Lost Mine of Phandelver: the complete DM guide

If you’re running your first D&D game, Lost Mine of Phandelver is almost certainly the adventure people pointed you to, and they were right. It remains the most recommended starter for 5e, and one of the most searched, because it teaches you how to be a DM without drowning you in prep. Here’s how to run it well.

Why it works for new DMs

Phandelver is deliberately small. There are only a handful of factions, the goals are clear, and the map of the region is compact enough to hold in your head. That focus is the whole point: it lets a first-time DM concentrate on the actual craft, describing scenes, adjudicating rules, voicing NPCs, without also having to juggle a sprawling plot.

Prep it one session at a time. Read the chapter you’re about to run, note the key NPCs and their wants, and don’t worry about the chapters ahead until you get there. The adventure is built to be run this way.

The opening ambush is deadlier than it looks

The very first encounter, a goblin ambush on the road, has a reputation for dropping level 1 characters. Four goblins with bows can concentrate fire and put a new player at zero before they’ve had a proper turn.

Don’t nerf it, but do telegraph it. Describe the two dead horses in the road so the party has a beat to be cautious. If someone goes down, remember that death at level 1 is swingy and a captured or bleeding-out character can be a story hook rather than a full stop. The ambush is a great teacher of tactics precisely because it bites.

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Phandelver & Below Handout Bundle

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Run Phandalin as a hub, not a railroad

The middle of the adventure opens up when the party reaches the town of Phandalin. Several threads present themselves at once, the Redbrands, the missing wizard, the various nearby locations, and new DMs sometimes freeze here, unsure which way to push.

The answer is: don’t push. Phandalin is a hub. Lay out the leads, let the players decide what to chase, and follow them. This is where your group learns that D&D is a conversation, not a track. If they take the quests out of order, that’s fine, the adventure is robust enough to handle it.

Know where it leads

If you’re running the original 2014 Lost Mine, the story wraps at level 5 with Wave Echo Cave and the Black Spider. That’s a complete, satisfying arc, and plenty of tables stop there and start something new.

If you own Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, the same characters continue. The expanded book reprints the starter and then turns darker, following a strange obelisk and its corrupting influence all the way to level 12. Running the starter first and then continuing is one of the smoothest level 1-to-12 campaigns available, because the party is already invested in Phandalin by the time the bigger threat emerges.

Prep that makes your first game smoother

The nicest thing you can do for yourself as a new DM is remove friction at the table. Phandelver is full of locations that benefit from a real map, Cragmaw Hideout, the Redbrand hideout, Wave Echo Cave, and a couple of player handouts that land better on paper than read aloud.

The Phandelver and Below Handout Bundle (£50 £15) gathers printable props, maps and tokens for the adventure, and the 250,000+ RPG Battlemaps Mega Bundle (£30 £9) covers the caves, mines, ruins and town scenes the campaign runs through, gridless and ready for Roll20, Foundry or print, so your first game runs without you scrambling for the right image mid-session.