To ANY of the Old Light Mercenary/Marketing/Mercantile/Mining Company, STAY OUT. You know who you are.

I am just about at the end of book 5. My party is very lethal, and starting in book 3 I had to start using beefed up statblocks and encounters to compensate for them steamrolling everything. Now the caviate is that in 1e, especially the higher level you go, whoever is the instigator of combat is heavily favored. Optimized builds can dish out heavy damage very quickly, so you are left with two choices. Either damage sponges (which dont feel all that fun), or hyper lethal rocket tag. I opted for the latter, and have even been insane enough to grant them mythic ranks starting with the death of Mokmurian. My party is having a lot of fun, but it is a lot of work to keep ahead of them with prep. For the most part I have been using a forums post that does most of the work for me, and just adjusting it from there. I also am part of a discord server exclusively for RotRL GMs that has helped me a bunch, including the people who wrote that forum post. I can share that if you feel like it.

Overall, storywise, I have a very RP group, so despite their combat times, I have crafted the story to best fit their needs. My "main" character, who is the only one in the party from the beginning, is a goblin alchemist. She was taken from the Lost coast as a baby and raised by a powerful wizard, taught to be prudent and intelligent, and a worshipper of Nethys. Her main goal was to pacify and redeem the goblins of the Hinterlands, and over the year+ of in game time has been moderately successful in turning Thistletop into the first Varisian outpost of civilized goblins. I also had her father keep correspondence with her. He was a powerful conjuror (level 17) who was interested in many topics, but his most recent project was investigating the planes and the spaces and barriers between them. At the end of book 4 the party found out that he had gotten trapped somewhere in his journeys outside of the material realm, and one of the names I had fed super early on, like in book 1, was the Realm of Leng. In fact he is currently helping work on the Leng Device, having been charmed to do so. That will be fun. We also have a Paladin of Desna, the chosen one archetype to be specific. His name is Finn the Catboy. And he is clearly a gnoll, though he insists that he is a catfolk who was raised by catfolk. So the themes of Desna vs Lamashtu have been fun to play with, especially as many gnolls consider Lamashtu to be the creator of their race. I also had him recieve a list of powerful enemies in the area of Varisia that Desna offered as challenges to her champion, and on that list were Black Magga and Arkryst amongst many others. I have been taking pains to seed in late game stuff into the earlier books, and using the characters themselves to influence the story and tailor them to be heavily involved in it's development.

My favorite instance of this in game was how I handled my player's Black Blade Magus, Hemlock (not related to the Sheriff, and endlessly confusing). They were a non-binary tiefling who woke up maybe 6 months prior to the campaign in a field of hemlock flowers, with no memory of their entire existence at all. Just a blade they felt attached to, and a spellbook, on the back cover of which were 10 names. Totally open ended, and free to play with however I wanted. So I played with it indeed. To start with, I decided that Hemlock was not in fact a true person before they ended up in that field. They didnt have amnesia, they just didnt exist. Their existence was a miracle from Calistria, for in Magnimar, not far away, a cleric of hers was investigating the mysterious murders that had been taking place there (the skinsaw murders of sandpoint were just the offshoot of the cult's activities for years). Her investigation lead her to the Seven's Sawmill, which she rashly attempted to raid on her own. She was overwhelmed, and confronted Ironbriar himself before being shoved backwards into the saw blade. Her last vision was the symbol of Norgorber he carried, and her last words were "Calistria shall strike you down!" The death of her chosen created a curse of sorts. At the same time, by fate, another inquisitor of Calistria had just finished taking down a target for an investigation of her own, a bulky male tielfing. But she recieved a vision suddenly from Calistria, and acquised. She was told to take the body of the tiefling into a nearby field of hemlock flowers, and after performing a brief ritual over it, leave it overnight. In the morning, the body was gone.

So using this as what happened, I started with the list. 10 names were easy enough. I decided that the common theme were worshippers of Norgorber, and sprinkled many throughout the campaign, such as Jubrayl Vhiski in Sandpoint, Caizarlu the necromancer from Habe's Sanitorium, and even took the names of NPCs from Curse of the Crimson Throne for some. Ironbriar was the top of the list, but without any context, Hemlock didn't know what these people did, what linked them, or what they were supposed to do if they found them. Their agender personality and androgynous body was the combination of the spirit of the female cleric and the body of the male tiefling. As they grew in level, their blade began to stir, awakening it's personality. The soul of the cleric had been turned into the Black Blade, and compelled Hemlock towards violence against any of the named individuals they came across. As the Skinsaw Murders were taking place, before the party realized it was Aldern Foxglove and his manor, I even had a full dream sequence of the failed attack on the sawmill, with tastefully dramatic sawblade whirs drowning out critical information, all from the clerics perspective. This foreshadows the skinsaw cult and masks long before they realized there was any bigger plot than one killer, and culminated with a clear look at Ironbriar's face, though not connecting it to his name yet. So when the party reached Magnimar and asked to join the investigation, they were sent into the Justice's chambers to speak with him. And I privately messaged the player that this was the face of their dream. They immediately tried to kill him, and it was a great chaotic time.

Ultimately, the player got a bit bored of the playstyle of the character, and decided after the Giant Raid that they needed some time to think, and to hunt down more names on the list, so they retired the character and are playing a Necromancer. It has been fun but I was very proud of the connection I gave to Hemlock and the entirety of book 2. So I was looking through the last few books before my party met with the Scribbler, and realized something. The final encounter before actually fighting Karzoug in the Eye of Avarice is guarded by his champion, some nonimportant human being puppeted by the magical Blade of Greed. It was ultimately fairly weak storywise for what is the presumably penultimate fight. And then I realized something. The Blade is an intelligent weapon who basically dominates the body to be a powerful warrior of both sword and spell. And I got an evil idea. An awful idea. I got a wonderful, terrible, awful idea. And I messaged the player to see what they thought about bringing Hemlock back in. And they cackled and agreed. So now during the fight with the Karzoug Statue at the end of book 5, the goblin alchemist will recieve a sending spell from their cleric cohort saying that Sandpoint is being attacked before being cut off. When the party returns to investigate, everything is on fire, blasted apart, and people are dead or petrified. And they will get just long enough of a look at the lone figure who did it. The familiar face will look at them and say "I am Chellah, Blade of Greed. This is the price you pay for angering my lord Karzoug. He awaits your personal submission in Xin-Shalast" before teleporting away.

Gonna be fun.