The game of Dungeons & Dragons runs on rules. Something I expect the designers of the game to do is respect those rules. In this case, from Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, they did not. In the original version of this room in The Lost Mine of Phandelver, there are two bandits. The revision, which keeps adding monsters to make it a more challenging … Continue reading I hate “Just handwave it”
My group is playing through Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk on every Monday evening. (I will get to finishing the Dragonlance reports, I promise – I just wanted to get this down while it was fresh). We are playing on Roll20 using D&D Beyond (Beyond20 integration). Skype for voice. Two players are quite experienced, the third, playing a sorcerer, not so much. An NPC … Continue reading Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, session 1
We played the final session of our Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign this weekend. It was a longer session than usual, which was devoted entirely to the exploration of the Wave Echo Mine. However, “longer” in my hands is still fairly short – it was about four hours in total. The exploration of the mine can take a lot longer, especially if you play up … Continue reading Examining Phandelver: Mine Minis
My latest session of Lost Mine of Phandelver found the player characters in the hills, having run out of clues and not sure of where to go next. Whenever a mystery needs to be solved for the plot to progress, you have the potential that the players reach a dead end. They might not have found the clues, they might have killed the NPCs rather … Continue reading Examining Phandelver: Getting Back on Track
One of the excellent aspects of Lost Mine of Phandelver is that it includes a number of side-quests. These are quests which don’t advance the main storyline that you can get from NPCs you meet. Side quests allow a Dungeon Master to present a view of ongoing life in the world. Necromancers investigate buried ruins (and cause problems with wandering zombies), orcs strike from a … Continue reading Examining Phandelver: Side Quests
Many of my reviews are written as “capsule” reviews, which is to say, reviews where I’ve read the product but haven’t played through it. The sheer amount of product against the number of hours I have available to play games necessitates that. For products which I do have the chance to play, it’s something of a relief. My judgement as to whether it’s a good … Continue reading D&D Review: D&D Starter Set
The final session of my Friday campaign playing through Lost Mine of Phandelver was missing Adam’s wizard, but with everyone else present. It was also over a month ago; I’ve discovered I’m pretty good at writing session reports when the campaign is still ongoing, but the final reports of a campaign? Those I’m hopeless at. However, better late than never, so here’s an abbreviated description … Continue reading Secrets of the Lost Mine (Friday session 5)
The fifth session of Lost Mine was a fairly short session, delayed as we waited for people to return from dinner, and it was spent entirely in the confines of Cragmaw Castle as the group went through two rather big battles that used a lot of the battlemat. By the end of it, the party were rather hurt, but there were a lot of dead … Continue reading Lost Mine of Phandelver – Saturday session 5
As it turns out, running two groups through Lost Mine of Phandelver, each fortnightly and each offset from the other by a week is not entirely conducive to me remembering everything that happened in a session. These reports, therefore, are terribly important for reminding myself of what occurred in the previous session! We had five players at this session of the Saturday group: Jesse, Tait, … Continue reading Lost Mine of Phandelver – Saturday session 4
My fortnightly campaign of Lost Mine of Phandelver continued for my Friday group last week. We took up the adventure with the group resting in a room with a number of sarcophaguses – and not checking the nearby door which actually led to a prison where a couple of Redbrand Ruffians were standing guard, having heard the fight the group had had with the skeletons … Continue reading Lost Mine of Phandelver – Friday session 3
