Is Waterdeep Dragon Heist Worth Getting?

[JNAProductions]

See title.

[Millstone85]

Personally, I am waiting for Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage.

I am more interested in a 5th-to-20th-level megadungeon, with several cities in it, than a 1st-to-5th-level urban adventure.

[Unoriginal]

See title.

Depends what you want. If you like an urban adventure full of NPCs and inter-connected intrigues, it can be worth it.


The real question is: what would it make it worth it, for you?

[Foxhound438]

It seems pretty good from my first look through, but it leaves a lot of the leg work to the DM at certain points.



Chapter 1 is pretty braindead simple, you contrive the party into the yawning portal, garunteed bar brawl happens (how surprising), then the first quest is just tracking down a guy with a pretty hot trail. A couple of psuedo-dungeons later and you're off.

Chapter 2 is pretty open as to what to do, it's pretty much "wait until more story happens", and it gives you a few side quests to run to grind the party to level 3. The part that sucks about it is that it really pushes players to play run a business simulator, which is pretty boring if you ask me. If I were running it, I'd just skip the rolling for all of that. Probably the best thing about this chapter is that you can kind of insert your own material here without changing anything.

Chapter 3 is where the story actually continues, this time the party is expected to do a big investigation where they figure out a bit about the dragon hoard and the politics around it. It looks to me to have a lot of potential for good role play, and is very combat-light.

Chapter 4 is where the story kind of falls apart for me. It basically gives you a big ass list of crap encounters where the party is supposed to be chasing down this magic item, but in the end it just looks like a series of contrivances designed to shift the goal posts over and over, and if I were playing in the game I'd be pretty unimpressed. It ends with the party knowing where the dragon vault is, but they need to get 3 "keys" which actually turn out to be a bunch of random junk that you can just happen to have on you, since none of it is specific. The biggest downfall of this chapter, however, isn't that it's random encounter simulator. It's that because it just makes the players jump through a bunch of contrived hoops rather than actually making any sense, it totally loses all of the intrigue and politics that have been building up to this point. The encounters are pretty much just re-flavored for each season to kind of fit with the villain of that season, but it looks like at the end all of that just stops mattering.

Luckily there is a saving grace: as a DM, you can just re-write all of that to your liking. Unfortunately that takes away the only advantage of having a book, being saving prep time, but you could pretty easily at least still use the basic structure from those encounters, cutting or replacing things that are too contrived. In addition to re-writing the path that the stone you're supposed to be chasing, I'd probably make it so that the vault actually needs three specific keys, rather than random junk from a table. This way you can re-insert the characters and groups that are practically forgotten in chapter 4, by making it something to the effect of having the open lord (or maybe the masked lords as a group) possess one key, the main villain of the season having the second, and maybe some faction that the party's been working with/against/around having the third. This also gives you a good reason to run the later chapters, since there's no direct link written in for getting the party there. Everything after chapter 4 is just showing the structure of the lairs, basically to be a "what if" clause for if the party for some reason wants to go there.


To conclude on all of that, it's got a lot to it for sure. Running the adventure would probably take more work than something straight forward like a dungeon crawl, but you do get a lot more leeway to make the adventure your own. I'd definitely recommend reading through the entire adventure, the chapter on the season's villain, and the chapter 9 "Volo's Waterdeep Enchiridion" before running it, the last of which can give a lot of inspiration for throwing in things that would be mostly RP events like holidays or run-ins with certain locations or nobles. I think it's probably an adventure that would be made best by iteration, since there are so many potential moving pieces that could be included but aren't outright told to be included.

And to give an answer to the overall question: if you're a fan of games from books, it's pretty good for the most part. It certainly looks like it would be fun to play in. If you just want a book that gives a ton of information on Waterdeep, it's got a lot for you there too- a big map, a good amount of lore, and a good spread of villains that can probably be fit into any game that wanders there. Overall score from me would be like a 8ish out of 10, but I've only read through it once.

[Unoriginal]

Chapter 4 isn't "a series of crap encounters".

Sure, the structure of this chapter isn't good, but basically they listed the events by locations, and different things happen given the season. Each event leads to a different one, etc, but the intrigues and the like are kept.


It's true you can use that chapter to put whatever you wish instead, but it's still good if you want some already-set-up encounters or if you want to learn more about who's living/working on those locations.


But to reiterate, it's a pain to read at some points, due to them listing the events by locations rather than chronologically (with the chronological order depending on the season).

As for chapter 3 being combat-light...well, it CAN be, but there is a "dungeon", aka the base of one of the BBEG's underling, which is being ****ed up by other bad guys' goons.

Also, chapter 5 to 8 are about the different BBEGs' home bases.

[Bugga]

If you're a new DM, probably not. If you have a bit of experience and a feel for your players, it can be AMAZING. It's a superb adventure, as long as you can run it nicely for your players. You don't have to go by the book always, but its an amazing adventure, one of the best wizards have put out if not the best imo.