I’ve written about this elsewhere, but I started my RPG-adventures with the final D&D Basic box sometime around 1993 (yes Basic apparently still was getting reissued in 1993). In the late 90’s early 2000’s I stopped playing and got back in around 2015, just in time for D&D 5E to hit, I got the 3 main books, and the starter set containing “The Lost Mines of Phandelver” to run for my family. The now famous mini-campaign opens with the party escorting a delivery to the town of Phandalin for their boss Gundren Rockseeker, and getting attacked by a group of goblins. Most of the early sections of the campaign have been kept straight-forward and similar to before with only some small tweaks, although some quite notorious encounters have been made more difficult.

After the parts many players will already know, the PC’s will find themselves in a crypt that leads them into the “Underdark”. Spoilers here, but at this point Phandelver and Below leaves the simple dungeon crawl it was initially behind, and enters the realm of bizarro cosmic horror (I seriously loved this). We get a huge underdark metro area, a Dwarven fortress, and a terrifying plot by those always creepy “Mind Flayers”. Of course, the campaign doesn’t stop here, and after a while the PC’s find themselves having to visit otherwordly realm environments, and this is where everything really shines.

I feel like everything Wizards of the Coast does is for a reason, and with Planescapes coming out next month, this is a nice metaphysical lead up to that. It also reads as straight up fun. I know experienced GM’s might be hesitant to run Phandelver again, after having run it over the years, but rest assured there is enough here to make this a fun wild ride, thinking of it an extended director’s cut of a soon to be classic. RECOMMENDED!