It is fair to say that the D&D Starter Set adventure, “The Lost Mine of Phandelver”, is a good adventure. I’ve run it at least four times, and each time the players are do things the other groups haven’t done. It’s a really good introduction to the game, and it manages this by just being a fantastic adventure. There’s a lot in it for experienced players as well as new players.
In Lost Mine of Phandelver, you agree to escort a caravan of supplies to the mining town of Phandalin at the request of Gundren Rockseeker, a local dwarf. Things don’t quite go as planned – and the player characters will find themselves drawn into a number of events revolving around the small town of Phandalin and the legendary Lost Mine. Along the way, you get to meet (and possibly befriend and work for) members of the five major factions that support adventurers, as well as proving yourself as skilled (or lucky) adventurers.
The adventure will advance characters from 1st level to 5th level. What do you do next? Well, why not try one of the other published adventures? However, what happens if you want to use your characters from Lost Mine in the new adventure? That’s fine: each of the adventures has a point that allows new characters to enter it. It’s not always explicitly stated, however. So, here’s how I’d integrate characters who’ve finished playing the Starter Set into the published adventures.
Tyranny of Dragons – Hoard of the Dragon Queen and The Rise of Tiamat
The Tyranny of Dragons story has two adventures; Hoard of the Dragon Queen is levels 1-7, The Rise of Tiamat concludes the story with levels 8-15. The beginning of Hoard of the Dragon Queen sees the characters aiding the small town of Greenest in the south of the Sword Coast against a sudden attack by the Cult of the Dragon, who burn the place down to the grounds and take as much loot as they can carry. The characters are then asked to investigate the Cult’s camp, where they discover the treasure is being shipped up the Sword Coast.
At this point, the five factions (Harpers, Order of the Gauntlet, Emerald Enclave, Zhentarim and Lord’s Alliance) are now really paying attention to what the Cult is doing. The Cult is beginning to attack towns all over the Sword Coast. So, they begin sending out agents to discover what’s going on. The characters are some of those agents. In the adventure, they’re asked to investigate by agents of the Harpers and the Order, but it wouldn’t be hard to adjust things so they’re asked by their own factions to investigate. The fourth episode of the adventure sees the PCs following a Cult’s treasure caravan up the Sword Coast until it reaches a work camp near Neverwinter (on the edge of the Mere of Dead Men). The characters should be about 4th or 5th level moving into Chapter 5.
This is where characters from Lost Mine should be introduced. Players who have adventured through Lost Mine will have gained a number of contacts with the factions, most likely with the Lord’s Alliance (Sildar Hallwinter), but with other factions as well depending on their actions (check page 15 of Lost Mine, it’s got a list of the important NPCs and which ones are the faction contacts). Have those contacts inform the players that the Cult of the Dragon has been attacking towns all over the Sword Coast and shipping their treasure to secret locations. One of the treasure caravans is about to arrive at the work camp, so could they go there and investigate where it’s going – after all, it’s only a couple of days travel away!
From this point, you can play through the rest of Hoard as written, and then continue through Rise as well.
Elemental Evil – Princes of the Apocalypse
The main adventure in Princes of the Apocalypse is for levels 3-15. It is a sandbox adventure, which allows the players a lot of freedom of where to go. As a result, players can get to dangerous areas quite quickly.
Material is also provided for levels 1-2 in a chapter of side treks, but this isn’t important for people moving to this adventure from Lost Mine.
A group moving from Lost Mine will immediately enter the main story, where they must investigate the disappearance of a trade delegation in the area. The adventure takes place not very far to the east of Phandalin. There are guidelines in Princes that make linking the two adventures together easier.
You don’t need to adapt Princes very much to play it after Lost Mine. The major problem – that the characters are level 5 instead of level 3 – is negated by the sandbox aspect of the adventure. Yes, there will be a couple of locations that the party will find easy, but that’s part of this style of adventure. (They’ll probably end up in one of the high-level sections too early, anyway!)
The best way to transition to the adventure is through using the faction contacts in Phandalin. The trade delegation going missing means that agents of the factions need to investigate, especially due to all the other reported weirdness in the Sumber Hills, and so the party are asked to investigate.
If you know that you’ll be going from Lost Mine into Princes, you may want to include some of the backgrounds and motivations from Princes into the player character backgrounds as they begin Lost Mine – yes, they’re doing this job for Gundren at the moment, but once they’re finished with it, they know they’ll be travelling to the Sumber Hills to discover what’s going on. However, even if you just finish Lost Mine and then decided to go into Princes, you can adapt some of the motivations to hook the players into the story, in addition to the request from the factions.
Rage of Demons – Out of the Abyss
Out of the Abyss is an adventure for levels 1-15. It begins with the characters prisoners of the drow! Obviously, this will not lead to a fulfilling and happy life (or a particularly long one), so the characters need to escape. And that’s the start of the adventure. The players need to escape the drow, and make their way back to the surface. That journey will get them to around level 7. They’ll get hints on the journey up that things are even weirder than they suspected in the Underdark, but eventually they’ll emerge to the surface. Where? Oh, in the north of the Sword Coast, not too far from Phandalin and Neverwinter.
And sometime soon after that point, King Bruenor Battlehammer will summon them, inform them that things are now Really Really Bad in the Underdark, and having heard of their exploits, he thinks they’re just the people to save the situation. Well, one of the situations, because there are probably other parts of the storyline which characters in the novels (Drizzt) and computer games and D&D Expeditions adventures are dealing with… And so they head back underground to deal with the rest of the adventure.
There are two obvious possibilities for transitioning between the adventures.
The first is to have King Bruenor to summon the characters after hearing of their exploits helping Gundren Rockseeker and finding the Lost Mine, and tell them of the dreadful trouble down below and send them to face it! This will likely mean they’re a couple of levels too low, but throw a few of the Underdark encounters at them they missed from the first half of the adventure, and they’ll gain those levels quickly.
The second is to just have the drow capture them anyway. Starting Out of the Abyss at level 5 will make escaping easier, but the Underdark will still be challenging. This would be my preferred option. The travels through the Underdark will allow them to understand what’s going on, and the adventure is written so the party should escape when they reach level 7 or 8 in any case.
Curse of Strahd
Curse of Strahd is written for level 3-10 characters, so characters coming out of The Lost Mine of Phandelver will be slightly higher than its starting point. As with Princes of the Apocalypse, this shouldn’t affect play that much: the first few challenges will be easier than normal, but you’ll soon find yourselves in a part of the adventure that is more challenging.
Curse of Strahd is a much more exploration-based and role-playing heavy adventure than the others currently available, mainly because it draws upon the tropes of Gothic Horror for the story. It became available in select stores on March 4th, 2016, and goes into wide release on March 15th, 2016.
Incidentally, the adventure name is the same as the season name – something that occurred from then on.
No changes need to be made to the start of Curse of Strahd, except that you can omit the optional level 1-3 section, Death House. The letter from the Burgomaster can come to the characters as they’re relaxing in Phandalin after their efforts in the Lost Mine.
Storm King’s Thunder
The main play of Storm King’s Thunder is levels 5-10, and the adventure includes suggestions for integrating it with the Lost Mine of Phandelver.
This one’s easy to use. The adventure features a lot of wilderness travel in the Savage North, much fighting against giants, and some negotiating with other giants!
The adventure plays differently each time, depending on the starting town (three choices) and giant lair visited (five choices).
The main adventure starts in one of three towns; the challenge is just to get the characters there. I suggest using the hooks from the opening section (A Great Upheaval) and just changing the quest-giver to one of the party’s allies in Phandalin.
Tomb of Annihilation
The initial section of Tomb of Annihilation, which is where the characters search the jungles of Chult for clues as to the location of the Soulmonger, is levels 1-5. I suggest that when the characters are given the original mission, they are also given the location of Omu; in that way, they can travel directly there and enter the main section of the adventure.
The beginning of the adventure where the characters are recruited by Syndra Syldane can still be used, but just have Syndra tell them that the Soulmonger is somewhere in Omu. Adjust the amount of time the players spend in the jungle to suit your playing style. Typically, I wouldn’t spend that long there – just the journey to Omu.
Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage
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aterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage is an adventure for fifth to twentieth level, and by its very nature works well as a drop-in, drop-out sort of dungeon. You can mount individual expeditions into Undermountain whenever you like. Several potential hooks are listed in the adventure, but you could add information found in the Spider’s Lair to provide additional pointers to that location.
Perhaps the Spider has a partial map of a level of Undermountain, with a valuable treasure marked on it, or there’s a stolen letter from an NPC in Waterdeep talking about the dungeon. It’s likely that some of the allies the players have made in Phandalin also could point the adventurers in that direction.
D&D Adventurers League adventures
You can also use your Lost Mine characters to play any of the D&D Adventurers League games that are available through the DMs Guild. If you keep an up-to-date Log Sheet, you can play your character at any store or convention running D&D AL content, and you can even run them at home!
Note that the Expeditions have limits on what level characters can play them: tiers of levels 1-4, 5-10 or 11-16 at present. So, make sure you have a character of the proper level. (A character at level 4 or 10 can spend downtime and gold to immediately advance to the next level, which is useful when you’re just short of having a character at the proper tier.
There’s a lot of adventuring opportunities out there. So, if you’ve started with the Starter Set, there’s no reason not to just continue with those characters into any adventure that interests you. There are adventures made by other publishers. Or you could always write your own adventures!
I am getting prepared to run Lost Mine of Phandelver, as my first D&D adventure as GM in 5th Ed., and I am planning to get my players in Out of the Abyss as soon as they finish the events in LMoP. This will be my first time running a game through Fantasy Grounds too, so as soon as I bought both modules, I started to read them and take a lot of notes. During this process, I decided to change some things in LMoP, so both modules would work better together. Here are my toughs:
1. First, I picked almost all side quests hooks and transformed them in vague story backgrounds; players will pick one or two of those backgrounds to their characters they will start the adventure at level 2, already in Phandelver.
2. I took that approach because, in my opinion, the adventure start is too much railroaded. That way, characters will meet in Phandelver, and will be able to choose what to do in whatever order they wish. The only exception will be Echo Wave Cave, because they will only fun the location of the place when they finish the Redbrands (probably, the very first encounter will be the fight with the Redbrands in a scene inside the tavern, were all characters will be at dinner time, putting them to work together).
3. Nezznar will be an outcast novice Lolth Pristess, trying to gain a hold of the magical properties of the mine. She is acting alone, trying to prove her worth to the Demon Queen. Her main objective is to build a drow outpost in the region, to gather slaves and use the mine and forge to produce magic weapons, as well as ascending in drow society.
4. In this scenario, she will be trying to unite the Cragmaw goblins (maybe the Old Owl Well orcs too) under her command, and is manipulating the Redbrands to do the dirty work for her. Her ultimate plans is enslave all of her minions, but for now, she will be in need of them.
5. This is the motive behind the Redbrands capturing people and holding them; Nezznar plans to send the prisoners as slaves to the Underdark, using them as coin for drow support in her plans.
6. I plan two possible outcomes for the end of the adventure. If Nezznar is defeated or captured, the characters will discover information indicating that she was in contact with other drow. They discover a meeting point where she planned to deliver the slaves and when the players investigate the place, they are captured and end at the beginning of the OotA adventure. If she scape, she will return with a large force of drow that decided to help her, and the players get captured, ending at Out of the Abyss start.
7. After OotA, my idea is to build my on adventure, where the characters rise from the Underdark and repel the drow invaders from the area of Phandalin ( this will be at a lvl range 15-20), ending the campaign.
Well, it is clear that in my version of the facts, a lot of things will change in the history of the area, but nothing that will cause a huge impact in the rest of the world.
Where I use Phandelver as a place, and not as the module name, read Phandalin, please.
This is super helpful, thanks! I’d love to get your overall rating on each of the other modules, which might help inform which one I DM with my group next.
Sorry, very noob question coming in. Do any of these follow-on come with boards? If not, are there boards that could be purchased that follow these stories? I had a blast escorting the caravan and my friend (the DM) had a board for that mission. My friends and I prefer to have a board to play on but when I look up your recommendations, they all seem to be books.
I do not believe so – most of the adventures have a LOT of different locations, so maps for them are tricky. (Some of the artists sell digital images of the maps).
Products like the the Dungeon Tiles (in city, dungeon and wilderness) can be used – https://amzn.to/337sLST – or perhaps a dry-erase board.