I just finished running Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, WotC's 2023 follow up and expansion of the old starter set Lost Mine of Phandelver.
As a follow up to the much-loved starter adventure, my initial impressions were positive. The expansion takes the starter adventure and extends it into a full campaign featuring iconic D&D adversaries and as usual the book is packed with great art. The adventure though, is a bit of a let-down.
I won't go into detail on the first 4 chapters, they are little-changed from the well regarded starter set. They fixed the first encounter so the initial ambush is much less deadly, which was good, but I wish they had done more to smooth out other rough spots and balance the difficulty curve better. It wouldn't have taken much, though I can see why they might hesitate to change too much of a well-loved adventure.
Chapter 5 is the start of the new material. This is where things started to go a little off the rails, over the last few weeks several townsfolk have gone missing, apparently no-one thought to mention it to the adventurers that of this town of 200 people 12 had vanished. If you read ahead you can foreshadow it in the earlier chapters but this is the first hint of the problems with the rest of the book.
Chasing the mind goblins around town was fun and once they have all been run off, in comes a helpful NPC to put it all together for them and tell them where to go next.
They head off to the dungeon and it is a nice one, an old mine with goblins up top and lots of nasties below. After a cool boss fight they get some strong hints that the goblins are just a cat's-paw for another shadowy enemy. The hostages here tell the characters that the rest have been taken "somewhere else".
Chapter 6 starts with helpful NPC decoding their map and giving them three new dungeons to explore. Each contains another obelisk shard so the characters can gather them up to hinder the mind-flayer's plans. The first two dungeons are good, but by about half way around the last dungeon the players were asking "does everything in here do a condition?" They were joking about the cleric playing Pokémon and collecting all the conditions by the end, the cleric wasn't really amused. I understand the desire that not every monster be a bag of hit points and to mix things up but it was overdone and it only gets worse from here.
At the end of this last dungeon is a room full of exposition and some hints about what is to come. We finally know at this point that it is a group of mind flayer cultists trying to turn Phandalin into a town of mind-flayers and take over the world.
Chapter 7 sees us heading back to town to see if the nice NPC knows where to go next. When we get back things have gone very weird in Phandalin, townsfolk are turning into aberrations, and the town has started growing tentacles of its own. All the nice NPC knows is that Illithinoch is deep below Phandalin, but not to worry, a sinkhole has opened and another NPC can lead them by the hand to find it and we discover that there are more goblins and some of the townspeople were seen going down into it. This is not at all clear at the time but these townsfolk aren't new ones captured by the new goblins but the ones who have been missing for weeks at this point. The book misses this point and I only figured it out by going back to the initial hostage list and cross-checking. Where have they been since they left the first dungeon and the players cleared the other ones? Why did they get taken from Phandalin to another dungeon then brought back here?
We head on an awkward feeling journey into the Underdark to reach Illithinoch, the old mind-flayer stronghold. There are some stupid design decisions here you need to collect McGuffins but you don't really know that and have to rely on players recognising a McGuffin when they see one and picking them up. This was the main dungeon I thought was actively bad.
Mind flayers are a fantastic shadowy enemy for low to mid level games where their creepy mind control and psionic powers can be used to good effect and they can make hit-and-run attacks while their thralls do most of the fighting. Here we have to fight several of them as the primary combatants in rooms and corridors where their mind blast is almost impossible to avoid. Not a good use of them and the fights are miserable affairs with half the party constantly stunned, a condition that can only be escaped at this level by making a save or waiting out the full minute.
In Chapter 8 we open a portal to the Far-Realms to go find the remaining townsfolk and put a stop to the ritual. This is a nice dungeon, designed as a giant brain. At the end we make it to "Beyond a Lightless Star" which seems to be a collection of floating islands. It is hard to do a good representation of the Far-Realms, strange geometry that baffles the mind and all that is hard to replicate with pen and paper, but this just seems to be an opportunity to have a few nice set pieces, which are fine but don't add up to much.
After doing a few of these, rescuing the townsfolk at last and making it to the final section there is a confrontation with the mindflayer cultists. These have a different stun effect, a 30 foot sphere with a higher DC. The fight was a huge slog since there were only ever two characters able to act at a time thanks to all the stunning.
The final confrontation is against a boss with either harder saves vs stun and a legendary action to give disadvantage on saves, whoever wrote this really loves stun. The players murdered it as they knew it was the final confrontation and could go all out, he was a bit of a let-down but the final confrontation was really the one against the cultists, this was just tidying up.
In summary Lost Mine of Phandelver remains a solid adventure but this falls short of its potential. You get to like the nice village of Phandalin and its people, then leave it to do lots of dungeons. More things to do above-ground would have been nice but with the time-pressure of the kidnapped townsfolk there isn't much room for side-quests. It also needed a good editor, there were errors and inconsistencies in the text vs the maps and several sections that were hard to understand.
As written I give it 5/10.
Some re-working and I think a good DM could break it apart and rebuild it as something really special. But this is a review of the provided book, not the remix of it you could make, all adventures are great if a good DM reworks them, but really you shouldn't need to.
The marketing says it "Offers new Dungeon Masters and players the opportunity to dive into their first full-fledged Dungeons & Dragons adventure" this would be a terrible adventure for a new dungeon master with new players.
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