D&D Waterdeep Dragon Heist HC (Dungeons & Dragons)

We ran this module as a year-long weekly campaign and had a ton of fun with it in my group. The module is heavier on roleplay compared to other DnD modules due to the urban setting. Waterdeep is a fun city with lots of great characters and locations. The full-size tear-out map is wonderful and I had it framed after the campaign finished.The biggest downside of the book is the organization is weird and, if you run the book as it is intended, you won't even use half of the book (there is a chapter for each villian but you are intended to only run one of them). The chase sequence is also pretty silly and might be fun for some groups, but running it as more of a sequence of more complex and slow heists was more fun for our group. I ran a modified version of the Alexandrian remix so I could run three of the four villians (sorry Manshoon) and to extend the book from an adventure to a full campaign. If you want to run the Alexandrian remix, just be ready to spend a LOT of time reading and preping!

Great D&D story!!Fast Shipping!!

Very fun game for beginners. Book came in very good condition. Bought a used copy of the book. Which prompted me to buy more d & d books.

This review includes spoilers.The good: the basic setting is truly excellent. A former lord of Waterdeep embezzled a massive amount of gold, and the PCs are hunting for a sentient stone that holds the secret about where the gold is hidden. At the same time, several nefarious groups in Waterdeep are also hunting for the stone/gold. So there's a great ticking clock element. The authors have also done a superb job bringing Waterdeep to life, with more than a dozen truly outstanding (often funny) nonplayer characters. For example, the players are likely: to own a tavern run by a moody poltergeist, to run afoul of the law embodied in the person of spluttering Capt. Hyustus Staget (and then to be tried for crimes in court), to be targeted by the slanderous accusations of a shrewd owner of a competing tavern, to be invited to join one of several really cool factions vying for power in Waterdeep (including factions run by the drow, a beholder, and devil-worshipers), and to discover that several powerful Waterdhavian nobles are deceitful or worse. My players -- particularly the ones that like role-playing as opposed to combat -- have absolutely loved all of these parts of the adventure. Even more than in Phandalin, Waterdeep feels like a place for new adventurers to make a real name for themselves in a complex, fully realized world. In this Waterdeep reminds me of Barovia in Curse of Strahd and the Underdark in Out of the Abyss. Perhaps it's not quite as memorable as either of those places, but it's close, and that's a MAJOR achievement in my view.The bad is that this book is difficult to DM. The main problem is that, as others have pointed out, the book primarily describes not places with maps to be explored by the players, but sequences of events for the players to witness, where the players are fated to remain one step behind the stone as various people run off with it through Waterdeep. I thought this setup denied the players any real chance to change how the story ends. In the case of my own campaign, my players did something really smart and got the stone before they were "supposed" to, which obviated my using a lot of the most interesting material in the book. Another little problem for DMs: I think urban environments, because they are full of NPCs who must be given interesting things to say to move the plotline along incrementally, are just inherently more difficult to DM than most monster lairs. The book also has lots of material that is bound to be discarded -- unless the DM comes up with her own way of integrating it into what's going on her game. In a way this is good, because I feel kind of proud that I've been able to make the material my own, but it is time consuming. Final quibble: players who like combat will at times get a little antsy, as it's hard to pull out swords on the streets of an apparently "civilized" place like Waterdeep.Anyway, overall I say it's still five stars. Clearly better than a good solid adventure like Storm King's Thunder, because more original and fully fleshed out, but slightly inferior to my favorites, which are Out of the Abyss and Strahd. It's more interesting than Lost Mines of Phandelver for 1st level characters, which is high praise as Lost Mines is really good. But at the same time, unlike Lost Mines, the DM must be prepared to do a lot of work!

I love this adventure. I really do. But don't buy the book and expect to necessarily sit down and run it just the way it is. The unfortunate fact is that the motivations of the key NPC's in the story just don't make a lot of sense the way they are written. I had to do some significant work to make the whole premise of the hidden hoard feasible, and you should expect to have to do the same (keep reading for my DM spoilers). But, the potential of the story is great, and my players had a great time investigating the mystery and conspiracy rather than just killing everything that moves. If you're like me, you like to modify these modules anyway, and that's why four stars. If you want to have a pre-packaged adventure that requires no tinkering, this is more like 2 or 3 stars for you. It'll play, but get ready to suspend that disbelief. One last caution: this may get the party up to the right level for Dungeon of the Mad Mage, but it is not a lead-in story-wise, so get ready to come up with your own hook if that's important to you as a DM. If you want DM SPOILERS, keep reading:The backstory given by the book is too complicated and lacks a certain plausibility. The best single example of this is that I can think of no reason why Dalakhar the gnome thief wouldn't just attune to the Stone of Golorr himself and go get the treasure. For that matter, why didn't the (nameless) wizard who did the memory erasing do the same thing? Solution: only a Neverember can attune to the Stone, which makes the PC relationship with Renaer a much more dynamic one. The poor guy has 3 crime syndicates who need to nab him, so keeping him safe becomes a fount of side missions. My backstory: Dagult embezzles, gets his wizard to do the memory erasing, disappears. Wizard can't attune, puts the Stone up for the highest bidder. Jarlaxle (or whichever villain) hires Dalakhar (who is the wizard's apprentice) to steal the Stone for him before the auction. Dalakhar wants to get hold of Renaer, and now you can go with the events of the story as written. That's just what felt right to me, you can figure out what works for you.I also had trouble with the idea that a man smart enough to embezzle half a million gold out from under the city's nose would "hide it under a mattress". Solution: the hoard is a shill, and the actual money is in banks and brokerages. If people believe in a secret hoard in a hidden vault, then they won't be looking for that money in more reasonable places. It's D&D money laundering. I also didn't make Dagult the previous Open Lord. I thought it read better when he was a noble, but more of a bureaucrat or accountant.So why go after the treasure? The really valuable thing in the vault is the Dragonstaff, which essentially gives the owner the ability to blackmail the city with the threat of letting hostile dragons in to attack. My Jarlaxle goes toe-to-toe with Aurinax (because the PC's obviously can't) and makes off with the staff, bleeding all the way. Now we get to use the wonderful villian hideout chapter as the PC's run him to ground and reclaim the staff. I had Aurinax show up in the PC's tavern in dwarf form to explain all of this later, just to avoid breaking the action in the vault.And, for the love of game balance, don't give the party that 10% of the hoard. 50k, even split four or five ways, is enough ready cash to break your game if you are planning to continue with DMM. Because my hoard was fake, the PC's get the gems that Aurinax didn't eat yet, which let me tailor the amount to something reasonable, about 1 or 2k each. If the PC's return the Dragonstaff to the city, there are plenty of things they can get that aren't cash; I gave them a bag of holding and a wand of secrets, and sweetened it up with some of those "marks of prestige" from the DMG.Chapter 2 is pretty useless. Missions to earn renown don't advance the story, quite frankly. I decided to break down the costs for repairing Trollskull Manor into little bites instead of one lump payment (fix the roof, repair the plumbing, just look at the list of guilds in the intro and use your imagination), and then I came up with some tasks they could do to help their Trollskull Alley neighbors and their friends from Chapter 1, to earn coin or discounts on repair work. Again, use your imagination, and look at the faction missions for some inspiration and balanced encounters. My PC's got some rare wood for Tally the Woodworker, and dealt with a bigoted supplier for Fala the Gender-Neutral Elf, just to give a couple of examples. The most important thing is to let the players decide when they've had enough of this stuff, and then jump forward until the tavern is all fixed up and in business, and drop the fireball. My players were super stoked about everything to do with the repairs and running the business, but if yours aren't, don't lose momentum and let them get bored. You could even hand-wave the entire Chapter 2 without damaging the story line.My adventure hook to lead into DMM was just having Open Lord Laeral advise the characters that earning respect through valor is much better than strutting around and resting on their laurels. Not inspired, but it did the job.A last note on the maps: I absolutely love the minimalist look. Yeah, the Tomb of Annihilation maps were beautiful, but I much prefer being able to make notes directly on the maps about how things were left when the party was last there. Doors open, treasures found, even quick floorplan changes are much easier to mark than on a full color map.So, that's the best advice I can give you on how to get Dragon Heist working a little more smoothly than it's written. Use your imagination and come up with a story you want to tell, and just keep the story events from the book. It's the difference between what happens and why it happens. The book is good on the what, so take the why and make it your own. Cheers, happy gaming, and Carpe DM!