New D&D Campaign: Lost Mine of Phandelver

This Friday I will be starting a new D&D 5e campaign. I will be the GM, running the Lost Mine of Phandelver for my kids and their friends. I will be chronicling it all here.

Background

I played a lot of TTRPGs in high school, mostly Legend of the Five Rings (L5R), but I also played D&D, Deadlands, Vampire, Shadowrun, and Call of Cthulu. I have not played much in the past twenty-five years, though. Now I’m a dad. I’ve been looking forward to playing TTRPGs with my kids since before I even had kids. Life gets busy, however, and my kids, age 10 and 12, are begging me to run more games.

I considered several systems when trying getting back into running games. I wanted something that I could prepare for without too much work, since my free time seemed to be the biggest limiting factor. I considered the Fate Core System for this reason, but ultimately abandoned it due to it not being quite what I had in mind (it involves interesting negotiations betweens players and the GM).

I also wanted something that was not too rule heavy. We play a lot of board games, so my kids could have probably handled lots of rules, but I was more worried about any barrier preventing us from getting going.

Lastly, I wanted a system that had lots of available pre-made adventures. This ruled out L5R.

Fifth edition D&D seemed like a great fit for us, and Lost Mines of Phandelver seemed like a great place to start. I went to the Green Dragon and picked up a copy of the Shattered Obelisk, the first half of which contains LMOP. I do not expect to run the last half, since I’m uncertain the kids will enjoy the theme.

Preparation

By far, my favorite videos for preparing LMOP were by Verdigris Table.

I’ve read the character creation section of the Player’s Handbook several times now. I enjoyed Fast Character to quickly expirement with characters and double-checking the rules. I’ve glanced through the Player’s Handbook sections on races and classes, and spent an evening trying to understand the different ways that classes can use magic. I’ve also read through the combat chapter a few times.

I’ve read the actual LMOP adventure book many times. I’ve read through the whole adventure (chapters 1-4) once, but I’ve probably read chapter 1 something like 8 times, and chapters 2 and 3 about 3 times.

I have nice pictures of all the Phandalin NPCS that I plan on printing. I also have a nice map of Phandalin. I am still deciding what to do about the dungeon maps. I’ll probably draw them during play as the players explore, using the nice (spoiler-heavy) maps that came with the book hidden for my eyes only.

I’ll probably keep a notebook, preloaded for each session in advance.

The Plan

There will be 5 players, my two kids and three of their friends. We aim to play about once per month, about four hours at a time.

The first session will be focused on making characters and tying everyone’s backstory to Gundren or the Phandalin townsfolk.

At the end of the first session, we will start the campaign off in a tavern in Neverwinter, meeting Gundren and having the characters introduce themselves, before heading down the road to Phandalin and encountering the Goblins. Mabe we will end there, or if there is time, they can go to town and look around or start exploring the Goblin hideout.