Hi all.

I have played DND since the 80's...but until I picked up LMOP, I hadnt played for around 25 years.

My group of players(friend/family) had never played before, they loved DND and also LMOP.

There are 4-5 of them and they all want to carry on playing D&D and all want to keep the same characters...which just made level 5 during the late stages of Wave Echo Cave.

I have a few questions-

1-  I need suggestions for the next adventures. I think they like a campaign for next choice...so what could they move on to...or even any decent smaller/one shot adventures(I have a few downloaded free from DND Beyond).  Any really nice campaigns out there for level 5(3-4 players)?  Or any good ideas for what turn to take next?

2-  What can I say the players have been up to?  How much gold should they have 'used' between the time etc

3-  I see there are new 2024 Rules.  Should we stick we what we know(5e) or would it be wise to transition to be playing the latest rules....which I guess will become the norm over time?

Consider:

• Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk (If you want to continue that storyline.)
• Waterdeep: Dragon Heist // Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage (If you want a fun city romp followed by a massive dungeon crawl.)
• Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frost Maiden (If you want a fun travel adventure around the cold north.)

As for starting gold, it's up to you. You can either let them have whatever they still have, or start the next campaign with them having nearly spent their gold supply and looking for a new payday adventure. Maye they spent it all doing downtime activities in town for a few weeks/months?

As for the rules update, I don't think it really maters either way, but getting used to the newer changes, that were mostly accumulated stuff people were asking for anyway, will only make the game easier on you overall. Especially if your players want to use some of the newer spells and feats and such. 

Good campaigns to do are the Tyranny of Dragons or a homebrewed campaign. The gold is up to you and the players. And the 2024 rule transition... I say stick with 5e until the full core rule set is released, but that is pure personal opinion. (Also I like 5e more than the new stuff I've seen in the 2024 Player's Handbook.)

I'm seconding Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk

This will keep everything familiar for the players at the start and pull them into a great new adventure.

Thanks all, very helpful.

A couple of follow up questions, I may carry on with Phandelver after Wave Echo Cave if the players want to as I have the book(they may want to see more of the world though, so in case...)

1-  IcewindDale Rime of the FRostmaiden.  Its level 1-12 that I can see.  Is there an easy way of starting at level 5(where they are now)?

2-  Waterdeep Dragonheist is noted above...I looked but I think its for level 1-5?  (my group is level 5).  Would I just miss that out and go on to Dungeon of the Mad Mage?

Any others before I sit down for a think on the next adventures?

So, in order:

1. The 1-5ish content in Rime of the Frost Maiden is mostly the beginning part of the adventure where the party travels around and visits various small towns and such before the chapter finale where they get to open up more into the region. If you want to, you can either skip the chapter one town adventures, or not, and just fold them in as your players come and go from each of the towns. The party can just be over-leveled for a given issue, or you can adjust the encounter to match them as you see fit. It's mostly just a way to get the party familiar with the region before the mid-adventure fight with a robo-dragon set on torching all the towns.
2. Like above, Dragon Heist's main goal is to familiarize the party with Waterdeep and also give them something of a "home base" in the form of Trollskull Manor to return to when they are tired of dungeon delving in Dungeon of the Mad Mage. You could just as easily skip all of Dragon Heist and just give the party some reward of the deed to Trollskull Manor or say one of them was willed it by a dead relative or something. That way, they could come to town to see their new property and learn about the dungeon at the same time. Maybe delving into the dungeon is their best option to get funding to fix up the property? 

Quote from ansp73139 >>

2-  Waterdeep Dragonheist is noted above...I looked but I think its for level 1-5?  (my group is level 5).  Would I just miss that out and go on to Dungeon of the Mad Mage?

I'd like to point out that the much more important consideration is what kind of campaign your players want to play to begin with? Dragon Heist and Dungeon of the Mad Mage are two campaigns that couldn't be more dissimilar. Would your players enjoy a combat heavy dungeon crawl? Then forget about Dragon Heist and move on to Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Would your players enjoy a city intrigue with lots of roleplay, factions, politics, and a treasure hunt? Then play Dragon Heist and adapt the encounters to be better suited for their levels. You can probably adapt it from a level 1-5 campaign to a level 5-7 campaign by swapping out some statblocks.

I'm going to address the OPs comments on the 2024 (5.5e) rules with my answer here.

The 2024 PHB is a new ruleset. Be under no illusions here. Several of the spell changes and the addition of weapon masteries alone change up the core tactical elements of 5e so much that it should be considered a seperate edition. Calling it anything other than a new edition is to fall for WotC's marketing that is desperately trying to sell more, more, and even more to players of D&D.

With that said, I would suggest that the 2024 ruleset should be avoided by all DMs until the DMG has been released.

When running 5e, and building encounters and adventures we should have read and understood the DMG to understand just how and why 5e is designed the way it has been. It is here that we learn that in a single adventuring day we should be seeing a party of between 3 and 5 players coming up against 6-8 medium to hard encounters. We learn that it is assumed that a party short rest on average twice per day. 

With the changes, as subtle as some might claim they are, to 2024/5.5e we currently do not know what assumptions that the rules designers have made in making these changes. Did the team still assume 6-8 medium to hard encounters per adventuring day? We don't know. Did they assume only two short rests per day? We don't know. Did they assume that the average party size was four player characters? We don't know. These are answers that we might hope will be found in the 2024 DMG. Likewise we still don't have a 2024/5.5e adventure yet. We have no model for what the designers think an adventure should look like with this new set of rules. We won't have that until at least autumn of 2025! 

So, for all these reasons I would suggest that running the 2024 rules at this point is like driving to a destination without a map or sat-nav. You're going to need a lot of help and support along the way, or you're going to get lost here and there. 

Don't misunderstand. I can quite see how players are desperate to use all the shiny new tools that 5.5e offers. That is the entire marketing program of D&D - appeal to and give the player characters all the things. However, we don't have the complete rules yet. We have one chapter of a four part book. I just don't think its a good idea to use the new ruleset until the book is complete. Irrespective of what the marketing people at WotC are hoping for. 

My gaming group also played back in the 1980s and were in a similar position to you iro what to play after Lost Mines.  Whilst often viewed as being difficult to DM we opted for Princes of the Apocalypse.  As the adventures are set just south of Phandalin it all tied in seamlessly.  It had a bit of an ‘old school’ D&D vibe and everyone had a blast playing the campaign.  It was fantastic.  There is also some helpful info about how to use it as a follow on adventure.  A lot of adventuring for the money as it took a long time to play out.  Worth a thought.

There are quite a few options available ...

1) Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk ... this is NOT a new campaign ... it LMoP+extended adventure. The first 4 chapters are a repeat of LMoP with some balance tweaks and perhaps some edited text. The extra content adds challenges behind the scenes in Phandalin with other stuff going on but the direct tie ins to the LMoP material appear to be minimal. It is supposed to take the characters to level 12. Since this is a direct continuation of what you have already run it would be pretty seamless to integrate. I haven't played it.

2) There are several hard covers of varying scale and difficulty (in terms of running) that could be started at level 5 -

-Dungeon of the Mad Mage - this is a level 5-20 book of dungeon crawling and only dungeon crawling. Each chapter is a level of the Undermountain dungeon beneath the Yawning Portal Inn in Waterdeep. Since Waterdeep is just some distance south of Phandalin, this is pretty easy to integrate but it is only dungeon crawling so probably won't work for most groups.

-Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is fun but it is only level 1-5 and so wouldn't be suitable for continuing level 5 characters.

-Ice Wind Dale : Decent adventure in the 10 towns at the north end of the sword coast in the icy tundra of ice wind dale. You could just skip the content designed to get the characters to level 5 - however, in my opinion, that represents a significant portion of the content since IWD expects characters to start at level 1.

-Curse of Strahd : if you like horror themed adventures and are ok with the product warnings (some objectionable content due to the age of the material it is based on but also typical fairy tale tropes) it is a good sandboxy adventure dealing with a vampire. The module is designed with level 3 characters in mind (it includes a mini adventure to get characters from 1-3) but should be easily adaptable for level 5 .. runs to level 10-12 but if you go for level 12, you will probably want to make the final encounter with Strahd a bit harder.

- Storm King's Thunder : If starting at level 5, one of the starter locations is in Triboar - just up the road from Phandalin. This is a sprawling adventure with a lot of travel covering most of the sword coast. Runs to at least level 10. I played it and I think the character's reached 13 by the end. Mostly up to the DM when they award milestones for leveling.

- Prince's of the Apocalypse : No direct experience with this one but a comment above suggested it worked well as a follow on to Phandelver since it is set nearby. I've heard it can require some extra work when running it since some parts might not be as clearly written as might be ideal.

- Dragon of Ice Spire Peak : Extra adventures - DoIP is also set in Phandalin. However, DoIP runs 1-7 but includes a set of three extra adventures that go 7-9, 9-11 and 11-13 (if bought in digital on D&D Beyond ... I don't know if they come in the box). These adventures are structured quite similarly to LMoP with a job board and are set in the same area. They continue some of the plot elements in DoIP - but you would need to bridge from 5-7 before the first of the extra adventures.

- Candlekeep Mysteries, Radiant Citadel, Tales from the Yawning Portal, Keys from the Golden Vault, Quests from the Infinite Staircase - these are collections of short adventures, typically one level gain/adventure though some like Against the Giants from TftYP have multiple sections and multiple level ups possible. These adventures cover a range of themes and most of the books have an adventure going up to level 12-14 or so. It is quite possible to build a campaign by combining adventures from several of these sources and build an overall narrative from the pieces. Adventures from these sources can also be good for bridging between other adventures which are at higher levels.

For a further continuation, Vecna: Eve of Ruin, is an adventure for level 10-20 characters and would be a suitable extension for many of the options above if you are eventually looking for something to level 20.

You can continue with "Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk" which is a campaign that started in LMOP.  The 1st four chapters are what your party has already gone through although the writers made a few changes for the reimagined and expanded version of the adventure to tie it with the 2nd half of the adventure.  I don't think it would be hard to change some things to give your players an in to continue on with the 2nd half of the campaign.  The whole campaign takes your players from lvl 1-10.  If you want to continue the story, the book gives you a few options and even suggests other published adventures that you can easily tie into your campaign.

Having run shattered obelisk, I would just advise that the DM kind of needs to do a good deal of work to stitch the two halves of the adventure together. Nothing from the original Lost Mine of Phandelver really carries over or pays off in the new content. It really is two seperate adventures, and it shows. When I ran it, the players I ran it for all pretty much agreed that it seemed like the new content was tonally and in design radically different to the old content.

The second time I ran it, I started seeding in the psionic goblins here and there, started to have some foreshadowing through weather and the like, even dropped in a rogue intellect devourer in order to try and make the two halves stitch together better. I even altered the motivations of Glastaff and the Black Spider. I had them aware of a looming threat that was targeting Phandalin. That group received it better, but their feedback was how poorly designed the second half was because it all felt too linear.

Shattered Obelisk I'm sure has the potential to be a good adventure, but the second half is a distinctly different adventure without work from the GM. Work that frankly WotC's 'writers' ought to have done. That's not to say you can't have fun with it, but I think it worth highlighting that there is a massive tonal shift from one half to the other.