While the Lost Mines of Phandelver adventure doesn’t force most events to happen in a specific order, it does group them into several sections of activities that are likely to happen in a given time frame. Part Three is the largest in terms of providing a variety of different quests and locations to visit, and that’s where we’ve spent our last 4 sessions. Characters learn about these locations by conversing with the locals once they arrive in Phandalin.
Without yet having discovered the location of the lost mine, my players found out instead about a number of locations where they might find danger, treasure, and information. Exploring these locations led them to a banshee in a hollow tree, an old well, an orc-infested hillside, and lots of random encounters as they traveled. They found there was a young dragon living in the abandoned town of Thundertree, but wisely decided to wait until they were a bit stronger to come back and approach its tower.
Their last stop was the dilapidated castle that served as the current home of the Cragmaw goblin tribe. Rusora, eager to make use of her recently acquired druidic shape-shifting ability, explored outside the keep in the form of a cat, successfully locating a hidden, unguarded entrance. She led the rest of the party inside and continued to explore ahead of them as best she could, listening at doors and sniffing the air to try to identify where enemies might lie. She even successfully detected a hidden predator on the ceiling before it detected her and conveyed to the other characters through mimery that something was waiting for them in the dark of the next room.
Everything was going well until she walked through a broken door and hit a tripwire, dropping her into a noisy pit trap (I assume she landed on her feet) that alerted pretty much the whole west side of the keep to the party’s presence. What followed was a chaotic melee with a swarm of goblins and hobgoblins. With the characters by now at level three, they could fairly easily dispatch any of the individuals attacking them, but they were at a numeric disadvantage that could become dangerous. Fortunately they were able to maneuver in such a way as to keep the most vulnerable among them mostly out of harm’s way, and though multiple healing spells were cast and over half of their healing potions were used up, they were victorious in the encounter.
The other denizens of the castle were ready for them when they arrived, but also clustered closely together in the narrow confines of the keep into an area where they became the targets of dragonborn breath and color spray.
Bad guys beaten, dwarf rescued. mine location ascertained. Next time, on to either the dragon or the lost mine.
The party keeps collecting all the weapons from their fallen foes and hauling as much as they can carry back to town to try to sell. Twice now they’ve left hidden weapon caches with the intent to go back with a wagon later to dig them up for resale. They’ve donated a bunch of them to the militia in Phandalin, and the merchants there have bought a few from them, but at this point the town seemingly has more swords and bows than it does citizens. The businesses in town won’t buy any more weapons from them, except to load onto a cart heading back to Neverwinter, where there’s a demand for cheap, serviceable used weapons… but the characters are now making about 1/4 of the standard selling price on these items.