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 original, 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 on 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