Campaign Summary

A living reference for Owen’s campaign. Last updated: Session 8 (9/4/26).

Setting: Forgotten Realms, Phandalin region — Dragon of Icespire Peak, D&D 5e (2014 rules), level cap 6. House rules: no Neverwinter location; no tracking of ammunition or weight except special ammunition or absurd loads.

The story so far

Sessions 0–1 — The Road to Phandalin (4/27/26)

The party formed on the road and entered Phandalin, where they worked the quest board, met the Quest Master, and picked up the Gnomengarde Quest: warn the reclusive gnome tinkerers about a dragon, with a bonus for recovering magic items. Dragon rumors first surfaced here. A strange figure watched them at the inn — a thread that pays off later. Camping en route, they killed a wild boar — Barnaby’s Dragon’s Breath and Sage’s reluctant finishing arrow — and preserved it for food.

Session 2 — Dax Joins (5/15/26)

The party found Dax wounded amid five dead orcs, on a parallel quest to Gnomengarde and carrying orc rumors of an area dragon. He cautiously joined. They explored Gnomengarde, met gnome mushroom-farmers, and a brusque baker who pointed Dax toward the king. Then Facktoré, an unhinged gnome, shot Thom with a crossbow ballista; Thom slept her, Dax tied her up, and Bean pocketed her 10 gold. Rut later freed her, and she fled screeching.

Session 3 — The Mimics (5/18/26)

The party worked through the throne room (hidden passage, peephole into the king’s chambers, a bound queen, a paranoid king checking everything for mimics), disabled traps, crossed a goop-covered rope bridge, and beat two mimics in a storage room. The Guildmaster’s contract was delivered to the King, and Dax received a sealed envelope from the King — proof of the completed trade.

Session 4 — Back to Phandalin, and a Squeeze (6/22/26)

Harbin Wester paid 135 gold (19 each), returned the wand, and offered two contracts: Umbrage Hill (get midwife Adabra Gwynn, a Colletite of Chauntea, to leave her windmill, 25 gp) and the Dwarven Excavation (warn dwarf prospectors about a white dragon, 50 gp). At the Miner’s Exchange, Dax delivered the King’s sealed letter to Guildmaster Holia Thornton; the letter’s dragon mention prompted her questions. She then revealed a Zhentarim dragon-pin (recognized by Hamish), leveled crossbows at the party, and forced an intel-sharing pact, paying for dragon information. The guard posted outside — one of her Zhentarim people — was the same strange figure who’d been watching the party at the inn back in Session 1. With his original contract discharged, Dax stayed pragmatic — happy to keep working with Thornton so long as coin was on the table. Thornton also flagged a ruined temple south along the Trivial Trail where locals stash gold. Bean lifted Harbin’s private notes on Thornton during an unauthorized return visit (Dax and Rut sat it out). At Umbrage Hill, the party fought off two manticores (Dax burned an Action Surge; Barnaby shielded him with a reaction; Bean and Sage landed the kills). The windmill mostly survived.

Session 5 — Adabra, Orcs, and the Temple of Abbathor (7/14/26)

Post-manticore, Rut’s Goodberry and Barnaby’s Lay on Hands stabilized the party; Rut ripped a tail-spike from a manticore corpse and kept it — why, he hasn’t said. Adabra Gwynn refused to relocate (she can only brew the town’s healing potions at her windmill), gave a free healing potion (Dax tossed it to a bleeding Thom), noted rising orc activity, and sent a note back to Harbin. En route to the excavation, the party found day-old orc tracks and confirmed a large orc encampment down a split trail (bypassed). At the excavation — a ruined settlement behind a broken black-stone gate — they met dwarf prospectors Norbus Ithermel and Dazlyn Grayshard, delivered the dragon warning, and negotiated a 60/40 treasure split in the party’s favor (Thom) plus lodging. Dax’s Dwarvish introduction earned goodwill. The site is a ruined temple of Abbathor (god of greed): displeased with his priests, the god buried the settlement in an avalanche and transformed the survivors into the ochre jellies now blocking the dig. In the morning fight the party learned that slashing splits jellies (Dax’s longsword follow-up backfired after his thrown handaxe already split one). Notable beats: Thom’s Magic Missile triggered a Wild Magic Surge that aged him years; Bean’s natural-20 sneak attack; kills spread across the group. Loot: a hidden coffer of gemstones (Dax found it, went to Thom, dwarves unaware), and an acid-etched gold necklace overwritten in ancient Dwarvish — “This is what happens to those who displease me” — that Rut pocketed. Two secret doors opened: one to a glinting rubble hallway, one to a closed door. The session ended with Hamish investigating the glint — another ochre jelly lurking in the rubble.

Session 6 — Doors, a Broken Deal, and Seven Orcs (7/24/26)

Picking up mid-fight, the party killed the last ochre jelly — Barnaby’s breath weapon split it in two on the way down, proving lightning works like a blade on them. Rut, still a rat, found a third secret door past the jelly and spent the whole fight failing to open it. Behind it: a straight passage ending in a cave-in floor to ceiling, with a door on either side. Hamish found a skeleton wearing Abbathor’s holy symbol — a jeweled dagger reading “Greed is good” — and Barnaby found two dwarves in red vestments, a dry stone font, a secret door behind it, and a longsword under a bed frame that hadn’t rotted with everything else. Dax opened a seamless wall that led straight back to the main chamber: the temple loops. Thom, Sage, and Bean found a dead dwarf and a tattered ledger in another rubble-choked branch.

Norbus and Dazlyn came for their share. The party lied badly — only Thom was believed — and the dwarves put their hands out and asked for the sixty-forty split anyway. Bean paid them five gold pieces of her own money. They took it, looked at the temple full of doors, and walked. By the time Sage went out to talk them around, the camp was stripped and cold; nobody knows where they went. Sage read the ledger in the meantime: generations of offerings to Abbathor thinning year over year, the entries turning defensive (“Abbathor will be pleased with our investments”), a sacrifice chamber flanked by two statues the party has never seen — and no accounting anywhere of where the wealth went.

Then Sage heard footsteps in the rock. Seven orcs came up the canyon scouting the ruin as a fort. Dax set the defence — the entrance hall as a funnel, archers behind the pillars — and the orc war-leader stopped when it saw him: “Were you near Gnomengarde? So you killed our men.” The fight nearly ended the party. Sage put an arrow through the leader’s skull early; Barnaby’s thousand ball bearings across the entryway did most of the rest. Hamish went down to a javelin and was revived by a healing potion Thom delivered by mage hand; Dax dropped and bled out until Barnaby crossed the room to pour his last six points of healing into him; Barnaby himself went down twice, healed off the floor by Rut, who fought the front line as a wolf. Bean spent the whole fight behind a pillar untouched and killed an orc from it. Dax finished the last one — “I killed your brothers before, and I’ll continue to kill everyone I come across” — and took its head off. Seven orcs and three jellies dead; the party holds the temple, and levelled to 3.

Session 7 — The Hidden Chamber, a Debt Paid, and a Dragon (8/25/26)

The party stripped the orc dead. Hamish recovered rations, ten gold, and a child’s doll with its head torn off; Barnaby collected orc blood in his waterskin; Thom pulled an eye for Rut’s trophy collection. Dax stripped the leader’s chain mail and identified it as human-made Neverwinter garrison work, concluding the band had been raiding settlements nearby — a read supported by the leader’s sheepskin map of the Sword Coast (read by Hamish), marked with scouting notes for raid targets along the Triboar Trail and High Road, around Leilon, and near Phandalin, with a stated preference for mountainous ground.

Rut wild-shaped into a giant badger and burrowed through the blocked rubble, opening a sealed round chamber — two pedestals, one holding a statue of a horned dwarf cradling an enormous emerald, the other blown to fragments scattered in a wide radius. Two pedestals and two statues match the ledger’s description of a sacrifice chamber, but nothing in the room named itself, and the party never confirmed it. Thom, Bean, and Barnaby went in; Dax, Hamish, and Sage held outside. Thom found a draft and a hairline seam in the far wall with no visible mechanism; Barnaby’s shoulder charge failed; Bean cleared the room for traps. Thom lifted the emerald with Mage Hand and the statue detonated — 20 piercing to Rut (breaking his badger form), 10 to Barnaby. The emerald was undamaged. Sage healed Rut with Cure Wounds outside; Dax and Hamish then entered.

Hamish found gearing beneath both pedestals and worked the mechanism until the seam opened onto a hidden alcove: a small locked chest flanked by miniature idols of the temple’s door-statues, praying toward it. Bean picked the lock. Inside were 150 gp, 70 tarnished silver, and a note written in Common — an instruction that all offerings to Abbathor cease forever, and that whoever found the room and survived should take what remained and let Abbathor be forgotten. The party treated the note as license.

Sage voiced guilt over the broken dwarf deal; Rut answered with a parable about eating squirrels’ nuts because he was bigger. Leaving at dawn, Hamish and Sage scouted ahead and confirmed the main orc encampment had moved west, away from the road. A panther then came out of the underbrush directly for Sage — her animal companion, who had been asking after her among the local wildlife. Via Speak with Animals he confirmed the road north was clear. He remains unnamed.

Running alongside all of this: Dax convinced Rut that dragons eat people, privately, on the road down from the temple. Rut gestured at Barnaby; Dax supplied the reason the party keeps him well fed. Rut then explained the whole doctrine to Sage as his own, and it was extended to the panther the same day. He has raised the feeding question with Barnaby directly and with Adabra Gwynn. Barnaby does not know why, and nobody knows Dax is the source.

North on the trail they found Dazlyn Grayshard dead, an orc javelin in his back, a sending stone clutched in his hand. Hamish pried it loose; Thom identified it and used it, reaching Norbus, who replied: bring my brother back to Phandalin, I will bury him, and pay me what you owe. Barnaby carried the body.

At Umbrage Hill, Adabra Gwynn agreed to return to Phandalin — the orc threat moved her where the dragon had not, and she recounted an orc raid that burned Phandalin to the ground roughly a century ago. She supplied a burlap sack for the corpse; Sage gathered flowers and Rut bloomed them with Druidcraft.

In Phandalin, the party left Dazlyn’s body in a bush outside Harbin Wester’s house and told him only that the dwarves “left.” Harbin declared it a job well done and paid 35 gp (Adabra) and 70 gp (dwarves), refusing to pay more for bringing Adabra home. He flagged concerning reports and “unfortunate work” coming, to be discussed the next day.

At the inn — unusually crowded and visibly agitated — the party delivered the body to Norbus at the bar. He broke down, said they could have settled it together, and revealed the sending stones were a gift from his and Dazlyn’s parents for the brothers’ mining venture. He surrendered the second stone. Thom and Dax paid him 25 gp out of their own purses — ten from Thom, fifteen from Dax — plus the 70 tarnished silver; afterward, Dax privately left an additional 15 gp and offered his sword for future work, and Norbus took his name. The party does not know about the second payment.

As they turned to leave, a man burst in with a report: Umbrage Hill had been attacked and completely destroyed by the dragon.

Final split: 36 gp each (255 gp across seven — the chest’s 150 plus both quest payouts). No long or short rest was taken in town — the party remains injured and un-rested. All characters remain Level 3.

Session 8 — The Town Finds Out, a Deal in the Dark, and a Trap Door (9/4/26)

Picking up in the inn the instant the messenger finished shouting. Only Hamish could pick speech out of the crowd, and what he heard was the town working out that it had been kept in the dark — “I only heard about the dragon yesterday”, and “Did Harbin know?” The party got outside and decided to reach Harbin before the town did.

On the way, Dax, Hamish and Barnaby spotted a dark-clad figure moving toward the Miner’s Exchange; Sage, Thom, Bean and Rut never saw him. The party split.

At Harbin’s door, the news of Umbrage Hill was genuinely new to him — and he gave up more than he ever has. He wanted to avoid a panic and an emptying town; Phandalin cannot defend itself and he knows it; and every job he has given the party has been a search for a weapon that would kill the dragon, which has found nothing. Told that Holia Thornton knew about the dragon too, he said he believes she is angling for the townmaster’s position — he is banker as well as townmaster, so both the money and the influence would move with it — and wondered whether the rumor had been hers to spread. He asked the party to guard his house; Bean declined, and suggested a fee. He then offered 90 gold for information on what Thornton is planning and was talked up to 100. Unpaid so far.

Behind the Miner’s Exchange, Barnaby twice hoisted Hamish to a high window: one candle, Thornton at her desk with the man they had followed, and a grin on her face. A second guard came around the building; Dax’s chain mail gave the three of them away, and he stood his ground while the other two got clear. His bluff failed, but the guard recognised him — “You’re that sellsword” — and walked him inside rather than running him off.

Thom picked up the message cantrip and ran the two halves of the party as a switchboard for the rest of the night: 120 feet, through walls, no word limit, and the target can answer under their breath. Dax answered mid-arrest — “Miner’s Guild. Stand by. Negotiations happening.”

Inside, Dax negotiated with Thornton, and struck each deal before handing anything over. The Umbrage Hill attack was worthless to her — she already had it — so rather than sell it he offered it as a freebie on condition they agreed terms on orcs first, and only then spent it, framed as proximity: the party walked Adabra out that morning and the hill was destroyed by evening, so the dragon is within an evening’s flight of Phandalin. Then he asked what she was paying with — gold, or information — and got her to agree to a trade before answering a single question of hers. His first purchase under that arrangement was Harbin. Only then did he pay his half: the band at the excavation came from the east, all seven died, and the tracks showed a much larger force moving west. She took the heading, put a map on the desk, and paid 50 gold — which Dax has not mentioned to the party. Collecting the rest of what he was owed, he asked about Harbin again; she said he has been afraid of the dragon a long while, that the party had handed her “a great opportunity”, and then caught herself: “Things may be looking up in Phandalin. And Harbin may no longer be a part of it.” Dax closed by answering Holia and Thom in the same spoken sentence — “things are fine right now, but we’re afraid of movement later” — which she took as intelligence and Thom took as a status report. Her parting words: if anyone is caught sniffing around at night again she knows where to find them, she knows where Harbin sends them, and she would start with “that gangly wizard.”

Outside: Rut wild-shaped into a weasel and wedged himself under the front door, head and shoulders inside — where he heard the entire negotiation. Sage named the panther Phantom — out loud for the first time as she called him off Hamish, whom he had just knocked flat — and set him to circle the building; then, rather than let a weasel get crushed by an opening door, she instructed Phantom to pull him clear, gently and without eating him. She had watched Rut transform and knew exactly whose weasel it was, and later told Dax — which is why the animal rode out of there on Dax’s shoulder.

Thom stashed his backpack — and the emerald — in a bush, then spent two sorcery points to twin Invisibility on himself and Bean. One hour on concentration; they held onto each other because they could not see one another. When the guard held the door open for Dax on his way out, the two of them walked in.

The guard then found Sage in the lane and she talked her way out truthfully (she had been looking for her friend, and the weasel at her feet was the friend in question), before throwing a knife at the weasel and missing. The five regrouped, left visibly, and circled back to watch the Exchange: Dax, Barnaby and the weasel near the shrine on the square, Sage in between, Hamish holed up in one of the burned-out houses. Nobody knew where Thom and Bean had gone. The sending stone was spent and will not work until tomorrow, and message can only be answered, not initiated.

What Thom and Bean heard, standing invisible in the middle of the room: “Well done on your scouting… Soon Harbin will be out and I will be town master… Those foolish adventurers have brought me everything I needed.” And to a guard: if any of them are caught sniffing around again, they all die — the entire troop set on them. Thornton and two guards then went down a trap door in the floor behind her desk; the last guard locked up, closed the shutters, followed, and the trap door sealed flush — no seam, no handle, nothing to show it had ever been there.

The desk search turned up ordinary business — gold dust, small diamonds, payouts, town names, nothing illegal — including a record of the gold paid to Dax for the job he did for Holia. No false bottoms, no pressure plates, no lever in the wall. Thom found a bar-like catch under the trap door’s edge with a dagger and could not shift it; Bean opened it with thieves’ tools.

With about fifty minutes of invisibility left, they climbed down the ladder — Thom seeing fine in the dark, Bean seeing nothing at all — and their feet hit stone at the bottom. The session ended there.

No rest has been taken since the temple. All characters remain Level 3.

Open threads

Thom and Bean are under the Miner’s Exchange. Alone, invisible for roughly fifty more minutes, at the bottom of a ladder in the dark, with Guildmaster Thornton, three guards and “our entire troop” somewhere ahead of them. Nobody else in the party knows where they are, and neither the sending stone nor the message cantrip can reach them from the outside.
The trap door seals flush. It took thieves’ tools and a lucky angle to open it from above once. If it shuts behind them, nothing on that floor says a door was ever there.
Thornton means to be townmaster. “Soon Harbin will be out and I will be town master.” Only Thom and Bean heard her say it — Rut, wedged under the door, heard the negotiation but not the speech that followed, and nobody has told the rest of the party anything.
Harbin’s hundred gold, offered for anything on what Thornton is planning. Thom and Bean are currently standing in the answer. It has not been paid, and it has not occurred to anyone that Harbin would be paying for his own survival.
Standing orders on the party. If anyone is caught around the Exchange at night again, Thornton’s instruction to her guards is that they all die, and her stated preference is to start with Thom. She knows where Harbin sends them.
Dax’s fifty gold, paid by Thornton for the orc band’s position and heading, and not mentioned to anyone. The party also does not know she keeps a written record of what she has paid him — Bean read the line and Dax was not there.
The recon point. “Let’s head on back to our recon point. We have a lot of work to do this evening.” Whatever is down that ladder is somewhere the Zhentarim work out of, and it is not empty at night.
Every job has been a weapon hunt. Harbin admitted the gnomes, the midwife, and the dwarves were all him looking for something that would kill the dragon. It has found nothing, he has field reports still to hand over, and he says Phandalin cannot defend itself.
The town knows, and it is angry at Harbin — not at the dragon. He has gone from hiding the rumor to needing the townspeople ready, in one evening, and he asked the party to guard his house from his own neighbours.
The emerald is in a bush outside the Miner’s Exchange, in Thom’s backpack, where he left it before going invisible. Its properties are still unexamined, and neither it nor the coffer of gemstones has been appraised.
The white dragon. It destroyed Umbrage Hill within hours of the party walking Adabra Gwynn out of it — close enough, by Thornton’s reckoning and Dax’s, to be a short flight from Phandalin. Phandalin’s only source of healing potions went with the windmill.
Where the temple’s wealth actually went. The ledger says invested, not stored, and the alcove chest was a final offering, not a treasury.
The rest of what the party owes Norbus. He was paid 25 gp and 70 silver against a 60/40 split of a haul that includes the gemstone coffer and the emerald. He accepted it and believes it was fair. He was never told about the gems.
Dax’s private arrangement with Norbus — 15 gp of his own and a standing offer of his sword, unknown to the rest of the party.
The offering note is in Common. Nobody has asked why a dwarven temple’s final message was left in a language its priests would not have used among themselves.
The party has not rested since the temple. A rest was raised in town and again while posting up outside the Exchange, and has still not been taken; whatever the statue left on them, they are carrying it.
The cursed-seeming necklace Rut carries blind, now joined by the holy symbol Hamish took off Abbathor’s dead priest.
The orc bands. Seven dead at the temple; the main body has moved west, away from the road north — and Thornton has now bought its heading and written it on a map. What she wants it for is not clear.
The Zhentarim intel pact with Thornton, plus Harbin’s stolen notes on her, which nobody has read.
Rut’s true name — the party still only knows him as “Friend.”