It's something like 14 months since the D&D Starter Set was released. Which means, of course, that it was well past time to review it! It's odd - there's no adventure I've played as much in a short period of time as this one. Three times in all, each time with a different group, and I expect that it'll come out in the future as well. Because, you know, it's a really solid adventure.
It can also be deadly. My current play of the adventure is because I did a TPK against a group in Hoard of Dragons, so I wanted to quickly get a new party up to the level where they could take over at the place the others left off. Except they ran into the Black Spider and battled foolishly - running into melee in the middle of a big room, and swiftly being surrounded by giant spiders. Actually, that was only half the group - the half who hadn't been playing Hoard with me. The group that had played Hoard knew better and ran away. They also did so before the downed characters failed their third death saves, so they're all still potentially alive. Just captured.
Useful tip: Run away before your friends die, and they exist in a Schrodinger's Cat state, potentially alive or dead.
The very first time I ran the adventure, the initial ambush saw the cleric of the group cut down by missile fire before he acted. Which meant the group started by ignoring the goblin trail and going into town and getting involved in the Redbrand storyline first. Which is really challenging as there's a HUGE difference between first and second level characters. You know that extra die worth of hit points? It really matters!
I'm yet to actually run the Green Dragon encounter. None of my three groups have discovered that quest. On the other hand, I've seen some great interaction with the banshee. One group spent the rest of the adventure avoiding the Harper in town after using her gift to ask a different question. I've only managed to work the Zhentarim agent into the adventure once. I do feel that there's a lot more townlife I can run than I have so far, but the adventure just hasn't gone that way.
When I began DMing, my first adventure to run was the venerable Keep on the Borderlands. At least, it's venerable now. It was a few years old when I tried running it (in 1985, as I recall). I was very young. I was very inexperienced. And I had absolutely no idea what to do with the actual Keep section. "Men take your horses to area 2" - this is perhaps not the best way of describing what happened as the party entered the Keep. The Caves were fine - it's easy to run dungeons. The Keep itself? That was hard!
So, I'm very happy with the way Phandalin is described. Having NPCs with quests? Very Baldur's Gate! (The Village of Hommlet managed to describe all the wrong things, IMO.) I was very fond of the village section of Keep on the Shadowfell as well, and I'm not sure which I prefer more, but Lost Mine has the better dungeons. And overall structure. And system. A lot of the problems with Keep on the Shadowfell really came down to it being 4E; the dungeon would be a lot less tedious if run at 5E speed.
The existence of the Basic Rules really makes the lack of character creation rules a non-issue for me. The rulebook in the Starter is awesome - doubly so because it's really just sections of the PHB reprinted and reorganised. You don't have the horrible surprise of finding that the game you've been playing isn't the actual game (see the 4E Red Box starter... argh!) One of my techniques for creating pregens for organised play is to only use spells found in the Starter rulebook. I can then lob it at them for detail look-up.
So, have you played the Lost Mine of Phandelver? Have you played it several times? How do you find it, and how do you think it's holding up, 14 months in?
Cheers!
It can also be deadly. My current play of the adventure is because I did a TPK against a group in Hoard of Dragons, so I wanted to quickly get a new party up to the level where they could take over at the place the others left off. Except they ran into the Black Spider and battled foolishly - running into melee in the middle of a big room, and swiftly being surrounded by giant spiders. Actually, that was only half the group - the half who hadn't been playing Hoard with me. The group that had played Hoard knew better and ran away. They also did so before the downed characters failed their third death saves, so they're all still potentially alive. Just captured.
Useful tip: Run away before your friends die, and they exist in a Schrodinger's Cat state, potentially alive or dead.
The very first time I ran the adventure, the initial ambush saw the cleric of the group cut down by missile fire before he acted. Which meant the group started by ignoring the goblin trail and going into town and getting involved in the Redbrand storyline first. Which is really challenging as there's a HUGE difference between first and second level characters. You know that extra die worth of hit points? It really matters!
I'm yet to actually run the Green Dragon encounter. None of my three groups have discovered that quest. On the other hand, I've seen some great interaction with the banshee. One group spent the rest of the adventure avoiding the Harper in town after using her gift to ask a different question. I've only managed to work the Zhentarim agent into the adventure once. I do feel that there's a lot more townlife I can run than I have so far, but the adventure just hasn't gone that way.
When I began DMing, my first adventure to run was the venerable Keep on the Borderlands. At least, it's venerable now. It was a few years old when I tried running it (in 1985, as I recall). I was very young. I was very inexperienced. And I had absolutely no idea what to do with the actual Keep section. "Men take your horses to area 2" - this is perhaps not the best way of describing what happened as the party entered the Keep. The Caves were fine - it's easy to run dungeons. The Keep itself? That was hard!
So, I'm very happy with the way Phandalin is described. Having NPCs with quests? Very Baldur's Gate! (The Village of Hommlet managed to describe all the wrong things, IMO.) I was very fond of the village section of Keep on the Shadowfell as well, and I'm not sure which I prefer more, but Lost Mine has the better dungeons. And overall structure. And system. A lot of the problems with Keep on the Shadowfell really came down to it being 4E; the dungeon would be a lot less tedious if run at 5E speed.
The existence of the Basic Rules really makes the lack of character creation rules a non-issue for me. The rulebook in the Starter is awesome - doubly so because it's really just sections of the PHB reprinted and reorganised. You don't have the horrible surprise of finding that the game you've been playing isn't the actual game (see the 4E Red Box starter... argh!) One of my techniques for creating pregens for organised play is to only use spells found in the Starter rulebook. I can then lob it at them for detail look-up.
So, have you played the Lost Mine of Phandelver? Have you played it several times? How do you find it, and how do you think it's holding up, 14 months in?
Cheers!
