Adventure Postmortem: Dragon Heist

At 2:45 am on Saturday, September 17, my Dragon Heist group finished the published adventure. It’s not the end of the campaign, just the official material. We’ll be having further conversations about their goals and what comes next, but this seems like a good time to look at what worked and what didn’t for this group in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (Winter Wizardry) and “Blue Alley.” For us, it took 41 sessions two-hour sessions; we started on May 1, 2021.

There are absolutely going to be spoilers below, but W:DH came out more than four years ago. I’m taking it chapter by chapter.

The roster:

Baris Stonebreaker, dwarf druid of the Circle of Stars
Morgane Thistlewillow, satyr Battle Master fighter
Orum Stonebreaker, dwarf paladin of the Oath of the Ancients
Unst, half-orc cleric of the Peace domain (a former member of the City Watch – this is often relevant)
Zachariah Fields, human Scribe wizard (a Waterdhavian noble – also frequently relevant)

Chapter 1: A Friend in Need

Our heroes decided that they already knew each other, as members of a chartered adventuring company called the Silver Spears of the Honorable Knight. There were a few NPC members of the company, to handle miscellaneous things that wouldn’t be interesting on-camera, and they had a few floors of a tenement building near the Walking Statue known as the Honorable Knight.

In the opening encounter with a troll and some stirges, they didn’t hang back and let Durnan handle the troll – Orum rushed in, got knocked out, and when he got back up, he critted on the troll with his maul. In the meantime, Zachariah sent the stirges plummeting back down the Yawning Portal with a sleep spell. They broke up the fight between Yagra and the Xanathar Guild guys. All in all, they were off to a good start.

This chapter had a good mix of social interaction with NPCs, weird stuff to see (such as the Old Xoblob Shop, where Morgane bought a tiny purple worm), dungeon-like areas to explore, and fights to take on. Unst’s past connections with the Watch put a different spin on a lot of interactions here, and again in Chapter 3 – the adventure often expects an antagonistic or frustrating tone to the interactions, and that would have been much harder for me to justify.

My PCs had no sense when it came to “probably we shouldn’t try to fight the mind flayer,” but instead of wiping the party with a Mind Blast, it decided to leave. That NPC might still show up later in the campaign, but not within this adventure for us because we were playing Winter.

Overall, Chapter 1 went fine – the only problems amounted to me working out some kinks in how I was using Roll20, and some ways I tried to embroider the content that were misfires for this player group. It’s a very straightforward chapter by any measure.

Chapter 2: Trollskull Alley

This chapter gives the party their big shared asset – Trollskull Manor – and introduces a small army of new NPCs and a business-running minigame all at once. For us it was the longest chapter of the whole adventure. That was in part because we added “Blue Alley” and in part because they connected deeply with their neighborhood, so there were a lot of additional social scenes and a few additional combat scenes. See, I really like the story of Jarlaxle and his three named drow gunslinger buddies, and even though we were set in Winter, I added an encounter where Soluun was hunting Tally Fellbranch, and Fel’rekt was trying to make sure neither Soluun nor Tally got killed.

For us, this was a big, expansive sandbox chapter with several one-session missions. That part – and especially the introduction of Zelidarn (yes, I changed a letter of his name; I don’t precisely remember why) the young bronze dragon the Friday after Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons came out. They took on Zelidarn as an additional patron and accepted his quest to find the dragonstaff of Ahghairon.

They also bonded strongly with Vincent Trench, so much so that he shared his deep dark secret (which is likely to pay off further in their future adventures). There were also sessions centered around the holidays of Howldown and Simril – they orchestrated a Grand Reopening for Simril, hiring Ulkoria Stonemarrow to create a planetarium-style illusion on the ceiling of the common room so that they could hold a cozy Simril, for once. It was a big hit with their neighbors.

The part of this chapter that caused us problems was the faction mechanics and how they’re presented: specifically, that each PC should only belong to one faction, and asking PCs to decide without much information whether it would be more or less fun to have PCs in differing factions. This caused some friction within the group and some stress around making a campaign-defining decision. Ultimately they settled on joining the Gray Hands and working for Vajra Safahr, so that was good.

I think I did okay with presenting the various guild NPCs. Differentiating all of them was a challenge for me. Emmek Frewn’s schemes against Trollskull Manor were blocked so decisively at the “wererat infiltration” step that I didn’t continue that story – the wererats were absolutely terrified of the moonbeam-casting druid and the wizard who kept one of them levitated for the whole fight, and they had to make promises of never doing this again just to live.

This chapter gets a lot of criticism in reviews, but it worked well for us, in the balance. It ran from June 26 to December 18.

Blue Alley

I offered the PCs a chance to explore the Blue Alley dungeon as a kind of bloodsport that nobles watched through scrying, and baited that hook (after they’d said out-of-character that they were interested in giving it a shot) with a ring of spell storing stolen from the Stonebreaker clan.

Completing the dungeon took five sessions, in part because my players were expecting the adventure to offer a deeper mystery that they needed to be looking for, instead of an assortment of mostly-unconnected puzzle rooms. Their expectation of a deeper story was such that they got frustrated and thought they were failing to find it. In most adventures this is a reasonable thought – just not here, really.

It also needed more of a sense of rising tension and climax. There are clues you can collect to solve one particular puzzle, but solving that puzzle is a lot less rewarding and satisfying than it should be considering that you have to clear just about all of the other rooms to accomplish it.

Finally… its story is some brutal character assassination on Mirt the Moneylender. He’s usually presented as being less of a dirtbag than he is here. I changed that story, and I think that was for the best.

Overall, this was a hard miss for us. The best thing the PCs got out of this adventure, other than the ring, was a boggart named Caverot (my addition; fighting boggarts wasn’t going to be fun for them), who came to work for them at Trollskull Manor. Every party needs a weird little mascot NPC, right? Because he’s a fey and Morgane is a fey knight, he went all gushing-fanboy over her, which endeared him to them instantly.

Chapter 3: Fireball

My PCs were strongly motivated by the fireball, as it killed prospective customers and people from their neighborhood. There was chaos and confusion, of course, but they pieced together the clues (including using speak with dead, cast by another Gray Hand wizard, to interrogate the dead Zhentarim) and went to the Temple of Gond to learn Nim’s secret.

As they climbed the tower toward Nim, they needed to get through a locked door, time stopped, and Caverot showed up. Morgane (the only high-Dex character on the team) had asked Caverot to teach her how to handle locks and traps many sessions earlier, and he finally got around to it the moment she needed it. He led them through a door into the Feywild, and I ran a 2-3 session side adventure that gave Morgane a lot of chances to open locks and disable traps. It also introduced a villain I hope to use in future adventures.

Anyway, back to the Material Plane. They sympathized with Nim and the other nimblewright, then went to Gralhund Manor, where violence was already in progress. They captured Urstul Floxin and gave him to Lady Gralhund; she revealed in turn that the person she owed vast sums of money to was none other than Manshoon. I am so very grateful to the one PC in the group who knew some Realmslore and helped sell how bad of a thing it was that Manshoon was involved in this plot. Everything that followed would have been much more heavy lifting on my part, otherwise.

Overall, Chapter 3 worked well for us, I felt.

Chapter 4: Dragon Season

This chapter is the 10-step chase sequence that leads you to the Vault of Dragons. My PCs got the map from Lady Gralhund pointing them toward the first stop in the Winter version of the chase. Running down the nimblewright involved another bit of help from Vincent Trench. They resolved that fairly well, while the blizzard picked up. They got the clues that led them to the second step, Cuttle’s Meat Pies and Vevette Blackwater, where the chase really picks up. There’s just one problem.

Vevette starts the chase within 60 feet of the PCs, and she isn’t guaranteed to win initiative. She’s up on a rooftop, at least. Zachariah and Unst both have easy access to a spell called hold person, and Vevette’s Wisdom save kinda sucks. So they derailed the whole chapter at Step 2. I checked in with them to see if they wanted to retcon this so they could follow the published adventure, or if they wanted me to roll with it and have something else happen; they went with the latter, which didn’t surprise me. The book’s advice for getting the adventure back on track was deeply dissatisfying to me, though.

Here’s what I did instead: they contacted Vajra with a paper bird to request pickup, now that they had acquired the Stone of Golorr. She’s the frickin’ Blackstaff, so she agrees and arrives maybe a minute later, getting the whole story from them. Then she casts teleportation circle to take them all back to Blackstaff Tower for mulled cider and a rest… and everything goes wrong. The Stone of Golorr allows her to teleport away, but redirects the effect for the PCs. They wind up in Kolat Towers, in Manshoon’s teleportation circle, because the Stone wants to find its way to someone powerful who will appreciate it.

So we move over to:

Chapter 8: Winter Wizardry

Before the teleportation, I wasn’t otherwise the least bit sure how I was going to use this chapter, and I wanted more time to build some heat for Manshoon. My PCs wound up going through this whole dungeon crawl on a single long rest, though they got a whole mess of short rests to reset Morgane’s Combat Superiority dice, and Orum’s and Unst’s Channel Divinities.

Unst attuned the Stone of Golorr during this time, on the reasoning that he had the best Wisdom save and could do the least harm of anyone in the party. He and the Stone did not get along at all, but he only managed to extract information from it when he succeeded or failed ego checks against it.

They had to get to the rune that brought down the force wall around the Towers. What they didn’t have to do was use a captured teleporter ring to activate the teleportation circle and go to the Extradimensional Sanctum. Now, once you’re in the Extradimensional Sanctum, then friends, you are in the poop. There’s no avoiding notice here unless you happen to all be invisible, so they wound up in a full throwdown with a Manshoon simulacrum, Kaevja Cynavern, and Agorn Fuoco. Everyone went down at least once in this fight, and I couldn’t believe they survived at all.

Even through everything, they would have lost if Unst hadn’t:

Been on 1 hit point from Relentless Endurance
Made literally his only melee attack in the whole campaign (he has 8 Str and 12 Dex)…
Against a greater invisible Manshoon simulacrum…
Landed a hit with a dagger, and…
Caused the Manshoon simulacrum to blow his concentration save against DC 10.

They stole bags and bags of rare books from the Extradimensional Sanctum and bailed, reporting everything to Vajra. In addition to cleaning out almost all of the loot in Kolat Towers and the Sanctum, I had also replaced a book in the Towers with a duplicitous manuscript, which oddly enough matches the description of the nonmagical tome in the published adventure. Big risk, big reward.

Which then took us back to:

Chapter 4: Dragon Season, redux

One long rest later, they spent a session gathering all of the keys they needed for the Vault of Dragons and went to the 10^th step of the chase, the Mausoleum. They finished the chapter in just two more sessions after that – one to explore the Mausoleum and most of the Vault, and another to finish the Vault, talk to Aurinax, and square off with another Manshoon simulacrum.

I loved how they played this out, too. Unst used sending to let Vajra know that they had the Hoard and needed some way to transport 10,000 lb of gold coins, then they waited. The musician they had with them – to play the duet of “Your Beardy Face,” one of their Vault keys – was back by the Vault’s main door, and he sounded an alarm on his bagpipe when the Manshoon simulacrum showed up. (Agorn was dead and Vevette was in custody at this point.)

So the party goes rushing back toward the main door. Unst spends his other 3^rd-level slot to cast another sending, telling Vajra that Manshoon was here, so could she please hurry? Her response: “Survive.” So they had to last about five rounds with the simulacrum coming after them. This one opened with greater invisibility, then started throwing fireballs all over the damn place. Just as things were about to take a very decisive turn for the worse (Morgane was down and everyone else had scattered to avoid fireball-formation), Vajra arrives with see invisibility active and hits the simulacrum with power word: stun. It’s dead before it breaks the stun, and there was much rejoicing.

Overall, the chase of Chapter 4 – Winter version, anyway – didn’t work for us. It relies very heavily on DM contrivance and luck to go off, with way too many failure points. The Mausoleum and Vault were great, though. I think the players found the conclusion satisfying, and (within the limits of running a powerful spellcaster) I found it all very manageable.

Conclusion

I ran this game over Roll20, using the Roll20 pack for Dragon Heist – all the maps, tokens, character sheets, art handouts, the whole deal. I can’t imagine running this online without those tools. At best, it would have vastly increased my session prep time for almost every session outside of Chapter 2. If you’re using Roll20 to run Dragon Heist, I recommend that pack in the very strongest possible terms.

I enjoyed the adventure and its many characters a lot. My favorite parts were the times the PCs were incredibly clever or lucky and got out of another desperate scrape when I was sure they were doomed. There wound up being very little not to like, because the one thing that went “wrong” got patched with one of my favorite sections of the whole campaign so far.

My advice to other people running Dragon Heist:

Chapter 2 is the PCs’ best chance to explore Waterdeep and fall in love with it. Let this chapter breathe a bit – speedrunning isn’t for me in the best of cases, but especially not here.
Chapter 2 is also a chance to seed a lot of future stories, with payoffs that are outside the scope of the written adventure.
Rethink factions. Let your PCs gain faction rating with as many factions as they want.
Vajra is the best, though.
I hinted at the “adventurer culture” around the Yawning Portal and Undermountain, but I do wish that had been a bigger part of play. Urban adventure is a great place for a rival adventuring party – the Doom Raiders are in the text, but I never found the right place to use them.
Blue Alley needs the DM to do a lot of work to build in a throughline story and a sense of rising tension.
This advice applies to every use of a published adventure, but: draw on their Backgrounds and character histories as much as possible. They’ll feel great when one detail about who they are turns an encounter on its ear.
Don’t try to force the chase to happen in Chapter 4. Instead, be ready with an alternative adventure, ideally one that uses your villain’s lair chapter.

I hope you found this interesting and/or helpful!

Brandes Stoddard

Harbinger of Doom