I just finished running Chap 1 of RotRL and I figured I'd go ahead and share my prep work. I ended up putting quite a bit of time into the prep, but it really helped keep the pace of the campaign fairly quick and I believe it made it more fun for everyone. I have included links to both the ODT and PDF versions within this post.

The Swallowtail Festival portion contains my own festival games along with the (significant) rewards I provided for my players. I am running a group of 6 with a few experienced players, so these early rewards actually helped individual player wealth without having to tweak combat rewards. The Cure Light Wounds wands also were very appreciated by the group. One of my players was even extremely lucky and ended up winning the grand prize in Gorvi's Goblin Fishing Extravaganza!

I should also note that the combats all maximize the monster health. After seeing this in action, I believe that even a 4 player group with experienced players would benefit from maximized monster health. I then scaled the monster hp up (in my head) by 50% for each player beyond 4, since not everyone always showed up. This was a pretty quick and easy way to scale and worked for everything except the Shadow encounter in part IV (which I just used maximized health for... shadows are really scary at level 3).

I didn't use XP, rather I just told them when they leveled. Level 2 was hit after defeating Tsuto, level 3 after the Catacombs of Wrath (2 and 3 were right on top of each other) and level 4 at the end of the chapter. If I were to do it again, I would award level 4 either after Nualia or just before Nualia after clearing floor 2 of the Thistletop dungeon. The shadows, giant crab and greater barghest encounters would be better with a group of level 4 PCs I think. They dragged a bit with level 3 PCs.

So, here is the prep work. Any comments are welcome.

RotRL Chap 1 ODT Documents

Swallowtail Festival

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Spell Reference

RotRL Chap 1 PDF Documents

Swallowtail Festival

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Spell Reference

These should provide just about everything you need to run Chapter 1 of Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition. I would still recommend reading the parts (and ideally the whole chapter) before running it, but you probably don't need to do much more than that if you use these prep sheets. Oh, fair warning, it's quite a few pages to print it all out.

I plan on continuing with the same type of prep work for the rest of the campaign and will post additional chapters in this thread as they are completed.