![]() ![]() The advice in Lost Mine follows this pattern with explicit and early cautions against adversarial play and encouragement towards fairness and adjudication rather then rules mastery. In general I have enjoyed the 5th Edition of D&D's expressions of support for less structured, non-adversarial play, with more GM control and a focus on rulings and creative solutions to in game problems. The advice in introductory modules is always a window into the game designer's mind and the system's preferred play style. In a way this short section of advice and suggestions for playing Lost Mine and D&D more generally is one of the most interesting parts of the adventure. Finally some other small locations, one with a dragon, a castle of goblins, and ultimately a cave complex with the regional evil mastermind hard at work exploring within. ![]() First there is a section of general advice and plot overview, followed by a goblin ambush and lair, then a town with bandit trouble. These sections begin to feel rushed and more poorly designed as the adventure progresses, but none are unusable. The adventure itself is fairly long, broken into four episodes, some with multiple small keyed locations. Something a bit more characterful would be nice, but everything in its soft pastels, greys and browns is readable, clean and offers no challenges for the reader. Even the cover is a generic adventurers and dragon sort of image, yet the art and layout are inviting,simple and certainly professional looking - more digital watercolor, bland but with a bit less of the shiny over sized shoulder armor or 'dungeon punk' aesthetic of some other editions. In fact not a single art piece within depicts an actual event from the adventure - it's as if everything was designed to be recycled in later publications. The art is relatively sparse and frequently seems designed for reuse, not showing actual events or NPC from the adventure, but rather generic fantasy monsters and vanilla fantasy adventuring archetypes engaging in non-specific adventuring tasks. As a tool for Dungeons & Dragons pedagogy its never more then half decent and for every time it says the right words it demonstrates the concepts very badly.Ī glossy and sometimes lovely book with maps and art that are both inoffensive and excellently drafted. However, as a 'teaching' module Lost Mines is confused wreck, giving good advice about avoiding railroads one moment and then on the next page making every effort to railroad the characters. Fifth Edition has a certain promise to players of older editions with a step back from grid based complex combat as the center of the game, towards exploration and roleplay, and Lost Mines could be intended to be an introduction to this style of play. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, it's not even close to as bad as Dragons of Flame, but its positive design and structure elements are mired in a pablum of fantasy cliche so bland that it makes for one wish for even Dragonlance's feeble gestures towards the weird and the wonderful. ![]() That and a player coddling, computer role-playing game derived game design ethos that limits player choice and insults player intelligence in the name of providing a consistent play experience. I start with my objections to Forgotten Realms, because I think they are the root of the module's considerable problems. ![]() I'm here because I've been reading the 5th edition's introductory module Lost Mines of Phandelver. I'm not here to talk about Forgotten Realms, except as a symptom, it will always be terrible. Most offensively, most objectionably, Forgotten Realms is a dense, full, world - so steeped in cliched lore and laid out so extensively in dull gazetteers that there is no room for a GM's creativity without excising some of the existing setting and map. Forgotten Realms embraces a pedantic faux-medievalism, but then uses a contemporary positivist understanding to explain magic that allows for cutesy magical technology to gloss over the inconvenient aspects of the pre-modern. It fills the land with huge civilized bastions of good/order like Waterdeep and exhaustively defines their systems of governance, but allows these nations to be plagued by trifling enemies like goblin tribes. It plunders everything cliched and overused from Tolkien but abandons all the strange sadness and the mythological references. Forgotten Realms was the worst thing to happen to D&D, a terrible setting that reeks of bathos and takes itself far too seriously. ![]()
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