Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk (Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Book)

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This is especially useful for session zero, as you'll need to establish what type of content your players want and what they're comfortable with. Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk is an excellent update to The Lost Mines of Phandelver with an additional 7 levels of adventure for a party. When not writing for CNET you can find him riding a bike, running around in Jedi robes, or contributing to WOSU public radio's Tech Tuesday segment. After a thorough readthrough, the verdict is this: Phandalin’s transformation is by no means seamless, but its new form is well worth exploring if you’re an adventurer who doesn’t mind a bit of squishy body horror. If they do, some very surprising things will happen with severe consequences, but they will also meet the entity trapped inside the obelisk.

This adventure also has some of my favorite dungeon designs I've seen in published 5e content including a dungeon with rotating passageways, and more naturally shaped dungeons including one shaped like a brain.It's well balanced, replayable at nearly every skill level, and very easy to spin into a larger adventure you've built on your own. The story begins with a party of adventurers on their way to deliver supplies to the small town of Phandalin. I think there was a strong desire from folks in the studio to preserve Lost Mines of Phandelver in a hardcover book – which was just a booklet in the starter set”, she says. Vecna was first seen in the Greyhawk setting but has also made appearances in Critical Role’s Exandria.

Whether it is news, reviews, features, or guides – we've been focusing on interesting games both big and small since 2013. If you want to keep this adventure short and sweet, feel free to omit mention of these unusual goblins! When supernatural forces later begin to warp Phandalin and its inhabitants, your party's favorite friend will be first on their mind!Players begin a familiar dungeon-crawling adventure at level one, and they’ll face a crisis of unexpected scale (and weirdness)by the time they reach level 12. New DMs won't find this version of The Lost Mines as helpful, explaining to the DM what rules they'd need to understand themselves or be able to explain to their players. Jerel has been writing in games media for years focusing on industry diversity, and loves dissecting video game narratives. With a healthy mix of combat, investigation, and getting lost in the small area Phandalin players get to experience a quintessential high fantasy adventure.

It enhances the original Lost Mines of Phandelver adventure and allows you to stop the adventure there or continue it into a new plot line. An important thing to know about the back half of this adventure is the survival of the players and a happy ending is not a guarantee. Cameron Powell is a real-life bard who accidentally dumped Charisma, and has played Purloque the loxodon cleric on Dice, Camera, Action!What begins as a strange investigation then turns into "the strangest adventure ever", with the big bad threat being kept a secret even from us. Both bring knowledge that will be invaluable to the players, either through things they know, or things they have seen. Accompanying Gundren from Neverwinter is Sildar Hallwinter, a middle-aged human and member of both the Lords’ Alliance and Waterdeep’s griffon cavalry.

The 2024 rules revisions are designed to be fully compatible with everything you’re playing today in fifth edition.The seeding of these obelisks has been part of a grander plan beginning in 2014 with the intention that each campaign and sourcebook will link into one universe. Some characters have been reimagined, such as Reidoth the Druid who is now a woman, and there are some completely new characters, including a tattooed dwarf from Neverwinter who is in Phandalin visiting her sister, and an archaeologist gnome who stumbled into a trap and became artificially aged. The adventures in the second half of the book are culminations of workings that have been going on in the background during your journey in the first half. Each of the stones matches up with one of the eight schools of magic, and during the adventure, players will be asked to participate in an experiment. New characters to meet in the adventure were also shown – including helpful university student Gwyn Oresong and unlucky archaeologist, Rivibiddel.