Before the Record
There is no transcript of the beginning. The recordings start on the nineteenth of March, partway down a corridor under a goblin fort, with the cleric on three hit points and somebody asking who has the light.
What follows is not a reconstruction. It is the list of things the later sessions establish as having happened, mentioned in passing by people who were there, and nothing beyond that.
Goblins in the market square
Sandpoint was attacked. Not besieged — raided, in daylight, in the middle of the town, with a crowd present. The party were there and they were good at it, and the town noticed.
One of the people who noticed was a nobleman named Aldern Foxglove, who introduced himself afterwards, told them they had done splendidly, liked them enormously, and invited the lot of them out on a boar hunt. Nobody took him up on it. He asked once and then left it standing, the way a man does when he intends to ask again.
The raid was not what it looked like. Months later, a captured mercenary would explain that the goblins had not come to burn anything that day. They had come to get a body out of a mausoleum: Father Tobyn, the priest who had died in a fire five years before. Somebody wanted his corpse, and got it.
The glassworks
The Kaijitsu family owned the glassworks and most of the money in town. The family consisted of Lonjiku, a cold and rigid man; his daughter Ameiko, who had refused to be a merchant's heir and ran an inn instead; and his half-elven son Tsuto, whom he had disowned.
Tsuto sold the town. He passed the goblins the layout and the weak points — including that on the north side, the trees grow right up to the wall — and he used the family name to get his sister somewhere isolated. Two of his documents ended up in the party's hands: a journal, and the letter he wrote to lure Ameiko out.
What happened inside is not on any recording. What is certain is what came out the other side of it. Lonjiku is dead. Ameiko is the last of her line and carries a concussion she picked up two days before the siege. Tsuto is alive, in a cell under the Sandpoint garrison, and has been there ever since.
Somebody at the table suggested killing him. It did not happen.
The stairs under the glassworks
There is a staircase in the glassworks basement, and it does not go down into a cellar. It goes down into worked stone that is thousands of years older than anything above it — a Thassilonian complex, laid out under the town by people who were dust before Sandpoint had a name.
The party went down. They cleared it, or cleared enough of it. They found a well with something thin that came out of it, and they killed the thing. They found a smugglers' tunnel running from the glassworks out to the cliff a couple of hundred yards beyond the wall, and they blocked their end of it very thoroughly and never got as far as the other end. That detail sat harmlessly in somebody's notes for two months and then became, for one very unpleasant minute, the most important fact in the campaign.
They also came back up with an interest. Brodert Quink, the town's antiquarian — a sixty-eight-year-old man who has spent forty years telling Sandpoint that the stone under it is older than the town, and being politely not invited to things — gave Thalanadil his field guide to Thassilonian runes. It is a small book. It contains perhaps five thousand words of a language that had hundreds of thousands: everything one man could recover in a lifetime.
Thalanadil carried it out to Thistletop, and it turned out to be enough.
The sheriff leaves
At some point in all this, Sheriff Belor Hemlock decided the town needed real soldiers, and went to Magnimar to beg some. That was the correct decision. Magnimar is fifty miles down the Lost Coast Road; there is nothing at all in between, no villages, no waypoints. Two days down, a day or two finding men, two days back. Five or six days total, and he took the town's professionals with him.
He left his daughter minding the store.
The boat
The party did not wait for him. They worked out where the goblins had come from — a sea stack four miles up the coast called Thistletop, with a fort on top of it — and they went, by water, in a fishing boat, because the fort has one bridge onto it and going in the front seemed a poor idea.
They found a sea cave and went in through that instead. Somewhere in the natural tunnels something came out of the dark at them, huge, with a very great many legs. They killed it and never worked out what it was. Afterwards, for want of anything better, they called it the giant centipede thing.
It cost them badly. When the tape starts rolling, Lucian has three hit points and Roland has eleven, and the party are standing in front of a door in a wall that has stopped being cave and started being masonry.
That is where the record begins.