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

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Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk” is a must-have for Dungeons & Dragons adventuring paries. Its captivating storyline, diverse content, and thoughtful design make it a fantastic addition to any campaign. Whether you’re a Dungeon Master looking for a new adventure to challenge your players or a player seeking an exciting journey, this book delivers on all fronts. There have been a variety of official materials that use Phandalin as a set piece. Whether you’re looking for an introduction to Dungeons & Dragons, a classic D&D adventure with a quintessential dungeon crawl, or some good old monster-hunting action, there’s something for everyone: As a cleric, druid, wizard, or other spellcasting class, you may not be used to thinking about how you can tweak your spells during combat. You’ve never had to consider whether life would be better if bane could be cast at 130 feet; what good would it have done you? Come, think like a sorcerer. Tell magic that it can be better. On that note, it feels weird that “take a decent Tier 1 sandbox and then awkwardly bolt a Tier 2 railroad onto it” should be a recognizable formula from Wizards of the Coast, but I guess somebody thinks that’s a good structure for a campaign.

Players who continue on through The Shattered Obelisk also get to face off against the idea of otherworldly threats that recent games and entertainment like Baldur's Gate 3 and Stranger Things have continued to bring to the public psyche. Should I Buy Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk? But don't toss these spent gems in the trash when their power has been used up; they're worth 50 gp once they run out of magic! ( Spell scrolls could not be reached for comment at this time.) One of the hallmarks of memorable adventure is when seeds of information planted earlier on blossom into realizations of what is to come, or provide hints on how to overcome a particular obstacle. Laying this groundwork as a DM is extremely rewarding when it ultimately pays off. Fortunately, these seeds are plenty and scattered throughout this first chapter, offering bountiful opportunity to capture your players’ engagement. The townsfolk of Phandalin are used to swapping stories with merchants and other passersby. Maybe they’ll tell your party about their farmer friend who’s having an issue with their crops due to a strange blight.While the core quests remain the same, tweaks have been made all over. This includes rewritten flavor text, adjusted 5e encounters, and NPCs with swapped genders. Here's where it gets weird. The Lost Mines of Phandelver has been out for so long and is so widely available, being actively promoted for new players, it's going to be hard to find people who have been playing D&D who don't already know what half of this book is about.

How do you manage to make mind crystals available in your game? While it’s always “safer” to err on the side of too few, you can often be a bit more generous with single-use items like these. Your players still must use action economy and consume a spell slot when using a mind crystal. Plus, unlike some other single-use items such as potions of healing, a spell can outright fail, consuming the mind crystal’s magic all the same. You may approach these items differently if the party already has a sorcerer, as you don’t want to hand out so many that the sorcerer feels like their class features aren’t uniquely useful. The Spider, who is the main mastermind villain of Lost Mine of Phandelver, seeks the Forge of Spells. Maybe he could also be looking for pieces of the shattered obelisk, allowing us to plant lore in his lair.

Is Phandelver and Below good or bad?

The new material begins with psionic goblins vandalizing and disrupting the Phandalin region, searching for pieces of broken magical obelisk, which is one of the ancient Netherese obelisks mentioned in other adventures. In this case, mind flayer fanatics who worship the Far Realm godlet Ilvaash are trying to reassemble the obelisk and use it to power a ritual that will turn humanoids into mind flayers and bring the godlet's power to Faerun. Phandalin is a small town with just a little over 1,000 residents. Compared to big cities like Waterdeep or Neverwinter, both of which have hundreds of thousands of residents, it's a cozy place to start an adventure. The population of Phandalin is primarily human, with a small number of gnomes and dwarves, and an even smaller number of D&D's other races. It offers a slow introduction to the different cultures of the Forgotten Realms, allowing both new DMs and players to get comfortable in a fantasy setting with the potential to expand as the game does.

After the release of Rime of the Frostmaiden, the D&D design team moved away from the Forgotten Realms for subsequent campaigns (with their primary focus on Dragonlance), leaving many fans to believe that was the last they’d see of the mysterious artifacts. Until now… You can access all of the monsters and magic items from Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk in and out of the game. The players must journey through a portal and into the Far Realm, where they’ll have to confront Ilvaash himself, while navigating an array of horrific creatures and an interdimensional labyrinth with the power to shatter players’ sanity. In the end, it will take everything the players have to stop Ilvaash and save the people of Phandalin from a fate worse than death. Note: This review isn’t going to spill the beans about everything going on with the Shattered Obelisk (i.e., the parts of this book from levels 5-12), but it does have some high-level spoilers. It’s less concerned about spoiling the contents of The Lost Mine of Phandelver, given that the adventure is almost 10(!) years old and the fact that most of the readers of this review have probably already played through it. And, ultimately, this is really unsurprising. Because the Cylons Wizards’ designers don’t have a plan. They never had a plan. “Weird obelisk” is a common genre trope, so they just coincidentally showed up as flavor text in a bunch of different adventures. Then fans noticed the “pattern” and created a Grand Conspiracy out of it. In the context of The Shattered Obelisk as a book, this doesn’t even count as a flub: The book doesn’t need or even seem to want a grand “truth about the Obelisks,” so it doesn’t matter that one isn’t included.

Retains the beloved Lost Mine of Phandelver quests that unfold into a brand-new adventure with classic D&D themes and a tinge of horror Uncover a new threat to Phandalin in this timeless dungeoneering adventure for the world's greatest roleplaying game. Between the touched-up Lost Mines of Phandelver content, and the new Shattered Obelisk questline I find that the overall collection sits in a bit of a strange place between celebrating nostalgia and taking a step forward.

I just want to start playing with my friends!” Then let us boil down our advice and deliver the best tips for running the first chapter of Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk: The titular shattered obelisk is a Netherese artifact. The original adventure includes a Netherese archaeological expedition, so you could plant links there. If you want to throttle the availability of these items, perhaps in your world, they are the personal invention of an NPC, or must be created by a magical being such as a dragon, genie, or giant. Regardless of how plentiful or rare these items are in your world, believe in yourself—if you could DM for a party with a sorcerer, you can handle whatever shenanigans your players would throw at you after they find a couple of mind crystals. FAQ: Mind Crystals The story is set in Phandalin, a small town located in the Sword Coast region of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting and is broken out into the following chapters. Notably, the first four chapters are all from the original Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign, and have been left largely as-is in Phandelver and Below. Chapter 1: A Dangerous JourneySpell suggestions: charm person, phantasmal killer, silvery barbs, thaumaturgy How to UseMind Crystalsas a Dungeon Master Artist: PINDURSKI New interior and cover artwork (including the new alternative cover, which showcases the horror aspects of the campaign)