Dragon of Icespire Peak

[nemarsde]

Biter bought issue 1 of the D&D Adventurer Magazine for his two kids to play, 10 and 8 YO.

The problem was, he hadn't played D&D since the BECMI days, his wife had never played, so without a DM who knew 5e he couldn't get it off the ground. That's where I came in, DM for hire, paid in tea and biscuits. (Let's face it, most game masters have worked for less.)

First I scrapped the generic pre-gens in the magazine, knowing that players love creating their own characters. Rather than sit through a boring session 0, I casually quizzed each player about what they liked in a hero, in fantasy stories, and that gave me enough to get started.

We had four players: Biter and his wife, Rollergirl, the 10 YO Catbro and his 8 YO sister, Splat.

1st-level characters are all relatively basic but I still chose simple, iconic classes. Eventually they'd reach 3rd level.

Duran the Dar
Mountain Dwarf Fighter (Champion)
Comment: Biter's last D&D character back in the Eighties was Duran the Dar. That game was set in Mystara but Biter couldn't remember any firm details about Duran, other than he was a dwarf of Rockhome. In BECMI D&D "dwarf" was a class, effectively a dwarf fighter. So I that's what I made and relocated him to Mirabar in the Forgotten Realms. Nostalgia has a powerful draw.

Kyle Mazik
Halfling Ranger (Monster Slayer)
Comment: Catbro is a fan of Middle-earth and has written several comics featuring the Hobbit adventurer, Kyle Mazik. A halfling ranger was the best fit for his exploits and Catbro was chuffed to be playing a character from his own imagination. In the past I would've used the revised ranger, but Tasha's Cauldron of Everything contained optional class features that neatly fixed the classes shortcomings without resorting to Unearthed Arcana.

Millie Whitefeather
Half-elf Bard
Comment: When we play board games, Splat always seems to pick up the rules quickest and remember them best. So I thought I'd challenge her with a bard, printing out spell cards from The Thieves Guild. The cards worked well and inspired Splat to make more accessories, inspiration tokens for each character.

Sharleena
Human Rogue (Mastermind)
Comment: Rollergirl likes a good mystery novel so a hard-boiled detective made sense. Rogue seemed to capture this archetype best and it doesn't have many moving parts either.

My idea was to give the parents the simplest classes possible, so they could help the kids without neglecting their own characters.

Splat didn't like being a bard though. She didn't like being the centre of attention. After a few sessions, we watched D&D: Honor Amongst Thieves and Splat was sold on being a wildshaping druid. She'd also played Magical Kitties Save the Day and wanted to be a magical kitty again, so I made a tabaxi druid named by Splat herself.

Kitty Meowingston
Tabaxi Druid (Moon)
Comment: I made sure to pick as many of the same spells as Millie as possible. Firstly, to avoid rules overload and secondly, to avoid printing so many spell cards.

I also made a character myself, a hadozee artificer called Erneth, partly because I wanted to learn more about 5e's newest class but also so I could hold up the character sheet at the table as a visual aid when asking for a roll. "You need to roll a DEX save, so look here on your sheet."

I also used some coloured fonts on the sheets for a quick reference. "You're attacking, yes, so look at the section in orange. If you hit, you do the damage in red."

5e character creation has slightly clunky tables to choose from when determining your background. These are a wasted opportunity for a player to think a little harder about who it is they're playing. I rephrased them as questions for the players at the start of session 1, then updated the character sheets later.

• Personality Trait
  In a word, you try to approach problems with...?
• Ideals
  In a word, the quality you value most is...?
• Bonds
  Name something stolen from you, or that defeated you or scarred you deeply
• Flaws
  What is it about you that always seems to get you into trouble?

Answering these questions around the table was a good ice-breaker and got everyone talking.

[nemarsde]

The first issue of D&D Adventurer magazine contains a 1st-level introductory adventure called King Under the Hill.

It makes some remarkably common mistakes.

1. It starts the players cold and wet, outside a deserted inn, expecting them to show initiative and investigate. No.
2. It gives the players no reason to care about the occupants of the inn who are total strangers. No.
3. It has them fight multiple batches of rats swarms and some cranium rats. Dangerous to 1st-level characters but repetitive and rather lame for fantasy heroes. No.

I would've scrapped the adventure but since Biter bought the magazine with good money and I'd already scrapped the pre-gens, I thought I better use it!!

1. Stonehill Inn is in good old Phandalin. I had the player characters be residents and Stonehill their local waterhole. Hence the game would start in the common room on a busy night. Revelry, ales, steaming hot viands and serving wenches. There would be a dodgy, half-orc traveller selling drugs in to miners in the corner. Merchants telling tales at the bar. The bard would be performing. The players could relax and simply react.
2. I had the players decide where their characters live on the map of Phandalin. Duran was living on his friend's couches, Kyle had his own Hobbit-hole, Millie lived in a treehouse and Sharleena was a resident at the inn. In the common room they were able to make friends with some NPCs from Phandalin.
3. When the attack came it was sudden and shocking. I reskinned the rats as feral kobolds, the cranium rats as feral kobold shamans. This made them more fearsome to describe. Patrons immediately started dying gruesomely. I didn't stat the mobs of patrons or kobolds attacking them, they were just scenery, but it jolted the heroes into action. To draw them to the stables I had horses screaming, and upstairs I had a baby screaming. Now the players could show initiative.

The player characters trounced the monsters. They felt imperiled but there was hardly a scratch on them, especially since the bard had sleep spell. By splitting the party they triumphantly saved the horses and the baby. The risk paid off.

They scared off the kobolds and captured one alive but didn't venture into the cellar so didn't find Brightblade. I wanted to save this for a second session.

⁂

So, was D&D Adventurer worth it? It cost £8.99 and comes with everything you need to start playing D&D 5e, including a 7-dice polyset in a foam padded, branded tin. Dice are opaque black with red numbering.

Unfortunately what it doesn't come with is a decent adventure. King Under the Hill is the right length, around 2 hours, but do you want your players' first experience to be breaking into a deserted inn and jabbing some rats? If you want an adventure of the same length and theme, you're much better off with Winghorn Press's A Most Potent Brew. It's the ultimate introductory "rats in the basement" introductory adventure and free.

The latest D&D Dragons of Stormwreck Isle Starter Set only costs £14.99 from Game, has better pre-gens, better rule book. The dice feel lower quality, are missing the d% and tin box, but the whole starter set comes boxed. Crucially, its adventure is a mini-campaign with easily 10 hours of play.

In conclusion, no, D&D Adventurer is not worth it in my opinion.

[nemarsde]

I was expecting to run a second session and planned for it to feature a dungeon. Knowing the players might catch the TTRPG bug, I also laid the groundwork for running Dragon of Icespire Peak, the adventure included with the D&D Essentials Kit.

I started the session with the player characters interrogating the captured kobold.

The kobold revealed their master, a dragon newly arrived in the mountains to the south, had sent them to find the location of a magical dragon slayer sword. The sword was buried alongside the mighty hero who wielded it, and local legend said that Stonehill Inn was built atop an ancient cairn. The kobolds had come looking. This hinted at both Cryovain and the Dragon Barrow from Dragon of Icespire Peak.

To keep the players on their toes, I interrupted the interrogation with a scream from the cellar of the inn. Toblen Stonehill had found where the kobolds had been digging in the cellar and together with some local miners been excavating. They'd broken through into a deep burial chamber and one of the men fallen inside.

Here I used the dungeon from A Most Potent Brew, replacing the giant rats with yellow oozes and the giant inferno spider with a carrion crawler. Classic D&D monsters. The player characters discovered that the cairn was the resting place of a dwarf lord and was buried with a magical axe made by the elves of Iliyanbruen and etched with symbols of friendship.

This axe was instead of the magical longsword in King Under the Hill, since none of the PCs could benefit from a longsword. This also allowed me to tell the tale of Axeholm and treachery of Vyldara from Dragon of Icespire Peak.

The session was a success and a third requested so we launched into a weekly mini-campaign.

[nemarsde]

Like most D&D adventures, Dragon of Icespire Peak relies on the DM to create the linkage between a series of adventure locations that will make sense in-continuity. Overall it's a better adventure than Lost Mine of Phandelver because the dragon is a constant and present threat to push the story along. The final boss in Icespire is a dragon without a dungeon, which is more exciting than a dungeon without a boss like in Phandelver.

Icespire has a less interesting menagerie of monsters than Phandelver, especially for beginners, and this became my guiding principle for our mini-campaign. Use the most iconic monsters from the adventure and bin the rest.

My first job was to get the player characters to Gnomengarde for an encounter with a mimic. With sessions only being 90 to 120 minutes, I wanted to an authority in Phandalin to send the heroes on quests rather than the heroes wander in search of a quest. To this end I reimagined town master, Harbin Wester as an authoritative, businesslike woman, inspired by Fiona Bruce. RAW it never made sense to me that the villagers of Phandalin would accept Wester as their leader if he was so pathetic. My reimagined Wester was the type to pragmatically tolerate the Redbrand ruffians in Phandelver for the sake of the village, since evidently no-one was willing to stand up to them.

So Wester sent the heroes to Gnomengarde to borrow their platform-mounted autoloading crossbow (G7 on the Gnomengarde map). This could be used the defend the town against dragon attack.

Every session I always made a big deal of rolling for "Where's the White Dragon?" on p11. It wasn't in the neighbourhood though, so as a warm-up I added a wilderness encounter with some Redbrand ruffians en route to Gnomengarde.

As for Gnomengarde, the only change I made to the adventure was to bin the whole encounter with the two kings. According to the map, the encounter would happen after the mimic fight anyway, making it redundant and anticlimactic. The other gnomes in Gnomengarde created plenty of fun and tension, no problem.

On the day, the mimic was defeated by kiting it into the spinning blades trap at G10 for 4d8 slashing damage.

I tied the mimic's presence to an attempt by the kobolds to destroy the autoloading crossbow, perceived as a threat by their dragon master. This further justified the quest to borrow the gnome's air defence platform and showed Wester wasn't wasting their time.

[nemarsde]

The players wanted to stop by Umbrage Hill on the way back to Phandalin from Gnomengarde because Erneth (the hadozee artificer I'd created) lived there with Adabra Gwynn and sold healing potions.

Umbrage Hill was balanced for 3rd-level characters and pitted the heroes against a manticore. But they had an autoloading crossbow now mounted on a wagon. (Two ranged attacks per round against one target, range 50/200 ft, 1d10 piercing damage each hit.)

I changed the adventure so that the manticore had already visited earlier that day, threatening to eat Erneth and Gywnn unless a meat feast was provided when it returned at high noon. This gave the heroes a couple of in-game hours to set a trap. They'd lure the manticore into the barn with their donkey as bait, then drop a cargo net on it and riddle it with arrows from the auto crossbow, hidden under a tarp.

After an A-Team montage, the trap was sprung. It didn't go completely according to plan. The donkey was eaten and the manticore dropped the ranger and fighter to 0 hp during the fight, but nothing that healing word from the bard couldn't fix.

The manticore was finally slain after its hp were so depleted the bard could hit it with sleep in midair. It dropped out of the sky and was impaled on an old broken tree. The player characters were jubilant that they now had a carrion crawler, a mimic and a manticore trophy.

[nemarsde]

I put a heavier role-play focus on this session. As expected for beginners, the players hadn't role-played much so far in the campaign. I wanted to level them up to 2nd with a montage of rest and recuperation. Also, Splat wanted to retire her bard and play a new druid character so I needed an in-continuity excuse for it.

I had Sister Garaele of the Harpers arrive back in Phandalin asking for the bard's help in retrieving the dragon slayer sword from the Dragon Barrow. Splat's new druid had just returned from Neverwinter after selling her handcrafted jewellry on market day. She agreed to join the party in the bard's place so game on.

Harbin Wester now sent the party to lift the curse from the fortress of Axeholm so Phandalin and surrounding area could take refuge there from the dragon. I repeated the dark tale of Vyldara and told the player characters they'd be facing undead. Scared, they spent more time in the village procuring holy water.

By the end of session 5, the heroes had reached Axeholm, snuck in, raised the portcullis and fought some ghouls until becoming surrounded in the mustering hall (A4).

I'd chosen to use Axeholm because of the undead---another classic D&D trope---but I didn't want to spend session 6 killing more ghouls, so I adapted the cliffhanger mechanic from Evil Hat's Masters of Umdaar to describe a dreadful battle in the dark, inflicting hp on failed rolls.

I capped this off with a round of D&D combat versus the 40 hp ghoul castellan. Then I moved the secret vault at A29 to behind the throne at A14, and had the door be unlocked by the magical axe they'd retrieved from the dwarven burial chamber in session 2. This was a nice callback.

I'd also prepared a scroll as a handout, explaining the reason behind the elf-dwarf hostility was mistrust over money. The elves spent their riches on clothes and jewellery, the dwarves spent their riches on their homes. Both looked exuberant to the other and led to a belief that each side was gouging the other on trade, when in fact they were dealing fairly.

The heroes took this with them to first floor, avoiding the sturges and running into Vyldara's banshee. The rogue attempted to appease the banshee by proving the folly of both sides... but the fighter stomped in and initiated combat. Welcome to D&D.

It was an even closer battle than the manticore, the druid, fighter and ranger dropping to 0 hp during the fight but Axehold RAW was balanced for 5th-level characters not 2nd. Removing the resource drain from fighting ghouls also removed the need for rests, so on the whole I thought I'd made Axeholm shorter but not less difficult.

Beforehand I was afraid the banshee's wail might cause a TPK but as it happened only the ranger failed their Con save. Ultimately, healing word saved the day again. Healing at range in combat without forfeiting an attack is a game-changer. I like it a lot! It's troublesome for beginner DMs though because a party without healing word is gimped compared to a party with it, yet nowhere in the rules do the designers highlight this.

[nemarsde]

I'd levelled up the characters to 3rd, so changes needed explain first. Then we started.

Arriving back at Phandalin the heroes were shocked to find the village had been attacked by the white dragon at first light. Toblen Stonehill had nailed it with several volleys from the auto crossbow before the dragon blasted him with its ice breath. He survived but lost a leg. The furious dragon then broke through the roof of the town hall and snatched Harbin Wester, flying off with her back to the mountains.

As the heroes surveyed the carnage, Sister Garaele and the Harpers returned from the Dragon Barrow carrying the dead body of Millie on their shoulders. They'd recovered the dragon slayer sword by Millie had been killed defending them from an invisible stalker. Before she died she said she wanted Kyle to have the sword and so he did. Splat was disturbed by this, so she must've had some attachment to the character even though she abandoned it. Very interesting to observe!

Soon Erneth and Gwynn arrived from Umbrage Hill with more healing potions. Erneth told the heroes he'd given Wester a speaking stone (as featured in the movie) so they could contact her if she was still alive.

Wester answered in a whisper and told them she was being held in the turret of a castle, very high up in the Sword Mountains. From one loophole she could see Icespire Peak, the highest peak, about 10 miles to southwest. From another loophole she could see Wyvern Tor, the highest foothill, to the northeast. Using the map of the Sword Coast I printed out for session 1 they used distance and compass direction to work out where the dragon's lair was. Splat and Catbro were fascinated by this and again I was struck by how players enjoy using their brains. Just like the puzzle trap in A Most Potent Brew, if this were a Wizards of the Coast adventure the players would simply make an Investigation or Survival check.

The heroes vowed to rescue Wester and told her to hang in there. Meanwhile, miners and frontiersmen were arriving in Phandalin from the surroundings, reporting of orc raiders, so it was quickly decided that the village would take refuge in Axeholm. The Harpers would try to waylay the orcs and the heroes set out in the opposite direction on a daring rescue. It was quite dramatic.

I gave the players another hard choice now. As the heroes were climbing up through the foothills they saw that Butterskull Ranch was under attack from orcs. There were families at the ranch and the orcs would surely roast the children over fires and eat them. The heroes wanted to help but had made a promise to Wester. They had a cunning plan, finding a local peregrine falcon and promising her a tasty rabbit if she delivered a note to the Harpers.

Hopefully the Harpers would arrive in time to save Butterskull Ranch. The heroes pressed onwards to Icespire Hold but by now we were running short on time, having only 30 minutes left. So I made the Stone-Cold Reavers a social encounter. They refused to help or hinder the heroes, they were only there for the treasure. Rolling a critical fail on their group stealth (even with pass without trace), the heroes found Wester alive but Cryovain was lurking in ambush rolling a natural 20 on initiative. All DM rolls were open and in combat I had the players roll my attacks on their characters.

The dragon fired its breath weapon and dropped the druid to 0 hp, everyone else taking 22 hp. It was like Lady Luck had deserted the players, their first round of attacks whiffed and the ranger was dropped to 0. The rogue spent her turn feeding the druid a healing potion and the druid cast healing word on the ranger. I'd ruled that the dragon was already on half hit points because of the auto crossbow in Phandalin, and that it would flee if it took more than 10 hp, but the heroes struggled to damage Cryovain at all. Until the dwarf fighter landed the most enormous attack of the campaign. Two hits, one a critical hit with 12, 12, 10 rolled on the d12. With +4 damage modifier twice, that totalled 42 damage!!

It was the perfect ending so the dragon's tail was lopped off and it fled to the sky, vowing revenge. Riled up, the player characters shouted after it calling it "Cryolame". They rescued Wester and from the turret saw the Stone-Cold Reavers as they were disappearing down the mountain trail with loaded sacks on their backs.

We then hastily cut to a final scene, weeks later, of Phandalin repaired and reoccupied and all the locals gathered around the town hall. The heroes standing on a stage, the ranger with the peregrine falcon on his shoulder. The Harpers had saved Butterskull Ranch and a statue had been erected of Millie. Duran had moved into her treehouse. Wester thanked the heroes of Phandalin and said a representative of the Lords Alliance would award them medals. Then Gwynn gasped and point skywards "Jarnathan!". The aarakocra from the movie and the kids favourite character arrived with the medals and cheers from the crowd.

⁂

We'd had fun. Biter and Rollergirl might've enjoyed it more than their kids! It was a good, family-friendly introduction to TTRPG but by the end I'd had enough of D&D 5e. Its combat is such a bore and discourages mind's eye theatre from the players. Even if you use miniatures it isn't very tactical either.

But, since Biter's family had invested in their own 7 poly dice sets I felt that whatever game we played next would have to use them.