Terrible Trouble at Rude River

I finally had a chance to run this adventure. Loved it, with some caveats. Here's my report:

I had the players start at the crossroads and head towards the town from there. I got a couple of escalations right off the bat and that led to them running into the bandit scarecrow. They bluffed/charmed their way into town and spoke with Captain Ragnar. I portrayed him as a competent soldier but a terrible interim mayor. He gave them the facts (mayor and paymaster missing, bandits getting aggressive, gee we could sure use some help sorting all of this out).

After that a farmer approached them and offered information in exchange for boar bristles. The party took him up on that and went searching for the boar. On the way they found the bogweed lair, uncollected corpses and a frantic frog. All fun little encounters in their own right.

They managed to track down Gratchumous's lair at dusk, just when he was becoming active. The party tried to sneak up on him but failed and we rolled initiative. The party is level 5 so I buffed him quite a bit and gave him legendary actions. It was a decently close fight but the party prevailed and decided to make camp.

During the night I had them witness Old Peat-Mouth gathering up the bodies they had seen the day before. I was hoping they would follow him back to his lair but they didn't take the bait.

In the morning they headed back to town and we got the "confused survivors" escalation and I rolled up that they were bandits disguised as demon cultists. The party went to investigate and ended up tracking the bandits back to their camp.

They wisely opted not to try and infiltrate the camp but observed for a while. I decided to have a group of bandits leave and head towards the crossroads to search for the paymaster and possible their payment. The party overheard the bandits say that they had been tricked and that they intended to get their payment "one way or another". After they left, the party also searched the area and turned up the payment and the note. At this point they knew that the bandits were upset about not getting paid but they did not know the fate of the mayor or the paymaster.

They very nearly took the money and ran but upon returning to town they saw how things were very much on the verge of collapse. We got the "local rival" escalation and they were able to diffuse the situation. At the tavern they got a pretty grim assessment of the situation in town and the party decided that they would go back to the camp and try to parley with the bandits in the morning.

They negotiated with the bandits and agreed to settle the debt one of two ways: 1) pay a reduced amount in gold or 2) help them recover the treasure from a nearby temple ruin and hand it over. They opted for option 2 and I ran Temple of the Moon Priests (obviously outside the scope of this adventure). 

At this point I hit pause on escalations due to the tentative agreement with the bandits.

Long story short, the party recovered the treasure but opted to keep it and pay off the bandits. They returned to town triumphantly, informed Captain Ragnar of the situation and promptly noped out.

They never did solve the mystery of what exactly happened to the mayor or paymaster but that wasn't necessary to resolving the main conflict.

Overall, it's a great scenario with lots of potential solutions and shenanigans. I enjoyed the escalation mechanic and actually wish they had triggered a bit more often. I think that would have put more pressure on the players to resolve the situation quickly. 

My only complaint would be the layout. It might be more a function of all the moving pieces that are necessary for this type of adventure, but there is a lot of flipping back and forth to find escalation tables, monster stats and NPC descriptions. Perhaps there is a way to integrate those things into the main body of the text. Still, it's very run-able as-is.

Thanks for making this available. Look forward to more of your work!