Hello there fellow Questers! I just posted my first full video review on my YouTube which you can watch below, and I wanted to share it here on my blog as well. However, instead of merely repeating what the review said, I’m going to start this series where I provide a ‘behind the curtains’ look at the review to provide some bonus content and resources that I didn’t have time to share in the video. So please, watch the video and then continue to read this bonus content!
Now that you’ve watched the review, let’s get on with the bonus content. Since this will be a lot of information, you can navigate to the parts you’re interested in using the Table of Contents below.
- Play This Adventure on StartPlaying!
- Monte Cook’s Consent in Gaming
- My Review Format
- Roleplay vs. Rewards: Should Players Get a Base Early On?
- Making The Lost Mine of Phandelver go out with a bang!
Play This Adventure on StartPlaying!
If you would like to try out this adventure as a player yourself, or to see how I run the adventure, I’m running the first part of the Campaign over on StartPlaying! Check out my calendar of available games to join over on my StartPlaying profile. If it’s your first time joining StartPlaying, here is a $10 credit for new accounts!
Monte Cook’s Consent in Gaming
I’m a big beleiver of the benefit of safety tools at the table, especially when you’re DMing for a group of people you’ve not played with much or at all. Monte Cook provides an excellent free PDF called Consent in Gaming that explains what safety tools are and how to use them at your table. For a game like The Shattered Obelisk that introduces both art and descriptions of body horror and otherworldys mosters, this is a great time to use this tool. In addition to the PDF, I’ve created a Microsoft Form version of the Consent List for people to use in my online games, and you’re free to copy and use it in your games as well.
My Review Format
For the purpose of my reviews, I don’t feel the use of numbers, percentages, or stars provide an adequte snapshop of the type of content I want to reivew. Often these review scales are subjective and fail to address that some audiences may enjoy it very differently than how the one doing the review did. I also feel it’s important to look at what the creators of the content set out to accomplish as well as any relevant context of the resources or constratins they had in bringing their vision to light. This comes into most focus when in video games, sites ues the same numerical system to rate AAA titles vs indie developed titles, which seems slightly unfair to put those on the same scale at time. Finally, I feel often people praise a product without thinking to congratulate the writers or developers that bout us that product. On the flip side, I’ve seen too many people take issue with a product that didn’t fulfill their specific desieres and they spew hate and rage towards the content creators directly and, I feel, unjustly.
All of this is why I try to frame my reviews in a way that tries to understand every game is different, the context of how it was made should be factored when providing crituqe and that who it was made for makes a big difference in who we should expect to get satisfaction from it. So I will simply provide whether I recommend a product or not, and who I recommend the product to be best suited for. I look to see how well the product satisfies, the Goals of the Creators, the Needs of the Customer, and the Evaluation of the Product. As mentioned in this video, I think the best audience for the Foundry VTT Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk module is any new DM wanting to learn both Foundry and D&D, as well as any DM that’s a fan of eldritch horror or that wants to continue the story of the Lost Mine of Phandelver. For that group, I Highly Recommend this product!
Roleplay vs. Rewards: Should Players Get a Base Early On?
In this video I talked about giving players a reason to feel more connected and invested in the town of Phandalin. I mentioned not all players are motivated by role play and how when I ran the original Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure, I let my players take over the Redband Hideout as their own headquarters. I just wanted to make a couple of clarifications on this that I didn’t have time for in the video.
First, I don’t mean to downplay the role or importance of roleplay with good NPCs or ignore that many players do indeed enjoy that aspect of the game. I just saw a number of reviews of Phandelver and Below mention the same thing and wanted to provide an alternative suggestion.
Also, some may say giving the players a ‘base’ right out of the gate is over powered but I’d simply counter with, yeah but they loved it so why not? I get there are many legitimate reasons not to do this and it could take away from the realism or the need to have the players use time and resources in finding their own lodging. But if your game is more casual and less focused on crunchy resource management then I say go for it. However, I do want to provide a bit more context on how I ran that in my adventure.
Once my players cleared out the Redband Ruffians from the Hideout, I had Harbin Wester suggest to the party that they actually take up residence in the basement hideout as both an encouragement to keep helping the town and to keep watch and make sure the Redbrands, or another group of thugs, don’t take it back over and cause more problems in town. I even used this as an opportunity to give the players unique NPC interactions in the Hideout itself, see I’m not against role-playing! When the players first entered the Hideout, they snuck up on a goblin alone in a room. I assumed they would just take him out but to my surprise, the Ranger player, who had taken goblins as a favored enemy, used their knowledge of the goblin language to interrogated the goblin and even let him live. I was impressed I ended up having this goblin devote himself to the players and when they took over the Hideout, this goblin became their housekeeper while they were away. They players also surprisingly didn’t kill the nothic right away as the Wizard specialized in aberrations and far realm knowledge, seeing this creature as an asset. So, the nothic joined their ranks and ended up being a regular in their headquarters too, though his lust for flesh did have to be abated from time to time with fallen enemies via bag of holding deliveries.
Better Downtime
I then created some downtime homebrew that the players could do in between adventures here. Since we play online using Foundry VTT and I host online on the Forge, my game world is always available so I thought it would be fun to let the players pop in and do some light crafting, shopping, selling or identifying treasure from their last adventure or simply do some training. We meet every two weeks so it turned out to be a great way to help everyone get their D&D fix during off weeks and then when we did meet, we didn’t have to spend time on the less engaging aspects and instead focus on adventuring.
Hideout Upgrades
The Redbrand Hideout was suitable for the party during the first part of the adventure but by the end of Lost Mine of Phandelver, it started to feel a little cramped. So I took it a step farther and let the players refurbish and move into a much larger dungeon featured later in the story, Cragmaw Castle, and they’re using that Headquarters to this day in our ongoing campaign. I even created a refurbished map in Dungeondraft, customizing different parts of the castle for my party specifically. Which in turn gave more downtime options as well with their upgraded fort.
Base Building Rules
There are rules out there for realistic base building, including MCDM’s Strongholds & Followers which is a great resource. I used a tweaked version of these rules to get started but as time went on, the rules began to evolve even more, especially as I continued to merge with my evolving downtime rules. There are even some base building rules in D&D’s Unearthed Arcana for the 2024 rules update, being called Bastions. But both the Stronghold and Bastion rules are heavier on realism with financial and time costs to balance the game but can be a bit overwhelming. Especially if, like my party, a lot of players are new and already trying to get the ropes of the regular rules. I think for those that want something a little more casual and fun, you can still have the option to add these bases for your party. Because if you’re in a magical world with spells like Move Earth and Wall of Stone, why would you go in debt to a slumlord when you can hire a group of Arcane Architects to help magically refurbish your old abandoned dungeons into great player headquarters!
I’ve been working on both these downtime and base building rules over the years and I’m hoping to publish them very soon so be on the lookout for them and comment down below if you would be interested in either one!
Making The Lost Mine of Phandelver go out with a bang!
Warning, story spoilers ahead: I briefly mentioned in the video that I didn’t feel the big bad at the end of Lost Mine of Phandelver lived up to the buildup throughout that adventure. Being the end of the Starter Kit and a big milestone in my first campaign, I felt the battle with the Black Spider wasn’t looking as exciting as I was hoping for. On top of that, there had already been another enemy encounter I felt didn’t live up to its potential. All over the box art and promotional art for Lost Mine of Phandelver is a menacing green dragon, that led me as a new DM, to think there would be an exciting showdown with the dragon at the end. However, this dragon Venomfang, shows up briefly once in a side quest only to bugger off mid battle. So, when it came time to prepare for the final showdown with the Black Spider, I did a little extra preparation by having a small map ready of a mountain pass. Instead of having the players face off against the Black Spider inside Wave Echo Cave, I decided to have the villain sick his spiders on the party while he made a hasty retreat through a secret passageway at the back of this final room. The passageway leads out to mountain map I had prepared and with a nice open skies above, I could kick this last battle up a notch by having Venomfang return to try and get his revenge. I was fully prepared to have him fly away again but after some crazy good rolls and impressive strategy they players manages to defeat both the Black Spider and the Dragon itself. It made for a satisfyingly epic end to the first part of our campaign and Venomfang’s head is still mounted in their keep today. Now, my party was already 5th level when they approached this fight, and they carefully managed to infiltrate Wave Echo Cave and found a room to get a long rest in before engaging their final boss. Not everyone will be that level and not every party will be able to go into that fight fully rested. And you would need to know your party enough if they could handle a young dragon at that level or be prepared to have him fly away again if need be. But for our group, it made for a much more exciting finale!
Quills & Quests 
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