Campaign Summary

A living reference for Owen’s campaign. Last updated: Session 9 (9/18/26).

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.

Open threads

• Don-Jon’s employers. He threatened trouble for Harbin through them but never named them. Thom’s Zhentarim accusation was not confirmed.
• The logging delivery and ranch. Return to Phandalin for the cart, take provisions to Harbin’s unnamed half-brother at Loggers’ Camp, then investigate the reported orc attack at Butterskull Ranch. 150 gp each, unpaid; neither site visited and the supplies not yet collected.
• Thornton means to be townmaster. Thom and Bean have told the party, and Harbin has been warned. Her takeover remains an intention. The hall beneath town is occupied; its maps and headings do not establish an orc alliance or confirm Thom’s theories about smuggling and a new foothold.
• Standing threats and a heard hatch. Thornton ordered the party killed if caught snooping again and singled out Thom. The infiltrators say their faces were unseen, but the escape hatch was heard. The three inn searchers’ target remains unconfirmed. Their two known routes are not a complete tunnel map.
• The white dragon. A messenger reported Umbrage Hill destroyed; the six cold-damaged orcs on the mine road look like further evidence. The party has still not seen the dragon or located its lair. No replacement for Adabra’s potion workshop has been established.
• Harbin’s defence of Phandalin. His earlier jobs found no weapon to kill the dragon, and the town has learned he kept its danger secret. No successful defence or change of government has been recorded.
• The temple’s wealth. The ledger says invested, not stored, and the alcove chest was a final offering, not a treasury.
• Norbus’s uninformed settlement. He accepted 25 gp and 70 silver without knowing about the gems and emerald. Their 500 gp sale did not settle his agreed share; no additional payment was recorded. He is no longer at the inn’s bar, but his whereabouts and Dazlyn’s burial are unconfirmed.
• Dax’s private arrangement with Norbus — another 15 gp of his own and a standing offer of his sword, still unknown to the rest of the party.
• The offering note is in Common. Nobody has explained why the dwarven temple’s final message uses that language, or who wrote it.
• The two religious necklaces. Rut still has the inscribed gold necklace; Hamish is the last confirmed holder of the jeweled holy symbol. Their properties remain unidentified. The sold emerald was never identified either.
• The orc bands. The main force moved west after the temple fight; Thornton bought its heading and had maps that appeared to track movements. What she wants with that information remains unclear.
• The Zhentarim intelligence pact and Harbin’s stolen notes. The party chose to avoid Thornton for now. Bean’s stolen notes remain unread; the payment-ledger line she saw has no identified amount or job.
• Rut’s name and feeding fears. Sage may share his name but has not. Barnaby has promised not to eat them and Sage has reassured Rut about Phantom; the others have not been told that Dax originated the feeding story.

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 broken into 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 up from the encampment west of the ruin, 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.

Barnaby boosted Hamish a third time to watch for Dax leaving. This time the ranger ended up sitting, stuck with the crown of his head showing in the window. Their noise made the people inside turn toward the glass; they climbed down and withdrew.

When the guard held the door open for Dax on his way out, Thom and Bean 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). Then he looked down at the weasel, said what people say about vermin, and threw a knife at it. He missed. 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.

Session 9 — An Alibi, a Name, and the Price of an Escort (9/18/26)

An hour later, Thom and Bean returned from another direction. Phantom found Thom’s hidden pack, and they rejoined everyone at the inn. Thom paid the innkeeper 3 gp for an alibi. Dax disclosed Thornton’s 50 gp, briefed the party on their negotiation and her threat against Thom, and shared the payment at 7 gp each.

Thom and Bean told their story: tied together while invisible, they had followed the mining passage through traps to a hall with roughly twenty to thirty people, maps, gold and untouched chests. Bean saved Thom from a tripwire; an arrow pressure plate caught them both. They slipped into Thornton’s private office and glimpsed document headings. A new foothold, Phandalin as a base, and smuggling were Thom’s interpretations, not confirmed plans. When the cook tripped over Bean, they escaped up another ladder before invisibility ended. Nobody had seen their faces, they said, though the hatch was heard closing.

Phantom warned Sage of searching figures. Three hooded people searched the inn, their target unconfirmed; the innkeeper kept the alibi. The party slept undisturbed. Over breakfast, Sage alone learned Rut’s name, with permission to share it. She has not yet done so.

Morning brought shopping: Thom’s scroll supplies and component pouch for 35 gp, Barnaby’s bow, arrows and healer’s kit, Dax’s 8 gp shield, and Hamish’s 2 gp whip. Barnaby sold his ordinary longsword and retained the temple’s +1 longsword. No scroll or shield decoration was completed.

The party warned Harbin about Thornton, the Zhentarim and the active mining tunnels. He paid 200 gp for the intelligence and 100 gp for entrance information, 300 gp total, settling the investigation job. Barthen then bought the small gems for 150 gp and the great emerald for 350 gp. The combined 800 gp was divided at 114 gp each. No further payment to Norbus was recorded; the emerald’s properties remain unidentified.

Harbin supplied three jobs at 150 gp each: escort Don-Jon Raskin to Mountain’s Toe Gold Mine, take provisions to his unnamed half-brother at Loggers’ Camp, and investigate the reported orc attack at Butterskull Ranch. They chose the mine first, planning to return for the cart afterward. Harbin called the mine job part of an arrangement with Neverwinter.

On the road, Barnaby told Rut he was a fake dragon and would not eat them. Rut told Dax; Dax suggested that real dragons fly and asked whether Rut could become a panther. He did not try. Sage reassured him about Phantom. Don-Jon boasted of his travels until they found six dead orcs. Bean, Hamish and Rut examined them after Thom’s inconclusive attempt: the cold damage looked like white-dragon work. No dragon or direction of travel was seen.

At the signed mine entrance, Don-Jon demanded safety inside before he would provide Harbin’s completion note, threatening consequences through his employers. Thom’s suspicion that he was Zhentarim remained unconfirmed. Dax negotiated an extra arrangement: Don-Jon offered loose gold found inside; Thom replied that they would take anything not bolted down. The broader claim was not explicitly accepted. Don-Jon led the way in, and the party followed.

All seven remain Level 3 and received a long rest before leaving Phandalin. No mine interior features, treasure, completion note or escort payment have been established.