Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk is a 2023 campaign adventure published by Wizards of the Coast that takes characters from levels 1 through 12. It incorporates the excellent starter set adventure The Lost Mine of Phandelver, and then continues onwards for seven more levels of exciting adventure.
Or at least, they hope you’ll find it exciting. The new material involves a plot by mind flayers to turn the folk of Phandalin, a very small village on the Sword Coast, into mind flayers. Unfortunately for the designers of The Shattered Obelisk, they released it in the same year as Baldur’s Gate 3, the multi-Game of the Year-award winning computer game that featured a plot by mind flayers to turn the folk of Baldur’s Gate, one of the largest cities on the Sword Coast, into mind flayers.
On about every level, it doesn’t come off well in comparison.
It’s not like Wizards of the Coast were unaware of what Larian Studios were doing. It’s a little baffling what they chose as the main storyline for the new material, but, honestly, it could work. All it required was ingenuity and a care for detail.
Oh dear.
A care for detail is one of the aspects you could not legitimately argue is part of this adventure. Again and again we see that the Wizards team botched it. As they attempted to make the Lost Mine section more diverse and less accessible for new DMs, in addition to removing tutorial text, they removed key pieces of information. (The treasure that has the map you were looking for is now gone!) A few NPCs had their gender and races changed so they weren’t all middle-aged human men… but then in the new material, one is back to their original state.
A pantry leads to a bedroom instead of the kitchen. You are told that the players could have discovered a secret entrance to a stronghold in the previous section, but there’s no mention of it anywhere. A goblin raid takes a lot of prisoners from Phandalin (ten or more), but in the chapter where the raid occurs and the party start their investigation, there’s no mention of the prisoners anywhere – and in the next chapter it assumes the players already know.
Can you get past this sloppiness and enjoy the adventure? You can, but as I kept finding error after error, I began to wonder how the process at Wizards of the Coast had gotten so bad to allow this.
The new material is serviceable. You can have fun with it. I think the overall storyline is simple and not that evocative, but it basically works. To be fair, it’s rarely the storyline that gets people excited about D&D games, it’s how they get implemented. Are the NPCs and monsters interesting and entertaining? Are the locations and treasures fun to explore and find?
In those aspects, the adventure wanders between middling and good. I tend to think the side content in the new material can be inspired. There’s a sequence of encounters towards the end of the adventure where players find clues about a group of Yugoloth mercenaries, before finally encountering the main bulk of the force. And, because of how it’s written, they get to have meaningful choices about how they treat with the Yugoloths. Can they get them on their side, or will it all end in violence?
Environmental storytelling, in particular, tends to be superior here. Over and over again I kept finding things I liked. It’s worth reading the adventure just to get a feel for how you can create dungeons with clues of what else is going on.
When you get to the main dungeon designs – and the new material involves a lot of dungeons – things get a lot less inspired. There’s a dungeon called the Briny Maze that looks like the interior of a big brain. Really cool concept. And lots of rooms to explore, plus some interesting ways of opening doors. Love this stuff. But when you actually analyse the structure, it’s a linear dungeon where you have to visit every room. (Perhaps you miss two).
Just to emphasise the poor design, in the penultimate room you meet an NPC who wants something from you (as it turns out, to find those Yugoloth mercenaries), and in return… can tell you what other monsters are in the dungeon. The dungeon that you had to go into every room before you found the NPC.
A previous dungeon includes a hidden chamber that you need to use levers to rotate into position… but you need to use the levers to progress further into the dungeon in the first place, so the mystery of the hidden chamber never features.
But it’s not all bad. There’s another rotating room in a different dungeon, which the players have to rotate in various ways to reach all the areas of that dungeon. It’s not complicated, but it feels really good. You can befriend NPCs who can help you negotiate challenges. There’s an immovable rod in the best place I’ve seen – my players loved it!
My group of experienced players didn’t have much trouble with most of the monsters. Some of the revisions to the Lost Mine section make it harder, which is very puzzling given that the initial goblin caves already had a reputation as a character-killing arena. Later on, it got easier.
However, the final set of encounters against a lot of mind flayers and related creatures with area effect attacks that could stun the entire party felt incredibly misjudged. With DC 17 and 19s, non-standard areas (not the cones you expect), these are TPKs waiting to happen. In a couple of them, the 10 Intelligence fighter never got to act. He spent all of the combats stunned.
Honestly, I found the final encounters to be underwhelming. There isn’t that much build-up for the final bosses. They don’t have personalities the players have witnessed. It’s fine, but it’s not more than that – and the fights themselves are terrible.
As for the big mystery of the Mysterious Obelisks that Wizards was hyping up? It doesn’t live up to the hype. Perhaps they’ll return in the Vecna adventure, but for now, they feel like a massive let-down.
I recently posted my rankings of the various Campaign Adventures published by Wizards of the Coast. I gave this adventure a “D”. If the material was error-free, I’d probably give it a “C” – it’s not unplayable by any stretch of the imagination. Just often uninspiring or with baffling choices. (One of the stronger parts of Phandalin was the range of NPCs you could interact with. The new material ignores most of them and introduces new NPCs to help you. Why?)
It’s not unplayable, but it does have errors. It has really bad design choices. It’s not an adventure I can recommend.
The Lost Mine of Phandelver section, despite some of the botched revisions, remains of a very high quality. It is a pity that the new material doesn’t even come close to matching it.
Agreed. I just used the original Mines of Phandelver, which is a classic at this point and much better than the version in this adventure. Run as written, Phandelver and below is a letdown and the changes they made to Phandalin are baffling, to say the least.
Would you consider posting those new rankings here? I deleted the social media formerly know as Twitter but I’d love to see your thoughts, particularly about the various anthologies of short adventures.
It’s up now!
This is one of the biggest WTFs out of the actual RPG team at Wizards (as opposed to the C-suite or marketing people or whatever). It’s such an actual failure and they patted themselves on the back about it so much in the marketing lead-up. Personally, I think so much of this could have been cool – doing a sequel to the Starter Set adventure as a way of bookending 5E is a cool idea. Having a major crisis in Phandalin occur that maybe explains why Gundren Rockseeker has packed up and left by the time of “Orrery of the Wanderer” five years later is a cool idea. Doing something with mind flayers around when BG3 was finally coming out, good idea. Making it different by involving the Far Realm, cool idea. But it fails over and over again. It vandalizes the original adventure in its editing attempts and makes it worst to run. It doesn’t actually tie into all the other 5E Phandalin adventures well *at all*, basically ignoring them. It wastes the mind flayers, and manages to somehow completely ignore opportunity to bring back the cool concept of Thoon from 3E and 4E, it’s yet again another 5E adventure where we fight a CR 10 “god”, and the Far Realm as presented just IMO isn’t weird or inhospitable enough. It’s an adventure that promises body horror and madness and extreme dangers and doesn’t deliver on any of that because the RPG team seems *way too tepid* in the kind of tone and adventures they want to deliver – body horror that doesn’t change anything mechanically, a realm of insanity that invokes no sanity related conditions, extreme dangers that are appropriate for level 10 characters, etc. etc. It all feels like D&D with kid gloves on.
And yeah, that’s before getting to the absolutely abysmal editing job that leaves the entire product feeling immensely unfinished, as if the “adults” on the team were all so focused on the revised core rulebooks and let the “kids” make a book on their own and they just weren’t ready.
It worries me immensely that it seems like Vecna: Eve of Ruin, the big giant edition capping 50th anniversary setting hopping mega-adventure, seems to have the same project lead. I don’t wanna blame her for Phandelver’s failures – maybe’s it’s the lead editor’s fault, but damn like he should know better since he’s been working on D&D since 3E. And Amanda Hamon may be relatively new to D&D but she worked for Pathfinder before that, like it’s not her first rodeo, so just where in the process did everything break down?
Was Kim Mohan *really* the one holding the ship together all this time? (Erin Evans said that she was once told, this would be like 15 years ago now, that there was no style guide to reference because Kim was the style guide)