Adventure Summary for Phandelver’s Red Hand

This campaign, Phandelver’s Red Hand, begins innocently enough:

• Your first-level character may have been contacted by Gundren Rockseeker, a dwarf treasure hunter, asking you for help escorting a cart of mining supplies from the big city of Neverwinter to the frontier village of Phandalin, a three-days journey into the wilderness, where Gundren claims to have discovered “something big.”

• Alternatively, your first-level character may be traveling for their own reasons to Phandalin, lured by the news that the town speaker, Harbin Wester, needs help handling some problems that have cropped up as the mountain settlement grows: Goblin tribes are ambushing merchants, orc clans are raiding settlements, ruffians are disturbing the peace, and most worrisome of all, reports of dragon activity are on the rise!

Are these recent disturbances merely coincidental, or might there be deeper interests and broader powers at play?

Phandelver’s Red Hand is a full campaign designed to challenge player characters from their humble beginnings as plucky upstarts at first level all the way through to the peak of their powers at twentieth level as forces for good that even demons and devils must fear from their home planes.

But initially, for their first five or six levels, characters will focus most of their efforts on individual quests that they encounter in the historic mountain village of Phandalin and its environs. During this stage of the campaign, players can expect to pursue a wide variety of goals as they help local residents respond to a seemingly endless barrage of disconnected problems. Gradually, however, characters can expect to begin identifying some common threads that weave these problems together into a wider tapesty.

From levels five or six through levels ten or eleven, characters will shift their focus toward a neighboring region, Elsir Vale, to investigate reports of even more serious problems that, if true, could pose a threat to both the Vale, Phandelver, and beyond. During this stage of the campaign, characters can expect to be faced with a very large, well-organized, and disciplined organization with grand designs for territorial conquest. Perhaps for the first time, the party will be facing an adversary that they simply cannot defeat alone. This phase of the campaign is about war on a grand scale, and player characters will need to cling to the slimmest of hopes that some semblance of victory might be snatched from the crushing jaws of battlefield defeats.

I will not spoil the third and fourth stages of this campaign here, except to say that neither the troubles in Phandelver nor the war in Elsir Vale materialize out of thin air. Our characters will need to travel far beyond both the surface world and the prime material plane itself to uproot the source of these threats once and for all.