D&D 5E Lost Mine of Phandelver tips n tricks

[wedgeski]

Hmm. This adventure played really, really well for my group. I might do Cragmaw Castle differently, if I were to run it again. It turned into a slug-fest with a couple of failed Stealth checks at the rear of the castle leading to an all-out brawl in one of the back rooms, but the players seemed to love it, so no harm done. I would agree that Wave Echo Cave is a bit...flat, but they haven't quite finished that yet, so I'll reserve judgement.

Overall, I found very little to fault, especially in Phandalin itself, with a variety of interesting people and affiliations to muck around with. The party is regenerating the manor as a base of operations and it seems Phandalin will become their home for the forseeable future. With Gundren likely to return triumphant and promptly put Halia out of business, the adventure hooks practically write themselves in the run-up to Princes of the Apocalypse.

 

[Cernor]

In my game, I turned everything up to 11 to see how the players dealt with it. I made Phandalin a police state under the thumb of the Redbrands Ruffians, Cragnaw Castle was inhabited (with a few exceptions) by hobgoblins rather than goblins, and Wave Echo Cave has a *lot* more enemies, with combat setting off a timer until a random encounter shows up.

So far they've seemed to enjoy it, although they've only just started Wave Echo Cave.

 

[iserith]

Very nice! I hope you had background music done by Ennio Morricone.

Oh yes, I found a lot of similar music on Soundcloud to score the adventure.

 

[jayoungr]

I'd have pushed harder for my players to use some of the pregen backgrounds, even though they wanted to roll their own characters. Maybe I'd have extracted the background elements and presented them in a list to select from, like in the HotDQ book. As it was, I ended up with a party of four PCs who had no connection to anyone or anything in the area, and they all had Flaws that led them to not want to interact with any of the NPCs either. That made it hard to get them into the story.

(Edited to remove an extra word that got into a sentence somehow.)

 

[Nebulous]

I would spend more time fleshing out Phandalin. I added several NPC's but the town deserved even more attention.

Yes, flesh out the NPCs in Phandalin far more than I did. The party met them a couple times, but not much evolved from it.

 

[Nebulous]

Cragmaw could have had a bit more to it. It basically became one big fight in my game. The wasn't a huge fan of the final dungeon either. The actual "forge of spells" didn't make much of an appearance. I think that making the forge an active part of the final battle would make things way cooler, and maybe the eye monster would last longer too!

My guys actually skipped Cragmaw Castle. I had it all printed out and everything, ready to roll (I can use it later for something, so it's not wasted). In hindsight, I'd like it to be more interesting though. Most, if not ALL of the stuff in there are just monsters to kill with no good story or hooks or surprises.

 

[Nebulous]

Overall, I found very little to fault, especially in Phandalin itself, with a variety of interesting people and affiliations to muck around with. The party is regenerating the manor as a base of operations and it seems Phandalin will become their home for the forseeable future. With Gundren likely to return triumphant and promptly put Halia out of business, the adventure hooks practically write themselves in the run-up to Princes of the Apocalypse.

I can't find anything to really fault in LMoP, it was really good. I wish I could have timed it better with the release of Princes, it would have been an excellent segue. That said, even though my players will have new characters for PotA, I can probably plant little hints about Phandalin and Phandelver and Neverwinter that they'll appreciate.

 

[wedgeski]

I can't find anything to really fault in LMoP, it was really good. I wish I could have timed it better with the release of Princes, it would have been an excellent segue. That said, even though my players will have new characters for PotA, I can probably plant little hints about Phandalin and Phandelver and Neverwinter that they'll appreciate.

I got a bit lucky with the timing. I had intended to go straight into the middle bit of Hoard, but with (what looks to be) a better option just around the corner, I only needed to keep them busy for a few sessions and their buy-in at Phandalin makes it easy. I'll be pulling some of the better bits of Hoard for that purpose.

 

[jusdup]

Did any of you happen to tweak any of the NPC's at all? Adjust stats or motivations?

 

[iserith]

Did any of you happen to tweak any of the NPC's at all? Adjust stats or motivations?

I changed up quite a bit to accommodate the silly Western theme. Here's a list of NPCs and services that I provided to the players:

The Lord's Alliance became Hell's Cargo and was an all-tiefling agency that dealt in banking and transport. Thus, Sildar became Sildar "Snowball" Hellwinter. Iarno/Glasstaff became Hex Arcana (who had a big ol' belt buckle that read "Don't Mess With Hexes"). And so on.

I re-labeled the map as this: Fandango. And I did a write-up of the first session here. (I hate writing the things, so I didn't detail future sessions.)