Recently I reviewed Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, the most recent campaign supplement for Dungeons & Dragons from Wizards of the Coast. That review highlighted a number of places where, unfortunately, I felt that Dragon Heist came up a little short in terms of its design. Since writing that review, I’ve had several people ask — based in part, perhaps, on my previous experience remixing the Keep on the Shadowfell and Eternal Lies — if I would “fix” Dragon Heist for them.

Short answer: Yes.

Unlike Hoard of the Dragon Queen, for which I received similar requests, Dragon Heist has a lot of really great material in it. Material that’s worth bringing to your gaming table. The primary goal of this remix is, in fact, to make sure that you can bring even MORE of this material to your gaming table than the published campaign allows, and to re-structure the material in a way that will make it easy and rewarding for you to run the campaign.

With that being said: If you’re expecting something as expansive as my remix of Eternal Lies or as mechanically-oriented as my remix of Keep on the Shadowfell, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. My goal with Dragon Heist is more narrowly focused, although it will perhaps serve as an exemplar of how I often rework published material in order to create a richer, more dynamic, and (importantly) more robust scenario.

EDIT: In the course of writing and developing the Alexandrian Remix, the scope of the project expanded. This is discussed in more detail in Part 7: How the Remix Works, but the originally design-oriented discussion ambitiously grew into a much more prodigious project than I’d originally intended. These essays were not designed for use at the table, and became even less useful as such as time went by. If this is your first time visiting the remix, I recommend reading through this series to understand how and why it works. If you’re looking to actually run the remix, you’ll want to have run-time notes: A description of those can be found in Part 7.

This advice also holds if you’re ever feeling overwhelmed by the minutia of the Remix: Skip to Part 7 and read “How the Remix Works” followed by “A Simple Checklist.” It’s easier than you think!

COLLECTED EDITION

Patrons of the Alexandrian can download a collected edition of the Remix. This includes:

• The Complete Collection, a PDF with all 25 parts of the Remix plus the original review, addendums, and Running the Campaign essays in one convenient file.
• Justin’s Running Files, a Patron-exclusive collection of the documents I actually ran the campaign from (as described above and in Part 7 of the Remix). These are presented in Word format for easy editing and re-arranging to your heart’s content.

Review: Dragon Heist

Part 1: The Villains
Part 1B: Other Factions
Part 1C: Player Character Factions
Part 2: Gralhund Villa
Part 3: Faction Outposts
Part 3B: More Faction Outposts
Part 3C: Response Teams
Part 3D: Other Response Teams
Part 4: The Eyes of the Stone
Part 4B: Bregan D’Aerthe – Sea Maidens Faire
Part 4C: Cassalanter Villa
Part 4D: Xanathar’s Lair
Part 4E: Zhentarim – Kolat Towers
Part 5: Clues and Timelines
Part 5B: Finding Floon
Part 5C: The Nimblewright Investigation
Part 5D: Backtracking Dalakhar & Kalain
Part 5E: Outpost and Lair Revelation List
Part 6: Golorr Artifacts
Part 6B: The Brandath Crypts
Part 6C: The Vault
Part 6D: Faction Reports (Gralhund/Jarlaxle)
Part 6E: Faction Reports (Cassalanter)
Part 6F: Faction Reports (Xanathar/Zhentarim)
Part 7: How the Remix Works

ADDENDUMS
Addendum: First Impressions
Addendum: The Twin Parades
Addendum: Fancy Props
Addendum: Other Collaborators
Addendum: A Night in Trollskull Manor
Addendum: The Dragon of Dragon Heist
Addendum: Timelines & Starting the Campaign
Addendum: The Blinded Stone
Addendum: Tutors for the Orphans
Addendum: Dragon Heist – Accelerated!

From Waterdeep to Avernus

LORE
Forgotten Realms: A Textual History of the Yawning Portal

RUNNING THE CAMPAIGN
Running the Campaign: A Party at Shipwrights’ House
Running the Campaign: The Manshoon Heists
Running the Campaign: Creating the Characters
Dragon Heist: The Final Session

TRANSLATIONS
Chinese

DESIGN GOALS

In remixing Dragon Heist, I have three primary goals.

First, I want to make it a HEIST. Or, more accurately, multiple heists.

Second, I want to eliminate the original “pick a villain” gimmick and instead restructure the campaign to feature ALL OF THE VILLAINS. The goal is to get all of the factions interested in the Vault competing with each other, and then thrust the PCs into the middle of that situation, bouncing around and causing all kinds of chaos.

Third, we’ll be doing a general FIX-UP JOB. This will include an attempt to clean up the broken continuity in the published campaign and also an effort to make the campaign’s scenario structure more robust (by applying the Three Clue Rule, for example).

Because I don’t want to get too consumed with minutia, however, this final point will not take the form of attempting to track down every single continuity error in the scenario. Instead, I’ll be looking to perform a broader reorganization of Dragon Heist’s back story that will hopefully rearrange its diverse parts into a coherent whole, and then trust the DM to resolve the local continuity appropriately using these broad reference documents as their touchstone.

Even if you don’t own Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, I hope you’ll find some points of interest in my design notes and other discussion. But it probably goes without saying that in order to actually use this remix, you’ll need to own a copy of the book.

We’ll begin with the villains.

THE GRAND GAMES

Periodically throughout Waterdeep’s history the byzantine factions of the city — or some significant subset thereof — will become collectively fixated upon some objective. Thus will begin a Grand Game.

Sometimes the goal of a Grand Game will be arcane. Often it is clandestine, although quite public struggles are not unknown. (On no less than three occasions the Grand Game has revolved around the appointment of the Open Lord.) Whatever the case, the intense rivalries of the Grand Game give birth to all forms of subterfuge, covert activities, deception, and intrigue.

This is very much the case with the current quest for Dagult Neverember’s vault. Obliquely referred to by many players of the Grand Game as Neverember’s Enigma, the truth of the vault was sought even before the players realized it was a vault. At first, it was merely known that the disgraced and ousted Neverember was keeping some momentous secret, and those involved in the Game yearned to discover what the former Open Lord of Waterdeep was hiding.

When the vast scope of his embezzlement — a half million gold dragons! — came to light, however, many intuited the truth behind Neverember’s Enigma and its pursuit became even more frenzied.

In terms of the Dragon Heist campaign, we will focus on five factions participating in the Grand Game:

• Xanathar, a beholder crime boss
• the Zhentarim, a network of assassins and mercenaries
• the Cassalanters, a devil-worshipping noble family
• Jarlaxle Baenre, a drow swashbuckler who is the secret lord of a city, leader of the dark elf mercenary group Bregan D’Aerthe, and has surreptitiously come to Waterdeep as the captain of a traveling circus
• the Gralhunds, a minor noble family who is way out of their league

For each of these factions, we will want to know:

• What they’re planning to do with the gold (which is largely, with the exception of our revised version of the Gralhunds, dealt with in the original book)
• How they became involved with Neverember’s Enigma and what their current strategy for pursuing the Grand Game is
• How the PCs first interact with them and become aware of their involvement in the Grand Game

DESIGN NOTES

The concept of the “Grand Game” was created to give a convenient label to the proceedings. As the PCs are exposed to this label, it will help them conceptualize what they have become a part of. It also elevates the hunt for the vault, tying it into the long history of the city and the rivalry of its factions. As the PCs make the choice to join the Grand Game, it will be clear to them that they have crossed a threshold and become part of something larger than anything they have taken part in before. (And thus they themselves have become more important.)

The terminology of “Neverember’s Enigma” is deliberately cryptic. It allows the participants of the Grand Game to speak in code while wrapping their words in elliptical euphemisms, creating a sense of mystery which will invite the PCs to drive forward and discover the truth of what’s happening.

XANATHAR

When Xanathar had the Stone of Golorr stolen from the Palace of Waterdeep, he only knew that he was stealing an object of great importance to Lord Neverember (i.e., Neverember’s Enigma). When he later learned about the missing dragons, he believed that he was now in possession of the whole key to Neverember’s Vault. And he was perfectly happy with that. You don’t need to actually hold the gold if you’re the one who controls its location.

What he didn’t know was that the Stone of Golorr had been blinded by Lord Neverember, who removed its three Eyes. (More on this in Part 4 of the remix.)

Then the Zhentarim came to him with one of the Eyes and said, “We have two different parts of this puzzle. We’d like to make a deal.” Xanathar was enraged at both their presumption and his own folly, slew the Zhentarim envoys, and took the Eye they had brought to him.

Thus began the gang war between the Zhentarim and Xanathar. Xanathar was convinced that the Zhentarim had the other Eyes. (They didn’t. Although that changes shortly after Dragon Heist begins; see below.) The Zhentarim, for their part, wanted both vengeance AND their Eye back (and the Stone of Golorr itself for good measure).

The gang war, in turn, became the point at which everyone who knows what’s really going on in Waterdeep (or likes to think they do) became aware that a Grand Game was in progress. In the process, Dagult Neverember became aware that it was Xanathar who had stolen the Stone of Golorr and he reassigns Dalakhar to infiltrate Xanathar’s organization and steal the Stone back.

ZHENTARIM

The Zhentarim were originally founded as a mercenary force by the wizard Manshoon, but they’ve been a fractured organization ever since the Manshoon Wars, when multiple clones of Manshoon warred for supremacy.

Most of Manshoon’s clones were destroyed during the Manshoon Wars, but yet another has recently returned to Waterdeep (claiming, as they all do, to be the one true Manshoon). When he peeled off a large hunk of the local Zhentarim network that had been established by the Doom Raiders (see p. 198 of Dragon Heist), he became aware that Lord Neverember had used the local Zhentarim’s resources to embezzle hundreds of thousands of gold dragons from the government.

Manshoon wanted to know where that money has gone. He knew that Neverember didn’t actually have it in his possession, so he sent agents to infiltrate Neverember’s household in Neverwinter to find out. Those agents weren’t able to fully ascertain where the gold was, but they did identify the Eye as the key to getting it. They stole the Eye from the Protector’s Enclave and brought it to Manshoon, who through a combination of divinations and other espionage efforts eventually connected it to the Stone of Golorr which Xanathar had stolen.

CHAPTER 1 – A FRIEND IN NEED: After he lost his Eye to Xanathar, Manshoon needed to get back in the game. His agents eventually concluded that Neverember’s son, Renaer, might have another of the Eyes. They were right, although Renaer didn’t know it: His father had given him an elaborate, ivory mourning locket in honor of his mother. The Eye was hidden inside it.

The full dynamic in the first chapter, therefore, is this:

• Zhentarim agents snatch Renaer Neverember and his friend Floon Blagmaar.
• While questioning Renaer in Area Z5, they realize that the Eye is in the mourning locket and take the locket from Renaer.
• Renaer is hauled back down to Area Z2 and tied up next to Floon. Upstairs, the Zhentarim break open the locket (it can still be found in Area Z5), remove the Eye, and give it to a courier to carry to Manshoon.
• Floon is then hauled upstairs for questioning (the Zhentarim want to see if he might be worth a ransom).
• Xanathar’s agents storm the warehouse. They immediately find “the prisoner” (i.e., Floon), assume he’s Renaer, and several of their agents hustle him out to their sewer hideout. Meanwhile, Renaer takes advantage of the confusion downstairs to slip his bonds and hide in Area Z2.
• Xanathar’s agents do a perfunctory sweep of the warehouse and then take off, leaving the kenku behind to kill any Zhents who show up.

Renaer will be able to tell the PCs that he was questioned by the Zhents about the half million dragons his father stole from the city; then they ripped off a locket that was very precious to him. If they find the locket and see the (now empty) secret compartment inside it, Renaer can also tell them that he had no idea that the compartment existed or what was stored inside it.

DESIGN NOTES

The opening scenario thus introduces the PCs to both the Zhentarim and Xanathar. It should also become clear that they’re both interested in the money Dagult Neverember stole, but the exact nature of what’s being fought over (i.e., the Stone of Golorr) should remain a mystery at this juncture.

The other thing we’re doing here is cleaning up one of the scenario’s major continuity errors: Why was Renaer kidnapped? At this point in the timeline, the Zhentarim already know that Xanathar has the Stone of Golorr and that the Stone is the only way of finding the vault. Questioning him “about the whereabouts of the Stone of Golorr”, as the adventure suggests, makes no sense.

JARLAXLE BAENRE

As Dragon Heist begins, Jarlaxle is unaware of the Stone of Golorr or the Grand Game which is being played. His current agenda, as described in the campaign, is to convince the leaders of Waterdeep to support Luskan’s bid to join the Lords’ Alliance. Freshly arrived in his cover identity as Captain Zord of the Sea Maiden’s Faire, Jarlaxle is coordinating and ramping up his local intelligence operations.

NIMBLEWRIGHTS: One of Jarlaxle’s main objectives right now is the sale of nimblewrights. Built by the technomancers of Luskan, he’s brought several dozen of these constructs with him and is selling them at surprisingly compelling prices.

Why? Because he’s actually harvesting data from them. In Jarlaxle’s stateroom onboard the Scarlet Marpenoth (Area U4, see p. 143) there is a specialized crystal ball that allows him to look out through the eyes of any nimblewright and even review what they’ve seen. (We might think of this as a “recording”, but Jarlaxle refers to it as a record of witness.)

After the PCs identify that a nimblewright is responsible for the fireball in Trollskull Alley, they’ll be able to trace the local nimblewrights back to “Captain Zord”. If they speak with Jarlaxle about the nimblewright they’re seeking, he’ll first want to know why they’re looking for it. Following up on whatever the PCs tell him, his agents will discover the hunt for the Stone of Golorr (or he’ll simply review the record of witness for the appropriate nimblewright and discover the Gralhunds’ schemes).

Alternatively, the PCs might decide not to talk to him and instead sneak in and steal his records of sale (or access the records of witness in the crystal ball for themselves). Which is great because, bang, you’ve got a heist pointed at Jarlaxle’s ship.

DESIGN NOTES

If the PCs perform a heist on the nimblewright proprietor instead of speaking with Jarlaxle, it’s very possible that Jarlaxle won’t become aware of the Grand Game and his agents will not become involved in later stages of the scenario. That’s fine, though, because we’ve already gotten maximum bang for our buck from the player-initiated heist, right?

Full details on how the nimblewright-focused investigation is structured will be found in Part 5 of the remix.

CASSALANTERS

The Cassalanters were actually interested in Neverember’s Enigma even before they knew that 500,000 dragons were on the line: Lord Neverember was not the first person to hide secrets within the Stone of Golorr, and through their fiendish researches the Cassalanters have identified a number of other lucrative and powerful lines of inquiry they would like to pursue (see Part 6 of the remix).

They discovered that Neverember had hidden one of the Eyes in the crypt of Lady Alethea Brandath, Renaer’s mother. They went to the crypt and extracted the Eye from the magical wards Dagult Neverember had placed around it. (Ironically, they were literally standing on top of the Vault itself and didn’t know it.)

When the Cassalanters learned about the embezzled gold, however, their priorities quickly shifted: They saw an opportunity to save their children from the pact they had made with Asmodeus.

A PLEA FOR HELP: After the explosion, during the time that they’re investigating the nimblewrights, the PCs are contacted by the Cassalanters, who request an audience. The Cassalanters’ own agents were in Trollskull Alley that day because they, too, were tracking the Stone, so they know that Dalakhar was trying to bring the Stone to the PCs.

When the PCs arrive at the Cassalanter estate:

• They are given an opportunity to “accidentally” meet the Cassalanters’ children, who come running into the Entrance Hall (C1) while the PCs are waiting.
• Lady Cassalanter comes out personally to gather the PCs from the Entrance Hall and shoos the children away. She leads the PCs to the Reading Room (Area C4), where they can look out over the Butterfly Garden (Area C25). The children have scampered through the mudroom and are playing out there now. (Make sure to mention the black dragon head mounted on the wall of the room.)
• Lady Cassalanter introduces her husband and they tell the PCs a modified version of their plight: The twins were cursed at their birth by Asmodean cultists to lose their souls on their ninth birthday. The Cassalanters have discovered a ritual which can save them, but it requires them to sacrifice “one shy of a million gold coins”. They are quite rich, but even in leveraging everything they own they still can’t raise that monstrous sum. If they could get their hands on Neverember’s ill-gotten gains, though… Will the PCs please help them?
• And then, of course, Lady Cassalanter turns to gaze wistfully at her children frolicking with the butterflies.

Obviously they don’t tell the PCs that the ritual also involves killing 99 people. (Unless they have some reason to think that the PCs would think that to be a great idea.) They don’t technically need all the money, and are willing to cut the PCs in on 10% of it or agree to return the surplus funds to the city.

THE FEAST: If the PCs agree to help and succeed in delivering the gold to the Cassalanters, they receive invitations to the feast where Ammalia poisons 99 guests in the garden pavilion and the final ritual is performed.

You may be tempted to have the Cassalanters betray the PCs by having them be among the 99, but I actually recommend the opposite: If the PCs have delivered as promised, the Cassalanters are more than pleased with their work and are looking forward to a long and prosperous friendship with them. They’re invited to feast in the Banquet Hall (Area C15) where all the non-sacrificial guests are celebrating.

If the PCs haven’t discovered the Cassalanters’ true motives, it will be far more effective for them to be horrified by their implication in the mass murder.

DESIGN NOTES

As far as I can tell, Renaer’s mother has never been given a first name, so I’ve provided one. If I’m in error on this (I haven’t, for example, read the novels the Neverembers appear in) please let me know.

Note that everything the Cassalanters tell the PCs is true… from a certain point of view.

Go to Part 1B: Other Factions

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