SPOILERS AHOY!

Insofar as it is possible for a movie to be objectively bad (in terms of internal logic, continuity, and so forth), this movie is objectively bad.

Insofar as it is possible for a movie to be subjectively awful, for me this movie is awful. Almost unremittingly terrible. Total garbage.

As I wrote in my reaction to The Last Jedi, the sequel trilogy — as a result of the foundation thoughtlessly laid by J.J. Abrams in The Force Awakens — is fundamentally built on a nihilistic foundation that diminishes the original films instead of building on them: “If you accept the sequel trilogy as canon while watching the original trilogy, it makes the original trilogy films weaker and less powerful. And that’s really not okay, in my opinion.”

Impressively, with The Rise of Skywalker, Abrams has done it again. Not only does the film make the original trilogy exponentially worse if you accept it as canon, it manages to ALSO make The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi retroactively worse films if you accept it as canon.

We could talk almost endlessly about the myriad ways in which this is true — the incompetent damage done to the mythic arcs of Anakin and Luke by bringing Palpatine back; the retroactively neutered character arcs; the thematic incoherence; and on and on and on — but it’s largely pointless because the film is so godawfully bad that it just doesn’t matter.

Trying to analyze all the ways in which this movie is terrible is actually a fractal exercise in madness. You can talk for hours and not exhaust all the ways in which the film is bad, because the closer you look at the film the more flaws you discover. So rather than trying to do that, I will instead look at two significant ways in which the film is terrible and hope they will serve as exemplars of all the other ways in which the film is terrible.

PALPATINE’S FLEET

One of the film’s major problems is that it’s filled with nonsense. Palpatine’s fleet is a good example of this because every time the film mentions them, it seems really committed to making them even more ridiculous.

First, the ships were apparently buried and erupt out of the earth. This makes no sense. They aren’t designed to land. It doesn’t make sense that you bury them.

Second, they show a comically large number of them on screen. It seems as if the image is meant to be threatening, but it misses the mark and ends up in the comedic absurdity of a five-year-old who has just learned how to copy and paste in Photoshop.

Third, we discover that “his followers have been building [the fleet] for years.”  But… how? Where did the supplies come from?

Fourth, we’re told that in 16 hours “attacks on all free worlds begin.” This is an almost comically short amount of time for them to even pretend to deal with the problem, but don’t worry: The film will shortly make it clear that this is impossible.

Fifth, we’re told that the fleet will increase the First Order’s resources “10,000 fold.” Assume that the First Order has as few as 100 ships currently. We’re being told that Palpatine has one million Star Destroyers. The visual was comedically inept before; the dialogue makes it even more absurd.

And where are the crews for these ships going to come from? This scene also features First Order leaders declaring, “We’ll need to increase recruitments. Harvest more of the galaxy’s young.” Okay, great. Let’s say a star destroyer only needs a crew of a hundred people. So you immediately kidnap a hundred million kids and instantaneously have the infrastructure to indoctrinate and train them. Great. Your fleet will be ready to go in, I dunno, let’s say 10 years?

This is, of course, the fleet that’s supposed to be launching attacks in less than a day.

Sixth, it’s revealed that every single star destroyer has a Death Star laser strapped to its belly.

… no comment.

Seventh, we’re told that the ships can only leave Exegol one at a time by following the signal from a navigation beacon. This is, prima facie, stupid. The film will also contradict this claim multiple times. But whatever, let’s accept the conceit that you can trap the fleet on Exegol by destroying the navigation beacon.

But if this is such essential infrastructure, why would you only build one tower? And why is it completely undefended and unshielded? And given that it’s completely undefended and unshielded, why do the good guys need to land a ground assault team?

Seventh, ha ha ha. Just kidding. The star destroyers can totally have navigation beacons built into them that will allow them to leave Exegol without a ground-based navigation beacon. They just turn that ground-based beacon off and use the ship-based one instead!

But only one ship has it! Because why would you include “able to leave drydock” technology into more than one ship?

Okay. Fine. It’s a very super-special navigational tower and it’s super-expensive and they can’t include it on every ship. Or even more than one ship. Sure. I mean, we’ll ignore the fact that the Rebels didn’t require one of these super-special navigational towers and Rey broadcast the navigation signal across hyperspace from an X-wing, but, sure, those are the “rules” and that’s just—

Eighth, GOTCHA! They blow up the super-special navigation tower, but the star destroyer can still send out the navigation signal! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Any star destroyer could do it, in fact!

Ninth, so they blow up the whole star destroyer! And that’s it! No way out now! Hee hee tee hee.

What’s that, you say? The ground-based navigation tower was never destroyed and could just be flipped back on? And then none of it matters anyway because they just blow all the star destroyers up?

Ho ho hee ha ha ha ho ha.

To be clear: The whole movie is like this.

Take virtually any element of the film and you will find nothing but nonsense. (Think about the Sith dagger for a moment if you’d like to see what I mean. Really think about it: Where did it come from? Why does it exist? What function was it supposed to serve? And how lucky was Rey when she walked up to that one specific, unmarked spot on the coast?) And many of these separate areas of fractal nonsense end up overlapping with each other, which serves to exponentially increase the stupidity.

ROSE

Beyond the nonsense, the other pervasive element in The Rise of Skywalker is the unrelenting retconning of The Last Jedi. It is not merely that the instances of this are so numerous as to be beyond easy cataloguing, it’s that they’re all so… pointless. For example, rolling back Poe’s entire character arc so that he’s once again not ready to assume the mantle of leadership doesn’t lead the character anywhere interesting, it just puts him in a stunted cul-de-sac. Kylo Ren reforging his helmet similarly doesn’t go anywhere; he wears it a couple of times, takes it off largely inconsequentially in the middle of a random scene, and then we just never see it again.

But perhaps the best example of this is how Chris Terrio & J.J. Abrams did Rose dirty.

Rose, of course, was the new major character in The Last Jedi who became an important mentor and friend to Finn before eventually falling in love with him.

And in The Rise of Skywalker, she is basically nonexistent: She pops up here and there to deliver lines as Generic Rebel Person, and is never given a single meaningful contribution or interaction with the other cast members.

Okay. That’s unfortunate. But maybe it’s just unavoidable? There’s already a lot of stuff going on in this movie and it’s possible there just literally wasn’t time to include more material for Rose.

Except, no. Because the movie goes out of its way to create a different female sidekick for Finn who can hang out with him for the final mission. It’s painfully clear that it would have taken literally zero effort for Rose Tico to fill that role. The only reason not to do this is because you’re deliberately attempting to erase The Last Jedi.

But just ignoring Rose isn’t enough. They even include a little scene where Finn says, “I’m going to sacrifice myself,” just so Rose can say, “Okay,” and contradict herself from the last film. (And then somebody else gets to rescue him anyway.)

Is it just sheer pettiness? An abject cowardice that waves the white flag to the most disgusting, misogynist, racist trolls in Star Wars fandom? It ultimately doesn’t matter. It’s a travesty.

To be clear here: It doesn’t matter whether you liked The Last Jedi or if you hated it. Expending all of this narrative energy in order to retcon the previous installments in a series for no other reason than to “fix” some abstract point of continuity that you consider to be “broken” is not how you make a good film. It’s not that continuity isn’t important; it’s that when you focus on continuity-for-the-sake-of-continuity, you are failing to do literally everything that goes into telling a great story.

There are whole scenes in this movie that exist for no other purpose than to say, “Remember this thing that happened in The Last Jedi? WELL, IT NEVER HAPPENED.” These suck the oxygen out of the room. They do not further plot or character or theme. They take up space and time that could be better focused on virtually anything else, disrupting effective pacing and structure.

CONCLUSION

There’s other stuff we could talk about here. Like how the film not once, but twice pretends to kill off a legacy character only to bring them back and then have them do literally nothing else of consequence for the rest of the movie. Or how the movie lacks any subtext, even going so far as to introduce a new droid whose entire job is to announce what emotion you’re supposed to be feeling at any given moment. Or that the movie is trying to cram about three or four times more content into it than the filmmakers are capable of integrating. Or some of the truly baffling editing choices that cut away from the action for no discernible purpose. But it’s all just variations on a theme.

And that theme is:

This movie is total garbage.

There are a handful of moments that are legitimately beautiful or clever or poignant. But I mean that literally: I can count them on one hand. And they are fleeting and largely inconsequential to the whole.

I am certain that I will not dissuade anyone who was planning to see this film from doing so. But I honestly wish that I had not seen it myself.

Imagine The Da Vinci Code except (a) the writing is exceptional and (b) it takes place 9,000 years in the future. Or National Treasure if the American Revolution was a space opera. Or Indiana Jones as a Star Wars movie.

A Talent for War by Jack McDevitt is one of the best books I’ve ever read. So good, in fact, that after I finished it, I immediately flipped back to the first page and read it cover-to-cover a second time.

PREMISE & EXECUTION

Alex Benedict is an antiques dealer. He was raised by his uncle, an archaeologist, but they have become estranged due to his uncle’s disapproval of his “tomb robbing.” Nevertheless, when the passenger ship carrying his uncle disappears into hyperspace and never returns, Alex receives an enigmatic message from his uncle, delivered in the event of his death and describing an incredibly historic find, the details of which are too sensitive to trust to the message and have instead been left as an encrypted file at his uncle’s house. By the time Alex returns home, however, the file has been stolen and he is left with nothing but a few breadcrumbs and a tantalizing mystery to pursue.

A Talent for War is, of course, Benedict’s pursuit of that mystery.

The book opens with the loss of the passenger ship Alex’s uncle was on:

On the night we heard that the Capella had slipped into oblivion, I was haggling with a wealthy client over a collection of four-thousand-year-old ceramic pots. We stopped to watch the reports. There was little to say, really, other than that the Capella had not re-entered linear space as expected, that the delay was now considerable, and an announcement declaring the ship officially lost was expected momentarily.

Over the next few pages you get a taste – just a little sampling! – of both the rich, layered complexity of the novel and its melancholic-yet-epic scope.

You can see here that McDevitt has introduced the tragedy of the Capella in a completely personal-yet-irrelevant manner: The main character receives it as a bit of trivia on a news broadcast playing in the background; the way in which we so often learn of the myriad tragedies that afflict our world. From this simple point McDevitt builds outwards, step by step:

It’s happened before. But never to anything so big. And with so many people. Almost immediately, we had a hit song. And theories.

We delve into the people onboard who were famous and then into those who become famous because they were onboard. And the narrative moves from how the news was reported to how the event becomes history and even, to a certain extent, legend and myth.

And then, abruptly:

About ten days after the loss, I received a transmission from a cousin on Rimway with whom I’d had no communication in years. In case you haven’t heard, he said. Gabe was on the Capella. I’m sorry. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.

Tragedy and news and history and epic are all abruptly collapsed back onto our protagonist; the abstract weight of it all collapsing into something personal and painful and immediate.

This, by itself, is pretty great storytelling. But that’s not all that happens here. Through the lens of the Capella tragedy, McDevitt encodes a ton of essential world-building: how space travel works, how the human polity is organized into a confederation of colonies, how media and information technologies work, etc. And he’s also subtly establishing some of the major themes that will guide the entire book.

In just eight triumphant pages, McDevitt has completely drawn you into his world, his story, and his main character.

This short sequence, however, also demonstrates the difficulty of explaining what makes A Talent for War so great, because to at least some degree I have now spoiled the effect. One of McDevitt’s primary tools in the novel — and one which perfectly suits the nature of its narrative — is the masterful pacing, structure, and shaping of the revelation of knowledge. Thus, the more I discuss, the more I am robbing the book of some of its power.

So I will do my best at this point to speak in generalities.

At the time of his disappearance, Alex’s uncle was on the trail of a major archaeological find. The loss of his original notes forces Alex to dive in, partly following in his uncle’s footsteps and partly charting his own course. In its most basic form, therefore, A Talent for War is a mystery. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as an interplanetary thriller.) What elevates this narrative, however, is the beautiful, multilayered texture that McDevitt lends it.

First, as we follow Alex in his investigation we become invested not only in the story of his life and the characters around him, but also in the historical story and personages he’s investigating.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, that historical story is constantly shifting. Each new piece of information that we (and Alex) learn not only adds to that story, it also transforms our understanding of what we already knew. Thus the narrative is not linear; it is instead a holographic patchwork, the parts of which are in a constant state of overlapping flux. It is not one story, it is many stories; it is a myth told and retold not only on the page, but in our own imagination. The effect is electric, forcing us not only to deeply engage with the narrative, but also to immersively walk the same investigatory path that Alex does. We are Alex Benedict, uncovering the lost secrets of cosmic history, sharing in the satisfaction – and frustration! – of watching the puzzle pieces click into place.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of A Talent for War is that we do, in fact, care — and care passionately — about the fictional history that Alex is delving into. It’s comparatively easy for Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, to make us care about the Lost Ark or for The Da Vinci Code to make us care about the holy grail because we are already living in the modern world, hate Nazis, and know the importance of Christianity and its lore. McDevitt has none of those advantages and must instead establish all of that from scratch. Impressively, he does it so seamlessly that you don’t even really notice it happening; you simply arrive at the end of the novel and discover that you are intensely invested in the outcome. Partly this is because McDevitt makes us care about the “historical” characters that are living the history that Alex is uncovering, but it’s also because he makes it intrinsically clear that the history is important to the “modern” world Alex lives in, and we see that reflected in every aspect of the world — politics, characters, architecture, culture. Everything.

And perhaps the most daring thing McDevitt does is to NOT provide an authoritative answer to every question. Thus we are forced to become active readers, piecing information together for ourselves and reaching conclusions that the narrative doesn’t deliver to us on a platter. In some cases, however, there is simply… enigma. Mysteries for which there is no solution. It is these little patches of uncertainty which lend the final patina of reality to Alex Benedict’s world and the immense depth of history which lies beneath it, for certainty and absolute truth can only be found in that which is artificially constructed.

As with the beginning of the novel, so at the end we find ourselves standing atop a pinnacle of myriad, kaleidoscopic complexity. One which is thrilling and epic, while simultaneously being melancholic and intensely personal. The personal is reflected into the epic, giving it humanity and truth; the epic is reflected into the personal, making it grand and true. Thus, like a house of mirrors, the totality somehow eludes your grasp.

Which is why you, too, might find yourself immediately flipping back to the beginning of the book and reading it once again.

If you do, what is most remarkable is that you will find yourself somehow reading a completely different book than the one you just finished. Everything which you have learned in your first journey along this road will cast a fresh light on each step of the story, utterly transforming your understanding of it. Even as you once again approach the end, the totality of what you have learned on your second reading will change your perception of what you thought you knew before.

And that is the mark of greatness.

GRADE: A+

A WORD ABOUT THE SEQUELS

Fifteen years after A Talent for War was published, Jack McDevitt returned to Alex Benedict and began writing sequels (starting with Polaris in 2004).

These are good books. They’re fun books. There are not infrequent moments when you’ll find yourself caught up in both the action and the enigma, unable to put the book down and staying up far later than you’d intended to compulsively turning the pages.

But sadly (and I say this mostly so that you can prepare yourself) they pale in comparison to A Talent for War.

First, they lack the incredibly beautiful, multilayered texture of the original. They are far more linear in their construction, with one revelation following another but never truly forcing you to revisit that which you already knew.

Second, they become increasingly formulaic in both their plots and prose.

Third, and perhaps least forgivably, they become lazy.

Where A Talent for War delves deep into the historical material being researched, allowing you to compellingly follow in Benedict’s footsteps as he pieces together the lost secrets of the past, the sequels generally just provide a rough summary of findings. Not only is this less thrilling, but it also means that the sequels lack the double narrative of A Talent for War: Where the original not only invested you in the story of Benedict but also the story of those historical personas he was pursuing in his research, the sequels lose that extra dimension and become lesser works as a result.

Most frustrating, however, is a complete lack of care for continuity. Contradictions abound, sometimes within books, but even more frequently between books in the series. For example, one book (Firebird) ends with a character stating that such-and-such an event will happen four years from now. The next book, Coming Home, is dated one year later, but the event has already inexplicably taken place. At another point in the series, the characters all appear to simply forget that the epochal events of Echo (the fifth book in the series) happened. The conclusion of A Talent for War, in fact, is apparently retconned out of existence, although it remains completely unclear to me whether this was an intentional choice or just another glitch. There even comes a point where one of the characters says, “How could we have missed this?!” while ignoring the fact that they literally discussed this very thing just fifty pages earlier.

This becomes a constant, frustrating grind on the series, in large part because it is not just a matter of trivia; these continuity errors cluster around the major events of the plot, sapping credibility and the suspension of disbelief from the characters, world-building, and narrative.

I do not, however, want to leave you with a completely (or even predominantly) negative impression of these books. Like I said, they’re fun. I enjoyed them. You’ll likely enjoy them, too. But they ultimately do not live up to the astonishing triumph of A Talent for War.

A guide to grades here at the Alexandrian.

The trickiest part of finding an audio book is that it has to be both a good book AND have a good narrator. What I’ve discovered is that it’s much easier to find a narrator you like and browse the corpus of books they’ve done looking for other titles that look appealing than it is to look for appealing titles and then just hoping that the narrator will be good.

Enter Ray Porter, who consistently elevates everything he’s involved with. (I’ve previously listened to his presentations of Dennis E. Taylor’s Bobiverse and Peter Clines’ Threshold series among others.) I’m browsing through the literally hundreds of audio books he’s recorded when I suddenly discover that I already own one of the books he’s done: A Pathfinder Tales tie-in novel called Death’s Heretic by James L. Sutter.

Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure how I acquired it. It must have been part of a bundle or a free book-of-the-day deal or something. But, in any case, it had been sitting in my Audible library untouched for several years at this point.

And that’s a pity. Because this book is really good.

HIGH FANTASY NOIR

In form, Death’s Heretic is a noir detective story in a fantasy setting.

Over the years, I’ve read any number of such stories. Often they have a steampunk veneer. Many of them take place in crapsack worlds. But a lot of them are just literally Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler with a veneer of magic and a smattering of fairy wings lightly dusted over the affair.

Death’s Heretic, on the other hand, stands out from the pack by truly owning its identity as a D&D… err, sorry… Pathfinder novel. Rather than trying to limit its scope to some “noir” subset of Pathfinder, it instead embraces the totality of Pathfinder’s cosmology and interprets it through the lens of a noir story.

Let me see if I can explain the difference: Whereas a typical “D&D noir” novel would open with a dame walking into a detective’s office and saying that her dad was killed by a fireball spell, Death’s Heretic opens with an angelic representative of the Goddess of Death requesting assistance because someone was killed and, when they attempted to resurrect them, they discovered that their soul had been kidnapped from the afterlife.

There’s also a dame, but you can see the difference. It’s not just that there are more fantasy elements being thrown into the mix; it’s that the fantasy elements are being allowed to fundamentally alter the nature of the story. It’s one thing to set a noir story in a weird, selective version of Waterdeep that somehow ends up looking like 1930s San Francisco with the serial numbers filed off, and it’s another to take the totality of Waterdeep, frame a story there, and truly see where it takes you.

Sutter pushes the envelope in other ways, too: He actually divorces himself quite strongly from noir tropes in general by setting the story not in some fog-drenched metropolis, but rather in the sun-drenched empire of Thuvia. Strong elements of pulp fantasy are also naturally pulled in as part of the setting. And that’s just the beginning, as Sutter relentlessly cranks up the dial as the narrative progresses.

BUT ALSO…

Death’s Heretic has more going for it than just novelty and creativity, though. Sutter just writes a legitimately good novel: The characters are interesting and multidimensional. He takes the time to weave together a number of interesting themes revolving around mortality, immortality, and the nature of faith.

Ultimately, this is one of those reviews I write specifically to call attention to something really nifty that I think is (a) not well-known enough and (b) that people would really enjoy if they knew it existed.

So now you know.

I hope you have a great time with it.

GRADE: B-

A guide to grades here at the Alexandrian.

The Hero’s Journey is over-hyped, largely because so many people using it really just mean, “I watched Star Wars once and i thought it was pretty dope.” And also because it’s an example of people using a critical apparatus designed to analyze content as a tool to create content, and the result of that is usually poor and often results in cookie-cutter narratives.

But the Hero’s Journey is more than “I watched Star Wars once and I thought it was pretty dope,” and it’s worth checking out Campbell’s original writing on the subject. Campbell’s treatment is very complex and made up of many modular parts that can be slotted into the macro-structure of Departure-Initiation-Return.

Which brings us to Captain Marvel.

The story in Captain Marvel does fall into the basic pattern of the Hero’s Journey. But it’s a really cool example of it because the non-linear presentation of that story deliberately obscures the Hero’s Journey, and then unifies its revelation to the audience with the hero’s revelation of self, thus narratively unifying both Crossings of the Threshold.

Let me unpack that.

The opening beats of the Hero’s Journey are the Departure:

The Call to Adventure, in which Carol is transformed by the explosion: “The hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the ‘threshold guardian’ at the entrance to the zone of magnified power.” The threshold guardian in this case is Yon-Rogg. Carol defeats the guardian as trickster, outwitting him and targeting the power core instead of engaging in direct confrontation.

The Belly of the Whale, in which Carol is brainwashed by the Kree: The belly of the whale represents the separation of the hero’s known world and self. In this case, Carol literally leaves her entire world (and her entire self) behind.

(Note that the “Meeting the Mentor” beat sometimes found in the Departure is in, fact, absent from this particular Hero’s Journey because there is no Campbellian mentor figure in the story.)

I’m not going to analyze every step of the Hero’s Journey in the film, because the key point is what happens at the opposite end of the structure: The Hero gains the Ultimate Boon and then Returns to the World they left behind, Crossing the Return Threshold and becoming the Master of Two Worlds. My point is that these final beats and the Crossing of the Return Threshold are narratively unified to the original Crossing of the Threshold because the moment in which Carol crosses the threshold is revealed to us in this moment and it is, in fact, Carol recovering and, importantly, ACCEPTING and EMBRACING her memories that signifies the Crossing of the Return Threshold.

This is an incredibly clever and very intricate use of the Hero’s Journey, greatly intensifying its impact by folding it back on itself. You see the beginning and the end simultaneously, like an ouroborus wyrm swallowing its own tail.

But the film also does something else even more unusual and clever with the Hero’s Journey structure: The entire Kree psyops campaign targeting Carol is structured as a dark inversion of the Hero’s Journey. In this structure, the first meeting of the Supreme Intelligence is positioned as Meeting the Mentor. Being captured by the Skrulls is the primary guardian of the threshold, and the Earth is positioned as the “unknown and dangerous realm” in which Carol’s adventure takes place. At the end of the film, the Supreme Intelligence tries to position Carol’s refusal to come back to the Kree as a Refusal of the Return (another classic beat in the Hero’s Journey), with the implication being that she must claim the Ultimate Boon (of the tesseract) and Cross the Return Threshold by coming back to the Kree.

It’s only by rejecting this dark inversion of the Hero’s Journey that Carol can achieve her true apotheosis.

SPOILERS FOR DRAGON HEIST

If you’re a local player in my campaigns, you might want to steer clear here. I may be running Dragon Heist in the future, but not for people who’ve read the plot.

I’ve been periodically checking out the published campaigns for D&D 5^th Edition whenever one catches my eyes, hoping that it’ll be something super awesome that I can use to kick off a 5^th Edition campaign. Hoard of the Dragon Queen was one of these, and that went… poorly.

Earlier this year, I started getting really, really excited about Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. It promised something distinctive: A heist-structured mini-campaign for D&D with the PCs competing against a complex web of factions in order to win a huge prize that would lead directly into a megadungeon campaign in the Dungeon of the Mad Mage! That would be amazing!

… that is not what Dragon Heist is.

First, there is no heist. And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “But Justin, the name of the book is Dragon Heist. Why wouldn’t there be a heist?” And I’m right there with you, because an overwhelming refrain as I read through this book was simply:

Why?

But… why?

And also: Why?

Okay, let’s take a step back and talk about what the story of Dragon Heist actually is. It basically breaks down into four parts:

• The PCs are hired to rescue someone who has been kidnapped. The person they rescue is virtually unimportant, but the other kidnap victim turns out to be the estranged son of a former Open Lord of Waterdeep who embezzled a bunch of money and hid it in a magical vault.
• The PCs are rewarded with the deed to an abandoned tavern. A little while later, a huge fireball goes off and kills a bunch of people just outside the tavern. Investigating the explosion will lead the PCs to discover that some bad guys have stolen a magic item (the Stone of Golorr) that will lead them to the magical vault.
• A Benny Hill chase sequence ensues, at the end of which the PCs have the Stone of Golorr.
• They go to the vault and loot it.

THINGS THAT MAKE NO SENSE

So one of the major problems with Dragon Heist is how much of it doesn’t really make any sense.

For example, the second part of the scenario works like this:

• Dalakhar is a spy who works for Lord Neverember. He has stolen the Stone of Golorr that leads to the vault, but is unable to leave Waterdeep and take the magic artifact to Lord Neverember because Zhent assassins are stalking him.
• He goes to members of Lord Neverember’s estranged son’s household and asks them to tell him where he can find the heroes who rescued the estranged son because he believes that anyone who would rescue Lord Neverember’s son can also be trusted to help him.

That doesn’t actually make sense. Why wouldn’t Dalakhar just ask Neverember’s son to help him? And if Dalakhar believes that the son is so estranged from his father that he would never help him, why would he believe that the son’s friends would be the only possible source of assistance? Why doesn’t he just ask his friends for help directly?

So then Dalakhar gets killed in the fireball that explodes outside of the PCs’ tavern. Where did the fireball come from? Well, Zhent assassins working with House Gralhund had successfully tracked him down. House Gralhund didn’t fully trust the Zhent assassins, however, and so sent their own agent to follow them and make sure the job got done right. “When it seemed as though Dalakhar might give [the Zhent assassins] the slip, this agent hurled one of the beads from the necklace [of fireballs] to stop the gnome in his tracks.”

Okay, fine. Except then it turns out that the Zhent assassins were also killed and/or badly injured in the fireball because they were literally mere feet away from Dalakhar when it went off. So… the Gralhund agent was so concerned that Dalakhar had escaped the Zhent asssassins – even though they were mere feet away from snatching him – that it decided to blow up an entire city block?

That doesn’t make any sense.

To be fair, I think the intention here may have been for the Gralhunds to be intentionally double-crossing the Zhent assassins by blowing them up along with Dalakhar. (There’s another passage later in the book that sort of suggests that might be true.) But it still doesn’t make sense because the Gralhunds’ agent immediately runs away, leaving the surviving Zhent assassin to collect the Stone of Golorr! It’s also obviously directly contradicted by the first passage.

Which is another problem: Dragon Heist is teeming with continuity errors. For example, in a later scene there’s a gazer who is invisibly following the PCs and watching their movements. When the PCs reach a particular location, the gazer waits outside and summons reinforcements from its gang. But when the PCs go inside, they discover that the gang members are… already there? How? Why?

FRAGILE STRUCTURE

Okay, Dalakhar and a bunch of other people have been blown up. So the PCs start investigating the explosion.

But… why?

There’s literally no reason given. The PCs are given no motivation to do so, and, in fact, the scenario goes out of its way to specifically discourage them from getting involved.

But, okay, the PCs start investigating the explosion. This investigation can follow one of two paths.

First option: Break into the morgue and use speak with dead spells. (This option is fine, if a little thin.)

Second option:

• Question witnesses and have one of them tell the PCs that she saw an automaton that “bears a striking similarity to the automatons that sometimes march in the Day of Wonders parade”, which is sponsored by the local temple of Gond.
• Go the Temple of Gond and discover that this is not, in fact, true and there are no such automatons that march in the Day of Wonders parade. (Because the adventure is teeming with continuity errors, remember?)
• The Temple of Gond does have a single automaton that matches this description, however. It’s known as a nimblewright. As the PCs approach the temple, the nimblewright will be on the roof flying a mechanical bird that will crash land on or near the PCs.
• If – and only if! – the PCs mention the incident with the mechanical bird to the priest of Gond they speak with, the priest will take them upstairs to the nimblewright’s room, chastise the nimblewright, and force the nimblewright to watch while acolytes pack up all of its mechanical inventions.
• If the PCs happen to have cast a detect magic spell while they watch the acolytes clear out the nimblewright’s stuff, they will notice that one of the items is magical.
• If they ask the nimblewright what this item is, it will turn out that the nimblewright has built a nimblewright detector! (What a lucky concidence!)
• If they use the nimblewright detector, they will discover that there are only four nimblewrights in the entire city of Waterdeep. (Lucky!)
• Three of them belong to someone who may or may not be the bad guy in this scenario. (More on that later.) Regardless, this is pure coincidence and irrelevant to the current investigation.
• The fourth is, in fact, the one they were looking for at Gralhund House!

This investigatory structure is so bizarre, arbitrary, and paper-thin in its rationale that I honestly find it difficult to understand why it was included in the book at all.

Fortunately, when this structure inevitably fails, the book does suggest that the GM just have an NPC randomly come by and tell the PCs where to go.

When I find stuff like this in a published scenario, I always kind of second guess myself: Am I the crazy one? Does this actually work for other groups? Well, the interesting thing about the rise of online actual plays is that you can very quickly do a survey of how scenarios actually play out, and notably every single DM running Dragon Heist online that I was able to find has been forced to improvise a fix for this broken structure.

And this is a pattern which repeats several times in Dragon Heist. The Benny Hill chase, for example, is largely built along a similar chain of implausible connections, leaving the GM with little choice but to force implausible-yet-predetermined outcomes.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the book is pockmarked with exhortations for the GM to railroad their players, accented with a smattering of pixelbitching propped up with several “thou shalt not find this unless you jump through my very specific hoop” bits. (One of the silliest involves making it impossible for the PCs to succeed on an Investigation test because there’s a thin layer of dust on the floor.)

TIMELINE

Something else to mention here is that the adventure’s handling of time makes no sense. This is really a more specific iteration of Things That Make No Sense, but it’s pervasive enough to become a serious issue in its own right which any DM running the adventure will need to deal with.

First major example:

• Dalakhar steals the Stone of Golorr from Xanathar.
• This triggers a gang war between the Zhentarim and Xanathar which has been going on for awhile when the PCs undertake their first mission.
• At the end of that mission, the PCs are rewarded with an abandoned tavern.
• A period of at least a tenday and probably several weeks now passes during which the PCs are assumed to be fixing up the tavern, joining various factions, doing missions for those factions, and advancing 1-2 more levels.
• Dalakhar, unable to get out of Waterdeep with the Stone, attempts to bring it to the PCs.

… what the heck has Dalakhar been doing for the past several weeks? The way the adventure is written, it actually seems as if he just stole the stone before coming to the PCs, but that can’t be true. And to make things even more confusing, there’s another timeline in which Dalakhar was keeping an eye on Neverember’s estranged son, and then abruptly stopped doing that to infiltrate Xanathar’s operation, but the dates in that timeline aren’t really consistent with the other events described, either.

Another example: After the PCs trace the nimblewright to Gralhund House, Lady Gralhund orders the nimblewright to deliver the Stone of Golorr to a courier who will carry it to her master. (Why not just deliver it directly to her master? I can’t help you.) In the adventure as written, it’s supposed to take the PCs several days to find the nimblewright and discover where it took the Stone of Golorr.

You might be thinking, “Well, that’s too bad. They’ll be way too late to stop those couriers from delivering the Stone of Golorr!” Thankfully, however, the bad guys all politely wait for the PCs to show up before suddenly remembering they have a package to deliver and rushing off to do so in the Benny Hill chase sequence.

I think my favorite sequence here is:

• The bad guy tells five cultists about the Stone of Golorr and sends them to pick it up from the nimblewright. But he simultaneously orders two of the cultists to murder the other three because now they know too much about the Stone of Golorr and must be silenced! (But… why?)
• They botch the job and leave one of the other cultists still alive. This cultist then lies unconscious in a mausoleum for several days until the PCs find her and wake her up. She tells them where the other two cultists went.
• Thankfully, instead of just having the cultists bring the Stone of Golorr directly to him (despite that being the most logical course of action), the bad guy has ordered them to wait at a converted windmill for – and I emphasize this once again – several days twiddling their thumbs for no reason.
• The bad guy eventually sends three spined devils to pick up the Stone of Golorr. With absolutely incredible timing, these spined devils arrive just after the PCs enter the converted windmill, but just before the PCs can climb the stairs and retrieve the Stone for themselves.

Cue the Benny Hill soundtrack.

And there are four different variations of this nonsense, because…

PICK A VILLAIN

Dragon Heist has a gimmick: It has four different villains.

Before the campaign begins, the GM picks one of these villains:

• Xanathar, a beholder crime boss
• Jarlaxle Baenre, a drow swashbuckler who is the secret lord of a city and also runs a traveling circus
• the Cassalanters, a demon-worshipping noble family
• the Zhentarim, a network of assassins and mercenaries

This decision also determines what season the campaign takes place (spring, summer, autumn, or winter). With one exception there is no actual connection between the villain and the time of year, but it does provide an interesting vehicle for emphasizing to the GM how the setting of Waterdeep changes over the course of a year.

The villain the DM chooses essentially affects three moments in the adventure:

1. It’s their minions the PCs are chasing during the Benny Hill chase
2. It’s their minions who track the PCs to the vault (even though they generally have no way of doing that) and fight them as they attempt to leave.
3. Each of them has a unique and elaborately detailed lair.

So, roughly speaking, at least three-quarters of the adventure is totally unaffected by the choice of villain. And where it gets weird is that most (but not all) of the villains are included in the scenario even if they’re not the villain you selected. So, for example, Xanathar is intensely interested in the vault at the beginning of the scenario regardless of whether or not the DM selected him to be the main bad guy, but then he just… stops caring? Jarlaxle will kind of randomly show up and you’re supposed to stage a random, lengthy scene with him which will, if he’s not actually involved with the vault storyline, result in… nothing?

Oddly, the most compelling and interesting villains – the Cassalanters – are the ones who only show up if you select them as the main villains. (Although, as written, it’s very likely that the PCs will never even realize that the Cassalanters are their antagonist, and it’s virtually certain they’ll never find out the really interesting reason the Cassalanters are interested in the vault without the GM rewriting a bunch of stuff.)

This is all baffling. And it becomes more so as we look at how these villainous components were actually implemented.

THE BENNY HILL CHASE: As I mentioned, this section of the adventure starts with the PCs discovering who the Gralhunds’ nimblewright delivered the Stone of Golorr to. There are four different variations of this sequence (one for each villain), but they’re all pretty similar and consist of the PCs chasing one set of bad guys and then, just as they’re about to grab the Stone of Golorr, a completely random new bad guy will leap out of the shadows, grab the Stone, and run off!

In most of these sequences the GM is instructed to not once, but TWICE use the chase rules from the DMG and then, as soon as the PCs succeed at the chase, pull the, “Ha ha!” moment.

Whatever.

There’s a bunch of other painful railroading in this sequence, too. (Including old chestnuts like “the city watch magically finds them no matter where they are and no matter what precautions they take and arrest them”.)

But it gets weirder, because the way they’ve decided to design this sequence is to take ten generic locations, add a little text customizing them to each villain’s minions, and then shuffle up the order in which you encounter them based on which villain’s minions you’re chasing.

But… why?

It’s difficult to really describe how pointlessly convoluted this whole approach is. I spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out what the benefit of this was supposed to be. They’d spent so much time constructing this Rube Goldbergian structure that I thought there surely must have been some purpose behind doing so.

But there just… isn’t.

In fact, it’s all negative value: If you want to run the adventure strictly as written, the presentation is just unnecessarily confusing. If you were thinking that you might try to remix Dragon Heist in order to bring all the villainous factions into play simultaneously, the design of this section only serves to block you from doing so (because your players will notice if a bunch of different factions are all independently holed up in identical windmills).

THE LAIRS: Dragon Heist spends a little over 60 pages describing each of the villains’ lairs in lavish detail. Here, at long last, a strong and unique spotlight is shone on each of the villains.

But if you glance back up to the beginning of this review where I summarized the plot of Dragon Heist, you may notice that “go to the villain’s lair” does not appear in the list of events.

That’s because in the adventure as designed, the PCs don’t go to any of these lairs.

“That makes no sense! Why would you spend 60 pages describing these lairs and then write up a scenario structure in which they’re never used? You must be pulling my leg, Justin!”

No. I’m not. The DM is, in fact, repeatedly told that the PCs don’t need to go there, probably won’t go there, and if they do go there and actually confront any of the villains, they’ll almost certainly be killed.

But… why?

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

This book made me feel dumb.

Great care was clearly put into its construction. Enormous effort was exerted in order to erect, for example, the Rube Goldbergian Benny Hill chase sequence. The “pick a villain” gimmick required a ton of extra work. It all suggested that there must be some meaning in the madness that I was seeing.

And so I spent inordinate amounts of time flipping back and forth through the book, trying to figure out what I was missing.

Ultimately, though, I don’t think I’m missing anything. Dragon Heist is just a mess.

Take the “pick a villain” thing, for example. I’ve seen it hyped up for giving the scenario “replayability”, but that’s not really true: As I mentioned before, fully three-quarters of the scenario isn’t affected by the villain swap-out. Dragon Heist is no more replayable than any other scenario.

My most charitable conclusion is that the goal might have been to create distinctly different versions of the plot in order to support rewatchability (not playability) for the audience of actual play streamers. (In other words, the second time you watch a streaming group playing Dragon Heist you’re surprised to discover the plot suddenly going in a different direction!) But just designing a scenario featuring dynamic faction play would have had the same result without turning your scenario’s spine into generic mush and having the GM ignore half the book’s content.

There are also places where you can squint and kind of imagine what the useful intention might have been. The Benny Hill Chase of Generic Locations, for example, might have been an exemplar of how to build an adventure out of customized generic urban locations. But the book doesn’t actually provide a stockpile of such generic locations, so even if that was the intention, it doesn’t really go anywhere.

Similarly, there are a number of scenes (like the Jarlaxle one) where it feels as if the scenario is almost trying to allow the ultimate bad guy to evolve organically out of the events of the campaign. But none of that goes anywhere, either, because the “DM picks the villain before the campaign starts” structure is pretty heavily embedded.

In many ways, Dragon Heist feels like the shattered remnants of a broken development cycle. It feels as if they were aiming for something ambitious, didn’t achieve it (or maybe it fell apart in playtests), and they ended up kind of cobbling together something that was at least mostly functional out of the wreckage.

So here’s the big question: Do I recommend Dragon Heist?

…

… how much work are you willing to put into fixing it?

I came to Dragon Heist because I wanted something that I could basically run out of the box. That’s not really what I found: I could probably technically run it as written, but I wouldn’t feel good about myself as a DM. So, for me, Dragon Heist is a failure.

If I was in a slightly different place in my life right now – one where I had the time necessary to heavily modify the scenario – I might feel differently: Dragon Heist is filled with interesting NPCs, studded with a number of good set pieces, and has an intriguing (if unfortunately squandered) premise. It’s drenched with absolutely stunning art, including excellent portraits for most of the NPCs you’ll encounter. It’s also an excellent introduction to the rich setting of Waterdeep, with the decision in the second part of the adventure to gift the PCs with an abandoned tavern (although it is largely unconnected to the rest of the scenario) being an inspired one to tie the PCs into the community.

In short, there’s a solid foundation here and a lot of good raw material to work with. But you will need to put in a fair amount of labor to realize its potential.

Here’s another way to think of it: Without the “villain swap” gimmick and a couple other instances of bloat, this could have easily been a 64 page module plus about 32 pages of gazetteer information. If you think of this as a 96 page book with a bunch of other pages that have been specifically designed so that you can’t use them, it’s really difficult to justify this as a $50 product.

If you’re willing to put in the substantial work necessary to actually get 100% utility out of the book, then your personal calculus may change.

Style: 4
Substance: 2

Author: Christopher Perkins (with James J. Haeck, James Introcaso, Adam Lee, Matt Sernett, Jeremy Crawford, Ben Petrisor, Kate Welch, Matthew Mercer, Charles Sanders)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 224