Happy holidays, everyone! As 2024 comes to a close, so too does my retrospective on the 50^th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons and my own part in all that. I guess I’ll have to think up a new theme for blogging in 2025, but hey—that’s next year’s problem.

Not much new to report otherwise. My day job is very busy at the moment, since we’re coming up on some writing deadlines that happen to land right before the holiday break. I’ve got a couple of manuscripts languishing in some editor or another’s “I’ll think about it” pile, and hopefully some good signs regarding the trilogy of TORG novels I wrote a few years ago. Being a writer means not knowing when your work is going to sell or how much you’re going to make. It’s not for everyone.

Anyway, on to this installment of my retrospective!

Lost Mine of Phandelver

A little more than a year after parting ways with Wizards of the Coast, I started picking up some freelance work with WotC. In Washington state, you have to wait a year after laying someone off before you sign them on for contract work, but as soon as I cleared that window WotC was ready to offer me some projects. (And yes, it was tough to take a contract from the company that laid me off from a job I loved. But WotC was one of the best-paying companies in the RPG biz, I liked the work, and not too many of the various irons I had in the fire were getting hot. You do what you gotta do.)

I started off with some work on the D&D Encounters program–Search for the Diamond Staff. Then, in the summer of 2013, Greg Bilsland and Chris Perkins reached out to see if I’d be interested in taking on some writing for the upcoming 5e D&D Starter Set.

I initially declined, since I was working on Pathfinder Online at Goblinworks. That’s a story for another time, I suppose. But the 75-minute drive each way was just not working for me, and I had my mind set on my own Primeval Thule project. By October, I decided it was time to leave Goblinworks and concentrate on freelancing and my own stuff. That freed up my docket quite a bit, so I ended up taking the job to work on the Starter Set.

My specific assignment was the adventure module to be included in the box. Chris Perkins sent me a bunch of documents and 5e working files, including a vision document for the Starter Set adventure. That didn’t specify much more than “a small village near Neverwinter” and a sandbox adventure featuring a drow mastermind. Okay, no problem—my hands aren’t tied by that!

I looked over my Forgotten Realms materials, and realized Phandalin was pretty much perfect for what Wizards wanted. In turn, that suggested Wave Echo Cave of existing Realmslore as a good dungeon to explore. I knocked together a story pitch to tie them together, and came up with “the Black Spider” as our obligatory drow string-pulling villain. Chris and the other folks at WotC loved the pitch and turned me loose.

When it came to building a sandbox, I very deliberately set up Phandalin to work like a “quest hub” in a video game or CRPG. I figured that the vast majority of new D&D players would be familiar with the concept from Zelda or Skyrim or whatever, so I could use that as a powerful teaching tool in how to create a tabletop adventure setting. Few beginner-oriented D&D products had ever really tried to do that, and it wound up working pretty well.

I’ll admit that I didn’t have a great sense of the game’s lethality early on in a brand-new edition, so there are a couple of things that wind up being pretty tough on 1^st-level PCs. I’m amazed at the number of characters who get killed by the goblins in the first encounter, and the water trap in the Cragmaw Hideout is pretty brutal. Sorry about that! If that was your character, I hope you had fun anyway.

So, what’s the significance of Phandelver in the pantheon of D&D?

A *lot* of people played that Starter Set adventure. I’ve seen estimated sales of a million-plus copies over the lifetime of the product. That’s crazy. Just in volume alone, Lost Mine of Phandelver is a hugely important adventure module. Beyond the numbers, it also received quite a lot of positive reviews and critical acclaim (especially as a beginner adventure). Heck, it even kicked off the first few episodes of the Adventure Zone! There are people who don’t like it all that much, but Phandelver is a meme-factory every 5E D&D player knows and recognizes—a touchstone of shared experience millions of people can talk about. That’s … pretty significant. I won’t ever get rich in this line of work, but I can take satisfaction in knowing that all those people played an adventure I wrote, and loved it.