Some Thoughts on the Lost Mines of Phandelver

First a minor nit, the names Phandelver and Phandalin are too similar. Also Phandalin is a village on the frontier with tribes of goblins and bugbears around and it has no defenses, no militia, nothing. It's a miracle it hasn't been wiped out yet. I would expect a ditch and wooden palisade at the very least if not a stone wall surrounding the place. 

Second, the maps. Cragma Caves reminded me a lot of the map in Murria's Revenge in the old Runequest Borderlands box. It's a good map and the similarities might be accidental. In fact most of the changes are improvements, still you start on the left side of the stream and circle around and cross to the right. Weird coincidence. 

The map of Cragma Castle was nice as well, My players enjoyed the tactical nature of it, even if the designer has apparently never actually seen a castle before. I didn't like the Wave Echo map at first, visually its pretty bog-standard, but in play it worked nice as my players were trying to circle around the enemies and take advantage of the looping nature of the place. It needed more verticals but it was nicely designed. Just goes to show you can't judge a map entirely on the appears. Lastly the Orc mission needs a battlemap. Luckily pretty much any map you could dream of is online somewhere.

Third, I like the way they aimed for a sandbox but the pacing was odd. Maybe I misread something but it felt like there is a bit of hurry to save the missing dwarf brothers, but you aren't really high enough level so first right away, so you do a side-quests or two to level-up before hand. Very video-gamey and artificial. It would have been better if it started in Phandelin against ruffians, then side-quests and sandbox fun, and on one of those the party is Ambushed > Cragma dungeon > Cragma Castle > Wave Echo cave for the win.

Lastly the module missed a chance to explain how to run urban adventures in Phandelin.  They needed details on how to handle encounters, how to dole out rumors, maybe an encounter table. Instead they just list out the important buildings and leave it all up to the DM. They leave you the feeling that the players need to go door to door knocking and asking questions for quest hooks which is silly. They should have had carousing rules of some sort. Not the kind used throughout the OSR for XP, but some fun tables to handle the celebration that was likely to spring-up when the players took out the Redbrand Ruffians. Tables that helped introduce NPC and dole out scenario hooks. 

So it was a good module for my parties intro to 5E and re-intro to RPG after a couple of decades.