Dragon of Icespire Peak DM Guide - Dwarven Excavation

Music by Folkard
----------------------------------------------------------

[maciejkusz]

I changed the final room trap into something completely different. When a player touches the gem, it emits super strong light for split of a second (like a flashbang) and disappears. Players won't notice anything odd, until they check their pockets, and find out all their gold gone :) Punished for greed, but not that harsh.

[mjsgrass]

I ran this in tandem with lost mines, so I actually had Gundren at Phandalin who hires the adventures to take some mail to his two brothers who are currently exploring some ruins thinking that those are the lost mines. The dwarves not knowing that their brother Gundren has already found the mine. While the players are cleaning up the temple the dwarves are reading the mail from their bother. This makes it all the better when the orcs show up that the dwarves area willing to give up the temple for them. This temple also makes a great Axholme later when the players are looking for a place to keep the village safe, and gives some RP situations to dealing with the orca who have now taken over part of the temple.

[MrBrianofarrell]

My first retuning of this was a solo with two sidekicks, the ranger was able to find everything, and abused the jelly with range and now. And then let his sidekicks negotiate passage past the orcs and he snuck out past, but dodge leaving the dwarves to the orcs but hey hum.

Second group, didn't any of the rooms beyond the altar, I handed them the bottom passage description of mirrored effect, but they didn't search the north of the temple.

Discovering the lower half, seemed like a reasonable conclusion after all they were honestly doing the job for the miners and it was their job to excavate the rest.

I added trapped doors to the corridor secret doors, with sunken heads, just simple darts or poison. In e6, the gem eyes were still there. And I had upgraded the holy symbol to have the trickery domain ability.

Alas, none spoke orcish, so the end engagement didn't advance the story but did adjust some alignment considerations as they butchered two magically sleeping orcs.

[paavohirn]

We started this with a group of 3 veteran players so I'm glad about the challenge. They have a healer sidekick as well. After character creation we made it to mid fight with the jellies. I love the jellies! It's such classic D&D.

The deathtrap at the end should at least have a reward for smart playing and maybe it doesn't have to be quite as deadly. It should make the players alert and hopefully curious about the signs of a similar trap already explodes. I like it that the adventure teaches players that there could be secret doors by showing one. I would like to also have one jelly retreat through one secret door, probably towards the third jelly.

I'm stealing Lazy DM's idea about the secret doors having a relief of a dwarf with a trap as well. The smaller traps would alert the players to further traps such as the super deadly one.

I may or may not use the orcs, but at least there needs to be an option to parley.

[duckipo]

My players went into the cave of their own will and ended up trapped in the cave (due to a very badly used thunder wave) and got stuck fighting two of the jellys at the same time. I played it differently and thought that two separate attacks dealing almost instant death was just unfair, so i combined the jellys together making a larger 15ft by 15ft jelly that had double health points and only one attack. Throughout the entire fight the jelly was unable to land EVEN ONE attack, cause our wizard cleverly used ray of frost, not to much damage, but it takes away 10ft of movement for 1 turn, when used on a creature with only 10ft of movement they effectively stunlocked it. From their on the players used ranged bludgeoning attacks untill the creature was defeated.

They eventually found the hall of greed and 2 players decided that the gem was an obvious trap so left it the last player, the wizard, told his side kick to collect the gem (who happened to be his characters little brother) the wizard walked out of the room to go chat to the party before he's thrown against the wall as an explosion goes of behind him and he sees his brother gone.

[Wizerdbyz]

I'm starting Icespire Peak tomorrow and i think these tips will super spice up the session! thank you so much for the ideas and inspiration!

[clownboy]

Hi, I know this is an old video but did you ever plan on doing more Icespire Peak content ? I found your videos helpful.

[jeremyjlavender]

Thanks, great to hear your ideas about Abathor. With a bit of tweaking this could be a much more memorable encounter

[JiixBooks]

Thank you!! Love the idea of Abathors servants a lot will def add them

[gommechops]

Great ideas here, when you started talking about how and where where to start the action I knew you were worth listening to. Good thought provoking stuff, nice one.

[healhp]

I'm going to be running this this weekend. Thanks for the great ideas! I think I'm going to incorporate the rapper since my party has decided to bring a small army of NPC adventurers from Phandalin with them... The manticore scared them (a wizard and cleric) a bit too much to go it alone.

[photogamenerd]

I love all this advice. I really with this channel would get more love.

[CorrosiveCitrus]

I actually really like the final room as written, it's very thematic - am I just insane? :')

[Johnn]

The players in my group constructed a trap with heavy stones and lured the jelly with food, that badly damaged it. Eventually they finished them off with ranged weapons (throwing rocks etc). In the end, they digged trow the tunnel and found the staty. Luckily they went of to grab their gear, and left the NPC alone with the statue. When they returned the greedy NPC:s where dead - killed by their greed.

[Nr]

Great video with some very neat ideas, keep up the good work ! One thing to note with the Ocre Jellies is that they can be VERY deadly for a smaller level 1 party if the characters don't know that the jellies are very slow and try to "tank" them. So either drop some hints at their slow speed early in the combat (which might not be evident otherwise if they spawn close to the PCs) - or be cautions with how many you want to use and their hit points.

Orcs are also really strong enemies at level 1, so you should be cautious with how many you want to throw at your party as they try to exit the excavation (if any). If they're already on their last legs, throwing the pre-written number of orcs at them can easily lead to a TPK, especially if most of the party is rather squishy and/or attacks from range (orcs can move 90 ft. per turn with their "aggressive" trait, making it next to impossible to safely snipe them from afar in close quarters).

[johnmarkley]

This was great help man! I hope the channel keeps on growing for you!

[matthewpieffer]

So glad you brought in the 1ed rappers . I have done a lot of mods from 1rst Ed to all my 5th Ed.. ~A Gygaxian

[vadymgyrenko]

Great work! Thanks for such useful tips!

[Artfusionary]

I'm wanting to try DMing a game (only D&D experience being tons of youtube content over the years) and got the essentials kit. Started planning everything and looking for more info about this area found your video which has amazing ideas! I really like the idea of putting at least one Rapper into one of the tunnels, but can't find any info online about what it's stats and behaviors might be. I don't want to make it unbalanced with the rest of the dungeon.

[KlausiboyZ]

I was reading through the adventure, and the excavation initially seemed like the intended first quest. Even before I started reading about it, I thought something was odd. The quest is literally just about going there and warning them, yet it awards 50 gold and a level up. The players are free to return to town after they warn the dwarves and claim this reward. But, of course, no real adventurer would do that when further adventure is offered by the dwarves, so I shrugged it off.
Then as I read through the areas and saw just how little there was in the ruins in terms of making things worthwhile, it again seemed a little meh. I mean, as far as I could tell, the only reward are the sending stones promised by the dwarves and the gems they MIGHT find, which they also have to split with the dwarves. Meaning that the rest of the dungeon has no real satisfaction to exploring it. Sure 75GP worth of gems isn't too bad a reward for exploring, but a bunch of empty rooms and a lethal trap as a "reward" for finding multiple layers of hidden doors and up to 40 minutes of digging (okay, much less, assuming that you're not digging alone), that seems so unsatisfying.
Combine that, with the insane Combat Encounter Difficulty of the quest, and I start to get really puzzled. There are up to 3 monster encounters, . 1-2 ochre jellies in the main room, one ochre jelly in a hidden room and a band of orcs when you leave the ruins. Let's say we have 2 players, probably the mst dangerous situation since it triggers 2 jellies and makes for the weakest party. According to the basic rules of calculating the encounters difficulty, we get that due to the low party size, we step up the monster exp multiplier from 1.5 to 2. Two jellies already combine to be a 900xp challenge, with a multiplier of 2, their xp-calculation becomes 1800. Now, the xp threshold for two 1st level adventurers for a medium difficult encounter is 100 xp, nowhere near what the two jellies get together. In fact, anything above 200 is considered deadly for two 1st level adventurers. Heck, with the rules stated, the encounter would still be considered deadly for 8 1st level adventurers!
And that's just the two jellies, not considering the extra jelly hiding in the secret room, the exploding statue that can potentially straight up kill any player standing within 10 feet of it, or the orcs that wait when the tired adventureres try to go back to town to rest.
Now, I know that D&D isn't just numbers. And I know that the jellies have an easily exploitable weakness in their lack of speed. But the book looks to be written for new DMs, and possibly new players as well, and they might not understand how to exploit that weakness. And since the adventure explicitly states that the dwarves want the adventurers to kill the jellies, the players can't really just avoid them and keep their distance.

This could very likely be the first quest that a group of people ever play, both as DM and players, and this little excavation is insanely dangerous for the inexperienced and offers little reward for thoroughness. I really don't think this quest is a good idea for any newbie DM to run with a newbie group of players. I still can't get over how ridiculous the numbers I ran for the encounter difficulty were.