Combining Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak

This blog post will detail my experiences DMing a campaign where I merged together the D&D Starter set and the more recent D&D Essentials Kit.



The D&D Starter set was released in July 2014, years before I got into the hobby. Included in the box is the adventure named "Lost Mine of Phandelver" (LMoP), which is widely regarded as one of the best 5e published modules. Its a pretty standard adventure with some rough edges, but overall its a great introduction to playing Dungeons and Dragons. It tells a story about a legendary mine and occurs around a frontier town named Phandalin, located south of Neverwinter. This adventure takes the players from level 1 to 5.

The D&D Essentials Kit was released in June 2019. The included adventure is named "Dragon of Icespire Peak" (DoIP) and tells a similar story set in the same area as the Starter Kit. Again, the adventure is based in Phandalin, but this story is more about an Ice Dragon named "Cryovain" terrorizing the local area. This adventure will take the players from level 1 to 7.

In a way, the Essentials Kit can be considered an expansion for the original Starter Kit. Since all of the quests in this adventure are given through a 'quest board', its pretty simple to combine the two adventures into something more interesting and rich!

So for the rest of this blog post, we're going to chat about this topic. I'll talk about ideas I had and didn't use, as well as what I did in my personal campaign.

Overarching Plots

LMoP's main story thread involves the discovery of a legendary mine named "Wave Echo Cave". The group is hired by a dwarf who almost immediately gets captured, and the adventure becomes about the rescue of the dwarf as well as the exploration of his mine. Only one minor villain is present throughout the story: Nezznar, "The Black Spider". Unfortunately, this is one of the weaker parts of the adventure, with Nezznar having little interaction with the group and even less logical motivation.

DoIP's story is heavily focused on the ice dragon Cryovain, and in general is an adventure focused on quests. All of the quests have something to do with the dragon, and there is little opportunity for RP or complex NPC interactions.

Putting the two adventures together give you two good plotlines to mix:

1. The players' promise to help Gundren clear out his cave + The Black Spider messing with the players.
2. The ice dragon Cryovain generally causing chaos and needing to be dealt with somehow.

Alternating from one plot to another is a good way to keep your players engaged with the world.

Specific Things to Take

THE DRAGON

One of the best things you can take from DoIP is the ice dragon Cryovain, and particularly the table of locations the dragon can attack.

For one, its a dragon. Your players get to kill it once they are max level, and believe me, they will be excited to try to kill a dragon.

And secondly, its a good plot that essentially generates itself. Tell rumors of the dragons attacking certain places, and if the players go somewhere that has already been attacked, describe that place as covered in ice and destroyed! It really helps the players to realize the world is living without them and that things occur when they aren't around.

One of the weaknesses in LMOP is that Nezznar (the big bad final boss guy) isn't seen at all except in the final encounter. The players only learn about him from letters and dialogue. DOIP and particularly the table above, really helps expose the players to the dragon. Maybe they'll find their quest location ruined once they arrive? Or they could even meet the dragon before the final battle somewhere in the field.

In my personal campaign, the dragon attacked Phandalin very early on and that led to a ton of cool scenarios. I would definitely recommend that you have the dragon attack Phandalin at some point (even if you have to fudge it) as it adds a lot to the story!

In my game, I took the foldout map of town (included in the Essentials Kit, another great reason to pick it up!) and put a bunch of sticky notes over places in town to represent their destruction. I had the Mayor "Harbin Wester" die in the dragon attacks, as well as destroying Barthen's Provisions (a general store)

These events kicked off others including

• Halia, the leader of the Phandalin Miner's exchange, assumed leadership of the city. My players accused her of having something to do with the dragon attack, and voila! A great, player-induced, plot-line was created!
• Phandalin being half destroyed brought in opposing philanthropic factions who wanted to help rebuild. The Zhentarim came to finance and construct new homes (AKA: profit from the financing), while the Emerald Enclave, an order of druids, came to help grow new homes and limbs for those impacted. Halia is a member of the Zhentarim, which helped tie NPCs deeper into the story.
• An election to choose a new mayor, with 3 contestants: Halia, Daran Edermath, and one of my players. This was my players' favorite part of the entire campaign. (Check out my DM blog about that session here)

I think its important as a DM to improv a bit, so I suggest you dig into whatever the players are interested in and improve that part of the plot. Run the adventure as written, but add cool stuff along the way! When I started this campaign I had no plans for an election, or for the dragon to attack Phandalin, or for Halia to become a fleshed out money-hungry dragon-worshiping NPC. But all of these things were the best parts, not what was written in the adventure.

THE QUESTBOARD + QUESTS

DOIP adds a quest board to Phandalin as a way to hand out quests in a simple way. For new DM's, this is ideal because there is no NPC or dialogue involved; your new players can pick which adventure to go on, then leave immediately. LMOP starts with one long intro quest which doesn't leave much room for player agency until they arrive in town.
The kit includes physical cards explaining each quest available, and it structures the quests into 3 tiers so that players don't pick a too-difficult quest early on.

There are a lot of quests in LMOP that can be converted to "quest board" quests instead of being sourced from NPCs in town, but I would caution against forgoing every quest in favor of the board. I could see it getting boring for players, so make sure to at out some funny NPCs every once in a while.

Quests from LMOP that can be on the quest board

• Conyberry and Agatha's Lair
• Old Owl Well
• Wyvern Tor

Some of the quests on the quest board are particularly weak, or are mapped terribly, so watch out for those. For example: Mountain's Toe Gold Mine is a massive dungeon with 15 rooms. Guess how many of those rooms are completely empty, and only have a one-line description? 11! No combat, no loot, no nothing, just one line of text for 11/15 rooms. The place does have an interesting plot about were-rats vs. miners, and a great session can be had with this quest, just don't use the map! Run it as a few simple rooms and a social encounter that might turn into a combat.

"Gnomengarde" was a really fun social dungeon based around a gnome laboratory, don't skip this quest! Its got mimics too!

Doing all the quests like this will surely make your players over level, so be sure to pick and choose which quests sound most interesting. I wouldn't try to stay in LMOP/DOIP for too long because there are some good sequel adventures freely available that come afterwards.

Wrapping it all up

My campaign took almost a whole year to finish up LMOP and DOIP, but you should focus on ending a few key quest lines before moving on.

1. Gundren and his Wave Echo Cave
• Clear out the mine and help Gundren get it running again.
2. Killing Cryovain on the top of Icespire Peak
• Climbing an ice mountain adventure
• Icespire hold is a bit bare-bones but can be made more interesting easily.
3. Any other plot lines you created in Phandalin
• Mayor elections
• Tresendar Manor reconstruction
• Faction battles

Once everything is wrapped up, your players should be loved heroes in the town around level 7. Which leads perfectly into....... FOLLOW UP ADVENTURES! But first...

Have a ending session

Its a good time here to have a chat with your players about the adventure so far, have a nice celebratory drink or two with everyone, and plan your future sessions. Ask what they liked or didnt like, spill some secrets, have fun with it.

But then you need to ask if you want to do a new campaign with new characters, or to continue with the same characters.

In my case, the players really wanted to stick with the same characters and keep RPing, so we continued playing the 3 follow up adventures:

• Storm Lords Wrath - Starting at level 7
• Sleeping Dragons Wake - Starting at level 9
• Divine Contention - Starting at level 11

The three adventures are freely released and take place in the nearby town of Leilon (which is already on the map!) It lets you re-use the world map and keep adventuring.

Check out this other blog post I wrote as an overview of Storm Lord's Wrath, the first sequel adventure.

Did you put these two adventures together? What went well?What didn't? I'd love to hear about your experiences, please leave a comment below!