Ripping apart Phandelver, getting freaky with its bones (Part 1)

As you might have heard, the Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure from the 5th Ed starter set is pretty cool for an intro adventure but needs a lot of work. This is the adventure meant to lure back bitter old timers and introduce a new generation to D&D, so it had better be good. Also, the new Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual aren't out yet, so creating new adventures from scratch is... more difficult than usual. Also also, it has the rare privilege of being an adventure out when there's only the one adventure, making it a shared experience like I haven't heard since Meepo became the star of the Sunless Citadel. So let's see what we can do with this thing!

5E really likes showing cropped portions of larger images. I dunno man.

I've started up a game with some co-workers and we're two sessions in. Character creation took about an hour and a half, which isn't great, but then we only had the one Player's Handbook and I'd added some house rule races on my laptop (more on those later). We also didn't have character sheets - I made some myself, but the office printer hates me - so there was a bit of writing and re-writing on lined paper to get everything organized. I think if we had more copies of the book and if I'd had my shit together we could easily cut that time in half, even with all the players being new to the system. Regardless, actually getting to play the same night we made characters was a welcome change from past editions.

Here's the sheet I made. See if you can guess what parts of the game I don't care about by omission!

Click to embiggen.

I: The Setting
I decided to make the setting a little more overtly post-apocalyptic than D&D assumes. The forest past the baseball field where I went to college grew out of a reclaimed landfill - the trees and ferns and fallen leaves hid most of it but sometimes you'd be walking through the woods and see an old washing machine or grocery cart sticking out of the underbrush. I wanted that sort of setting, where everything looks natural and pristine on the surface but dig down even a little and you start finding the ruined hulks of a lost age. It all happened long enough ago that no one remembers the specifics, but if players want to figure out how the demihumans are the product of genetic engineering, and the monsters are radiation-scarred mutants, and the demons and magic are from when the particle accelerators tore a hole in reality and the bad stuff slipped through, it's there in the background. I figure scavenging for relics and scrap metal is a profitable line of work the way delving is an assumed career path in core D&D, and a lot of the dungeons are actually subway tunnels or bomb shelters.

For Phandelver, I read that the big city of Neverwinter just a few days to the northwest is a smoldering wreck after the nearby volcano that had been dormant forever finally blew its top. Living in Portland Oregon, that reminded me that hey, Mount Hood hasn't erupted in forever either...

Still there... waiting...

...so now the area around Neverwinter gets near-constant rain from October to May, the elves all eat salmon and blackberries, and the woods are infested with Sasquatch. (The ancient ghosts may or may not ride fixies.)

Also I renamed Phandelver to Demonsgate. I ran with the "town built on the ruins of another town" thing and turned it into "town built on the ruins of another town built into the bones of an ancient demon that's been sleeping near death for centuries". The Forge of Spells (which is kept pretty vague and never really gets used in the adventure) becomes the demon's heart, which the bad guys want to defibrillate so they can have their very own rampagin' kaiju to command and live inside. (Needless to say this will fuck over the town something fierce.)

II: The Hook
Every campaign I run begins with one of the following:

• Washing up on shore after a shipwreck.
• Breaking out of prison.
• Being hired to rob a bank.

Okay that's a slight exaggeration but not really. The bank job is mostly for one-shots and very short campaigns with pre-gen characters, the sort where a certain amount of conceptual buy-in is assumed for the sake of expediency. The shipwreck and prison break are great because (a) if you sink a ship or throw everyone in chains after a campaign has been going for a while it's railroading, but if everyone starts out screwed it's backstory, and (b) no matter how dysfunctional a group of PCs you have you can pretty much count on them working together to survive and earn their freedom.

Phandelver on an island seemed like more reskinning than it was worth, so I went with the prison break.

Always looking for ways to make the big villains cooler and more despicable, I decided the Redbrand gang were called that because they had red marks on their chests from where their leader cut out their still-beating hearts and kept them in jars to ensure loyalty. The wizard started as a dandy named Glass Staff, on account of his glass staff, but I renamed him Glassjaw, on account of every time he uses the magic of the staff to pluck out an organ while keeping it alive another patch of his skin gets vitrified.

Sort of like this.

The party warlock sees this guy's whole left arm and shoulder and jaw (natch) are made of mirrors when she's brought before him, and he cuts out her tongue and gives it to a guard as a memento. Between her missing tongue and the guards kicking the cleric in the ribs every time he starts to pray for new spells, there's no way the party can just blast the guards to pieces with their mind lasers as they're all bound and carted off to the orcs and sold into slavery.

(Visually, orcs in my campaign are Uruk-Hai, because of course they are, but conceptually they're more like the Charr from Guild Wars. Instead of bloodthirsty warmongers they're really really competent bloodthirsty warmongers, to the point where they've already killed their own gods with giant magical cannon and the biggest thing keeping them from conquering everything is that their homeland is under constant attack from the vengeful ghosts of the people they've already slaughtered. None of this has really come up yet, but if the party ever makes it out to Wyvern Tor in the sandboxy part of the adventure the orc camp there is going to be built into the rusted chassis of a battlewagon.)

In Orc Jail (not as much fun as Space Jail), the party meets a dwarf named Gundren Rockchewer. (Much more evocative than Rockseeker. I guess he tried to dig a tunnel to escape using only his teeth? He'd have broken his teeth somehow regardless - dwarf names are written in runes meant to last forever, so their names are destiny.) After Gundren gets bought out of slavery by his brothers he sends his prison buddies a care package. The orcs pass it along. (They're not savages.) That's where the campaign starts.

The package contains a cake... a fairy cake. It's got magic baked right into the batter. It's a cake of holding. One bite and all the player's gear falls out on the floor. They also find a message in the cake: Brothers and I have struck it big. Meet us in Demonsgate. Shiv someone on the way out for me.

Shivving happens. The warlock gets her tongue back. They try to free the other slaves but there's too many orcs... they resolve to come back when they're better prepared. They steal some riding boars (these orcs aren't pig-faced, but their mounts are) and ride back to town.

That was the end of the first session. Not much time after character creation but a good start.

Next up: Demonsgate and its denizens. Also a fish bomb.