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Lost Mine of Phandelver DM Guide - Villains - Halia Thornton
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ส.ค. 2019
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Halia Thornton can be easily lost in a variety of characters provided in Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure. But if you invest some work into this NPC, she can become a very interesting villain.
A friend of mine inadvertantly made Halia the main villain in their campaign. She went from having small-town ambitions of crime to all out world domination.
My players completely ignored her, never got the quest and know her mostly as a shopkeep (given that none of them are Z-material). However, upon liberating the town from the redbrands as well as throwing the old townmaster into prison, the heroes return from Cragmaw Castle to discover a great celebration known as the first "redfall". A local holiday paid for my Halia Thornton and the miner's guild, wherein Sildar tells the party "If she's not mayor in a month I'll eat my mustache". But they have no idea about what's to come.
I really like your take on Halia. I always played her as a “femme fatale” type who wanted to take over the town, but I like your idea better as it fits in more with how a member of the Zhentarim might actually operate. In the several times I ran LMoP she only ever got close to a couple of the PCs; in one campaign the player ended up leaving the campaign early and let me kill his character off in a blaze of glory “off screen” before Halia had a proper chance to enlist him, and in another campaign a PC tried to date her >.<
That party eventually turned their attention to others things before the PC was able to get too far in his attempts to woo.
Thanks for sharing your struggles about this particular NPC. She's a challenge. I'm getting ready to run this for the 3rd time in a couple of nights, and your take on "The Family" is going to really help. Keep up the good work.
Hey! I'm really happy I could help. Thanks for the comment and have a great game =)
I am enjoying this LMOP tribute and your added narration. I think you and "How to D&D" have solid videos on the Lost Mines of Phandelver.
Thanks for that 😊
Very nice break down.
Hey! I appreciate that, thanks!
And I watch your videos by the way =)
@@LutesDice Thanks. There's not much on LMoP, so I'm not surprised ;)
Thanks for the inspo! I'm doing a solo campaign and I'm expecting the PC to end up in the Lord's Alliance. Doing some research and finding out that they are at odds with Zantaran, I thought it might be interesting to have him at odds with her and possibly take her out or something. So thanks for the inspo!
Thanks for the video man, I didn't think she'd play much of a role in my games, but then one of my players murdered the townmaster, planted evidence that he worked for the redbrands, then went back to Halia to make a plan of setting up an election to make her mayor, so I have that going for me now.
In 1 of my campaigns, Halia was a rakshasa. No one knew until they were a much much higher level. They were completely shocked that this casual npc of the town could read their minds, anticipate their actions, and stay in complete anonymity for so long. The rakshasa was the big bad guy at the end of this Adventure. Everyone else was a pawn.
my players loved halia. i made her professional and blunt with a little sarcasm and gave her a younger brother as an assistant to make her slightly more endearing. she had the most amount of information on the redbrands (namely, she gave them blueprints to tresendor manor and told them just taking out of the leader of the redbrands would make the bandits scatter, making the party much more confident in how easy saving Phandalin was going to be.) Plus she paid the most out of everyone in town to get rid of them. when the players returned glasstaff’s documents to her and left phandalin to go clear out cragmaw castle, they had no idea they were going to be returning to a reclaimed phandalin with halia as the new glasstaff and townmaster.
I haven't run Lost Mines, but just starting my second run of Icespire, and keen to flesh out the town and NPCs a lot more with this group.
The other major NPCs are interesting, would love to hear your take on Linene.
Really appreciate these NPC insights! Only one of my party met Halia, and he wasn't interested when she was dismissive of the Rockseekers.
She did mention what a shame it was that those nice boys got wrapped up in the Redbrands, and that she'd pay to have Glasstaff..."removed, do you understand?"
No interest, and I think they've forgotten about her, though they did chase off and kill Glasstaff.
The party's gone to WEC with Nundro to rescue Gundren. Imagine their surprise when they return to find the town guard reconstituted (yay!) trained by Sildar (yay!) and under the direction of Halia Thorton (huh?). Poor Sildar was overwhelmed at taking the townmaster role, and the party were only up to being deputized, so he still needed a sheriff until the Lord's Alliance could send another to Phandalin. What luck! Halia's happy to take that burden off his shoulders.
I’m running LMoP again this time and I plan to make Halia Thornton a mage as well as Zhentarim agent. The miners exchange is probably the most profitable business in a mining town like Phandalin. Miners must come to Halia to exchange their unrefined gold/platinum ore into coin and to register their mining plots. Like most frontier mining towns in real history the most successful people are not the miners but the business who sell supplies/services to miners.
Very cool! I haven’t read lost mines of Phandelver but have ran icespire peak where she doesn’t really hold any interest, so it was cool to learn more about her and in future runnings might add some hints about her.
Appreciate the ton of work you put into the vid and details. Keep it up, man!
Thank you so much. Comments like this really keep me going!
That's actually a pretty decent guide! The description in DoIP is basically the same and I had the hardest time figuring out how to interpret this character.
You gave me a couple ideas how to improve on any Zhenatrim Members. Thanks
Glad it helped!
Such a deep character analysis very inspiring! Thanks for the video, buddy 👍
Thank you, too!
this is great work man. I agree with you, as a first time DM im finding her incredibly tricky to get a feel for.. she has to be a little bit suspect, but not too much, and ultimately theres little info to even suggest what all of it is about. Perfect timing too, since my party hasnt felt the need to talk to her yet, despite the amount of times her name comes up haha
Thank you, man! Glad it helped =)
Best LMoP videos I've seen out there. Tremendous help, thanks!
our group recruited the nothic to be their pet and found out about her from mind reading.
The Zentarim, the fantasy version of Amazon/Walmart.
Cool idea about sending heroes to some mission to get rid of them. Maybe it should be some deadly encounter... How should she behave if party returns angry with her?
She should definetely have a well thought out story on where did she get the false infomation. And I would have her use that story to set the players against one of her competitors, or at least sow doubt in them.
I played Halia as more of a True Neutral character rather than an evil character. My players failed a couple important perception checks and had done a few missions for her before realizing that she had taken over the Redbrands in Glasstaff's absence. Now that my players have finished the Mines quests, I'm using her affiliation with the Zhents as an reason to have her send the players over to Waterdeep to intervene in the Zhent Civil war there during the Dragon Heist events. Maybe next time they return to Phandalin she will come across as too much of a dictator, but so far they have had a fun, positive relationship.
Thinking about Halia... first character that came to mind was Gus Fring from breaking bad, hiding in plain sight villain, cold and calculating or maybe i'm wrong
I love Gus Fring, that's a good inspiration
👍
Yes, please go on about the black network. ⚫️
Nice background music. Can I use it for my game somehow?
Thank you, Lilia! I'm planning on making an hour long video with my fantasy music, including the track used in this video. Stay tuned!
@@LutesDice Great! I got realy tired of our usual ambient music
img link?
What sorts of jobs do you have players do for her? in the cases where they do agree to work for her for a while?
I "borrowed" quests from other quest givers, changing the premise to suit Zhentarim theme. For instance Old Owl Well. While Daran Edermat is concerned about the safety of Phandalin townsfolk, Halia is curious about the work of Hamun Kost, and wants to seize whatever he has found in those ruins (a ring of protection as written, or something of your invention). Also she is still a guildmaster of Miner's Exchange. I imagine that folks have to get some license from her to work in the area. She might want the player to get rid of illegal miners, or make them pay. From there you can add as much drama as you want. Maybe they can't afford a license because of Halia's unfair prices and so on.
Hope that helps!
Also the DMG has a brief section on typical Zhent jobs.
Thanks! Didn't even notice that little section on Zhentarim in the DMG hahah..
Good ideas though. Between your suggestions and the DMG info/suggestions, i should be ok :)
My vision of Phandalin is based on the TV Show Deadwood, and Halia....Halia is my Swearingen.
This is how I have been running Halia too. I didn't play her as pretending to be goody-goody but confident and competent. I also had many of the Red-brands be kids to give the PCs some moral dilemma.
Later had Halia run for mayor too after asking the evil-ish PC to sway the townsfolk towards her since the heroes at that point had gotten rid of Glasstaff. She did not win the election (we had a roll off and her team was out-rolled).
That night most of the captive Red-brands were able to flee somehow.
Halia Thornton is an interesting character but not really relevant to the adventure. She can’t help the PCs but won’t directly oppose them either. You really don’t need her unless you can come up with some rationale to interact w/ the PCs.