We brought the Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign to a close just in time for my friend to move away. He actually put his moving day back so we could squeeze one last session in, and we managed to wrap everything up. There was a lot of combat and I’m just saying it right now, my DM did a great job. He bought a 3D printer the week before and had been printing some models, which came out really well. Including this –
But we’ll get to that later.
This is actually going to be talking about a couple of sessions as we had two either side of the weekend, but all we did was go through the lost mine. We fought some ooze (which was a really cool model) a flaming skull, a wraith, a spectator, and more! The Half-Orc warlock in our party got a new gift from his patron while I and the Rogue were doing tons of damage with our attacks. But the best was saved for the last session.
We ended up going to the boss room a little earlier than expected, but before that Neil had to have his swansong. He was playing a sorcerer with a terrible memory, but it turned out that he had merely forgotten that he was a level 20 legend. So he had a whole new character sheet and had to take on a dragon that the gem guarding the black spider brought forth from a hellish dimension. The rest of us took a back seat, which was fine because it was Neil’s last session, and we were happy to be given a glimpse into what it’s like to see a level 20 character in action.
The final cherry though is that the DM had recorded some snippets of conversation and modulated them for the dragon, and he played these through his phone, which added another level of creepiness to the encounter. It was tremendous work and I applaud him for it. The battle raged and Neil had a suitably epic death, and left us with some parting presents.
But we still had the Black Spider to face, who had been the person terrorising the region. During the battle we became poisoned, which meant we had to roll with disadvantage, but funnily enough my disadvantage rolls were actually higher than my normal rolls! I’m glad we had Neil’s battle because the fight with the Black Spider was a little anti-climactic, so the iconic moment for us was saying goodbye to our friend.
So we traveled back to the town and were given a 10% stake in the mine’s profits, which hopefully we’re going to use to renovate the mansion. Oh, and we put the flaming skull in charge of the mansion. Because that seemed like a good idea. I also ended up with four quarterstaffs so I’ve begun a collection of those and each of them are a little different.
This was the first full D&D campaign I played through and it was really fun. I love my character, and the story was pretty good too, although there were points where we went months in between sessions. We’ve played it more regularly over the summer and it definitely makes a difference. There’s only going to be three of us in the party now so it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out, but I think as the campaign has gone on we’ve become better players, and Dan has really grown into the role of DM, as this was the first time he’d ever done it. We’re starting The Hoard of the Dragon Queen next, so I’m looking forward to beginning a new story and getting a few more abilities!
