D&D 5E Phandelver first game experience

[Agglomérante]

So, in a nutshell, per the book (which i need to sit down and read this weekend) what IS going on the mine?

Difficult monsters lie between the territory that the Drow has claimed and the Forge of Spells. So he's snookered when the players arrive.

Lethal encounters:

Rooms 9 and 12, the great cavern (ghouls) and smelter cavern (zombies and flameskull), are lethal.

So are rooms 18 and 19 experienced together (which is likely), the collapsed cavern and the temple of dumathoin: bugbears, doppleganger, Nezznar, giant spiders.

Someone else gave me some ideas to vastly expand the scope of the final scenario, and i guess I could do that. I was going to layer The Seven Pillar Hall onto Wave Echo just to see what would happen. When I ran Thunderspire for 4e i actually printed the whole map out and would love to have the chance to use it again.

There could be a lesser spellforge in the upper mines level, and then the Greater Spellforge in the lower Seven Pillar Hall.

Tricky. Don't forget the mine's supposed to be lost, and not just to surface dwellers.

 

[Nebulous]

yikes, 18 and 19 does sound very bad, especially for level 4 party....

 

[Nebulous]

I'd like to add enough content to get them into 5th level. So that's going to be roughly around 4-5 game sessions.

 

[Agglomérante]

I think they're supposed to be 5th level upon finished LMoP. I'd been hoping to get my group of 6 to 6th level with my expansion, but it's a crazy amount of experience (45,000). That's a lot of encounters.

Consider adding:

• a Stone Guardian guarding a vault
• an epic vault , but most of its mithril ingots destroyed with an infestation of obese (move 20") Rust Monsters
• mithral armour as treasure. This is the right PC level for it, and it really makes sense here. There might be many suits waiting to be enchanted, and being mundane they won't necessarily fit. Roll race, height and weight.
• the basic idea from the Pool of Unmaking (p.4) from the free pdf, 5 Room Dungeons. A place that creates magical items would need such a pool for disenchanting magic gone wrong, as mistakes do happen as they say. I've added it as a cistern, protected by a Stone Guardian, but not labelled as the Pool of Unmaking.
• a purple worm hole, which if followed for 5 miles, leads to it's natural cavern home. It's long dead, but lives on as a ridiculous purple worm skeleton, which will swallow the PCs to no effect. Scale the hp down and the damage output and it'll be fine. Xenophobic Myconids inhabit the natural cavern.
• a xorn and an umber hulk as potential random encounters in the many miles of (otherwise boring) mine lodes the characters could follow

 

[Nebulous]

I think they're supposed to be 5th level upon finished LMoP. I'd been hoping to get my group of 6 to 6th level with my expansion, but it's a crazy amount of experience (45,000). That's a lot of encounters.

Well, my group also SKIPPED Cragmaw and none of the other side quests, like Wyvern's Tor. So they're just freshly 4th level.

 

[Nebulous]

Consider adding:

• a Stone Guardian guarding a vault
• an epic vault , but most of its mithril ingots destroyed with an infestation of obese (move 20") Rust Monsters
• mithral armour as treasure. This is the right PC level for it, and it really makes sense here. There might be many suits waiting to be enchanted, and being mundane they won't necessarily fit. Roll race, height and weight.
• the basic idea from the Pool of Unmaking (p.4) from the free pdf, 5 Room Dungeons. A place that creates magical items would need such a pool for disenchanting magic gone wrong, as mistakes do happen as they say. I've added it as a cistern, protected by a Stone Guardian, but not labelled as the Pool of Unmaking.
• a purple worm hole, which if followed for 5 miles, leads to it's natural cavern home. It's long dead, but lives on as a ridiculous purple worm skeleton, which will swallow the PCs to no effect. Scale the hp down and the damage output and it'll be fine. Xenophobic Myconids inhabit the natural cavern.
• a xorn and an umber hulk as potential random encounters in the many miles of (otherwise boring) mine lodes the characters could follow

Some good ideas there. I still might tack on the 7 Pillar Hall as a separate complex not really associated with the Lost Mine, just to flesh it out. Heck, i could even have the Black Spider escape to there and the PCs follow him.

 

[Nebulous]

Session #9


https://app.box.com/s/yxndyo29sxluf8gxeyas

 

[Gilladian]

I expanded the lake into a huge underground sea. My players have not explored it, because they decided fetching in a boat would be too much work.

 

[Nebulous]

I've been wondering if I should expand the water area as well. Would certainly make it far creepier.

 

[Nebulous]

I expanded the lake into a huge underground sea. My players have not explored it, because they decided fetching in a boat would be too much work.

But seriously, in the last update, they wouldn't even enter a ROOM with a small amount of water, much less get on a boat in a black ocean of it. Water terrifies them.