D&D 5E Phandelver in Greyhawk

chriton227 · Aug 5, 2015

My normal group is getting ready to try 5e and as a short introductory campaign I was going to use Lost Mines of Phandelver. I prefer Greyhawk to FR for a number of reasons, so I'm looking at transplanting it to Greyhawk. Does anyone have any suggestions for locations and factions to swap out for the FR-based ones? I can dig through my Greyhawk materials to do the swap myself, but I figured if someone else had already done it and was willing to share, there isn't a need to reinvent the wheel, and I could use the time focusing on other game prep instead.

neobolts · Aug 5, 2015

Other than the starting city (Neverwinter), most of LMoP takes place in and around the backwater town of Phandalin. It doesn't appear on the FR world map for 3e or 4e, and the town is pretty light on lore. IMHO, swap out Neverwinter and you should be good to go without making changes.

neobolts · Aug 5, 2015

Oh, there's some faction lore in the game that would need to be modified. I was thinking strictly in terms of geography in my first post.

Redthistle · Aug 5, 2015

It's been a while since I played in the world of Greyhawk so I don't remember most of the place-names, but one area that came to mind would be the southern end of the range (hills? mountains?) between Hommlett and the Urnst region.

AriochQ · Aug 5, 2015

I run in Greyhawk homebrewed and most of my politics have centered around the parties involved in the Greyhawk Wars. Furyondy tries to keep Iuz in check, Shield Landers are refugees, Greyhawk tries to play diplomat and Dyvers wants to make money. Other factions also include: groups living under the lands controlled by Iuz and not happy about it, the other kingdom level participants in they Greyhawk Wars and various guilds and merchant organizations. My campaign hasn't had to include much of the rest of the world up to this point and has been centered in Furyondy.

I haven't run Phandelver so I am can't give specifics for what factions to swap out.

doctorhook · Aug 5, 2015

I don't know much about Greyhawk, but I will say that my group enjoyed the hell out of that adventure. I hope yours does to!

epithet · Aug 5, 2015

Try replacing Neverwinter with Hardby or Safeton, both of which are on the Woolly Bay. Try using Anna Meyer's fantastic map to find compatible geography.
http://ghmaps.net/greyhawk-maps/online-map/

If you want to know what the existing lore is for a place, you can look it up on Greywiki:
http://www.canonfire.com/wiki/index.php?title=Greyhawk

Mad Zagyg · Aug 6, 2015

I just finished a very successful run of the Lost Mines of Phandelver in my long-running Greyhawk campaign. I've been playing a continuous campaign since 1983, beginning in 576 cy. Now, in 2015, my campaign date is 605 cy.

I carefully considered where I wanted to place the Lost Mines adventure because it was so well written. Seriously, it's one of Wizards' best adventures in years (way better, in my opinion, than any of their two new hardcover adventure paths).

Over my many years of running the campaign there has been very little activity in the region of the Principality of Naerie (formerly Idee). I took a look at the map comparisons and found that the adventure and the accompanying maps fit startlingly well. I used the maps by Anna B. Meyer as my baseline and I layered the map from the adventure over it. I discovered that the travel distances perfectly aligned with the Sword Coast regional map.

Here are the links to two of Anna's maps that I doctored up with the Phandelver locations added (distances are accurate to the original adventure).

[close up with all locations]
http://www.battlegroundgames.com/greyhawk/naerie_map_zoom.jpg

[zoomed out map of entire region]
http://www.battlegroundgames.com/greyhawk/naerie_map_full.jpg

Hope that gives you some inspiration!

Nebulous · Aug 6, 2015

Mad Zagyg said:
I carefully considered where I wanted to place the Lost Mines adventure because it was so well written. Seriously, it's one of Wizards' best adventures in years (way better, in my opinion, than any of their two new hardcover adventure paths).

Nice maps btw. I agree that Lost Mine is one of their better adventures. I can't say if it is better than Princes yet, we are greatly enjoying that one so far, as are my players, but Princes is so much longer, easily 3 times longer, it's hard to tell. I love that it has the same author and cartographer as Lost Mine though. In fact, i would recommend to anyone running LMoP, if you want to segue easily into Princes of the Apocalypse, start planning early and you can easily dovetail the end of one into the start of the next.

doctorhook · Aug 6, 2015

Nebulous said:
Nice maps btw. I agree that Lost Mine is one of their better adventures. I can't say if it is better than Princes yet, we are greatly enjoying that one so far, as are my players, but Princes is so much longer, easily 3 times longer, it's hard to tell. I love that it has the same author and cartographer as Lost Mine though. In fact, i would recommend to anyone running LMoP, if you want to segue easily into Princes of the Apocalypse, start planning early and you can easily dovetail the end of one into the start of the next.

I have to echo this, even if we are drifting off-topic: Princes of the Apocalypse has a lot of the same production values as Lost Mine of Phandelver (including maps by the eminently talented Mike Schley).

Plus, how bad could it be to transplant the Elemental Evil storyline back into Greyhawk?