Dungeons & Dragons Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk Reviewed
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ค. 2024
- Jeff shares his thoughts about the latest Dungeons & Dragons adventure book, from Wizards of the Coast, Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk. The 224 page hardcover arrives in stores on September 19th carrying an MSRP of $59.95. Currently you can order the physical book and digital bundle at D&D Beyond for the same $59.95.
Plus you'll find out who won Jeff's copy of the FLGS edition too!
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0:00 Introduction
2:00 Discussing each of the chapters of Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk
29:26 Final thoughts and review score
34:30 Wrapping up
#DungeonsandDragons #DnDPhandelverandBelow #WizardsoftheCoast - เกม
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It is PHAN-duh-lin. I dont know where Phan-DEH-lin came from.
yeah I'm pretty sure I've heard Chris Perkins say FAN-duh-lin, and you'd think he would know.
this bothered me way more than it should lmao, but I just chalk it up to various regional accents in Faerun
Wow, are you opens always like that and I have been skipping them? Thats some awesome effects!
That's the new open I'm using for reviews. ~ Jeff
Hey Jeff.
Yeah, I think I might have been mispronunciating Phandalin for most of a decade now!
Enjoyed the review - seems a fair appraisal.
I ran LMoP for my friends last year and I'm definitely going to run Shattered Obelisk for the same group when I can get my hands on the adventure. So I really appreciate this review as it's already giving me ideas on what I can do for my players and their characters!
Have fun!
Guess what? You’ve been pronouncing Phandalin correctly all these years, and this new way someone taught you to say it is actually contrary to what it says in the original “Mine of Phandelver” adventure. Refer to the Introduction, under Background, and in the first paragraph it says, “Times were good, and the nearby human town of Phandalin (pronounced fan-duh-lin) prospered as well.”
wouldn't that be (fan-dah-lin)
@@Euanbuddie seeing as the text provided came from the company that made the adventure and has been the primary source of official Forgotten Realms/Sword Coast content, no, it would not be your version.
A real simple way would have been to go the Dragon Heist route and have a system where the PCs are given the Sleeping Giant Building as a thanks, and they have to decide what they want to do with it; turn it into a shop, make it a tavern, an Inn, a home, etc.
Rational and even-handed, always appreciate your sober assessments Jeff. Thanks for all your hard work in our hobby.
Thank you, Paul!
Love that intro! Good review & DM advice as always.
Glad you liked it!
X2
thank you for this in depth review, i just found this channel and I love the work you put into your videos, will be sticking around for more :)
Welcome aboard!
kind of sad that they dropped the ball with fleshing out the starting town, as well as not addressing the various obelisks as they mentioned in previous promos. great review though, subscribed!
Welcome aboard! Thanks for the sub!
Thanks for sharing your toughts and the look through.
Thanks for the review. Also they did said what the obelisks do in icewind dale rime of the frost maiden. They are artifacts created by ancient netherese wizards that act like safety triggers. They can put a staff of power inside the obelisks that they reverse time back to netheril time. In case something horrible happens they can go back and change that event. It not just reverts time for the person that puts the staff in it but for the entire planet. It's at page 255
it was made unclear if all obelisks accomplish the same goal, as it's been established the technology to create them wasn't netherese.
Thanks for another great video. Love your content and I will defiantly be picking this one up.
Awesome, thank you!
thanks for the review, this really does sound like it would be a lot of fun to play out! it's probably too late to do a lot of foreshadowing for Shattered Obelisk in the LMoP campaign i'm currently running, but the potential for it to be a sequel is very intriguing!
when Icewind Dale: RotFM came out I was so stoked because I absolutely thought the latter half of this new Phandelin product (Mindflayer plot) was what RotFM was going to deliver. I got such The Thing and At the Mountains of Madness vibes from the marketing and was ultimately very disappointed with how purely High Fantasy it was with little to no Cosmic Horror. All we got was a sad crashed Nautiloid with insultingly cute Squidlings or whatever they were. I wonder how hard it would be to replace all that Dwarf, Chardayln Dragon, competing wizards stuff with the Mindflayer plot and set whatever this climax is in that crashed Netherese city of Yithryn. That would be one hell of an adventure!
You were lied to about the pronunciation. "...the nearby human town of Phandalin (pronounced fan-duh-lin)..."
Also, I have no idea who on earth could claim that Mike Schley's maps are bland. He's literally the best cartographer WotC employs. Miles better than Dyson Logos, that's for sure.
Thanks for the review! My players are just finishing Lost Mines of Phandelver. Three of the four, it's been their first experience in D&D. n_n I'm excited to offer continuing the campaign into The Shattered Obelisk.
I've run LMOP a couple of times and my players always go straight to the redbrand hideout and the then to Cragmaw Castle, skipping all of the side quests. I think that if I ever run this again I will down play the redbrand ruffians until the characters have done a couple of side quests. I have a group going through it now who are getting ready to go to Wave Echo Cave. I have heard that some people transition to HoTDQ swapping Greenest with Phandalin (hope I said that right). I was planning on going into Against the Giants. This Shattered Obelisk is another option, but I'm not excited by it after hearing this review.
I had to laugh at the phandalin pronunciation. I always thought the syntax was funny between the two, but like you (and everyone else I know) I've always called it PHAN-da-lin.
Nice review. I already ran LMoP for my group. So I need to run another adventure campaign for them for levels 1-5. I need to figure out how to run the sequel campaign if the group already went through LMoP years ago.
I have the same problem. Any ideas?
I pronounce it just like you and people can fight me on that.
Love when people get bent out of shape about how people pronounce made up fantasy names, as if different people wouldn't pronounce them differently just like in real life.
I've always pronounced it Phandalin, and always will. 😜
Jeff, the mispronunciation of lore objects is such a minor issue. The person that told you about that was being petty. How many games, TV, movies etc mimic real life in that things are pronounced differently? I've heard the Dark Elves pronounced as Drow (like something used to fire an arrow) and Drow (an action of bend the body as a sign of respect or submission). As far as the people listening understand, who cares. There are bigger fish to fry, ya know? Great review, BTW.
Thank you kindly. Yeah, the comment on the first look was pretty nasty. To the point I actually deleted it; something I do very rarely. Funny enough, I constantly say I'm here to mispronounce fictional people, places, and things. I even said that during the first look. :) ~ Jeff
@@Thegaminggang It does actually bother me a bit, but only because I spent a lot of time prepping and running LMoP and I got very used to the name of the city. But it's a small thing, and even using the pronunciation guides from the books it can be sometimes hard to interpret. And of course tons of people stick to their own pronunciations of things in D&D regardless of what official sources say. And that happens all the time. Hell, in Star Wars even the canon movies aren't consistent. It's all good.
Ed Greenwoods perspective on 'mispronounciations' is that pronounciation varies in Toril itself, with dialect and accent differences. So any pronounciation is cannon. :)
30:00 That's simple. Because the players don't know that there's a fail safe. The goal is for it to be the player's moment and their success, based on either the features they've chosen, or luck. But they also don't want to leave the DM to design a solution if that goes wrong, so they install a fail safe in case the players don't roll well. Because nothing is more dumb than having a huge segment of prepared content thrown in the trash can because the dice said no. There's also the possibility for things to go off the rails in situations like these. Maybe a player decides to scry, or the cleric contacts their god, or a warlock asks to call upon their patron. So you can spin the solution off easily into whatever they come up with. It's okay to create an illusion of stakes so there are opportunities for the players to have memorable moments, without putting the campaign at risk or having to design twice as much content for an A path and B path. The players should have some tension involved, of course, even if the DM doesn't. The players obviously know that failing the dice roll won't mean the campaign is over and they lose. But it might mean putting them at greater risk, incurring extra combat, or spending resources they might have used elsewhere. They may be unaware that the game has you put the NPC in front of them, and may feel that they discovered the NPC on their own, so it will feel like a reward for their roleplay and social encounters that they had an alternative means of discovering whatever they might have investigated for. As both a DM and a player, I've come to appreciate the peek behind the veil, and it's actually helped me to let go of my videogame-inspired tendency to vie for a "correct" or optimal solution to problems, and instead roleplay out what's fun, appropriate and thematic.
Finding out that the first 77 pages of a 200 page book is a reprint of a starter set nearly everyone has, (sans unessecary gender and race swaps) is incredibly dissapointing.
It feels like they are retreading the same ground, same setting, rather than running other areas with updated lore from 3e to 5e.
That said having more content for the area makes for a localized but expansive campaign.
I also hoped it would be for higher levels running on from the Beyond Dragon of Icespire Peak content which ends at 9th.
I'm currently running LMoP for my 3rd campaign and weaving in Dragon of Icespire Peak during and after, with plans to run Storm Lord's Wrath after that.
The content for Illithids is welcome, but I would prefer more than half a book. I think I'll use a pdf to run any content from this book and will likely have to level it up for my party when they do get to it. Or stick to my original idea of them facing the twin black dragons in the Mere of Dead Men.
I’ve only ever heard it pronounced the way you used to say it. This “new” way? No thanks. It’s like tomato: to-may-to to-mah-to
The bigest part of this adventure that I hated were the Factions. It really annoyed me. Saying that, I didn't really think much of The Forgotten Realms.
Are the illustrators names AI generated like the art? 😅