In my review of The Shattered Obelisk, I said that buying the book in the hopes that you could remix it would be a bad idea: The book would actually have a negative value compared to just reading the basic pitch and designing your own campaign with the same concept.

Nevertheless, the first thing several people asked me was: Will you be remixing The Shattered Obelisk?

Obviously, no.

So what are we doing here?

In addition to my remixes of adventures like Dragon Heist and Keep on the Shadowfell, I’ve also done a couple of Remixing essays, one for Hoard of the Dragon Queen and another for Call of the Netherdeep. These are basically How I Would Remix It, If I Were Going to Remix It. You still have to do all the heavy lifting, but insofar as you find my advice useful, this is my advice.

But I said you shouldn’t buy the book and it would have a negative value if you did!

So, again, what are we doing here?

Well… I did say you would be better off just reading the basic pitch and designing your own campaign with the same concept.

So let’s talk a little bit about what that might look like.

SALVAGING THE LOST MINE OF PHANDELVER

Before we dive into the concept of the The Shattered Obelisk, though, let’s briefly touch on the first half of the book, which is a badly marred reprinting/remastering of Lost Mine of Phandelver. If we wanted to salvage this part of the book, how would we do it?

Fortunately, this is pretty straightforward:

1. Find a used copy of Lost Mine of Phandelver (from the 2014 Starter Set).
2. Buy it.
3. Run it.

That’s it.

Reclaiming Lost Mine of Phandelver from The Shattered Obelisk is literally just laboriously scraping the graffiti off. If we, sadly, get to the point where the only viable means of getting Lost Mine of Phandelver is in the altered form it takes in The Shattered Obelisk, hopefully there’ll be a wiki out there somewhere that will do the work of listing all the changes so that you can reverse them.

THE CONCEPT

Let’s start with the core concept we’re working with:

1. A powerful obelisk was shattered and the pieces are scattered in the region around Phandalin.
2. A group of mind flayers want to re-assemble this obelisk (or as much of it as possible) so that they can use it in a powerful ritual.
3. The PCs need to race the mind flayers to obtain the various pieces of the obelisk. The more pieces the PCs stop the mind flayers from getting, the less powerful (or more difficult?) the mind flayer’s ritual will be.

What does the ritual do?

Whatever you want it to do. Here’s some quick brainstorming:

• Rewrite reality so that the mind flayers never lost control of Gauntlgrym.
• Forge a spelljammer that will allow them to travel through time.
• Create the powerful illithid tadpoles required to ceremorphosis dragons.

Something to keep in mind is that, unless your campaign structure makes it plausible that the mind flayers could actually win, their objective is only really significant for (a) setting stakes and (b) the cool lore you can pull into the campaign. So you’ll want to be make sure to build revelation lists to pull that lore in. It’ll be even better if you can make it actionable in some way: For example, the illithids are also collecting spelljammer components (and that gives a new vector for the PCs to track their activities). Or they’re collecting the various dragons scattered around the Phandalin region so that they can transform them once the ritual is complete. (The PCs might find a mind flayer team engaged with one of the dragons from Lost Mine of Phandelver or Dragon of Icespire Peak; or they might even be able to forge a draconic alliance in response to the mind flayers targeting them. This activity could also bring in the Cult of the Dragon as an additional faction.)

THE RACE FOR THE SHARDS

The core structure of the campaign is the race to claim the obelisk shards.

As written, The Shattered Obelisk has the mind flayers automatically grab four of the seven shards before the PCs can even get involved in the race; two more shards are claimed through a completely dissociated trigger; and the third is pursued by a mind flayer who is inexplicably stuck waiting for the PCs.

It’s underwhelming. But the problem probably largely boils down to the fact that the designers simply don’t have a good scenario structure for handling this. They can’t present the mind flayers as a truly active, responsive challenge to the PCs because they apparently don’t have the tools to do that.

Fortunately, we do have those tools.

Start by having a single fragment in the Phandalin region, the stealing of which is structured in a way that clearly reveals what’s going on. My suggestion would be to frame this after the conclusion of Lost Mine of Phandelver: The PCs have helped reclaim the Wave Echo mines. A little while later, the dwarves at Wave Echo find an obelisk shard and they bring it to Phandalin so that the PCs can help them figure out what it is.

Design Note: This hook directly protagonizes the PCs. It’s also a great way of signaling the transition from Tier 1 to Tier 2. The PCs aren’t just anonymous wanderers anymore. They’re local heroes who have built a rep for themselves and are now leaders and experts who are sought out by the community.

The dwarves disturbing the obelisk somehow brings it to the attention of the mind flayers, who dispatch their minions to steal it.

At the end of this sequence, there should still be a lot of unanswered questions about what exactly is going on — what the obelisk is, where it came from, who the mind flayers are, what they want, etc. Resolving this enigma will help drive the campaign forwards and get the players invested in solving these mysteries.

Structurally speaking, however, the key thing is that some combination of investigating the shard itself, the attempted/successful theft of the shard, and/or backtracking to Wave Echo and seeing the site where the dwarves pulled the shard from (which may have also been targeted by mind flayer operatives) points the PCs (and the mind flayer agents) in the direction of a second obelisk shard.

This triggers a Race for the Prize, which is a scenario structure where two or more groups are all pursuing the same McGuffin.

Design Note: We’re structuring the campaign this way — an initial shard that points to a single additional shard — to kind of “prime the pump,” because things are about to get really crazy. This initial phase will help prep the players for race-based activities, so that when we step things up in the next phase, they’ll have had time to grok the basics.

One key thing you’ll need to prep for this scenario structure is the team that’s competing with the PCs to grab the shard. The mind flayers probably aren’t doing this themselves, so you’ll want to figure out who their agents are.

In the original module, they use psionic goblins. I would recommend not doing that, unless you take the extra effort to connect them to the goblins in Lost Mine of Phandelver, because otherwise the players will probably assume there is a connection and create unnecessary confusion. Finding some other option — even if that’s just adding the word “psionic” to literally any other creature in the Monster Manual — will eliminate that confusion, and also offer a valuable change of pace. (We’ve already been fighting goblins for a bunch of sessions now; let’s fight something else for a while.)

The other thing is that these McGuffin-based scenarios tend to become more fun if there’s more than two factions involved. So you might want to think about who else might be interested in the Obelisk and toss them into the mix. (Zhentarim? Cult of the Dragon? Zariel cultists? Thayans?) Alternatively, maybe the mind flayers — while all being loosely aligned — are each competing to see which one can claim the most shards.

At the site of the second shard, you’re going to plant all the clues pointing to the remaining fragments. This will include a method to find the shards, because in addition to launching multiple Races to the Prize, this phase of the campaign will also kick off a McGuffin Keep-Away, as the factions (including the PCs) not only seek to claim new shards, but also steal shards that have already been recovered.

(How many additional shards should there be? That’s entirely up to you. I’m guessing the sweet spot is probably four to six.)

At some point you need to trigger your endgame. I see a couple of options here:

• Throughout the shard race, the PCs can start collecting clues revealing (a) the mind flayers’ intentions for the obelisk and (b) the location of their final ritual, giving the PCs a chance to take the fight to them.
• The PCs figure out how the obelisk ritual is supposed to work, and they’re able to stage their own ritual. Depending on what the mind flayer ritual is actually doing, this might put them directly in conflict with the flayers (their version of reality vs. the flayer reality); or they might actually be doing a counter-ritual. If this ritual doesn’t need to take place at the same location as the flayer ritual (the site where the obelisk was broken perhaps? or Netherese site of power? or the Phandelver spell forge?), I recommend some kind of schism in reality that can connect the PCs’ ritual to the flayer ritual and allow for a final confrontation.

And, of course, both of these might be true with the PCs being able to figure out their own strategy for bringing things to a conclusion.

LINKING PHANDELVER

Most of what we’ve discussed for our version of The Shattered Obelisk doesn’t require the adventure to be run as a sequel to Lost Mine of Phandelver. But if you are running it as a direct sequel, you’ll want to make the effort to add foreshadowing to Lost Mine that will help set the stage for The Shattered Obelisk.

I listed several possible options for this in my original review of The Shattered Obelisk, and I’ll repeat them here for convenience:

• The titular shattered obelisk is a Netherese artifact. The original adventure includes a Netherese archaeological expedition, so you could plant lore about the obelisks 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. (This could also set up the Spider — or the organization they work for — as an additional faction during during the obelisk chase.)

I discuss other techniques for this sort of thing in The Campaign Stitch.

As an additional note, the published module also features a plot thread where the mind flayers kidnap a bunch of people from Phandalin. If you decide to do something similar, do yourself a favor and create a cast list for Phandalin, establish the characters on this cast list during Lost Mine of Phandelver, and then kidnap NPCs the PCs have established relationships with.

For a completely different alternative, you could spread the obelisk fragments throughout the existing locations of Lost Mines of Phandelver (and/or Dragon of Icespire Peak): Whichever piece the PCs happen to discover first becomes the instigator of the obelisk chase, and the two adventures will become much more tightly interwoven as a Tier 1 epic.

As an alternative to this alternative, you might have three or four of the shards scattered around existing locations in the Phandalin region:

• The first is a curiosity.
• The second forms a pattern.
• At the third, there’s a mind flayer scouting team present.
• Then a mind flayer team tries to steal a shard.

This lets you spread out the initial lore dump a little more, hints at the machinations of the mind flayers, and sets the stage for when things explode with the discovery of additional shard locations.

MAXIMUM SALVAGE EFFORT

“But I already bought The Shattered Obelisk! And I want to get some use out of it!”

That’s fair.

Here’s my recommendation: Don’t try to salvage everything.

Instead, identify the stuff that you personally find fantastic and nick it. Maybe that’s an encounter. Maybe it’s a map. Maybe it’s a whole dungeon.

I’m not going to try to guess what that stuff is for you. I know what the one or two gems in the dung heap were for me, personally, but that may or may not match your list.

The other thing to keep in mind is that you don’t need to do a full rebuild of The Shattered Obelisk to do this. You could grab your favorite stuff and build a completely new campaign. Or you could likely just add it to a Storm King’s Thunder or Spelljammer campaign.

Which is ultimately my point here: There’s so much amazing D&D content out there — and even more lurking in your imagination and just waiting to be released — that there’s just no reason to think that you need to save the soul of every $60 hardcover from Wizards of the Coast.

ADDITIONAL READING
Review of The Shattered Obelisk
Phandalin Region Map – Label Layers

I’m on the Questing Beast! (I… am a questing beast? How does this work?)

Ben Milton and I had a really great time chatting about my upcoming book So You Want To Be a Game Master, and he’s apparently declared that it’s the solution to the DM crisis!

Ben also asked his subscribers to send in questions, and we spent a lot of time answering them. The questions were fantastic, and I’d like to give a big Thank You! to Ben’s fans for creating such a great discussion.

Watch Now!

In the summer of 2010, I wrote the article now titled Xandering the Dungeon.

That wasn’t the original title of the article, nor the original term I coined to describe both the process of creating a non-linear dungeon (xandering) and the properties of a non-linear dungeon (xandered). The original term was “jaquaying,” which was, of course, an eponymous term I had chosen based on how much the work of Jennell Jaquays had inspired me.

In 2023, for better or for worse, this term was changed to xandering. I want to offer a brief explanation for why this happened.

First, Jennell Jaquays wanted a change. She didn’t like that the term dropped the “s” from her name. Her name is very important to her. This wasn’t a problem. In fact, Jennell had previously requested some sweeping changes to the article for similar reasons, and I’d made those changes. Based on that experience, though, I knew that making this change would not be a quick or easy process: It took weeks of effort, followed by months of extra work to make sure all the metadata had been properly scrubbed on the site. Making this change would be even more substantive, because I’d been using the term for over a decade and I’d need to track it down in every single article. (As I’m writing this, in fact, I’m still in the middle of that work.)

Second, Jennell’s preference for a change in the term had been mentioned in some interviews. Unfortunately, this began a harassment campaign: Whenever somebody used the term “jaquaying the dungeon” they would be targeted. Some of this just took the form of saying, “You shouldn’t use that word.” Some of it escalated to claiming the word was bigoted. In a few cases, I’ve had people tell me they received death threats.

And to be as crystal clear as possible here: Jennell had absolutely nothing to do with the harassment. She didn’t want it. She didn’t encourage it. And if anyone tries to use this as an occasion to be an asshole and harass her or her fans, I’d really like to emphasize that (a) you are no fan of mine and (b) you can come for me first, because I’m definitely a fan of hers.

Obviously, however, this could not be allowed to continue.

I spoke with Jennell earlier this year. We both agreed that the name should be changed, and I said it would be a large project to do it, but I’d make sure it happened by the end of the year.

The final factor here is that I had also been working on So You Want to Be a Game Master, a book in which I discussed non-linear dungeon design that had originally used the term “jaquaying.” So I contacted the publisher and said, “We need to make sure we change this term.”

Long story short, this created a legal question. Not an arduous or terrible one. But one that resulted in the conclusion, “There is some risk in using a word based on someone else’s name. Let’s not do that.”

One option at this point would have been to drop the neologism entirely and just refer to “non-linear dungeons.” But I’d originally created a verb because I found a verb useful; other people had found the verb useful over the years; and it would be substantially easier to update all of the various articles that had used the term over the years if I could just swap one word out for another. (As opposed to rewriting entire articles.)

After a bunch of back-and-forth, we (UPDATE: me and the publisher; the “we” mentioned in previous paragraphs who “need to make this change”) finally settled on the term “xandering.” And so, from this point forward, my dungeons will be thoroughly xandered.

UPDATE:  There has been interest in a more precise or detailed sequence of events. To hopefully make things as clear as possible without obfuscating what this article originally said, the sequence of events in early 2023 is: Jennell and I spoke about changing the article. Legal questions resulted in a new term being selected. I let Jennell know that the site would be updated by the end of the year. She thanked me. That conversation, in April 2023, was our last before she became ill. The book was then updated for publication. From September thru October of 2023, I worked on updating every article using the original term on the site. I then posted this historical note on November 1st, and spent another couple weeks updating posts and metadata that had been missed in the original update.

If you’re reading this historical note in November 2023, shortly after I’ve posted it, then there’s likely still a few instances of the old term floating around the website. If you’re reading this in the mid-term future, then this is likely the only place on the Alexandrian where you’ll still find the term being used. If you’re reading this even further out, then it’s possible you’ve never even heard of “jaquaying the dungeon.”

There’s a part of me that feels sad about that. But I also know that this was the right thing to do and that it needed to happen.

FAQs

You can’t do this!

I can.

This is, honestly, one of the reasons why the term needed to be changed. People were somehow convinced that I was not the creator of Xandering the Dungeon.

To be really clear here: I wrote the article. I invented the word (both the old one and the new one). I created the categories of techniques and level connectors. It’s my work.

So, yes, I can do this. And, for the reasons described above, I also believe it’s the ethically right thing to do.

I’ve used the old term in my article or video or blog post. What should I do?

Well, I’m not your boss, but if you’d like to respect the wishes of the original creator of the term and the article, it would be great if you could update your stuff to use the now-correct terminology.

If it’s in a form that can’t be easily updated (e.g., a video or printed book), though, please don’t feel like you need to take that material down. You might, however, consider adding a clarifying note in the info-box for your video or making a note to update the text when the book is reprinted.

I see someone using the old term. What should I do?

It’s fine to just do nothing. Particularly if there’s a link to the original article, it’ll sort itself out. (If there’s not a link, though, I won’t dissuade you from pointing people in the right direction.)

I’d rather not see every discussion of the dungeon design principles in Xandering the Dungeon instead turn into a discussion of the term. That’s one of the reasons why the change was necessary, and it would be great if the solution didn’t perpetuate the problem.

Why have you edited comments on your site that used the old term?

To make sure that the update of the site is complete and the term Jennell Jaquays wants removed is totally purged, we wanted to use database updates. It turned out the use of the term in comments was actually a problem and they might get invisibly changed by the search-and-replace. I wasn’t comfortable with that. I also didn’t want to just delete comments. So I opted to track the references manually and update them in a way that indicated the original wording had been edited.

Will links to the old article still work?

Yes.

If they don’t, please let me know what link isn’t working and we’ll get it fixed.

UPDATE: Are you saying that Jennell Jaquays threatened to sue you?

No. The decision that the name of the article needed to not use Jaquays in any form was prompted by legal advice that resulted as a consequence of Jennell asking for the article to be updated. The full and specific chain of events is described above. As previously noted, Jennell was not the one to create or specifically request the term “xandering.”

UPDATE: By removing the term “jaquaying,” are you plagiarizing Jennell Jaquays’ work?

No. Xandering the Dungeon prominently celebrates and champions Jennell’s genius. It always has and, if I have anything to say about it, it always will. Her dungeon designs are both foundational works and also remain examples of excellence that anyone can (and should) learn from. But the article is not a Cliff’s Note summary of some previous article written by Jennell Jaquays, nor was she a co-author as some have suggested. It’s also not accurate to claim that the article only cites her work or that her work is the sole inspiration for the categories of techniques & connections I created. Other works cited include the sample dungeon from the 1974 edition of D&D (Dave Arneson & Gary Gygax), Stone Mountain from the D&D Basic Set (Tom Moldvay & Tom Wham), The Temple of Elemental Evil (Gygax & Frank Mentzer), Dungeonland (Gygax), Star Trek, The Glass Elevator, Greek myth, and The Empire Strikes Back, as well as my own work in Halls of the Mad Mage, Darkwoods’ Secret, and The Lost Hunt.

If I was writing the article today I would also mention, in addition to Jennell’s post-2010 design work, Dave Arneson’s First Fantasy Campaign, Greg Svenson’s Lost Dungeons of Tonigsborg, Rob Kuntz’ El Raja Key, and Pete & Judy Kerestan’s Palace of the Vampire Queen. If you’re interested in diving deeper into early dungeon design, I recommend all of these adventures.

UPDATE: Is it true that you removed all reference to Jennell Jaquays from your article & book?

No. This never happened. You can easily read the article for yourself. She is also given an acknowledgment in the book. Some have claimed that Dave Arneson being mentioned three times, Gary Gygax being mentioned twice, and Jennell Jaquays only being mentioned once in the book is intended as some sort of insult to Jennell’s legacy. If this is so, however, it was not my intention.

UPDATE: Will you be changing the name again?

No. As I’ve attempted to explain in as polite a way as possible, the primary reason for changing the name was because Jaquays’ name in the title was creating the false belief that either I did not write the article and/or that she or others had some legal and/or moral authority over my work.

It’s not so much that nothing has changed, but rather that recent events have proven that these concerns were completely justified and that the situation was, in fact, much worse than I had ever imagined. I am sorry for those who have been hurt by this, but unfortunately that makes the change no less necessary.

This article was updated in January 2024, as indicated above, to reflect discussions with the RPG trans community and to provide additional details as requested.

A longer reflection on these discussions, which may also answer other questions you may have, can be found in the Second Historical Note on Xandering.

PLEASE HELP MS. JAQUAYS

As I was working on this, Jennell Jaquays was hospitalized and diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome. Her wife has posted a GoFundMe, and if you have the means, it would be really, really great if you could help her out.

DONATE HERE

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