Phandalin and the surrounding region of the Sword Coast have featured in three D&D adventures:

• Lost Mine of Phandelver
• Dragon of Icespire Peak
• The Shattered Obelisk

Each of these adventures have featured a slightly different versions of a region map drawn by Mike Schley. At the moment, I’m specifically interested in the various versions of the map designed to be given to the players as a handout. The best of these is probably the poster map found in the D&D Essentials Kits (to accompany Dragons of Icespire Peak), but all of them are fatally flawed as player maps because they spoil the adventures — not only showing locations that the PCs don’t know about yet (“Boy, I wonder if Icespire Peak — the only mountain labeled on this map — will be significant at some point…”), but frequently showing hidden sites that the PCs are supposed to go on adventures in order to locate.

NPC: But where could Cragmaw Castle be?! Nobody knows!!!!

Players: It’s right there.

NPC: If only someone could find it!

Players: It’s right there.

NPC: It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma, baked into a souffle!

So I wanted a version of the map I could actually give to the players. I also, for purely personal reasons, wanted a version of the map without the hex grid.

Fortunately, you can purchase a digital map pack from Mike Schley that includes multiple versions of the map, including one with no grid and no labels.

The only catch, though, is that I don’t want NO labels… I want some labels: The roads. The major cities. And so forth. And I suspect I’m not the only one.

So what I’ve done is to create label layers that will let you control exactly which labels you want on your version of the map:

• Roads & Cities
• Regions
• Mountains
• Thundertree & Helm’s Hold
• All Layers

To use these labels:

1. Download the files below.
2. Buy the map pack from Mike Schley (also linked below).
3. Load the no-label map from the map pack into any graphic program that allows you to easily add and edit layers. Then add the PNG layers you want.

The layer files should line up perfectly with the map and with each other.

Alternatively, I’ve included a PSD file that you can use with Photoshop. (You’ll still need to add the no-label map from Schley as the background layer.)

Download the Layer Pack

Download the PSD File

Buy Mike Schley’s Map Pack

ALTERNATIVE MAPS
Phandalin Hexmap
Reveilled’s Phandalin Player Map

I’ll be appearing on the Wandering DMs livestream today at 12pm CT to discuss Adapting Content for D&D and So You Want To Be a Game Master. If you don’t see this until later, that’s okay! The podcast is archived on Youtube and you can watch any time!

Dan & Paul host Justin Alexandrian, creator of the Alexandrian and the new book So You Want to be a Game Master, for an in-depth chat on the best ways to adapt content to and from D&D and other RPGs. What tricks work well? What things should you avoid? And what content is simply incompatible with other systems?

Watch Now!

You can find links to my previous appearance on Wandering DMs at the Alexandrian Auxiliary.

I’ve previously reviewed the D&D Starter Set (2014) and the D&D Essentials Kit (2019). Now we turn our eyes to the third major introductory boxed set for D&D 5^th Edition: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle.

In 2022, the original D&D Starter Set was discontinued and replaced with D&D Starter Set: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. I suspect that, as I discussed in my review of the Essentials Kit, the primary motivation for this change remained the desire to create a new product that could be marketed to big box stores which had stopped carrying the original Starter Set: As we’ll see, very little is altered or upgraded here, and the only substantive change — replacing the Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure with the new adventure Dragons of Stormwreck Isle — could hardly be motivated by a lack of faith in the original adventure material, since plans were simultaneously made to repurpose the adventure as the opening act of the Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk campaign book.

So Wizards of the Coast’s intention seems to have been a direct swap from one Starter Set to another with as little change as possible. The first question is: Was this a good idea?

Well… probably not. The Essentials Kit had already featured a bunch of substantive improvements in the 5^th Edition introductory boxed sets, all of which Stormwreck Isle rolls back:

• The dice set is incomplete.
• The booklets lack cardstock covers.
• Character creation is once again missing.

So rather than continuing to refine and improve the introductory box format, Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is, prima facie, a big step backwards in a way that feels like a completely unforced error.

Unfortunately, things don’t improve once you start reading the booklets.

RULEBOOK v. RULEBOOK

In terms of basic mechanics, the Starter Set Rulebook in Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is largely identical to the one found in the original Starter Set.

A closer comparison, however, reveals that a bunch of material has been removed. Some of this is just weird, like missing gold piece costs for armor (but not for weapons). But there’s also some pretty deep cuts, like the section on adventuring gear being gutted to a tiny fraction of the equipment originally covered.

More immediately obvious is that only a fraction of the spell list from the original Starter Set has been included. Similarly, over in the adventure booklet, the bestiary has also been reduced to a fraction of its original size (and the selection is far more limited in its breadth).

I heaped praise on the original Starter Set for not being designed as a disposable product: It felt like a complete game, and (with the exception of character creation being missing) could easily support a DM who wanted to run multiple Tier 1 campaigns.

The net effect of all these degradations to the rulebook, unfortunately, means that this is NOT true of Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. This is a boxed set you use once and then throw away. It’s an advertisement for a fully functional game, and you pay for the “privilege” of being told that you should have bought a different product.

So the question of whether or not Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is, in fact, a product that you should buy – whether for yourself or someone else interested in playing D&D for the first time — is going to almost entirely come down to how good the included adventure is.

DRAGONS OF STORMWRECK ISLE

SPOILERS FOR THE ADVENTURE!

Something else missing from Dragons of Stormwreck Isle are the sidekick rules from the Essentials Kit, which were super useful because they allowed first time DMs to start running the game even if they could only find one or two people interested in joining them.

Stormwreck Isle tries to plaster over this lack by simply suggesting that players could play multiple pregen characters. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but it does lead to some truly terrible advice:

A player with two characters should treat one of them as their main character and the other as a sidekick, there to help out but probably not engaging in a lot of dialogue.

If you kinda squint and try to give them the benefit of the doubt, you can see the potentially good intention of making sure that a new player doesn’t feel overwhelmed trying to roleplay multiple characters. But what they actually told the player to do is dissociate from the game world and treat characters as if they were game piece tokens.

Which is… not great.

In fact, there’s a lot of “not great” when it comes to how Dragons of Stormwreck Isle instructs both players and GMs in how to play the game. One of the things that made Lost Mine of Phandelver a great introductory adventure was that it was an excellent exemplar of what D&D adventures should look like and how they should be run. Sadly, this is not the case with Stormwreck Isle.

Instead you get bad boxed text that, for example, repeatedly takes control of the PCs away from the players and turns them into puppets.

The DM is instructed to have the world level up with the PCs. (Oof.)

There’s a section of the adventure where the PCs have the opportunity to tame a trained owlbear that’s lost its owners and gone slightly feral. This is really cool! … but then the adventure says, “Oh, no! The PCs aren’t allowed to have cool things!” and goes to great lengths to erect contrived barriers to prevent the PCs from actually using their trained owlbear.

These are all terrible lessons to be teaching new DMs by both instruction and example.

Is this intentional?

Mostly not, I suspect. The adventure is simply sloppy, careless, and amateurish in its execution, and therefore sets a sloppy, careless, and bad example for the DM.

The basic structure of Dragons of Stormwreck Isle breaks down like this:

• The pregen PCs have personal goals that bring them to Stormwreck Isle, with all of them arriving on the same boat.
• They gain the patronage of Runara, a bronze dragon (appearing in human form) who runs the local monastery.
• They’re given the option of going on one of two different adventures.
• After going on the first adventure, they go on the second.
• With both adventures complete, Runara reveals herself and sends the PCs to the Clifftop Observatory, where her former apprentice (also a dragon) has turned to evil and is doing an evil ritual that the PCs need to stop.

This lacks the ambition of Lost Mine of Phandelver and feels fairly anemic by comparison, but is mostly inoffensive.

Notably, however, the reason Runara doesn’t send the PCs immediately to Clifftop Observatory (despite potentially apocalyptic stakes) is because they aren’t experienced enough and will likely die. Which is true.

… and yet one of the pregens has the personal goal of explicitly checking out the Clifftop Observatory. Which is trivial to locate and which they can just walk to at any time. The personal goal is a path straight to death.

This is just bad design. It’s setting a new DM up to fail.

The other major problem I have with Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is that everything is plagued by a severe lack of basic internal logic.

To take just one example, the island has been plagued for forty years by the zombies of dead sailors who have drowned when their ships have wrecked on the reefs north of the island.

It turns out the source of the problem is a cursed locket onboard the wreck of the Compass Rose. The zombie problem can be solved if the PCs take the locket to a gravesite on the island where the lover of the young girl who cursed the locket is buried. The PCs will know to do this because they’ll find the captain’s log of the Compass Rose in the wreck, the final entry of which describes the creation of the cursed locket, the zombies rising from the dead, and then concludes with:

I am securing her talisman with this book in my chest, in the hope that someone who comes after us may end this nightmare by bringing Altheia’s talisman to her husband.

So, first off: Why not just take the locket yourself? “Lemme just write this log entry, carefully lock it up, and hope somebody stops by!”

But more importantly, Runara sends them on this quest knowing the Compass Rose is the source of the zombie problem: If the PCs ask questions about the zombies, she tells them the ship is the source of the problem and sends them to check it out.

Remember: Runara is a bronze dragon. Which means she could have easily dealt with the zombies on the Compass Rose and solved the problem literally decades ago.

Instead she’s just sat around and watched people die for no reason.

THE VERDICT

Although it superficially looks similar to the original Starter Set at first glance, Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is a deeply crippled product. The bottom line is that, for as long as it remains available, the Essentials Kit is a massively superior introductory boxed set and it’s definitely the one you should buy.

This mostly leaves the question of whether or not you should buy Dragons of Stormwreck Isle in addition to the Essentials Kit, the core rulebooks, or whatever other method you choose as your introduction to D&D 5^th Edition. And that question, in my opinion, is going to depend almost entirely on the quality and utility of the adventure.

As a starter set adventure, of course, Dragons of Stormwreck Isle naturally invites direct comparison to Lost Mine of Phandelver. And, as I wrote in my review of the original D&D Starter Set, I think Lost Mine of Phandelver is the best introductory adventure D&D has ever had. So, first, a regression to the mean is perhaps inevitable. And, second, it’s pretty easy, in a direct comparison between the two, for us to be unduly harsh on Stormwreck Isle’s inadequacies.

Standing entirely on its own merits, therefore, how good is Dragons of Stormwreck Isle?

And I think the best answer I can give to that question is:

Mediocre.

The functional, but not daring, set pieces of the adventure are strung together with fraying filament, but the filament is never so rotten that it actually breaks. Its flaws, although myriad, never completely ruin the experience. This will never be a great adventure. It will rarely be a terrible one.

Overall, however, this leaves the D&D Starter Set: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle in rather rough shape: A crippleware rulebook wedded to a mediocre adventure, packaged with a barely adequate set of dice.

Perhaps the best case scenario we can hope for at this point is that, with the release of 2024 D&D (whatever we end up calling it), Wizards gets the opportunity for a do-over and will produce a new Starter Set that capitalizes on its previous successes instead of diminishing them.

Grade: C-

Rulebook Designer: Jeremy Crawford
Lead Adventure Designer: James Wyatt
Additional Adventure Design: Sydney Adams, Makenzie De Armas, Dan Dillon

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $19.95
Page Count: 80

Buy Now!

Let’s talk about encounter balance.

A common misconception is that the challenge rating system in D&D is meant to guarantee specific encounter outcomes: The CR = X, therefore the encounter will end with precisely Y resources depleted.

This isn’t really true. Furthermore, I would argue that it’s not possible for any challenge rating system to accomplish this (unless you so thoroughly constrain player choice as to choke out the creative heart of an RPG), because a challenge rating system is inherently limited in the systemic knowledge it can have about a specific encounter.

Factors beyond the scope of 5^th Edition’s challenge rating system, for example, include:

• Players’ tactical skills
• Variance in character builds
• Environment
• Encounter distance
• Stat block synergy (in both PCs and opponents)
• Equipment
• Random dice rolls

(I frequently get static on listing random dice rolls here: “But probability!” Yes, probability exists. But, first, the number of dice rolls in a single fight are often too few for probability to become truly relevant — for the results to conform to the expected value — except over multiple encounters. And, second, the entire point of random dice rolls is to have random outcomes. QED.)

Does this mean that the challenge rating system is pointless?

Not at all. The function of the challenge rating system is to help the DM identify monsters and build encounters that are in the right ballpark. Our first hot take today is that the challenge rating system is actually pretty effective at doing that. And, furthermore, that’s all it needs to do and, arguably, all that it should do.

Despite this, DMs are constantly lured by the siren call of hyper-precision: If we could just account for every single variable, we could guarantee specific outcomes! We wouldn’t even need the players at all! Their choices wouldn’t matter!

(That, by the way, is why this is not actually a desirable goal, even if it was achievable.)

There are several reasons for this.

Partly, it’s the allure of false precision: If we have a Challenge Rating Table, then the designers need to put numbers on the table. And no matter how many times they use words like “maybe” or “might” or “roughly” in describing the function of that table, this can create the expectation that hitting that precise number is important. (In reality, the difference between a 1,600 XP and 1,700 XP encounter is essentially nonexistent.)

The labels applied to different encounter levels also seem prone to misinterpretation. I find this varies depending on the methodology used for the label. In the case of 5^th Edition D&D, the designers have generally chosen a label which describes the worst case scenario. For example, a “Deadly” encounter doesn’t mean “this encounter is likely to result in a TPK.” It actually means that there’s a risk you’ll see at least one PC making death saving throws. (You can think of the possible outcomes of an encounter as being mapped to a bell curve: The outcome of an 8^th-level encounter might, in actual practice, be the average result of anything from a 4^th-level encounter to a 12^th-level encounter. The 5^th Edition label is generally describing a result somewhere a little off to the right side of the bell curve.)

But the final factor is linear campaigns.

THE PROBLEM WITH LINEAR CAMPAIGNS

I’m occasionally accused of hating linear campaigns. This is not the case. I dislike predetermined plots, but that’s not the same thing. I’ve actually talked in the past about how to design linear campaigns, and in So You Want To Be a Game Master I actually have several chapters and adventure recipes for creating linear scenarios.

(A linear scenario is also not the same thing as a railroad. It’s accurate to say that I loathe railroads, and everything I talk about here is probably ten times more true if you’re railroading your players.)

There are, however, consequences for using a linear structure. (Just as there is for using any structure.) This is particularly true if you only use linear structures, which can be the unfortunate case for many DMs who don’t have alternative scenario structures in their repertoire.

A linear scenario inherently means that you, as the DM, are preparing a specific sequence of experiences/scenes/encounters/whatever you want to call them. The players will experience A, then they will experience B, then they will experience C, and so forth.

A consequence of this style of prep, therefore, is that the DM is solely responsible for what the PCs will be doing. This creates an enormous pressure on the DM, because you’d better get it right: You’d better get the spotlight balance right and make sure that every single PC has an equal chance to shine, because otherwise you’re making it difficult or impossible for one of the players to participate. And you’d better get the combat balance right, because forcing the players into fights they can’t win is a dick move.

So the DM will, naturally, spend more effort carefully crafting each encounter to make sure it works. Ironically, the more specific their prep becomes for each situation, the more weight is placed on their shoulders to make sure they get it right. This can quickly decay into a vicious cycle, with the DM pouring more and more effort into every single encounter in order to meet ever-rising expectations. The result is often My Precious Encounters™, in which every encounter is lovingly crafted, carefully balanced, painstakingly pre-constructed, and utterly indispensable (because you’ve spent so much time “perfecting” it).

… and then the challenge rating system isn’t hyper-precise and the players mop up the whole thing with a couple of quick spells?!

This is an outrage!

I guess we’ll just need to lock down more choices, get out the shackles, and try even harder next time guarantee the encounter works exactly as we predetermined it should.

NON-LINEAR BALANCE

Some of you reading this may be thinking, “Okay… but what’s the alternative?”

And when I say that the alternative is non-linear scenarios, your gut reaction is likely to be, “You mean design even more encounters? And the players might not even encounter some of them? I can’t do that! Do you know how much work I put into these encounters?!”

In truth, however, non-linear design is a completely different paradigm: The players are now able, to at least some extent, choose the experiences they’re going to have. And because the players now have responsibility for what they do and how they do it, that weight is lifted from the DM’s shoulders.

Looking at just the issue of combat balance, for example, if the PCs run into an encounter in a linear adventure that they can’t defeat, that’s a disaster! They can’t move forward unless they defeat the encounter, and they can’t defeat it, so they’re completely stuck. It’s as if they lived on an island and the only bridge to the mainland was closed for construction.

In a non-linear scenario or campaign, on the other hand, if the PCs run into an encounter they can’t defeat (or which they just think they can’t defeat or which doesn’t look fun to them), then they can just change direction and find a route around that encounter. Or, alternatively, go and do something else until they level up, gain magic items, make allies, or otherwise become powerful enough to take out the challenge that was previously thwarting them.

You can see an analogous set of paradigms in video game RPGs: Some will allow players to grind XP, allowing them to dial in the mechanical difficulty they’re comfortable dealing with at their level of skill. Other CRPGs will level up the world around the PCs or limit the total amount of XP they can earn. The former games can appeal to a broader range of skill levels and the designers have a lot more leeway or flexibility in how they design the challenges in the game. The latter games have a lot less flexibility, and players can end up completely stuck (due to lack of skill, a mistake in their character build, disability, or any number of factors).

LINEAR BALANCE WITH MILESTONES

Okay, but you want to run a linear adventure. Maybe that’s the best structure for the campaign you’ve got planned. Maybe you’ve picked up a published adventure that uses a linear structure and it’s just not working: It’s too easy or it’s too hard, and you want it just right.

Fortunately, there’s an incredibly powerful tool you can use for balancing linear campaigns: Milestone leveling.

The trick is that you just need to ditch the idea of hardcoding the level ups to specific beats in the campaign. Instead, after each scenario, do an assessment of how your encounter balance is working in actual practice:

Are the players cruising through stuff? Increase the difficulty of encounters. If you’ve been designing 6th-level encounters, bump them up to 7^th-level encounters. (You can also change the balance of Easy/Medium/Hard/Deadly encounters you’re using, or do half-step bumps in XP budgets between levels.)

Are the players feeling challenged? You’re in the sweet spot. You can hold in that sweet spot for X sessions, with the number X being adjusted to your personal taste. Then you can start increasing the difficulty by steps again until…

Are things getting really tough for the PCs? Level them up (without immediately shifting encounter difficulty) and then assess.

One thing to be aware of is that this doesn’t work great for 1^st-level characters, which are very fragile (and kind of need special treatment when it comes to encounter building in general).

Another thing to keep in mind is that you need to miss very low and for a very long time for “too easy” to ruin your campaign; you only have to miss once for “too hard” to TPK the group. So, when in doubt, you’re generally better off aiming low and then adjusting up.

You’ll also likely discover that sometimes PCs will level up, feel like they’re in the sweet spot, and then suddenly everything gets easier and they’re cruising through encounters that are too easy. What’s likely happened is that the players have figured out how their new abilities work (and, importantly, work together), allowing them to perfect their tactics.

You can see the opposite effect happen if the PCs have been fighting one type of monsters for awhile, but then the campaign shifts and they’re suddenly fighting completely different monsters. Experienced difficulty may momentarily spike until they get a feel for the new creatures.

It’s also not a bad idea to check in with the players periodically and see how they’re feeling about the difficulty level in the campaign. They won’t always be right, but neither will you, so comparing notes can help you find the sweet spot for your group.

“Hey! Isn’t that actually Level Advancement Without XP?” Sorry, folks. The ship sailed on this one back in 2014 when every single official adventure started referring to “you pick events in the campaign when the characters level up” as milestone XP. “Milestone” is just too convenient a term for the form of level advancement best suited to these linear adventures. If you have any complaints about this, please address them to Wizards of the Coast.

LINEAR BALANCE WITHOUT MILESTONES

“But I don’t want to use milestone XP! I want to give XP for combat!”

… you just want to make things difficult, don’t you?

That’s okay. Once you understand the principles described above, you can accomplish the same effect with combat/challenge-based XP, it will just be a little more obfuscated.

Specifically, with XP awards, the PCs will be gaining levels at a certain pace. If they’re cruising through encounters, you just need to increase the difficulty of the encounters they’re facing at a faster pace than the pace they’re leveling at. (So in the time they’ve gone from 6^th to 7^th level with everything feeling too easy, the encounters you’re building will have gone from 6^th level to 8^th level or maybe even 9^th level. Or, conversely, if the encounters have been too tough for them, you might hold the encounter design at 6^th level even though they’ve leveled up to 7^th.)

In other words, it’s the same process of dialing in: It’s just made slightly more complicated by the PCs being a moving target.

OTHER FAQs

“Doesn’t this mean that my 7^th-level PCs could end up facing, I dunno, 11^th-level encounters?”

Quite possibly. Or your specific group of 7^th-level PCs might be better served by 5^th-level encounters. If it makes you feel better, even by-the-book 11^th-level Medium encounters are actually easier than 7^th-level Deadly encounters, so you’ve probably already been doing this.

More importantly, these are just arbitrary numbers. The important thing is that you and your players are having fun: If your players are really good at tactical planning or they’ve managed to get their hands on an unexpectedly powerful magical artifact, that can easily mean that they’re capable of punching above their by-the-book weight-class.

And you know what? That sounds fun to me!

“I’m running a published adventure. How do I ‘increase the difficulty’? Do I need to rebuild the encounters?”

Instead of adjusting encounter difficulty, just skip the next milestone level suggested by the scenario. You can see a similar technique in Random D&D Tip: Adjusting Encounters by Party Size.

“Couldn’t I use these same principles when designing non-linear scenarios or campaigns?”

Absolutely!

For scenarios, you’re generally targeting a certain difficulty in your encounter design regardless of whether it’s a linear or non-linear scenario. This technique is about dialing in what your current target should be in the challenge rating system, so it works just as well either way.

For a non-linear campaigns, you want to avoid the potential pitfall of leveling up the campaign world. So if you’ve got a structure like a megadungeon or hexcrawl, where the players can already dial in their preferred difficulty level, this technique probably isn’t going to be particularly useful. But it can find application in some node-based campaigns and freeform sandboxes.

FURTHER READING
Revisiting Encounter Design
The Many Types of Balance
Fetishizing Balance
The Death of the Wandering Monster
Adversary Rosters

Our Let’s Read of the original 1974 edition of D&D continues as we open the eldritch tome of Volume 2: Monsters & Treasure. Topics covered in this video include:

• How did D&D transform our understanding of fantasy?
• What were the original three Tiers of play in D&D?
• Why do cloud giants have a keen sense of smell?
• Why are Arneson & Gygax directly responsible for the Twilight novels?

If you want to start watching from the beginning, you can do that here.

Subscribe Now!