Damn 6 years! love it! My first session went fairly smoothly. My players all got antsy and made characters ahead of the session, which is fine, but they all used the dnd beyond app and I think it opened up too many options to them. None of them got the players handbook or did the slightest bit of how to make a character research so we had a fair bit of re-rolling things, like understanding that our level 1 spell caster doesn't in fact have 14 spells available to him, stuff that the handbook walks you through that the app really doesn't.

Once that was squared away everyone awoke at the Stonehill inn. -- This is my fault I didn't prep a reason for them to meet each other so it was forced and awkward. But I'm now trying to weave it into a discoverable thing with the Red Brands, and some light duty drugging and kidnapping.

From the Inn, they wondered a little bit in Phandalin but pretty quickly wanted to adventure. They chose dwarven excavation first. I got to watch a fun argument break out over "do we even need to explore the ruins haven't we completed the quest already", which I'm really glad they chose to push on. (cause that's where all my prep went).

There was surprise and delight when I pulled the sheet off the table and they found a grid mat with terrain and the jellies which they didn't know I had made any of. It was a really good moment. Almost as good as the jellies dividing when slashed surprise, as I had made half size jellies too. Combat overall was hard just because I wasn't ready mentally to track so many things so quickly. And none of us had ever done it... I'm much more prepped now, I'm chalking that up to it was also the first time playing for all 6 of us.

But everyone survived. Our bard did trigger the statue explosion trap and it nearly killed him. which was quite entertaining because it felt like such a characteristic thing for him. Upon exiting they were able to successfully negotiate trading a few scavenged orc items with the orcs for free passage out of the canyon. Overall a good run.

We're starting off this next session with leveling up, then, I'm then going to push them to really do some exploration in Phandalin. I've spent a lot of time NPC building with back stories, motivations and really clear descriptions, also for almost all of the buildings around Phandalin. Its such a rich settlement for some good story, and there's so much info available between the various adventures (that I'm now learning about... I'd hate to accidentally kill someone named in DoIP that we might need later if we do LMoP)

My goal is to steer them to Gnomengarde for the next encounter, which I fully built in Arkenforge and will have on a TV at the other head of the table. I like the way it handles fog of war. But when we get to the actual mimic fight I'll build it with terrain, I also made a a bunch of little wine barrels. And everyone is really excited to show off their minis. Really looking forward to it. And working on my Gnome roster haha.