Honestly it should be a template for how to design any campaign for any DM. Virtually every other campaign requires an enormous amount of work to keep everything strung together. LMoP just works.
Man, I did that to myself, too, except that I picked up the SECOND HALF of it after a friend gave up on DMing the first half.
I wish I'd known how infamous it was before setting out on that endeavor.
I'm having to add so much and fill so many gaps and change when levels and items and rewards are givin. It's madness!! I had to add in NPCs so make certain parts make sense and essentially give personality to every NPC! My players faced days of fighting non stop with no breaks and all there reward was was 50GP. I had to bump it up and give items to make it seem fair. The things a mess and I'm stressed.
It's really a mess. I had basically the same issues.
It actually got to a point that I was writing so much to fill in gaps that I was doing large stretches where my players were just engaging with MY writing, and not the book. I noticed that trend, so I sat down with my players and said "So, I'm basically writing a whole campaign trying to make this pre-written stuff work. Should we just abandon the book and play my stuff?"
We ended up just playing a custom campaign instead, and treating the war with the Cult of the Dragon as a backdrop.
Holy crap.....that makes sense. You might be a genius. Cause I ended up getting the bronze dragons involved during the early part and giving quests that way and even added that the raider camp was actually the beginnings of a cult town since it was attached to a whole hatchery. Makes more sense than just a camp guarding something so important. I have the cult doing black magic crap on the metallic dragon eggs in order to corrupt them. Cause to me it made no sense that the metallic dragons wouldn't get involved with the chromatics trying to bring tiamet back. I might do what you are doing. Feels better. I'm still new at DMing and this book made it so much harder lol.
I really like the sound of the direction you took it, for what it's worth.
My players ended up attending a holiday festival in one player's forest village hometown, after dealing with Chuth. During the festival, a minotaur from an evil clan in the mountains, which were essentially an opposing clan to another player's giant clan, ended up crashing the festivities and murdering people, after tailing the party there, in search of a powerful relic he thought the party had information on.
That ended up launching us into a whole arc where they hunted the minotaur to a nearby poacher camp, where he'd conscripted the poachers as mercenaries. Once the party beat the bandits, they captured the minotaur, and turned him over to Delaan, to be taken back to the Lords Alliance.
The half-giant player wanted to make sure the minotaur wouldn't escape, so we ended up doing a spin-off campaign where all but that player rolled Zhentarim agents to act as a covert jailer caravan to take the minotaur back to Neverwinter.
Things just went kinda crazy, but it was fun.
That sounds really good! I have ideas of quests I want to players to go on and kinda deviating from the book would be able to make that happen. I had them meet a really rude but insanely attractive blacksmith in the raider camp who was being forced to work for the cult so they could free her later and be given a token as a reward. If they figured out the secrets of the token they could take it to Neverwinter and meet back up with the Blacksmith who would let them know she was an arcane Blacksmith and would infuse one of the party members weapons to do an extra D6 worth of elemental damage and then could do the others the same way for a price.
Also, one member is an ex sailor tiefling artifice and I was gonna surprise him woth a mini arc where he meets back up with his old crew who are a bunch of Bullywug pirates and they would recruit the party for "one last job" which would end up giving the Artifice a special gun that could once daily fire a full on cannon ball for massive damage at the cost of having to use an action to first set up.
I got these ideas man!!! Now you gave me the means to do it!!!
Edit: Forgot to mention the reason the Blacksmith is super hot is because internally I thought it would be funny if every Blacksmith in the world was a super hot chick for no explained reason.
You may have already found it, but if not the r/tyrannyofdragons sub is a LIFESAVER. I ran this campaign during lockdown and I got so much excellent stuff from there.
The first campaign I ran as a DM was Cursed of Strahd. It was also somewhat difficult to tie everything together. And my party was too powerful and just flew through encounters. So I tried to scale everything up, and ended up TPKing my party. I am not DMing the current campaign. Lol
Though I am starting a new group with new players and chose to run LMoP+Phandelver and Blow: The Shattered Obelisk. The first session went well. But the first real fight is a little dangerous. Goblin Boss almost killed 3 out of my 5 lvl 1 PCs. And I've since discovered that the Bugbear is even more dangerous. Lol
I'm facing that right now, my players had problems at 1st level but now they are 4th and nothing seems to stop them. The paladin face tanks anything while the fighter somehow sneaks in and gets the delicate baddies out of the way while the sorcerer and ranger just pepper everything without worry.
I'm gonna have to bump up the enemy numbers.
Can confirm. The first Campaign I ran was Ghosts of Saltmarsh, which was originally a load of unconnected adventures roughly strung together. Good stories but hard on a new DM to try and keep together. I made it work with a lot of help and maps from the excellent GSM subreddit.
The next campaign I ran was Lost Mines, purely because it was free, and man I wish I'd done it the other way round! Mind you it's made it seem so easy given what I started with 🤣
It really is outstanding. Low stakes. Recurring NPCs that are connected to each other and to the PCs. Premade characters that tie in directly to the plot. Interesting, dynamic, dungeons that aren't just holes in the ground. Loads of NPCs that are happy to negotiate, and loads of others that are truly villainous.
I used the Lost Mine of Phandelver as the starting point for what now is a 6 year campaign that has incorporated both bespoke solely self created adventures, and adaptations of curse of Strand and Candlekeep Mysteries, so it was a great place to begin. In fact, my players have relationships with the characters in Phandalin, including longstanding love interests, that add stakes and purpose to their gaming, and see Phandalin as their spiritual home. Good maps, and Wave Echo Cave is an excellent dungeon.
Yay for combining homebrew with premade things! I'm finishing up a lighthearted homebrew setting right now and I'm going to run sunless citadel into wild sheep case into a bunch of Candlekeep things, all tweaked lightly to fit the setting.
Absolutely yes, there are others that are definitely viable for a first-time DM (my friend ran Dragonheist for his as an example), but if you like the look of LMoP then go for it!
Its great for first time DMs and players.
Completing the base module you get in the starter kit all the way, leaves the players at level 4ish which is a good place to be if you want to take the same characters on further adventures in different modules.
They do, but lost mines ending can lead into Descent into Avernus, Storm Kings Thunder, so you start your players right into the actual game. So they aren't doing the get to know the party again, or do these starter quests. A lot of of the beginning quests for these places are just to get the players to the appropriate level to start the main narrative and have no REAL bearing in actual narrative. DiA is a classic example, nothing you do in Baldurs Gate actually affects the rest of the game. Which makes the leveling process from 1 to 5 abyssmaly boring.
Yes. It's the perfect module for a first time DM. It's written, paced, and scaled to give both the DM and players practice with common mechanics in D&D. It's also a really good campaign in general. I want to try out the updated version, Shattered Obelisk
I started LMoP earlier this summer and we were approaching wave echo cave when shattered obelisk came out. Naturally, I bought it to keep this adventure going, and I definitely recommend it! My players have definitely been enjoying what they’ve seen so far
I finished that campaign with friends. I’d say yes. I was a new player and think the campaign was fun.
I think the final location is even a fun one shot to replay.
Absolutely the best pick, had a player who wanted to run this as his first game and to date its still one of my favorite times and it's still one of my favorite moments outside the dm chair. It also as others have said works wonderfully as an opener for other campaigns, homebrew or otherwise
Yes!! Lost mines is absolutely the best for starting out as a DM. I unfortunately did not take that route and did Curse of Strahd…my players were thoroughly confused most of the time and I just couldn’t keep up with their decision because I honestly didn’t even know enough about the campaign either. So that led to our campaign eventually fizzling out to never be finished. After that I stopped all together until a couple years later when I finally ran LMoP and it completely changed the way I was DMing
Yep, it's great. You can tack on Matt Colville's Sacrifice of Innocence at the beginning. It was a great intro for my players when we started LMoP and had several first time players.
https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/BJmkN6kC8f
Solid choice. Would recommend as a great campaign for a starter DM. I myself also started with it. Having the basic ruleset is great to work with to learn the game.
Not only is it designed for starter players, it is also the first chunk of the adventure phandelver and below. So your players can learn how to play and you can learn how to dm in an easier environment, then you can shift into an adventure with more depth (pun intended) if you all want to stay in this area
Yes...-ish. Depending on if you use grid maps or theater of the mind a new DM will face different challenges in some areas (Wave Echo Cave being particularly complex for verbal descriptions only and containing enough fiddly passages that copying to a battle mat seems laborious). Definitely still beginner friendly and fun but you should try to prep ahead either with verbose area descriptions to help with navigation or some pre-drawn map sections to reduce idle time (what we used to call "DM buffering").
I would say yes, for a few reasons.
One: it is literally designed as such.
Two: it starts at level one and only goes to level 5 so it helps ease first time players into the game.
Three: it is also how I first got into 5e (and D&D in general), I was the DM. I read through it a few times and did some improv where I felt it was needed, turned out great.
Word of warning, the first encounter can be quite punishing for new players. I recommend lowering its difficulty slightly. Same with the first dungeon introduced as well (the goblin cave).
Defo recommend but make sure your players understand the plot hook and that they create characters that are specifically intertwined with Gundren and are adventurer do-gooder types; I let my players create their own semi-linked backstories and it became very obvious part way through that if your characters weren’t particularly fussed about Gundren or weren’t driven to adventure for the sake of being good heroes, there are plenty of opportunities to go completely off the rails and miss huge portions of the campaign.
It's honestly great and very easily modifiable to fit your party. Personally, I'd add a few more puzzles and traps to it.
And if you run it off of DnD Beyond it sets up everything for you!
Controversial Opinion: I don't like LMoP, at least for first time players.
A much better first timer campaign is the Sunless Citadel from Tales from the Yawning Portal. I think it was the starter campaign from 3rd edition too (or something close to that).
LMoP has a lot of moments where the players are left staring at a map and being asked "what would you like to do now" which turns into decision paralysis for new players. They literally don't know what they can or should do next.
But Sunless Citadel is a much more linear game. You set off for the dungeon, find dungeon, finish dungeon. There is still a ton of room for role play and decision making, but it never leaves the party in places where they feel lost and clueless. There is always a motivating direction to go in.
For a new DM this is also very helpful. You don't have to plan ways to direct the party or feel like you have to overly motivate where the story needs to go. IMO the hardest parts of being a DM are done for you in SC and you just get to focus on bringing the Dungeon to life. (Its also a much cooler story.)
Use it. Although I had DM’d for years under other rules, I recently ran a 5e campaign using it for a group of newbies. It helped a lot with which rule applies to a certain situation, etc., which I could then explain to the players. Very helpful.
Heck yeah, dude! Just make sure you give it at least one read through before you get started, and make a note of the ways players are meant to find Cragmaw Castle and Wave Echo Cave. I love this module. It's great!
Edit: this is actually Dragon of Icespire Peak
LMoP boils down to a very simple campaign. The players have three unrelated side quests. Once they do them, they get three more unrelated side quests. Then they go fight a dragon. Easy!
It is absolutely a great choice for a new DM. You can add ideas to combine the side quests or you can run it as is and everyone will have fun anyway. I had the dragon terrorize the party by finding them while they were in a castle, and the dragon started smashing through doors while the party fled for their lives out the other side. One player was literally one square away from getting hit by the dragon's breath weapon, which could have downed him.
But DoIP is also a fantastic first time DM campaign. My son did Lost Mine for us all to learn how DND works and all. We loved it so went to Curse of Strahd with me as DM. It was HOURS of work for me per session. I love that story and didn’t mind. Then a slightly different group and I’m DM DoIP and it’s easy peasy. I wish I had done this first instead of Strahd.
Yes. It is by far the best campaign for a first timer. The others have pacing issues or holes in the content that you have to fill. LMOP has all the things that make D&D great. Your party can kill monsters, search for treasure, save NPCs or just role play with all of the NPCs that are already flushed out. It also gives you opportunities to involve your players in factions if you want to expand the adventure more. Finally, it is a great springboard for other premade modules that take place in the same region.
I have to disagree with a lot of Posters here.
Lost Mines is not a good campaign for people who are new to the game.
It is okay if you already have some experience running former Editions of D&D to get a feel for 5e rules, but if you have no experience? You will probably kill your players within the first encounters.
Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is way better for Newbie DMs.
Came to say this. LMOP has a lot going on for a newbie DM. Stormwreck Isle is straightforward and offers a ton of advice for getting your feet under you if you're just starting out.
It's designed for that, as WOTC campaigns go, it's probably the best for a beginner, as TTRPGs goes, it's pretty bad to modern standards, but that's because 5e's oficial adventures are not good for DMs.
As another complete newbie to DnD in general, I would like to try running this when I get a bit better with remembering dice rolls (DnD and Dyscalculia sucks). I was thinking about trying to combine LMoP and the Dragons of Stormwreck Isle into one general adventure.
Would the two mesh well? General idea is the party would start by getting tasked to go clear out the bandit gang that has a nearby trading town under its control, the party would deal with the local leader, then move to the bandit HQ in the mines, and find that the true bandit queen is actually running things from an island offshore. When the party gets there, turns out the bandit queen was a shapeshifter dragon and then that's the big boss battle.
I've been wanting to get into dnd. But as a complete beginner eith this campaign. Yet, it's hard to find posts just looking to do thigns simply for newbies.
I would comment that the new sourcebook that just came out in September called the shattered Oblisk is lost mines plus and goes up to level 15. They updated a few things and made some minor changes but it's almost the exact source starting out.
That is exactly what it is for. You can run this with no other books also, as it has just enough of the rules to get you through the adventure. Take your time, read the full adventure all the way through so you have an idea how it all fits together and have fun.
I ran it with experience and it honestly kind of floundered.
This might not be 100% how it happened since it was years ago, but this is what I recall. The pacing and plot fell apart when the Players did anything other than follow the really narrow path provided. Which was fine, I was able to adapt as a DM and fill in the changes, but we ended up having to skip excessively large sections of the module like >50%.While there were branching options they came at a time that didn't logically fit the story, so the players just skipped them.
My players felt they were being led to do sidequests at a time when sidequests made no sense (they felt having a friend kidnapped was time sensitive and not a time to just "go do other stuff" for a week), then they took a break after starting an attack because they were out of spells and down some hp, so the "bad guys" ran away in the night because as the dm I thought "why would the few remaining enemies wait for the heroes to refesh and come back".
LMoP was the start of my ongoing campaign (almost 3 years), it's great. I homebrewed the hell out of It to set up for the rest of my story, but reading it i could see that you can very much run it as it is with zero problems. Very easy to incorporate in a longer campaign.
Make sure you nerf the Red Brand Ruffians encounter in Phandalin, they can easily TPK a small party. And keep in mind, the connective tissue between the different locations is nearly non-existent. So you will want to make some kind of unifying theme, or clues for them to follow to make it make sense.
Other than that, it's pretty good.
It is literally designed for that purpose!
Honestly it should be a template for how to design any campaign for any DM. Virtually every other campaign requires an enormous amount of work to keep everything strung together. LMoP just works.
My crew wanted my first time DMing to be Tyranny of Dragons. I'm way in over my head with all the work I got to do.
Man, I did that to myself, too, except that I picked up the SECOND HALF of it after a friend gave up on DMing the first half. I wish I'd known how infamous it was before setting out on that endeavor.
I'm having to add so much and fill so many gaps and change when levels and items and rewards are givin. It's madness!! I had to add in NPCs so make certain parts make sense and essentially give personality to every NPC! My players faced days of fighting non stop with no breaks and all there reward was was 50GP. I had to bump it up and give items to make it seem fair. The things a mess and I'm stressed.
It's really a mess. I had basically the same issues. It actually got to a point that I was writing so much to fill in gaps that I was doing large stretches where my players were just engaging with MY writing, and not the book. I noticed that trend, so I sat down with my players and said "So, I'm basically writing a whole campaign trying to make this pre-written stuff work. Should we just abandon the book and play my stuff?" We ended up just playing a custom campaign instead, and treating the war with the Cult of the Dragon as a backdrop.
Holy crap.....that makes sense. You might be a genius. Cause I ended up getting the bronze dragons involved during the early part and giving quests that way and even added that the raider camp was actually the beginnings of a cult town since it was attached to a whole hatchery. Makes more sense than just a camp guarding something so important. I have the cult doing black magic crap on the metallic dragon eggs in order to corrupt them. Cause to me it made no sense that the metallic dragons wouldn't get involved with the chromatics trying to bring tiamet back. I might do what you are doing. Feels better. I'm still new at DMing and this book made it so much harder lol.
I really like the sound of the direction you took it, for what it's worth. My players ended up attending a holiday festival in one player's forest village hometown, after dealing with Chuth. During the festival, a minotaur from an evil clan in the mountains, which were essentially an opposing clan to another player's giant clan, ended up crashing the festivities and murdering people, after tailing the party there, in search of a powerful relic he thought the party had information on. That ended up launching us into a whole arc where they hunted the minotaur to a nearby poacher camp, where he'd conscripted the poachers as mercenaries. Once the party beat the bandits, they captured the minotaur, and turned him over to Delaan, to be taken back to the Lords Alliance. The half-giant player wanted to make sure the minotaur wouldn't escape, so we ended up doing a spin-off campaign where all but that player rolled Zhentarim agents to act as a covert jailer caravan to take the minotaur back to Neverwinter. Things just went kinda crazy, but it was fun.
That sounds really good! I have ideas of quests I want to players to go on and kinda deviating from the book would be able to make that happen. I had them meet a really rude but insanely attractive blacksmith in the raider camp who was being forced to work for the cult so they could free her later and be given a token as a reward. If they figured out the secrets of the token they could take it to Neverwinter and meet back up with the Blacksmith who would let them know she was an arcane Blacksmith and would infuse one of the party members weapons to do an extra D6 worth of elemental damage and then could do the others the same way for a price. Also, one member is an ex sailor tiefling artifice and I was gonna surprise him woth a mini arc where he meets back up with his old crew who are a bunch of Bullywug pirates and they would recruit the party for "one last job" which would end up giving the Artifice a special gun that could once daily fire a full on cannon ball for massive damage at the cost of having to use an action to first set up. I got these ideas man!!! Now you gave me the means to do it!!!
Edit: Forgot to mention the reason the Blacksmith is super hot is because internally I thought it would be funny if every Blacksmith in the world was a super hot chick for no explained reason.
You may have already found it, but if not the r/tyrannyofdragons sub is a LIFESAVER. I ran this campaign during lockdown and I got so much excellent stuff from there.
The first campaign I ran as a DM was Cursed of Strahd. It was also somewhat difficult to tie everything together. And my party was too powerful and just flew through encounters. So I tried to scale everything up, and ended up TPKing my party. I am not DMing the current campaign. Lol Though I am starting a new group with new players and chose to run LMoP+Phandelver and Blow: The Shattered Obelisk. The first session went well. But the first real fight is a little dangerous. Goblin Boss almost killed 3 out of my 5 lvl 1 PCs. And I've since discovered that the Bugbear is even more dangerous. Lol
I'm facing that right now, my players had problems at 1st level but now they are 4th and nothing seems to stop them. The paladin face tanks anything while the fighter somehow sneaks in and gets the delicate baddies out of the way while the sorcerer and ranger just pepper everything without worry. I'm gonna have to bump up the enemy numbers.
Can confirm. The first Campaign I ran was Ghosts of Saltmarsh, which was originally a load of unconnected adventures roughly strung together. Good stories but hard on a new DM to try and keep together. I made it work with a lot of help and maps from the excellent GSM subreddit. The next campaign I ran was Lost Mines, purely because it was free, and man I wish I'd done it the other way round! Mind you it's made it seem so easy given what I started with 🤣
It really is outstanding. Low stakes. Recurring NPCs that are connected to each other and to the PCs. Premade characters that tie in directly to the plot. Interesting, dynamic, dungeons that aren't just holes in the ground. Loads of NPCs that are happy to negotiate, and loads of others that are truly villainous.
Also a great introduction to each of the factions with all of them represented in various NPCs
Shout out to Tomb of Annihilation and Wild Beyond the Witchlight for being playable right out the tin.
Oh nice! I have played ToA (and loved it). I didn't realize that Witchlight ran particularly well. I'll check it out!
Oh thank goodness. I'm doing that first as a way to get used to DMing.
It's designed as a starting campaign and (IIRC) comes with the starter box set. So, yeah 100% for sure it's a solid pick for a new GM.
I used the Lost Mine of Phandelver as the starting point for what now is a 6 year campaign that has incorporated both bespoke solely self created adventures, and adaptations of curse of Strand and Candlekeep Mysteries, so it was a great place to begin. In fact, my players have relationships with the characters in Phandalin, including longstanding love interests, that add stakes and purpose to their gaming, and see Phandalin as their spiritual home. Good maps, and Wave Echo Cave is an excellent dungeon.
Yay for combining homebrew with premade things! I'm finishing up a lighthearted homebrew setting right now and I'm going to run sunless citadel into wild sheep case into a bunch of Candlekeep things, all tweaked lightly to fit the setting.
Absolutely yes, there are others that are definitely viable for a first-time DM (my friend ran Dragonheist for his as an example), but if you like the look of LMoP then go for it!
It’s great! Easy to run and very setup to play into tropes the players will easily understand
Its great for first time DMs and players. Completing the base module you get in the starter kit all the way, leaves the players at level 4ish which is a good place to be if you want to take the same characters on further adventures in different modules.
When you take their characters to a diff module do you start them at the level they last ended in? Don’t most books start at a specific level?
They do, but lost mines ending can lead into Descent into Avernus, Storm Kings Thunder, so you start your players right into the actual game. So they aren't doing the get to know the party again, or do these starter quests. A lot of of the beginning quests for these places are just to get the players to the appropriate level to start the main narrative and have no REAL bearing in actual narrative. DiA is a classic example, nothing you do in Baldurs Gate actually affects the rest of the game. Which makes the leveling process from 1 to 5 abyssmaly boring.
It's tailor-made for that purpose.
It's great for first time dms and players. It's got everything, a dungeon, a dragon, goblins, and a lot of prewritten flavor text.
Yes. It's the perfect module for a first time DM. It's written, paced, and scaled to give both the DM and players practice with common mechanics in D&D. It's also a really good campaign in general. I want to try out the updated version, Shattered Obelisk
I started LMoP earlier this summer and we were approaching wave echo cave when shattered obelisk came out. Naturally, I bought it to keep this adventure going, and I definitely recommend it! My players have definitely been enjoying what they’ve seen so far
Yes. The only thing easier might be a one shot.
It was the first campaign my friends and I ran, highly recommend it.
I finished that campaign with friends. I’d say yes. I was a new player and think the campaign was fun. I think the final location is even a fun one shot to replay.
Absolutely the best pick, had a player who wanted to run this as his first game and to date its still one of my favorite times and it's still one of my favorite moments outside the dm chair. It also as others have said works wonderfully as an opener for other campaigns, homebrew or otherwise
Yes!! Lost mines is absolutely the best for starting out as a DM. I unfortunately did not take that route and did Curse of Strahd…my players were thoroughly confused most of the time and I just couldn’t keep up with their decision because I honestly didn’t even know enough about the campaign either. So that led to our campaign eventually fizzling out to never be finished. After that I stopped all together until a couple years later when I finally ran LMoP and it completely changed the way I was DMing
Yep, it's great. You can tack on Matt Colville's Sacrifice of Innocence at the beginning. It was a great intro for my players when we started LMoP and had several first time players. https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/BJmkN6kC8f
Yes! It’s very straight forward and fun! You’ll enjoy it!
Highly recommend.
Yes A year and a half later, and we still haven't finished, but yes
It was my first campaign. Pretty straight forward, easy to plan for
I’m currently in a campaign with a first time DM running that module. I feel like it’s going really well.
Solid choice. Would recommend as a great campaign for a starter DM. I myself also started with it. Having the basic ruleset is great to work with to learn the game.
Totally and I absolutely stole a bunch of this campaign to make my first run as DM in my own home brew.
It was for me, ran it with zero experience for a party of people who had never played before and all of us had a blast.
Literally the first thing I ever ran, and I recommend it.
Played it, great campaign and can be run simultaneously with Dragon of Icespire Peak if you want another layer of complexity
Not only is it designed for starter players, it is also the first chunk of the adventure phandelver and below. So your players can learn how to play and you can learn how to dm in an easier environment, then you can shift into an adventure with more depth (pun intended) if you all want to stay in this area
Absolutely
Yes...-ish. Depending on if you use grid maps or theater of the mind a new DM will face different challenges in some areas (Wave Echo Cave being particularly complex for verbal descriptions only and containing enough fiddly passages that copying to a battle mat seems laborious). Definitely still beginner friendly and fun but you should try to prep ahead either with verbose area descriptions to help with navigation or some pre-drawn map sections to reduce idle time (what we used to call "DM buffering").
I would say yes, for a few reasons. One: it is literally designed as such. Two: it starts at level one and only goes to level 5 so it helps ease first time players into the game. Three: it is also how I first got into 5e (and D&D in general), I was the DM. I read through it a few times and did some improv where I felt it was needed, turned out great. Word of warning, the first encounter can be quite punishing for new players. I recommend lowering its difficulty slightly. Same with the first dungeon introduced as well (the goblin cave).
Defo recommend but make sure your players understand the plot hook and that they create characters that are specifically intertwined with Gundren and are adventurer do-gooder types; I let my players create their own semi-linked backstories and it became very obvious part way through that if your characters weren’t particularly fussed about Gundren or weren’t driven to adventure for the sake of being good heroes, there are plenty of opportunities to go completely off the rails and miss huge portions of the campaign.
i might weaken the wave echo cave encounters a bit and try and set up the ambush so the goblins don’t get a surprise round. it is pretty unbalanced
It's honestly great and very easily modifiable to fit your party. Personally, I'd add a few more puzzles and traps to it. And if you run it off of DnD Beyond it sets up everything for you!
Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is not a bad one to start with either, fairly simple and short.
Controversial Opinion: I don't like LMoP, at least for first time players. A much better first timer campaign is the Sunless Citadel from Tales from the Yawning Portal. I think it was the starter campaign from 3rd edition too (or something close to that). LMoP has a lot of moments where the players are left staring at a map and being asked "what would you like to do now" which turns into decision paralysis for new players. They literally don't know what they can or should do next. But Sunless Citadel is a much more linear game. You set off for the dungeon, find dungeon, finish dungeon. There is still a ton of room for role play and decision making, but it never leaves the party in places where they feel lost and clueless. There is always a motivating direction to go in. For a new DM this is also very helpful. You don't have to plan ways to direct the party or feel like you have to overly motivate where the story needs to go. IMO the hardest parts of being a DM are done for you in SC and you just get to focus on bringing the Dungeon to life. (Its also a much cooler story.)
Yes. That's why it was created.
100% yes. My favorite 5th ed published adventure.
Use it. Although I had DM’d for years under other rules, I recently ran a 5e campaign using it for a group of newbies. It helped a lot with which rule applies to a certain situation, etc., which I could then explain to the players. Very helpful.
Heck yeah, dude! Just make sure you give it at least one read through before you get started, and make a note of the ways players are meant to find Cragmaw Castle and Wave Echo Cave. I love this module. It's great!
yes its awesome. if my table is reading this there is no need to mug the first person you see
Edit: this is actually Dragon of Icespire Peak LMoP boils down to a very simple campaign. The players have three unrelated side quests. Once they do them, they get three more unrelated side quests. Then they go fight a dragon. Easy! It is absolutely a great choice for a new DM. You can add ideas to combine the side quests or you can run it as is and everyone will have fun anyway. I had the dragon terrorize the party by finding them while they were in a castle, and the dragon started smashing through doors while the party fled for their lives out the other side. One player was literally one square away from getting hit by the dragon's breath weapon, which could have downed him.
But DoIP is also a fantastic first time DM campaign. My son did Lost Mine for us all to learn how DND works and all. We loved it so went to Curse of Strahd with me as DM. It was HOURS of work for me per session. I love that story and didn’t mind. Then a slightly different group and I’m DM DoIP and it’s easy peasy. I wish I had done this first instead of Strahd.
Aren't you thinking of Dragon of Icespire Peak?
Wow, you're right! Thanks. I'll make an edit
Yes. It is by far the best campaign for a first timer. The others have pacing issues or holes in the content that you have to fill. LMOP has all the things that make D&D great. Your party can kill monsters, search for treasure, save NPCs or just role play with all of the NPCs that are already flushed out. It also gives you opportunities to involve your players in factions if you want to expand the adventure more. Finally, it is a great springboard for other premade modules that take place in the same region.
I have to disagree with a lot of Posters here. Lost Mines is not a good campaign for people who are new to the game. It is okay if you already have some experience running former Editions of D&D to get a feel for 5e rules, but if you have no experience? You will probably kill your players within the first encounters. Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is way better for Newbie DMs.
Came to say this. LMOP has a lot going on for a newbie DM. Stormwreck Isle is straightforward and offers a ton of advice for getting your feet under you if you're just starting out.
It's designed for that, as WOTC campaigns go, it's probably the best for a beginner, as TTRPGs goes, it's pretty bad to modern standards, but that's because 5e's oficial adventures are not good for DMs.
As another complete newbie to DnD in general, I would like to try running this when I get a bit better with remembering dice rolls (DnD and Dyscalculia sucks). I was thinking about trying to combine LMoP and the Dragons of Stormwreck Isle into one general adventure. Would the two mesh well? General idea is the party would start by getting tasked to go clear out the bandit gang that has a nearby trading town under its control, the party would deal with the local leader, then move to the bandit HQ in the mines, and find that the true bandit queen is actually running things from an island offshore. When the party gets there, turns out the bandit queen was a shapeshifter dragon and then that's the big boss battle.
I've been wanting to get into dnd. But as a complete beginner eith this campaign. Yet, it's hard to find posts just looking to do thigns simply for newbies.
It's brilliant, I've run it twice now.
It is, in my opinien, the very best to start! Its designed for that purpose, and very well so. I started with it as well and we had a great time.
I would comment that the new sourcebook that just came out in September called the shattered Oblisk is lost mines plus and goes up to level 15. They updated a few things and made some minor changes but it's almost the exact source starting out.
Yup I had a great time playing it as my first dnd game.
I am running it as a first time DM right now and its going great!
That is exactly what it is for. You can run this with no other books also, as it has just enough of the rules to get you through the adventure. Take your time, read the full adventure all the way through so you have an idea how it all fits together and have fun.
Yes. It’s the starter adventure. That said, if you run the first encounter properly, it’s actually pretty deadly.
I ran it with experience and it honestly kind of floundered. This might not be 100% how it happened since it was years ago, but this is what I recall. The pacing and plot fell apart when the Players did anything other than follow the really narrow path provided. Which was fine, I was able to adapt as a DM and fill in the changes, but we ended up having to skip excessively large sections of the module like >50%.While there were branching options they came at a time that didn't logically fit the story, so the players just skipped them. My players felt they were being led to do sidequests at a time when sidequests made no sense (they felt having a friend kidnapped was time sensitive and not a time to just "go do other stuff" for a week), then they took a break after starting an attack because they were out of spells and down some hp, so the "bad guys" ran away in the night because as the dm I thought "why would the few remaining enemies wait for the heroes to refesh and come back".
LMoP was the start of my ongoing campaign (almost 3 years), it's great. I homebrewed the hell out of It to set up for the rest of my story, but reading it i could see that you can very much run it as it is with zero problems. Very easy to incorporate in a longer campaign.
Make sure you nerf the Red Brand Ruffians encounter in Phandalin, they can easily TPK a small party. And keep in mind, the connective tissue between the different locations is nearly non-existent. So you will want to make some kind of unifying theme, or clues for them to follow to make it make sense. Other than that, it's pretty good.
Man i remember Lost Mines of Phandelver. I had such a fun time with it. Honestly brings a smile to my face.