The Shadowvale Campaign (thoughts) part 2

This is a follow-up to the previous post on the Shadowvale Campaign that I ran over the course of 3 years, recently ending. If you haven't read the previous post, you can find it here: The Shadowvale Campaign (The beginnings)

We were ready for our first session. My initial players were all new to role-playing games and we, myself included, were all new to the 5E ruleset. That being said, I wanted to go easy on them at first and ease them into some comfort for the rules and for their characters. The first session involved the festival and the goblin attack which draw the players into a much more dire plot, if they took the bait...and they did! Right off the bat I was pretty impressed with the power level of the 5E classes, this will be an ongoing theme as I make some mistakes throughout this campaign that pushed my players into the realm of extremely tough.

Sketched Shadowvale Area Map

The players wrapped up the first session by doing some investigation on behalf of the town sheriff Belor, part of which included the players on their own initiative meeting the main protagonist of the setting Mayor Darius. Perhaps they were more suspicious than I initially thought....during the course of the next few sessions, the players followed up on the goblin attacks by tracking the goblin tribe back to their home for their first taste of a D&D dungeon.

Goblin Caves (Straight from my notebook)

I had a set of goblin caves (pretty basic stuff) set up for the group that required them to find an entrance near an old farmstead, where the original owners corpses still rotted in the farmhouse now occupied by the goblins. I included a few side ventures within the goblin caves, as well as some clues that would tie in the plot towards Darius (the Mayor) being involved. Also, I included a human wizard (part of Darius's more trusted group) who had a lab within the caves. The highlight of this dungeon was the trapped roped bridge that spanned an underground river, the fall wasn't so bad, but the rushing water quickly submerged back underground which would prove near fatal to anyone falling in. 

The group surprised me in their eagerness to explore and interact with the numerous objects and rooms within the dungeon, including them absolutely annihilating the wizard in his lair. I also, had a few new members join the group in the midst of these caves. I wrote them into the story as being captives of the goblins. The conclusion involved a boss battle with the goblin chief and within his lair, where I had goblin lackeys hurling burning oil flasks down upon the group from a ledge over the main cavern. The goal was a dynamic encounter which I mostly pulled off.

In the end, the group had earned some loot, which they discovered was actually plundered loot from the poor citizens of Glasspring. I wanted to challenge their morals a bit as characters (do players even care about alignment these days?), they also had another piece of the puzzle regarding the bigger plot of the campaign. They were headed back to Glasspring for more answers....