, and a lovable, playable race that no longer eats babies. All has been forgiven!
Good discussion! I recently started to run the AP (before reading this thread) with an experienced set of players and I have to admit made this mistake. I let sheriff Hemlock set the bounty on goblin ears and the head of chief Gutwad. As soon as the players discovered the Goblin village, they started to kill the Goblins. I assume they are still stuck in this old stereotype thinking that Goblins are evil and can be killed without any remorse.
At least, two Goblins managed to escape and the party captured one alive to learn about what happened before. I hope they keep to their promise letting him go unharmed if he tells them everything. We will see in the next session.