Dungeons & Dragons - The Lost Mine of Phandelver, Part 2

These are notes from playing the Dungeons & Dragons scenario in the Starter Set, "The Lost Mine of Phandelver". Spoilers are contained herein, you have been warned! 

And so, onto game session #2 with my junior players. It went well and an interesting turn of events. The session started with the heroes having just entered Cragmaw Hideout and killed the wolves in the kennels, which was a difficult battle. Then they crept up into the entrance to Klarg's chamber and had a bit of fun spying on him, making some good Stealth rolls to avoid alerting him. Eventually Klarg's wolf sniffed them out, they entered combat and ended up killing Klarg rather sooner than expected. The goblins with Klarg ran back into the pool room (as it were) and ganged up with the goblins there, and this combat caused the adventurers some serious difficulty, incapacitating two of them.

One of the player characters ran off (playing a bit of a coward in character), was knocked out and captured by the goblins and taken to Yeemik. The other adventurers withdrew for the night and once rested, returned to rescue the character that had been captured. They did so by storming into Yeemik's chamber, shouting and hollering at the goblins to back off, doing a lot of cool roleplaying and successful intimidation rolls. Yeemik, realising by this point that Klarg was dead, saw no reason not to allow the characters to safely leave with their comrade (and Sildar), especially as the characters agreed to pay a ransom to him in the process. Yeemik was happy to become the leader of Cragmaw Hideout and did not want any more goblins slain pointlessly.

Fun session! Looking forward to the next session and the return to Phandalin and seeing how the players choose which adventure threads to pick up on. I'm thinking of focussing on their foray into Cragmaw Hideout as both being a relief to the townspeople, but also a cause for concern when they fear possible retribution from Cragmaw Castle. Either way, this point of controversy will lead the townspeople to interact with the player characters more - I don't want to just leave it to them to think of visiting different parts of town to move the adventure forward. Phandalin is a living village and its inhabitants clearly have their own agendas.