This week I want to use my weekly thoughts blog post to go ahead and get another module review out of the way, but I will say that I recently reflected on how Wizards of the Coast launched Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. They did a marvelous job of getting their old fans/customers interested as well as attracting a new audience. The 5E Starter Set module was a big part of that, especially since it continues to be sold at many stores in the board game section (thus appealing to people looking for a new game to play) and comes prepackaged with a set of dice.
The Lost Mine of Phandelver
The D&D 5E Starter Set adventure is called "Lost Mine of Phandelver" and was created for 1st level adventuring parties, taking the characters all the way to 5th level. The product came in a nice box that really is bigger than it needs to be; I put several other older modules inside the box for storage when I added it to my shelf.
One of my favorite elements of the product was the inclusion of 5 pregenerated character with backgrounds custom-tailored for the adventure and specifics about how to level them up through level 5. The pregens included (a hill dwarf cleric with a soldier background, a lightfoot halfling rogue with a criminal background, a human fighter with a folk hero background, a human fighter with a noble background, and a high elf wizard with an acolyte background. The rogue is shown below:
Wizards of the Coast has also released a PDF file with the pregens as a free download from their website (along with many other useful resources). Of course my players knew we were getting involved in a longer campaign so they chose to make their own characters, but I used some of the pregens as NPCs.
The module made for a fun experience for both me as a DM and for my players. I think we played 5 sessions at about 5-6 hours each going through the material so there's probably 20-30 hours of material (depending on how your group plays, of course). My main criticisms of the adventure were that (1) the beginning was a potential TPK if the dice had been different and (2) the side quests seemed unnecessary to my group at first because they bought into the urgency of needing to rescue the kidnapped dwarf (and thus they didn't want to waste time on side quests).
As usual, I also did my research on the Forgotten Realms lore from previous editions (and video games) so I could include elements from 4E and Helm's Hold; I understand the lack of inclusion of the extra details because this was an "intro to D&D" product and I certainly had access to the lore that I wanted to add in for my players.
Overall I give the module a rating of 7 out of 10 because it was wonderful but, in addition to the previous issues I mentioned, I also had to rework the town of Thundertree (since there was a strange druid NPC (who I felt should have been more helpful and more powerful) and a green dragon that was too high of a CR for the party at the time).
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