SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this post and join me in a future one.

While the players negotiate the date for the next session I still need to start planning. The time between now and the next session will just fly by. Before I know it I’ll be staring down the barrel of the next session with very little done.

That’s the benefit of the way of the Lazy DM. You focus on the important things that you need to run a session, whilst keeping the workload to a minimum.

It’s also why I write these planning posts. They are my notes for the next session, and sometimes ideas for future ones. Which I do refer back to while preparing my notes for the next session.

These days often my first task after a session is the post mortem (which I share with the world) followed by an update of my mind map.

Which is then followed by one of these posts capturing early thoughts about the next session.

Having justified these posts (probably for the umpteenth time) I think I should get on with my thought process.

During the players time in Mintarn and their quest for information about the Ironstar mine I kept mentioning that they were getting looks, glances from those around them. I think that was me not ready for them to take on Angrath but to have them fearful that at any moment they could be surprised by him and his pirate crew. (That bit probably could have been in the post mortem.)

The party think they managed to dodge a bullet. They went back to Mintarn and avoided Angrath. Or did they?

The party are basically camping on a beach at the moment.

So my thinking is, and I think this fits in with the ‘create a strong start’ of having a handful of pirates crash out of the undergrowth and attack the breakfasting party.

After the encounter from the beach they will notice a much larger boat near theirs. They won’t be able to get to their boat in time and make an escape. They will have to go in land.

For this over land travel and the search for the lost Ironstar mine I plan to run it based on the group challenge that was used in the D&D Beyond encounter of the Week: Detour Past Dragonspear. I will make it clear to the party that they will find the mine whether they fail or succeed. However how well they do on the challenge will determine what shape the party get there in and what happens when they find the mine.

The map I am going to use for the lost mine is from the Essentials Dragon of Icespire Peak adventure. I like the Dwarven Excavation scenario a lot for this. It looks the perfect length for our sessions. It’s designed for level 2 characters. So the threat level will have to be upped a little.

I also like the idea of using the Circle of Thunder or Dragon Barrow scenarios as potentially something the party could stumble upon to and from the lost mine. Although these would make great mini islands for the party to discover also.

So that’s my thinking at the moment. Obviously more to follow.