Lost Mine of Phandelver Review: D&D’s Best Intro Campaign? I Ran It For My Group

By JimmiWazEre

Opinionated tabletop gaming chap.

Updated October 2026

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TL;DR: Lost Mine of Phandelver starts strong with tight early dungeons and a solid onboarding for new players, but quickly loses focus. The villain is forgettable, the pacing drifts, and structural choices teach new DMs bad habits like railroading and pulling punches. I rebuilt huge sections and turned it into a spaghetti western, giving the BBEG presence, adding time pressure, and replacing the green dragon with a recurring ancient red. The result was decent enough, but only because of heavy rewrites.

It took us about 10 sessions. Only run it if you're an experienced DM who's prepared to chop it up and fix its many issues.

Run it as written and you'll learn the hard way.

Bow before me… or burn

Belch, Duncath, Twig, Diego, and Nasbo fire up the Forge of Spells.

From the shadows: slow clap. "Well done…" says the Black Spider, stepping into the dim light. "You have been my pawn from the start…"

Her skin tears away. Her back splits. The Black Spider crumples, replaced by an ancient red dragon: Dragos, the Destroyer of Worlds.

"Bow before me… or burn in this place!"

What is the Lost Mine of Phandelver?

Lost Mine of Phandelver (LMoP) is the first D&D 5e starter set adventure. Released in 2014, LMoP is an event driven campaign for 3 - 5 players, taking characters from level 1 - 5.

It took me several months of play to finish this, about 10 sessions in all, you could probably do it faster but we're limited to 2-3 hours sessions twice a month.

That's right folks, it's another review from Jimbo about a product that's been out for chuffin' ages already! Wooo.

Spoiler Warning

As written, the adventure is set on the Sword Coast, near Neverwinter, this dwarf dude named Gundren Rockseeker has found the legendary Wave Echo Cave (WEC), and the valuable Forge of Spells (FoS) within. En route to the frontier town of Phandalin, Rockseeker is kidnapped by the Cragmaw Goblins, leaving you and your fellows to pick up the pieces.

This all ends with a fight against a BBEG you'd be forgiven for forgetting about called The Black Spider, who's been orchestrating all the local problems from the shadows like some moustache twirling villain out of a Saturday morning cartoon.

Ok, that's you all caught up.

So, What's it trying to do differently?

LMoP is a starter set, so it's trying to teach new DMs and players how the game works over the course of a strictly Event Driven Campaign (EDC). Emphasis on strictly, because all modules sit somewhere on a scale between sandbox and railroad. Well, this adventure sits at 90% railroad and IMO that's too much for something that's meant to set expectations.

The big problem here is that the EDC structure is a rigid sequence of set pieces where the players are nudged from one scene to the next. In my opinion, that's a rubbish exposure to how an adventure should look for a new DM, and it's a big reason you see so many online complaints about railroading from players regarding their lack of agency, and from burnt out DMs begging for help over their stress trying to force the flow of the game towards the predefined solution.

What does it do well?

Cragmaw Hideout in act 1 is a neat and concise little dungeon that does a good job teaching players about stealth, traps, competing factions, multiple paths and solutions. Aside from being too verbose, (which I'll get to later) the dungeon presents a nice little challenge to the players, and is easy enough to run for the DM.

Redbrand Hideout too, is a little bigger but still very well designed and reinforces those lessons about multiple routes, traps, and adds rewards for extra exploration. It also includes a cool encounter with a Nothic which can lead to fun shenanigans - like sucking the skin off a willing dragonborn's finger!

Finally I can confirm that this adventure contains both dungeons and a dragon, which at the very least earns it points for correct advertising.

Unfortunately that's about as much as I can honestly say that I thought was legitimately good. Everything else is 'meh' at best.

Yikes, I've got some beef. Here's what's broken, and how I fixed it

Deep breath.

I'm an experienced GM so after giving the game a cursory read through and seeing a tonne of things both objectively and subjectively bad, I had lots of work cut out for me to make a bunch of changes.

Some of those changes were quite experimental and not all of them worked as I'd hoped. We lives and learns, don't we precious?

First things first: this is a western

To start with - old forgotten mines, gangs, a frontier town... come on - this is a western, and yet, the game seems to forget this. Barely anything else nods towards this as the game defaults again and again to generic European fantasy land. Bugger that. So I reskinned it into a spaghetti western, including house-ruling in six-shooters. Much better.

Running it from the book is slow, so I rewrote every room

Man alive, I hate long form text! If you want to run from the book (because, you know, that's why you bought a book in the first place) without having to spend hours rewriting and summarising it, then the DM is required to parse long form prose over several pages then flip back to a map for reference. This is no way to design an adventure, and it makes running scenes slow and easy to mess up.

Below is just 2 pages from the 9 page WEC dungeon. Can you imagine trying to read that at the table, under pressure, and then articulate it back to your players? And those read aloud text boxes - my players would be asleep!

So, given my loathing of long form prose at the table, I went through every dungeon and rewrote every room out for brevity and utility. Check out this post on how I prepare room descriptions if you want to learn how to do this.

The opening ambush can TPK the party, so I ran it as a level 0 gauntlet

Ok, so, as it's meant to be played the first encounter is a forced combat, seemingly 'balanced', and yet it's so deadly that any DM playing the ambushing goblins with any degree of tactical nous should cause a TPK within a few turns. This is a terrible lesson - forced combats are bad enough, but making brand new DMs fight with one hand tied behind their back to give the fledgling players half a chance sets a bad precedent about expecting fudged rolls for both parties.

The text should acknowledge the deadliness here, and then give very specific guidance on what to do as DM if the players do not win.

So I leaned into the deadliness instead. This was really experimental, I ran act 1 as a lvl 0 gauntlet - each player had a cast of 4 characters each and whoever survived until after Cragmaw Hideout got to level up to 1, gain a class and became their primary character. This worked pretty well, but if you try it yourself make sure your players fully understand what's going to happen, as most of their characters will die by design and the players are expected to embrace this. It worked for me, just about - but you do you.

"Just about" is doing a lot of work there. I obviously didn't do a good enough job explaining how deadly it would be (5e encourages players to think they're superheroes), and by the end of Cragmaw Hideout they were about to lose their last characters. So something big turned up to save them, by pure DM fiat. More on him later.

Nobody cares about Gundren, and I never fully fixed that

Gundren, the whole game is about rescuing Gundren, but other than a single boring read-aloud text box which mentions him at the start of the game - the players never meet him or have any genuinely gripping reason to care that he's missing other than an underwhelming amount of GP offered as a reward.

In truth, the game comes with pre-gen characters that we didn't use, and one or two of them have some tertiary connections to Gundren and Phandalin, but you don't meet his brothers until the end so they're not pressing you forwards, and the relationship Gundren has with Sildar is only mercantile, so why should he bust a nut begging for your help?

The cast of Phandalin got pruned down to just a few memorable NPCs. One of Gundren's brothers was dead from the start, murdered by the Redbrands to push that conflict to the front. Sister Garaele became possessed by Agatha the Banshee, forcing the party to solve that before they could get her help.

I also kept on bringing Gundren up every session to remind the players about him, but I can't say that they ever developed a natural care for him. He was effectively just a MacGuffin.

The Black Spider is forgettable, so I put her in the inn from the start

Then there's the Black Spider. A BBEG that players just don't care about. As written, you never meet the Black Spider until the end, and you barely learn anything about them, their motives, or even that they're particularly evil or just misunderstood. That's a real kicker when you consider that this is so story driven - what's the point of a baddie if the players don't have an opinion about them?

So the Black Spider was given presence. Introduced early under the guise of a serving girl at the Sleeping Giant Inn, I had her and the party competing to secure a lockbox containing a vital key to the Forge. That idea came from Matty P on YouTube, who really likes LMoP. I took a lot of his tips to heart about improving the story and trimming some of the fat, and his full playlist is definitely worth watching if you're planning on running it.

The players ended up opening the lockbox and keeping the key from inside, which flipped the final dungeon: instead of chasing the Black Spider to the Forge, they were the ones being pursued.

She even kidnapped a beloved NPC, turning her from an abstract villain into someone the players actively hated. That was Diego Ramone, who a new player later took over as their character. She held him at a deserted roadside inn outside town, and the players handed over the (empty) lockbox in exchange for him. She betrayed them, of course: a bunch of statues came to life and attacked the party, and a progress clock started ticking on getting Diego out in time.

The game's only dragon is miles off the path, so Dragos came to them

It feels like ancient wisdom to say that a dragon that most players will never meet is no dragon at all. If a dragon falls over in the woods but no PC is there to hear it - does it still make a noise? Well, said dragon lives in Thundertree, which is so far removed from the main quest that I can't see many players naturally finding it without heavy DM fiat. What a waste of the game's only dragon!

So I got rid of Thundertree, it's too far away from the adventure site and has absolutely nothing to do with anything. I also swapped out the young green dragon who lives there with an ancient red dragon; Dragos, Destroyer of Worlds, and I had him turn up every now and then as this ever present threat to extort treasure from the players.

He turned up three times. The first was pure DM fiat at the end of Cragmaw Hideout, saving the party from losing their last characters, and that rescue came at a price. The second was a random overland encounter, where he collected: every coin they had, as his "protection fee". Some of the players hid from him, but one couldn't resist poking him in the face with a mage hand, which gave the game away. The third was the finale, which I'll get to. Dragos' impact was sufficient that the players were speaking about him more than the Black Spider, they really hated/dreaded/were awed by him.

Act 3 has no urgency, so I added progress clocks (after a funhouse that backfired)

The game doesn't give you any tools to address pacing. Gundren has been kidnapped, but time might as well be standing still for days on end whilst you side quest. This should be used to teach DMs about driving urgency and hammering the game forwards with a simple GM facing timeline of steadily worsening events that happen if the PCs fail to act.

Speaking of act - after you finish up with the Redbrands, act 3 suddenly opens up into a sandbox which sends jarring messages about the game becoming a hex crawl. There's only the most cursory guidance given to teaching DMs this new skill, and when the players have just experienced two acts teaching them that the game is a railroad about a time sensitive rescue mission, the sudden lack of direction brings the game screeching to a whiplash inducing halt.

In Act 3, I tried expanding Old Owl Well into a full "funhouse" dungeon, and even though it was cool, it heavily distracted from Gundren's rescue and confused the group about what mattered. The lesson there was clear: trying to add sandbox elements into a strict railroad just muddies both.

By the end of the Old Owl Well thread my players had pretty much forgotten all about Gundren, so I very quickly abandoned the idea of the exploratory sandbox, and swiftly provided more clues to guide the players towards his rescue where I made liberal use of progress clocks to make sure my players knew what was at stake. If you want to learn about how and why to use progress clocks, check this post on progress clocks.

Cragmaw Castle's side door skips the whole dungeon, so the clocks had to save it

Much later, Cragmaw Castle offers a false dichotomy. You see, players can go in the front door but that's obviously trapped, but if they do then it leads to several routes through the dungeon until the end and a potentially satisfying experience. However, because of the aforementioned trap, the players do a quick bit of recon, and discover that they can just walk around the outside the castle and go in through the prominently placed side door with a simple pick lock check. After that they can chance upon skipping the entire dungeon by turning right on a whim and walking straight to the boss room with Gundren.

The game is trying to teach players that there are multiple paths and choices, but if one of those choices is obviously the right answer, then that's no choice at all - all we're left with is an anti-climax.

That's more or less what happened at my table. The party scouted around the castle for ages, so meticulous about checking every angle that some of them were getting frustrated. Eventually they decided the side door was the safest option, turned left straight into the galley, beat every goblin in there, and got the one survivor to tell them where Gundren was being held. Then they went straight there.

What stopped that being a bag of Tom Hanks was two clocks: 6 turns until Gundren was executed, and 4 turns until reinforcements arrived from the rest of the castle they'd skipped. They quickly failed to stop the reinforcements, and the flood of mooks almost stopped them reaching Gundren in time. That alone is responsible for rescuing the Cragmaw Castle session from being a massive anticlimax due to its bad dungeon design.

Wave Echo Cave is a slog, so the maze became a skill challenge

Then, in act 4, WEC is such a large and boring dungeon that even the designers feel obliged to acknowledge as much. To combat this, rather than equipping the DMs with detailed knowledge about how to run a procedural dungeon crawl, the game settles for a quick paragraph about rolling a d20 on a random monster table according to GM fiat. This is not sufficient, not even close. (If you want that missing guidance, I've written about how to run a dungeon crawl and running random encounters.)

Wave Echo Cave was rebuilt into something tighter and easier to run. The maze became a tense skill challenge instead of a drawn-out slog.

Here's how it worked. A fine fungal spore hung in the cave's air, causing confusion, so the party could easily get split up and lost. Each player described how they'd find their way through, and made a check that matched their approach. Everyone who passed stayed together; everyone who failed rolled a d4, and the result was their new group.

Then I made a random encounter check for every group, including the one that passed. That was the real punishment for failing: you might face an encounter on your own. We did three rounds of this before the party found its way out of the maze, and the results of the last check decided who came out of which exit. In retrospect, that last part was a mistake, since it created two parties going in different directions, which makes it harder as DM to keep everybody engaged without massively increasing your own stress overhead by constantly juggling back and forth.

The finale: five golems and a traitor

At the climax, I revealed that the Black Spider was actually Dragos all along, which was a nice twist. One of my players even sided with the ancient red dragon whilst the others chose to fight, which gave me the opportunity to finish a campaign my favourite way - with a massive PvP monster bash.

You see, I placed 5 pilotable stone golems in the FoS chamber, and when battle commenced, the players used these in their combat against Dragos (who was controlled by the player who sided with him) - it was awesome and played out like the finale of an episode of Power Rangers, whilst I got to sit back and watch this really tightly fought match between titans.

Each golem was identical, with a couple of unique special abilities of its own. At first the players stuck to those abilities as written, and they were losing. More than once I suggested they start thinking outside the box and off the character sheet, or they were going to lose this battle.

So they did. They started narrating very specific attacks and the effects they wanted, which ended with Dragos's wing destroyed and him shoved off a ledge into a bottomless pit he could only glide down.

Conclusion: should you run Lost Mine of Phandelver in 2026?

In the end, I have mixed feelings about LMoP, but I'm unfortunately leaning towards it being a bit pants. I really enjoyed acts 1 and 2, but the adventure rapidly drifts away from focus in act 3. Additionally, for a game all about a prewritten story, said story requires a major rewrite to make it satisfactory.

Also, as a starter set to introduce new players and DMs to D&D, I think it probably does more harm than good if I'm being honest. I'd like to try to excuse its flaws by saying it's really old, but frankly, there are starter adventures for earlier editions that have existed for much longer and nail it - Keep on the Borderlands anyone?

Turns out Lizards Ate My Toast had the same idea. In September 2025 they released a new starter set, Heroes of the Borderlands, loosely based on the classic Keep on the Borderlands module. I haven't run it yet, but I've seen a lot of reviews and videos saying it's very good, and it's where I'd point a brand new DM today.

So who should still run LMoP? In my view - Only experienced DMs who are prepared to chop it up and fix its many issues. New DMs and players just run a massive risk of learning all the wrong lessons.

I guess I enjoyed myself running it, but only because I enjoy playing games with my friends, and maybe that's enough for you too? That said - I would have enjoyed myself even more running something better.

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