Lost Mine of Phandelver Questions

[Bison]

First let me say how happy and excited I am to have taken the risk of VTT gaming with FG. It's a great program which has allowed an old friend and I to sit at the table and play D&D together once again. (Sadly we were up until 4 am just making characters last night, which is something we hadn't done in over 20 years. :) )

Now for the questions:

1. The pregen characters for Mines do not appear in the PC selection tab in game. Is there something I need to do on my end as the DM to activate those characters?

2. I'd like to be able to use the Sword Coast Area map that came with Mines as a base to experiment with learning how to make modules. How or am I allowed to import that map from Mines to a new module without have to have the module always activated?

Thanks in in advance for any help or advice.

[Zacchaeus]

Hi Bison, welcome to FG and to the community.

To get at the pregenerated characters open up the Lost mines in the library and look down the right hand side of the library dialog and you'll see 'Pregenerated Characters'. Click on that to bring up a further dialog and then click on the little green buttons to import the characters into the module. They will now appear in the 'PCs' tab.

You can't do anything with that map since it's locked into the module so you can't put it anywhere else. You can play with it as long as Lost Mines is open. There are lots of other maps however that you can play with that come with FG. Check out your modules via the library button to find them. Those you can use in any module you create.

[Bison]

Thanks for the assistance on the pregen characters. I sort of figured that would be the case with the map due either coding, IP rights, or both.

[Targas]

..and then there are lots of maps made from Mike Schley, which once bought separately of course can be simply included anywhere were needed.

[ddaley]

Check here for maps. Individual maps are fairly reasonable.

https://theredepic.bigcartel.com
https://mikeschley.zenfolio.com

Right now, you can buy all (as a bundle) of Mike Schley's Curse of Strahd maps for $30. Or, you can pick and choose individual maps for fairly cheap. Most come with DM and Player versions.

[ddaley]

BTW, Lost Mine of Phandelver is pretty fun. I DM'ed most of it for my group. I changed it up a bit and had more of a drow influence.

*** SPOILERS ***

The Orcs at Wyvern Tor were in the area hunting drow how have been kidnapping orcs. The orcs tracked them to this area, but lost their tracks and have been searching for them (the party captured and interrogated one of the orcs). I replaced the doppleganger with an actual drow at Cragmaw Castle and made other minor changes.

I didn't really care for Wave Echo Mine part, and I was anxious to get the party started on Out of the Abyss. So, after the party rescued Gundren at Cragmaw Castle and were on their way back to Phandelver, I had them kidnapped by the drow. Gundren escaped the drow however. The orc in the drow prison was the orc that they had captured and taken back to Phandelver as a prisoner. He told the party that the drow attacked the group that was escorting him to Neverwinter. When the party interrogated Ront, the orc, he had told them that he was personally invested in finding the drow, 'cause they had taken his nephew.

Anyway, have fun with it. It's a fun adventure.

[Bison]

^ Heh. That's pretty sweet. Right now the plan is to run Mines to completion to better learn the 5e rules and how to work FG. Next I'd like to move onto Hoard of the Dragon Queen and start working on some homebrew adventures/campaign.


Thanks for the links to the map stores.

[Zacchaeus]

There's also lots of maps on the forums here (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?90-Maps). I think there are some Phandelver ones in the stickies.

[Bison]

I'll need to look into some of the maps available. It'd be really nice to have a collection of ad hoc encounter maps to fall back onto as needed during a session.