Go to Part 1

In my review of The Shattered Obelisk, I mentioned — among a plethora of other problems — that the book was notable because some of the dungeons and dungeon levels it features aren’t actually keyed. Instead, unnumbered maps of the dungeons are presented, accompanied by a text that describes the various rooms of the dungeon in rambling paragraphs instead of well-organized room keys.

In particular, I pointed out an example from the end of Zorzula’s Rest, where the PCs enter a new level or section of the dungeon called the Indigo Sanctum.

Several people have contacted me to say that I was mistaken. Others have publicly accused me of being a lying liar who lies.

So let’s talk about this a little bit.

People who are wrong on the internet, of course, are a dime a dozen. I don’t have time to respond to everyone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. But I think this is actually a really important issue — for both adventure designers and Dungeon Masters — and I’d hate to see anyone dismissing it due to a misunderstanding: The fact that D&D no longer teaches DMs how to create and run location-crawls has resulted in a lot of DMs struggling to create and run adventures that should actually be really easy for them. That really sucks for those DMs.

Seeing this atrophying of basic adventure design skills crop up in third-party adventures is also bad. And the fact that we’re now seeing the same failures from Wizards of the Coast’s own designers is really worrisome: If the publishers of D&D lose the institutional knowledge for how to design the most basic adventures, this trend will accelerate and be even more difficult to course correct.

Some people tell me this isn’t a big deal because D&D still makes money. Which… yeah, I can’t even really fathom the logic there.

Some people tell me that this isn’t a big deal because D&D isn’t about dungeons any more. And if that was true, sure. I don’t expect Technoir to teach me how to make dungeons, because that’s not what the game is about. If dungeons aren’t relevant to you, go find the scenario structures that are! But you know who does think D&D is still about dungeons? Wizards of the Coast. The Shattered Obelisk features 25+ dungeons.

Some people tell me that I’m just angry that D&D doesn’t feature “old school dungeons” any more. There’s a lot of false assumptions to unpack there, but I think we can boil it down to a simple reality: If you think “put numbers on a map and write a competent room key” is what defines an “old school dungeon,” then you’re really just proving my point that basic adventure design skills are missing in action.

So if we can all accept that “dungeons don’t exist any more, so it’s okay that this dungeon is bad” is both a paradox and a fallacy, maybe we can take a look at what’s actually going on in The Shattered Obelisk.

THE INDIGO SANCTUM

The Indigo Sanctum, as I mentioned is one of three levels in Zorzula’s Rest. You can see the map of the Indigo Sanctum, as it appears on p. 98 of The Shattered Obelisk, above.

And if we were to properly key this map, it would look like this:

Now, the reason I’m supposedly a lying liar who lies is because this isn’t fair: Those aren’t three separate rooms! The Indigo Sanctum is just one big room!

This, however, is exactly why I chose the Indigo Sanctum as my example from the book. It’s not the only dungeon like this in The Shattered Obelisk, but if I showed you the Hardyhammer Mine:

You might say to me, “Well… c’mon, Justin. That’s only two rooms. Do you really need to key them properly?”

Or maybe I show you Marthungrim’s Home:

Sure, now there are four rooms. “But,” you protest, “only two of them are actually described in the text. So are they even really separate rooms?”

And then maybe we’d argue about what actually counts as a “room.” Or maybe you’d want to debate how large a location needs to be before it counts as a “dungeon.” Just all kinds of delightfully irrelevant semantics.

The thing about Zorzula’s Rest, though, is that none of that matters. You can’t tell me it’s a dungeon that shouldn’t be keyed for some reason, because the rest of the dungeon is keyed.

“Ah, ha!” you say. “But we can still argue about whether those are separate rooms!”

Well, if you want. But it’s not an argument you’ll be having with me. It’s an argument you’ll be having with the book. Because you know who else thinks those are separate rooms?

The designer of the adventure.

The Shattered Obelisk explicitly describes Area 2 and Area 3 on my map above as the “Hostage Room” and the “War Room,” respectively. They’re even given inline headings laden with a bunch of relevant details, meaning that it would have take only the slightest amount of effort to excise them from the middle of the big, rambling description of the dungeon level and properly key them instead.

…

This is the bit where I drop the mic.

DUNGEON HOW-TO

The failure to properly execute the dungeons in The Shattered Obelisk, as I said in the original review and as we’ve seen here, is not just some weird confusion over the final level of Zorzula’s Rest. It is a pervasive problem that occurs multiple times throughout the campaign.

Is it a problem that’s going to persist at Wizards of the Coast? Will this become a trend in future adventures, until perhaps we see official products in which no dungeons are properly keyed?

I hope not.

But it’s possible. We’ve already seen this happen in third-party supplements. It seems impossible; but to a gamer in the mid-‘80s it would have seemed equally unbelievable that hex maps would vanish for a generation… and then they did.

What I actually hope is that the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide will be a massive course correction, and we’ll see a full chapter dedicated to teaching new Dungeon Masters how to create and run dungeons. (At this point, I’d even settle for a minor course correction so that the book at least contains an example of a keyed dungeon map.)

Properly keying and running a dungeon is very easy, and that makes it really tempting to dismiss the idea that they’re skills that need to be taught. But the reality is that those are often the most important skills you can teach, because they end up being the foundation on which all the other skills are built.

So let’s keep our fingers crossed that the new Dungeon Master’s Guide is better than the old one; that The Shattered Obelisk is the last time we see Wizards’ designers fail to key their dungeon maps; and that we all get a better foundation on which to build our adventures in the future.

But if not, there’s always So You Want To Be a Game Master.

Go to Part 1

THE CORE FAILURE

A flub that The Shattered Obelisk makes entirely within the context of itself is the campaign it promises, which is a race where the PCs need to grab as many of the Obelisk fragments as possible before the mind flayers do: The more fragments the PCs get, the weaker the mind flayers’ ritual and the greater the advantage the PCs’ will have in the final confrontation.

This is a campaign that The Shattered Obelisk just fundamentally fails to deliver.

First, the “race for the fragments” is a bad joke. There are seven fragments in total:

• Four of them are taken by the mind flayers before the PCs are even aware that they exist.
• Two of them are located at sites which have no mind flayer presence at all, and the “race” consists of mind flayer minions materializing offscreen, grabbing the fragment, and dematerializing with it if the PCs lose an unrelated combat encounter.
• The final fragment, located in Gibbet’s Crossing, actually does have a mind flayer onsite, but let’s talk about this mind flayer a little bit…

The mind flayer’s name is Qunbraxel. He’s been here for weeks or possibly months (the adventure is unclear), accompanied by his grimlock servants. Unfortunately, the only hallway to the room where the shard is located is blocked by a regenerating magic item: No matter how much his grimlock servants hit it, it just regenerates.

Qunbraxel’s only idea? Have the grimlocks hit it some more.

The activation word to bypass the magic item can be found by reading the thoughts of a creature in the next room. Or Qunbraxel could walk across the hall and find it written down.

Qunbraxel has 19 Intelligence.

Given the complete failure to execute on the fragment race, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the promised pay-off also lands with a dull, wet thud. There are three triggers:

• If the flayers got five pieces, then one of the flayers is standing 100 ft. closer to the entrance of their lair.
• If the flayers got four pieces, then a different flayer is also standing 40 ft. closer to the entrance of their lair.
• If the flayers got all seven pieces, then two additional flayers are present.

Note how incredibly pointless this is. Also, that none of it has anything to do with the obelisk or its capabilities. It’s just dissociated noise.

This is part of a finale which is, frankly, a dud. The PCs jump through a convoluted series of arbitrary and increasingly tedious hoops, only to arrive at a remarkably pedestrian fight against three (almost certainly not five) mind flayers in basically four empty rooms.

As if sensing that a satisfactory conclusion has eluded their grasp, the writers have the angry god the mind flayers worshiped send a conveniently weakened “sliver” of itself to fight the PCs in an almost equally featureless 60-foot-wide room (this one has a pool in it!) while failing to announce its identity (so the players will likely have no idea who they’re even fighting).

AMATEUR HOUR

Dumathoin, Dwarven God: Yo! Ironquill! A bunch of mind flayers are going to attack your temple in a few days and kill everybody!

Ironquill: Got it!

(several days later, Ironquill appears in the dwarven afterlife)

Dumathoin: Oh, no! What happened?

Ironquill: Well, you warned me about the mind flayer attack…

Dumathoin: Right.

Ironquill: So I did the only logical thing.

Dumathoin: You warned everybody the attack was coming.

Ironquill: I faked my own death.

Dumathoin: Uh… okay. But then you warned everybody the attack was coming, right?

Ironquill: Then I secretly snuck away to investigate the local mind flayer stronghold by myself so that I could learn their plan of attack and tell everyone about it.

Dumathoin: But you warned everybody before you left, right?

Ironquill: You won’t believe this, but I died!

Dumathoin: But you warned everybody before you left, right?

(hundreds of dead dwarves appear)

Dwarves: Yo! Dumathoin! A little warning about the mind flayers would have been nice!

I would like to find some kind of silver-lining at this point, but I’m afraid it just doesn’t exist.

Most of The Shattered Obelisk is built around dungeons. And these dungeons are filled with the most amateurish design mistakes:

• Multiple NPCs with no viable route to get where they’re located.
• A hydra in a crypt that’s been sealed for centuries. (What does it eat?)
• A barricade (Z7) that stops goblins from going to the lower level of the dungeon… but the dungeon key makes no sense if the goblins can’t/don’t go down there.
• Maps that don’t match the text, and vice versa. (For example, room keys like X8 that list doors that don’t exist.)

And then you get to the point where Wizards of the Coast forgets how to key a dungeon.

On page 98, midway through Zorzula’s Rest, the PCs enter a new level of the dungeon and… The map is no longer numbered. The description of the dungeon bizarrely shifts from keyed entries to rambling paragraphs describing various unnumbered rooms.

In Whither the Dungeon? I talked about the fact that the Dungeon Master’s Guide no longer teachers new DMs how to key or run dungeons. (It doesn’t even include an example of a keyed dungeon map.) And I talked about how this has had, for example, an impact on adventures published through the DMs Guild, with an increasing number featuring dungeons with no maps or maps with no key.

It’s a disturbing trend that bodes ill for the health of the hobby.

But seeing it in an official module published by Wizards of the Coast was truly a surreal moment.

And, unfortunately, one that is repeated later in the book.

This poor design is, of course, not limited to the dungeons. I’ve already talked about the NPCs with nigh-incoherent backstories and incomprehensible motivations. To this you can add innumerable continuity errors and timelines that contradict each other, to the point where the adventure can’t stand up to even the most casual thought without collapsing like a waterlogged house of cards.

There’s a poster map that you’re supposed to give to the players at the beginning of the campaign, but you can’t because it shows all the hidden locations they’re supposed to discover through play. Later, the players receive a handout with a different overland map showing the location of the three dungeons in which the obelisk shards are located, but the dungeons are actually in the Underdark and two of them are actually different levels of the same dungeon, despite being shown in different locations on the handout.

So none of that actually works.

Something else that doesn’t work is asking the PCs to succeed on an Intelligence (Arcana) check, and if they don’t, they’re losers and they don’t deserve to finish the adventure.

Another major problem the campaign repeatedly suffers from is including potentially cool lore, but utterly failing to give the PCs any way to learn about it. (Which is a particular pet peeve of mine.) For example, in the mind flayer citadel of Illithinoch, we read:

Illithinoch’s heavy stone doors lack handles or latches. When a creature looks directly at a door for more than a few seconds, it swings open and assails the creature opening it with a jarring mental pulse that sounds to the creature like clashing cymbals. The pulse deals no damage, but all creatures other than mind flayers find it unpleasant. No one else within Illithinoch can hear this mental pulse except for the infected elder brain… Once the characters open this door and trigger the jarring mental pulse, the infected elder brain in area X15 takes notice of their arrival.

That’s pretty cool, actually. Very creepy. So with the elder brain tracking their every move, what does it do with that knowledge?

Absolutely nothing. The players will never even know they were being tracked.

…

It just goes on and on and on.

Eventually you reach the last four pages of the book, where you’ll find a “Story Tracker.” This is a double-sided sheet, repeated twice, which is “intended to help you or your players keep track of the characters’ progress throughout this adventure’s story.”

First, it has spoilers on it, so I’m obviously not going to give this to my players.

Second, it’s designed to be photocopied, not ripped out of the book. So why do they include two identical copies?

Third, I cannot even begin to conceive how it’s supposed to be used. For example, the “Chapter 2: Trouble in Phandalin” section includes spaces for listing three “Side Quests,” with each having a single 4-inch-long line for taking “notes.” The term “side quest” was used in the original Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure, but was, as far as I can tell, removed from The Shattered Obelisk. Plus, there are more than three side quests in this chapter. And what “notes” am I supposed to take in such a ludicrously inadequate space?

It’s kind of the perfect ending to The Shattered Obelisk, though, because I’m completely baffled by why it was included, what the designer was thinking, and how it survived any kind of editorial review process.

CONCLUSION

Giving a final rating to Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk is actually a little tricky.

On the one hand, Lost Mine of Phandelver is a good adventure and although it’s been needlessly degraded here, this is nevertheless the only place where it can be found in print today.

On the other hand, literally everything original to The Shattered Obelisk is terrible. Someone asked me if it would be worth picking up as a resource for trying to make a better campaign, and my conclusion was that it would actually have negative value compared to just reading the basic pitch and designing your own campaign with the same concept.

Ultimately, I think The Shattered Obelisk is a travesty and I’m going to give it the grade that it deserves. But I will offer the caveat that if it’s the only way you can get access to Lost Mine of Phandelver, you might still want to consider it (if you can find it at a substantial discount).

Grade: F

Project Lead: Amanda Hamon
Writers: Richard Baker, Eytan Bernstein, Makenzie De Armas, Amanda Hamon, Ron Lundeen, Christopher Perkins

Publisher: Wizards of the Cost
Cost: $59.95
Page Count: 220

ADDITIONAL READING
Addendum: Unkeyed Dungeons
Remixing the Shattered Obelisk
Phandalin Region Map – Label Layers

Go to Part 1

Let’s do some quick review.

The Three Clue Rule maintains that for any conclusion you want the PCs to make, you should include at least three clues.

Furthermore, we can classify clues as being either leads (which point to places where you can continue your investigation by collecting more clues) and evidence (which point to other revelations; e.g., the identity of the killer or the method for creating red mercury). This distinction is valuable because one is how you navigate the scenario, while the other is usually the goal (or goals) of the scenario.

(Plus, only leads need to obey the Inverted Three Clue Rule. See Node-Based Scenario Design.)

Now that we’re all up to speed, brace yourself because we’re about to go even deeper:

Leads can also be divided into two types: existential leads and access leads.

Existential leads literally indicate that the target node exists and/or that the PCs would find the target to be of interest (e.g., because they might find clues or treasure there).

Access leads, on the other hand, tell the PCs how they can go to the target node.

It’s not unusual for there to be little or no difference between these two types of leads because access to a node is often trivial: If the PCs know the Morning Star Nightclub is significant to their investigation, they can trivially use Google Maps to figure out where it is.

On the other hand, consider a runic inscription in some ancient ruins that says, “The Lost City of Shandrala is possessed of many treasures!” That’s an existential lead. It might get the PCs interested in Shandrala, but if they don’t know where it is, there’s nothing they can do about it. A map indicating the location of one of the Jade Portals that leads to the Lost City, on the other hand? That’s an access clue, allowing the PCs to go to Shandrala.

TROUBLESHOOTING

The distinction here might seem exceedingly esoteric, but it has practical applications.

First, it can be essential when troubleshooting a scenario. For example, you might look at your revelation list and say, “I’ve got three clues pointing to the Lost City of Shandrala! I’m good to go!” But if some or, worse yet, all of those clues are existential leads, then you haven’t actually fulfilled the Three Clue Rule.

This problem can even be hard to spot when it’s actively happening at the game table: If you think your players have all the clues they need, but they’re nonetheless spinning their wheels, it can be worthwhile to make sure that there aren’t roadblocks by a lack of access to the nodes they want to investigate.

The reverse can also be true: The PCs may have multiple leads giving them access to a node, but if they don’t have a reason to go there it may not matter! In my experience, this problem is much rarer because the dramatic nature of the game itself strongly implies that if something is mentioned, then it’s significant (e.g., I’m not giving you a random map with a location circled on it for no reason; therefore the location is inherently worth checking out). But particularly in a sandbox campaign, players not understanding the significance or value of a node may isolate material that you erroneously think is robustly linked to the rest of the world.

You can think of existential leads as pointing to existential revelations, and, naturally, access leads as pointing to access revelations.

In practical terms, as described in The Secret Life of Nodes, it’s not unusual for my node list to directly double as a revelation list. Most of the time this works just fine because, as we’ve noted, your existential and access leads for a node are usually one and the same thing. But when they’re not, obviously, your revelation list can become a trap, artificially conflating revelations that are actually separate from each other.

The solution, of course, is to separate your existential revelations into a separate revelation list and supply the proper clues for both lists. (In this sense, the existential revelations act much more like evidentiary revelations, insofar as they are conclusions you want the players to make, but which do not allow the PCs to navigate through the scenario.)

PAYOFF

The distinction between existential and access revelations can also be used to your advantage when designing scenarios by creating payoff.

Take the Lost City of Shandrala, for example. If the first time the players hear about it is when they find a map indicating its location with a hand-scrawled note reading, “Home of the Jade Masters!” that works: The clue combines both the existential and access leads, and it’s quite likely that the players will check out the Lost City at some point.

But consider what happens if you instead spend several adventures dropping existential — and only existential! — leads to the Lost City of Shandrala. Now you’re building a sense of enigma: Each clue builds the rep of the Lost City a little more, and possibly gives the PCs more and more reasons for finding it.

This built-up anticipation then pays off when you finally start delivering the access clues that will let the PCs plan their expedition to Shandrala.

To generalize: Separate and foreshadow your existential leads in order to build anticipation and turn the ultimate revelation of access into a reward.

(Check out Getting the Players to Care for more along these lines.)

Another technique here is that you can sometimes nest your existential and access revelations:

• You need to talk to the Immortal Sorcerer. (Existential)
• To talk to the spirit of the Immortal Sorcerer, you need the jade amulet. (Access)
• The jade amulet is hidden in the Lost City of Shandrala. (Existential)
• The Lost City of Shandrala can be accessed through the Jade Portals. (Existential)
• A Jade Portal is located at such-and-such a place. (Access)

You can see how this thread of the campaign builds over time. In fact, you could also imagine separate existential revelations about the Lost City of Shandrala that are built up over time, so that when the PCs also learn that the jade amulet they need is located there it will just pump up their desire to reach Shandrala even more.

Next: Hints

Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk can really only be described as a book of two parts, and it’s basically impossible to review it as anything else.

The first part is more or less a reprint of Lost Mine of Phandelver, the classic adventure that went out of print in 2022 when the original 5^th Edition Starter Set was discontinued. I strongly suspect that this was the entire modus operandi for Phandelver and Below: Wizards of the Coast wanted to replace the Starter Set with Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, but they knew Lost Mine of Phandelver was a great and well-loved adventure, so they wanted to find a way to keep it in print.

Unfortunately, Lost Mine of Phandelver wasn’t large enough to be its own hardcover release, and so it was grafted to The Shattered Obelisk, a Tier 2 adventure in which mind flayers search for the seven pieces of an obelisk which they can use to power a ritual which will transform the Phandelver region into… uh… let’s say an extrusion of the nightmarish Far Realm. The book is kinda vague about this, presumably because it will go to any lengths in order to railroad the PCs to ensure the pre-scripted outcome, so the specific details of what the mind flayers are trying to do doesn’t really matter.

On that note, it feels weird that “take a decent Tier 1 sandbox and then awkwardly bolt a Tier 2 railroad onto it” should be a recognizable formula from Wizards of the Coast, but I guess somebody thinks that’s a good structure for a campaign.

(It isn’t.)

And if you think that bodes ill for The Shattered Obelisk… well, strap in. Because we’ve barely gotten started.

GRAFFITI ON A MASTERPIECE

In my original review of the 2014 Starter Set, I described the original Lost Mine of Phandelver as being “the single best introductory adventure D&D has ever had.”

The version of Lost Mine of Phandelver found in The Shattered Obelisk is largely identical to the original, and it therefore remains a good Tier 1 campaign… mostly. The problem is that the designers have, in fact, made a bunch of minor changes, and, as far as I can tell, every single one of them makes the adventure worse.

Imagine you’re looking at Michelangelo’s David, but somebody has decided it would look better if they spraypainted some random graffiti on it. Fundamentally, it’s still Michelangelo’s David. It’s a masterpiece. But the graffiti seems problematic, right?

For example, the original adventure hook is that the PCs have been hired by Gundren Rockseeker to escort a wagon of supplies to Phandalin while he rides ahead to begin making arrangements for his business affairs. This hook is specific, detailed, and directly tied into the first encounter that actually kickstarts the campaign: The PCs find Gundren’s dead horse on the road, realize he’s been kidnapped by goblins, and need to rescue him.

For The Shattered Obelisk, the designers decided that they should include alternative hooks. This isn’t a bad impulse, but the hooks they came up with were:

1. The PCs randomly decide to head to Phandalin because… uh… maybe they can do something there (what, exactly?) that will impress the Harpers so that they can join up.
2. The PCs decide to head to Phandalin to meet with a representative of the Order of the Gauntlet so that they can then… join up somewhere else?

The problem here is not just that these are just generic mush. (Although that is a problem.) They’re also not hooked into the actual structure of the adventure. In fact, they actively muck up the organic pacing of the original Lost Mine of Phandelver, in which the PCs are assessed by local faction reps and offered membership based on their actions. Reversing cause and effect here isn’t a neutral change; it makes the adventure worse.

To be fair, the original Lost Mine of Phandelver never actually pays off the PCs joining one of these factions, which is too bad, but understandable because the adventure ends before that can happen (and it’s left as a seed that the DM can use to plan out their Tier 2 campaign). The Shattered Obelisk, of course, provides the Tier 2 campaign, and so it has the opportunity to actually develop and pay off the PCs’ relationships with these factions.

… an opportunity which it does not take.

This is really indicative of how half-assed these changes are, which is also evidenced by the fact that the opening boxed text of the adventure is completely unaltered and still refers exclusively to the original Rockseer adventure hook.

The immediately ensuing opening encounter, however, has also been changed: In the original adventure, the PCs discover two dead horses lying in the road. In the revised version, the two horses are still alive and just kind of wandering around the road.

Again, this seems like a minor change, but it isn’t: Dead horses send a clear message of DANGER, which is important because there are four goblins waiting to ambush characters who approach the horses. Furthermore, the tactics section for these goblins have been changed, making it much more likely that this initial encounter will result in an immediate TPK.

As I mentioned, these changes are frequent and the problems they create are pervasive, which can perhaps be best demonstrated by looking at the “foreshadowing” for the mind flayer portion of the campaign which has been introduced into Lost Mine of Phandelver.

Again, this makes sense. Obviously you’d want to foreshadow the new adventure and link it to the existing material so that the whole campaign would feel like a cohesive whole! And there are a bunch of obvious ways you could do that:

• The titular shattered obelisk is a Netherese artifact. The original adventure includes a Netherese archaeological expedition, so you could plant links there.
• The titular lost mine of Phandelver includes the Forge of Spells, a site where dwarves once studied arcane secrets. Maybe they studied the Netherese obelisks!
• There’s a nothic in the Redbrands hideout, a type of creature with specific ties to the Far Realms, Vecna, and the mind flayers in this adventure. We could link him to the mind flayers, perhaps as an advanced scout in the region?
• The Spider, who is the main mastermind villain of Lost Mine of Phandelver, seeks the Forge of Spells. Maybe he could also be looking for pieces of the shattered obelisk, allowing us to plant lore in his lair.
• We could actually just put an obelisk fragment in the Phandelver mine itself! Finding this fragment alerts the mind flayers to the presence of a shattered obelisk in the Phandalin region, triggering the next phase of the campaign!

But the designers do none of these things. Instead, they “foreshadow” the mind flayer plot by randomly pasting psionic goblins into various encounters. These psionic goblins do things that are best described as LOL-so-random-LOL, and it’s difficult to really convey just how dumb this is. Here’s the first reference to them, which comes from questioning the Cragmaw goblins from the first encounter:

Strange Goblins. Recently, strange goblins have sometimes joined the Cragmaws in their road-ambushes, though not today. These strange goblins have elongated skulls, and glowing green energy surrounds their weapons when they attack. The Cragmaw goblins don’t know who these newcomers are; the new goblins simply cackle and leave after each attack.

None of this makes any sense. Why would you allow random people to join your ambush? More importantly, why are the psionic goblins doing this? It’s not just the Cragmaw goblins who don’t know. The designers don’t either.

Even the decision to choose psionic goblins to be the minions of the mind flayers is fraught, because — as you’ve seen — the completely unrelated bad guys in Lost Mine of Phandelver are also goblins. You could have added the word “psionic” to literally anything else in the Monster Manual and it would have been a better choice: It would have mixed things up and helped keep the campaign fresh. It also would have made things significantly less confusing for the players.

STOP HUFFING YOUR OWN HYPE

I have unfortunately learned that if Wizards’ marketing promises some big, amazing thing in their next adventure book, it’s a virtual certainty that the book itself will completely fail to deliver on that promise.

• Dragon Heist doesn’t feature a heist (and also doesn’t include the promised links to Undermountain).
• Descent Into Avernus breathlessly promised Mad Max in Hell, but then only included a couple pages about infernal war machines before immediately forgetting that they exist for the rest of the book.
• Shadows of the Dragon Queen promised full integration with Warriors of Krynn so that you could play your own PCs on the battlefields of the wargame… and then just forgot to do that.

So when the marketing for Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk promised to reveal the TRUTH ABOUT THE OBELISKS which had been seen in previous 5^th Edition adventures like Tomb of Annihilation, Storm King’s Thunder, and Rime of the Frostmaiden… well, you know what happened.

First, the “truth” about the obelisks is completely irrelevant to The Shattered Obelisk. In fact, I’m uncertain how the PCs could even learn the “truth.”

Second, literally nothing new is revealed about the obelisks. The four paragraphs tucked away into the “Netherese Obelisks” appendix at the back of the book are just a rewritten version of the “Secret of the Obelisks” sidebar that appeared in Rime of the Frostmaiden back in 2020.

And, ultimately, this is really unsurprising. Because the Cylons Wizards’ designers don’t have a plan. They never had a plan. “Weird obelisk” is a common genre trope, so they just coincidentally showed up as flavor text in a bunch of different adventures. Then fans noticed the “pattern” and created a Grand Conspiracy out of it. In the context of The Shattered Obelisk as a book, this doesn’t even count as a flub: The book doesn’t need or even seem to want a grand “truth about the Obelisks,” so it doesn’t matter that one isn’t included.

But Wizards needs to stop selling their books by lying about them.

And if you were planning to buy The Shattered Obelisk because you were looking forward to learning the truth about the Obelisks… well, you deserve to know that it was a lie and you won’t get it.

Go to Part 2: Obelisk Hunting

Deep in its DNA, Dungeons & Dragons has a fundamental mismatch between the expectations of its players and the design of the game that goes back to its very earliest days.

If you look all the way back to Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign, the original tabletop roleplaying game and the world from which D&D was born, the game was designed with a structure of zero-to-hero-to-king: The PCs went into the dungeon beneath Castle Blackmoor. Those who survived earned money and power with which they would raise armies and eventually fight vast wars for the fate of the empire before being retired as the next best thing to legendary demigods.

But those earliest players also talk about how Greg Svenson was really smart because he never allowed his character to level up high enough to get retired.

Fast forward a quarter century to D&D 3^rd Edition, and you’ll find the E6 variant — which capped leveling at 6^th level, but allowed PCs to continue gaining new abilities through feats — resonating with a goodly portion of the fanbase (and probably would have resonated with even more if they’d known about it).

Through D&D’s history, we see this same pattern again and again and again: The game holds out the promise of characters advancing into truly epic levels of power — founding kingdoms in AD&D, becoming literal gods in Basic D&D, the Epic Level Handbook in 3^rd Edition, the Paragon and Epic tiers of 4^th Edition — but a significant portion of the fanbase has mostly been interested in playing Aragorn and Conan (i.e., fairly gritty fantasy heroes rooted pretty firmly in reality). And when the mechanics of the game have tried to push them into those epic levels of play, they have mostly just kept playing Aragorn and Conan while getting cranky that the high-level mechanics are returning “nonsensical” results.

The one exception to this is combat: They still want to play Aragorn and Conan, but they want to be able to solo Smaug.

D&D 4^th Edition tried to square expectations with mechanics by having the world level up with the PCs: The numbers get bigger as you level up, but the stuff the PCs are doing doesn’t fundamentally shift except for the set dressing.

D&D 5^th Edition, on the other hand, went the other direction: Just don’t let the numbers increase. Lock the target numbers in with bounded accuracy and unlock Smaug-tier monsters by increasing the number of hit points monsters have and the amount of damage characters can do.

Between the two, the 5^th Edition approach is almost certainly preferable, but not entirely successful, because you can also think of this problem as, “The players don’t want to leave the dungeon.”

Which makes sense: Dungeons are fun. We enjoy playing them. So why would we want to stop playing them?

But as you gain the powers of a demigod, the scenario structure of the dungeon — exploring an unknown location one room at a time — begins to fall apart: Teleportation. Scrying. Divination. Planar travel. All of this shreds the dungeon structure. This shift in play was entirely intentional in how the game was designed, but despite trying to move away from that shift in play, 5^th Edition nevertheless inherits the spells and abilities that make it inevitable.

THE FIRST SOLUTION

The first solution would be to fully commit to what at least one part of 5^th Edition’s schizo identity is trying to do: Eliminate all of those high-level abilities that shred dungeons and low-level structures of play.

This is basically what the E6 variant does, but arguably even better, because you can still use damage and hit point escalation to let the PCs level up into soloing Smaug.

But, frankly, I hate it. Not only do I enjoy taking characters into truly epic spheres of play, but I find the 5^th Edition dynamic — where you can trivially dispatch celestial titans and fight your way to the throne of Asmodeus, but knocking down a wooden door? Man, that’s a tough ask! —to be kind of ridiculous. But I would really hate to see the game cripple itself by lopping off the epic modes of play for those of us who enjoy them.

It would be a failure of imagination.

So I think the first true solution to this problem would be for D&D to offer an E(X)-style option so that groups can lock in the style of play they enjoy — whether that’s what we currently think of as Tier 1 or Tier 3 or whatever — with or without the option of continuing to boost combat performance for the all-important soloing of Smaug.

THE SECOND SOLUTION

But I think it might also be worthwhile to take a slightly deeper look at this problem.

Why, exactly, have players been so reluctant to move into the various “endgames” that D&D has offered over the years?

I said they wanted to play Aragorn and Conan… but both of those characters ended up being kings. So why does realms-based play seem to so often lie fallow, even in editions of the game that have tried very hard to include it?

Ultimately, I think it comes back to scenario structures. I’ve talked in the past about the fact that the only two game structures most DMs really know are dungeon crawls and railroading (and the DMG doesn’t even teach you how to run dungeons any more). We’ve already discussed how high-level D&D abilities shred dungeons, but they also shred railroads: It becomes increasingly difficult for a DM to force their players to do stuff as the power level and options available to the PCs proliferate.

If the only scenario structure the rulebooks teach is railroading, the game will fall apart at the point where PCs become powerful enough that it’s difficult or impossible for the DM to constrain their choices.

In addition, dungeons kinda become irrelevant to kings and gods. In order to go on a dungeon crawl, a king and/or god would really need to take a break from being a king or god to go on the adventure. So if the only adventures you’re running are dungeon adventures, being a king or god ends up just being a decorative element in the campaign; a distraction from what the game is actually about.

This spills over into official support products: If you don’t have a scenario structure for running a realms-based campaign, then you can’t publish adventures that will slot into that structure. So DMs end up with a nigh-infinite supply of books filled with dungeons, but nothing for would-be kings or demigods fighting interplanar conflicts.

It also spills over into mechanical design! High-level D&D characters get plied with abilities and spells all aimed to support the robust combat scene structure at the heart of the game, but it’s been more than two decades since there was an official edition of D&D that hardcoded realms-based play or any other post-low-level alternative into character advancement.

To boil this down, what you ultimately have is a DM problem: Even if you had players who wanted to, for example, become dukes and rule a realm, DMs aren’t being given the tools they need to successfully create and run those adventures. If they nevertheless decide to take the plunge, they’re basically just tossed into the deep end. Some of them might spontaneously figure out how to swim, but most of them will just drown and end their campaigns.

So the other solution would be to fully support the shift in play. Not just with rules, but with the scene structures, scenario structures, and campaign structures that would support realms-based play or divinity or whatever other styles of play you want to unlock at Tier 3 or Tier 4.