How to Run Lost Mine Of Phandelver - Dungeon Master Prep

In this series I'm going to help you prepare to run the Lost Mines of Phandelver, the excellent adventure that comes with the Dungeons & Dragons Starter set. If you are going to be a player in this campaign, do not read this. There's going to be spoilers and it's going to be way less fun for you. D&D is not the kind of game where you want to read a walk through. Maybe go watch my D&D 101 series to get the rules down or check out some character creation videos on the YouTube channel.

Ok, just us Dungeon Masters now. Or potential Dungeon Masters at least. If you are not sure what it takes to be a Dungeon Master I laid it out in the last post, or you can just get a copy of the Starter Set and figure things out by doing it. That's how a lot of us got started. It's definitely how I did.

We get all the rules we need to run the game. It's 32 pages but you don't need to memorize spells or like the cost of things so there's really under 20 pages you should try to fit in your head. But the best thing in the box is the adventure: The Lost Mines of Phandelver. You don't have to read this whole thing to get started. You definitely could, the adventure is 50 pages, and you will probably feel better prepared if you do. But I am going to tell you to really focus in on the first 19 pages to get started. If you have a good grasp on part 1 and the town of Phandalin, you're going to be ready for your first couple of sessions. Highlight stuff, underline, take notes, whatever you need to feel you have a solid command of the information.

The first page and a half or so of the adventure gives us some solid advice, the rules to game by box is solid and probably worth revisiting every few sessions at first. One nitpick I will voice on the Be Consistent line is that it is OK to make a call for one session to keep things moving and then figure out the rule afterwards and apply it next session if you own it and announce it to everyone. If your players aren't mature enough to handle that, fine, pretend to be an infallible god, but otherwise, don't be afraid to correct mistakes and use temporary fixes now and then.

Background: Forge of Spells in Wave Echo Cave

We define a few terms and formatting things, and then we're into it with the Background. This is information that the Dungeon Master knows. The players are going to learn some of it organically at the table from talking to NPCs mostly. You need this in your mind so that those NPCs can know parts of it. The players may never learn the whole story and that is OK. You knowing it is going to make it easier to run the game at the table. This is a classic D&D set up and a great lesson to learn if you are thinking of homebrewing your own adventures eventually. Lost, ancient secrets, buried under a layer or layers of history. This place was built for this purpose, but then something happened, and now these things have taken over. Some players will want to learn the whole story, some will not care and just hack and slash their way to the buried treasure. It is all good. The main points you want to put in front of your players early and often is the Forge of Spells in Wave Echo Cave. That's El Dorado, Shangra La. Some people think it's a myth, some people know it exists, some people are looking for it. Gundren Rockseeker and his brothers have found it. They're keeping it secret, but the evil Black Spider found out and is trying to take it for himself. The players don't know this when Gundren hires them, but we're going to reveal a lot of it to them pretty quickly one way or another. At the start all they know is that Gundren hired them to bring a wagon of stuff from the city of Neverwinter to the small town of Phandalin. That's the adventure hook, the thing that gives the players motivation. I'm going to help you sink that hook way deeper in a moment, and to get few more hooks into the players in the process.

We get an overview of the major beats of the adventure. Again, at fifty pages it may be worth reading through or at least skimming the whole thing, but I am going to warn you not to get too far ahead of yourself. Do not fall in love with the cool monsters at the end to the point that the introductory ones feel boring. You could potentially be finishing this whole thing in like 6 or 7 sessions, but every table is different, and mine spent months playing through this, probably clocking in closer to 20 sessions all told. Things are going to go faster if your average session is four hours and you jump right in than if you are like us and could only carve out two and a half hours from everyone's busy lives, plus you spend some of that time catching up and ordering delivery or whatever.

Think about pacing as far as getting everybody involved and having a good time, but don't worry so much about progress It's game night, relax, have fun, let it flow. And enjoy the fact that you only need to be one or two steps ahead of the players. I promise things will pick up as everyone learns the basics of game play and becomes more invested in the story.

Next up we're told all of this is happening on the Sword Coast of the Forgotten Realms. There is a ton of lore about the Forgotten Realms that you are free to look up or leave alone. I suggest you leave it as a new DM and know that you can always mine it for inspiration if you want to later. Feel free to make up or change anything, this is your version of this world, but if the players decide they want to know what's going on in the Mere of Dead Men know a little Googling will get you a lot of info. Part 3 has a lot of room to improvise if you want to try your hand at making your own material, and a little inspiration goes a long way. But before we get into that:

Know Your NPCs

I want you to know parts 1 and 2 backwards and forwards before you sit down to run this. We're actually going to start by studying up on part 2 and writing down every important NPC on page 15. We're adding whatever relevant information the adventure gives us, and we'll leave room to add notes later. I want you to add Gundren Rockseeker and make note of his brothers names: Nundro and Tharden. We're also going to add Reidoth the Druid on there. For good measure let's also do Iorno Albrek (Glasstaff,) and Nezznar the Black Spider. Knowing your NPCs is a huge part of preparation, and having an easy reference all in one place is going to be very helpful at the table. Have it in your notes, maybe even attach it to your DM screen. I find the act of writing things down helps me remember things even before I refer to the notes.

This is also great opportunity to make some changes and decisions about these people too. Do you think this name is stupid? Change it, it's your world. Do you think it would be better if this one was a different gender, or a different race, go for it. You want this one to talk like some famous actor, or your mutual friend, or have some particular quirk or mannerism that will help you embody them, perfect. Each one of these NPCs has a quest for the party, except for the Innkeeper, who is mostly here to point our heroes to all of these other people.

We're going to make a special note of the four NPCs on this list that are members of factions. We're also going to mark Reidoth as a member of the Emerald Enclave. Factions are an often underutilized tool that can be super useful in getting information, quests, aid, and even different kinds of rewards to the player characters. They build a richer world and can be key to moving things forward. These are the main NPCs we can have swoop in to make story and adventure happen, let's be prepared to use them. Each faction is associated with a few classes, try to link each PC to a different faction representative if you can. Some players might not bite, but it can come in handy later if you get a couple connections formed.

You might be wondering why we skipped ahead and put so much focus on prepping the town, when the party is supposed to get through part 1 before they make it there. Well, first off, they might end up in town faster than you expect, this is D&D, so be ready. But the main reason is this: one of the Dungeon Master's many jobs is getting the players to actually care. It is easy to get them to care about the goblin who is trying to kill them in the heat of combat. But eventually there will come a moment where they will stop and wonder, maybe even say out loud, in character or out: “why are we doing this? Why are we risking our lives fighting these goblins? What are we doing in these caves again?” Especially if it has been weeks in real time since they set out to Do the Thing. And the answer “centuries ago gnomes, and dwarves, and human mages, made a pact and dug a mine, uncovering the magical McGuffin maker, but then the orcs came...” won't be enough sometimes for some players.

Connect the PCs to NPCs to Keep Players Motivated

Yes, it's a game, and the players need to bring their own buy in for sure, but the more ties we can give them to the world the more connected they are going to feel. Plus, the more threads they are going to have to follow to figure things out. And the more strings we the Dungeon Master are going to have to pull to get the PCs moving. So we are going to connect the player characters to the story as much as we can and we are going to use the NPCs to do it. And we are going to do a lot of that work before the game even starts, during character creation.

The NPCs the players meet in part 2 are going to point the way to what happens in part 3. I'd at least skim that section because this is where we as a DM are going to make the biggest decisions. The party is probably not going to visit all of the places between page 28-35, so you can emphasize and even cut some. This is also where I would insert my own small side quest or mini dungeon if I wanted to do a little homebrew. Tie your player's backstories to the locations and NPCs associated with the quests you want to run, and edit out the hooks to plots you don't want to run. When I ran Lost Mines of Phandelver I cut out Thundertree, and I think that might be a good move for a new DM. We'll talk about that when we get there but keep in mind you are free to change, remove, or add anything you like to this adventure. Because you are the Dungeon Master!

We've got the Dungeon Master, that's you, and then we have the players. In a perfect world we want 3-5 players. The first time I ran this adventure we had seven, sometimes eight players around this Verdigris Table, and it was a lot of fun but honestly it was a bit much for a new DM to manage. If you only have one or two players we can still make that work by using the sidekick rules. Those come from the Essentials Kit, which is an alternative starting point but I like the Starter Set adventure better. What I really like, and what I think I am going to write about at the end of this series, is combining the two to make a mega, open world sandbox adventure. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Your first time out let's keep it simple.

So you've got your players, and those players are going to need characters. The starter set actually comes with pregenerated character sheets, and those are a really nice option because it makes things easier on everybody and those characters already have ties to the world and the story of this adventure. There are other pregenerated characters sheets online, if you want more options. If you have players that are more hands on, maybe they're experienced with role playing games, be it table top or video games, they may want to create their own characters. This is also a great option because it gets the players more invested in their characters and the process will teach them a lot that they'll need to know when they play. That's kind of the best and the worst part of bringing new players through character creation, you have to know a bunch of game mechanics to fill out a character sheet. Guess who made some videos that can help with that?

As the DM you should check over the character sheets just to make sure things are correct. Players are as likely to cheat themselves as they are to give themselves something extra. We are also going to put together another tool for our prep notes or DM screen here: We are going to write down all of the PCs names, along with their passive perceptions and passive insight. I also like to have their Armor class and Hit points listed as well.

If I were starting for a brand new group of players I think I would almost definitely have a session zero. Session zero is sort of a preamble to the campaign where we lay out a foundation and maybe do character creation together. You can dive right into the action, but session zero is a great way to make sure everyone is on the same page and coming with similar expectations. If I'm preparing to run Lord of the Rings, you want Monty Python, she wants Game of Thrones, and he wants Harry Potter, we're going to have a little conflict or compromise. It's also a good time to establish boundaries, someone at the table might not want super intense blood and gore descriptions, or maybe they don't want to fight snakes because they have a phobia. Some people won't blink at anything, while other people will really not enjoy dealing with certain themes. Don't assume you know who is who, someone might have some trauma in their past that they don't want brought up during a game, or maybe someone doesn't want to deal with the spell plague in the age of Covid because it doesn't sound like a fun way to spend their couple hours of escapism. Be respectful and be kind, and as the Dungeon Master it is also on you to get the other players to be so as best you can as well.

Besides the serious side of gaming, session zero can be a blast because it is fun to make characters together. Even if we're using the premade sheets, it gives the players an opportunity to figure out how they know each other. If you can bake in party cohesion early that's great, we want a team who works together and care about each other as quickly as possible. That standoffish, distrustful character rarely plays out as fun as it sounds. Even if it is just a single connection to one other PC that's a healthy start.

This is also your chance as the Dungeon Master to work with your players to get their characters back stories to connect to the adventure. Again, if you can give each character a relationship to one of the NPCs waiting in Phandolin, even an introduction or rumor that points the way to them, that is great.

The Key: Gundren Rockseeker & Starting in the Tavern

But the main thing we want to put our focus on at first is making the player characters, and the players, the actual human beings sitting around the table, care about Gundren Rockseeker. We also want them to like Sildar, but we want to do everything we can think of to get them to love Gundren. The adventure assumes the player characters are going to spend a lot of time and effort trying to rescue Gundren, but as it's written the players don't even meet him. You can jump right in where the book tells you and ask the players how they know Gundren, but I recommend you start in a tavern (as is tradition) the night before they all hit the road. Whether this is the start of the first session or towards the end of session zero, we put the characters around a table and give them a chance to introduce themselves and interact a little. It is OK if the players just describe what their characters do, that is still role playing. We don't need to act or do the voice to play D&D. That stuff is certainly fun, but you can simply describe how your character acts and speaks. The same goes for you as the Dungeon Master, because we are going to put Gundren and Sildar at the table too. And we're going to do whatever we can to make the players like the Gundren and Sildar.

I play Gundren as something like Yukon Cornelius from that old claymation Christmas movie. He's excited and eccentric, quick to laugh, animated. He's also paying for everybody's meal, and drinks, and night at the inn. Maybe he even paid for the PCs gear too. He's a miner who found the secret mother lode and is practically bursting at the seams to get back there. That's why he and Sildar are going ahead while the party is going to pick up the wagon filled with equipment and follow after.

The first time I played Sildar I made him aloof. I thought it would be cool if he underestimated the heroes and then they would prove him wrong, gaining his respect. That was dumb, they need to rescue this guy so we want them to like him too. I made the players think he was a jerk and they barely cared if he lived or died. He almost didn't get a chance to evolve and when he did the players still basically hated him. This time out he's a friendly old grandpa type, at least at the tavern. We can turn on the grizzled veteran later, but out of the gate we want the party to care about this guy. I present him as the retired hero past his prime who is getting too old for this stuff. That makes it powerful if he takes up arms beside the PCs towards the end of part one, and have things still make sense when he doesn't join them in busting heads after that.

So we have set the table: Gundren wants to get back to town to get rich, though he's keeping the details hush hush. Sildar wants to check in on his old wizard buddy Iarno Albrek, who disappeared. The player characters all have their own reasons to get the Phandolin, and Gundren is paying them and will probably have more work for them later, and everybody loves gold. Plus the players have a bunch of cool abilities on the page in front of them that they can't wait to use. This is a great place to fade out as everyone calls it a night, and narrate the next day when Sildar and Gundren set out, the party with their wagon about half a day behind. They take the High Road south, a couple days travel before they turn onto the Triboar Trail. The High Road is civilized and well patrolled, but the Triboar Trail is more dangerous, and the party is on their guard for bandits, or worse. Half a day down the trail they round a bend and see two dead horses, splayed out in the middle of the path. If we did a session zero and character creation this might be where we leave things off for the night. It's a good, mystery cliff hanger and the players will be excited for their next session.

To amp that excitement I would consider sharing the map. The one on page 5 is for the Dungeon Master's eyes only because all of the locations are keyed, but a players version is easy to find online. There's also a nice on in the Essentials Kit if you are considering the combo. I always have been a sucker for a story that starts with a map, so I think it will get at least some of the players even more excited to start exploring this world. The only argument for holding back is to use the map as a reward later. When the last few rewards were just gold, having an NPC in town giving them precious information (maybe along with gold) can spice things up, and it's always better when you earn it.

If we have around an hour of game time left when they find the horses I would run the Goblin Ambush and get some action in. Give the players a taste of combat, get those dice rolling, and see what their characters can do. If we have more time we can push further and maybe even finish part one. Don't get locked into one option, let the game flow and as the end of your time approaches start looking for good opportunities to stop that will keep the players excited for next time. If you can end right before a combat that's usually great, so you can start the next session with a bang.

In the next post we're diving into Part 1: where the Goblin Arrows fly. It's a lot of fun, but can also be very dangerous for our baby, level one player characters. Don't worry, I'm going to help you run the ambush, and the fantastic Cragmaw Hideout, in a way that drives the story, not ends it before it's barely begun. See you next time.

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