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Thanks for the link.

For plot, I have a cleric of a dragon god trying to summon a crag linnorm to rain destruction upon a Nearby Kingdom(TM). As a result of the ritual he's been performing, people within a couple miles of where the ritual is taking place have had their draconic lineages awakened, and the cleric has sought out some of them to use as protection.

And yeah, that's what I meant by "random." Right now, it's looking something like this.

Encounter 1: Two dire tigers (EL 10).

Encounter 2: One cleric8(destruction/madness), two sorcerer 8(draconic bloodlines), three sorc1(draconic)/ftr4/dragon disciple3 (EL 12)

Encounter 3: ???

Encounter 4: Crag linnorm (EL 14).

I may just drop Encounter 3 entirely, since I think we'll be putting the characters together before the game, and we only have so much time, after all. I'll come up with something for it just in case, but it's likely that I'll ignore it.

Edit: Okay, I know what two of the other players have. One is a gnome sorcerer 12 (undead bloodline); the other is an elven rogue 9/duelist 3, which means tossing in a couple traps/locks/what-have-you along the way. I do have the third encounter mapped, though: it takes place in the ruin of a temple to a dragon god. The room is a half-circle with PCs entering a large door on the curved side. The flat side of the circle offers a 20-foot-wide corridor, 120 feet long, into a large, circular chamber. The first room is 60 feet high. It bears four columns, two of which have toppled and provide a degree of cover for those behind them. On either side of the room are two balconies, each 20 feet above the ground. The two sorcerers hide behind the two standing pillars; each balcony features a dragon disciple; and standing at the entrance to the corridor are the cleric (will have a cold iron heavy mace, just in case the players need something like it) and third dragon disciple.

Down the corridor and into the last room, the floor in the center of the chamber has collapsed, leaving an altar resting on a tall spire of rock that plunges 100 feet to the bottom of the pit. When the PCs walk in, they will hear an enormously loud roar and then see the altar plunge into the pit with a crash. The following round, the crag linnorm will crawl out of the hole.

I figure I'll give the PCs five minutes to heal/buff before that final battle. If they take longer... well, tough luck.

Yep, I know all about that particular ability. It's why I chose a dragon, actually; I wanted to highlight that particular ability. The smite won't work superbly against the cleric/sorcerer/DDs, so far as I know, so it shouldn't be a huge issue. Likewise, I want to have something to highlight each of the other characters. For the gnome sorcerer, I'm going to throw in a check to identify the ritual taking place (know:religion being a class skill for him), and one of the enemy sorcerers is focused on illusion, so he'll get to make use of his save bonuses vs. illusion. I'll make one of the dragon disciples a white dragon for the cold breath weapon to give him a chance to use his resistance to cold.

Also, the player who was going to have a rogue9/duelist3 has changed his mind again and is going druid12. First, he was going to go with rogue or barbarian, possibly with some shadowdancer. Then he was going to to play a paladin/duelist. Then he was going to play a straight fighter. Then he settled on rogue/duelist, finished the character except for magic items, and decided to play a druid. Throughout all of this, we told him to play a barb1/bard1/cleric1/druid1/fighter1/monk1/paladin1/ranger1/rogue1/sorc1/wizard1, with one more level in one of those classes, just so he could try -everything-. Then he pointed out that it can't work with alignment restrictions.

The druid is one class that I haven't looked at closely yet. I do know that I need to pay close attention to wildshape, since it changed significantly.

So, for those interested, I finally got to run that one-shot. The group ended up being somewhat larger than I anticipated, but that's fine. All the characters were 12th level.

A gnome sorcerer(undead).
The gnome sorcerer's little sister and cohort, a 10th-level barbarian.
A human monk.
An elven paladin.
A half-orc fighter.
A half-elf bard.

The first battle went about how I expected. The barbarian (Fidget) wandered off alone and got attacked by one dire tiger. In the first round, the first dire tiger hits with a claw (crit), claw, and bite (crit), and the barbarian is grappled. Apparently said barbarian cannot escape with any roll short of an 18, so she's more or less out of the fight. The sorcerer (Gnuggs) spends a round trying to use hideous laughter on the dire tiger, which doesn't work on animal-intelligence critters.

Next round pretty much results in more damage on the barbarian, who's hurting pretty badly at this point. Then the rest of the characters arrive in melee range and clean up pretty quickly.

The second battle is very drawn-out and more or less pointless. The NPCs weren't quite as big an impediment as I'd hoped, and the fight took the better part of three hours. Almost didn't get to the final battle -- in fact, we voted on whether to have it or not. One of the NPCs was flying, invisible, and dropping silent-spelled summon monsters and black tentacles on the battlefield; nobody ever actually found him, and by the end of the battle, I just let him go. The cleric escaped down a tunnel thanks to a web that the previously mentioned invisiflier cast, and the characters never got around to finding him.

But then, there it was. The final battle: a crag linnorm, CR 14 vs. the crew.

Beginner's luck carried the day. Out of about five attacks the pally made, three critted for a whopping 2d8+68 damage each.

All told, each character did pretty well. The sorcerer shot spells all over the place; the barbarian soaked damage; the pally healed everyone up (with the bard's help) and took out the evil dragon, though had I known just how low her HP was, things may have ended differently; the bard threw around hastes and attack/damage bonuses willy-nilly; the monk flew around the battlefield and flurried the crap out of the low-level fodder; and the fighter, once he really got into the battles, hit stuff really hard.

There were a few things that got glossed over that I'd probably do differently. The pally's player, like I said, is pretty new to the game, so she wasn't familiar with all that her character could do. She never used her divine bond (sword) or many of her feats.

For the second battle, I'd opt for fewer NPCs of higher level, just to move it along more quickly.

The final battle... Well, with a paladin in the party -- and with a large party in general -- I'll go with a more-than-APL+2 encounter.

All in all, everyone had fun, and at least one of the players is firmly sold on Pathfinder. The other is not a fan of the druid, combat maneuver defense (he'd rather have opposed rolls), and few other things, and he wants to stick with 3.5 partially because there is much more material for it.