V. writes:

I’m heading into Chapter 2 of Dragon Heist next session. We left off right after Volo “paid” them with a deed for Trollskull Manor, so they want to start with inspecting the tavern in the morning. I’m going to have them re-encounter the urchins there, but then what? I’m not really sure how to keep the session moving after that.

Chapter 2 of Dragon Heist presents a little sandbox-like interlude between the introductory events of Chapter 1 and (in the Remix) the Grand Game literally blowing up on the PCs’ doorstep in the form of the fireball. It includes:

• Fixing up Trollskull Manor so that it can be re-opened (or sold or whatever else the PCs want to do with it).
• Other businesses and NPCs in Trollskull Alley for the PCs to meet and build relationships with.
• A half dozen factions who will be interested in recruiting the PCs, along with short faction missions that the PCs will be asked to do if they join up.
• A hostile businessmen (Emmek Frewn) who will hire a gang of wererats to harass the PCs.

To this toolkit, you can add any loose threads from Chapter 1 that the PCs are interested in pursuing: Relationships with Volo, Renear, Floon, etc. Investigations into the Zhentarim or Xanatharians. And so forth.

That’s a whole bunch of stuff! But how do you actually bring it to the table?

(As a quick aside: One important thing to keep in mind is that you’re not supposed to wrap up everything in Chapter 2 before Chapter 3 begins. The Remix, in particular, decompresses the Grand Game so that you have space to continue incorporating the faction and Trollskull business into the campaign. Doing so will add depth as the PCs’ actions weave together the Grand Game, the factions, and Trollskull into a dynamic interlock. But I digress.)

What you want do at the top of Chapter 2 is basically a massive dump of options — stuff that needs to get done around the tavern, scenario hooks, etc. You want the players to immediately have to start making choices about what they’re going to spend their time and focus on. This is what will keep things interesting.

To achieve this:

1. Factions will start paying house calls to say, “Hi. Heard you’re awesome. We have a job we’d like you to do.” Renaer is a VIP and saving him in Chapter 1 created a lot of buzz for the PCs.
2. Immediately start having guilds show up to discuss repairs that need to be made and services they can provide. (This is why the Remix breaks down the costs associated with repairs and assigns them to specific guilds. The guild reps humanize the expenses and the individual breakdown also gives the players a chance to think creatively about how they might work around each guild’s remit to save cash… while probably earning the guild’s enmity for scab labor.)
3. Get Frewn, the urchins, and one or two other people from Trollskull Alley involved. Frewn, in particular, will start a whole chain of events, but the ongoing relationships with the other NPCs will develop similarly in an organic fashion. (I recommend giving space to the other alley residents to give the PCs a chance to seek them out and explore the alley for themselves.)

Make sure that the guild costs are significantly (but not impossibly) higher than the group’s cash-on-hand. This will motivate them to figure out a paycheck (i.e., they can’t just focus on remodeling the tavern, they’re going to have to go do interesting things to pay for it).

Put them under a time crunch. They should NOT be able to do everything, at least not without splitting up. Have stuff from two different faction missions happen at the same time; or at the same time as the guild reps show up for some “hard negotiations.” They’re going to have to make choices.

Similarly, don’t wait for one thing to wrap up before triggering the next. Interrupt scenes with other scenes and hooks. For example, they’re negotiating with a guild rep when Frewn shows up or one of the urchins runs in to report that Nat has fallen into a sinkhole. Or both.

MAKE YOUR MENU

If this feels like a lot to juggle… it is!

Across all of these different elements of the campaign, you might have forty or fifty different things you’re trying to keep track of. It’s too much.

The solution?

Make lists.

Specifically, make a sequential list for each category:

• Guilds
• Factions
• Trollskull Drama
• Follow-Ups

Under “Guilds” list all the guild visits in the order you think they should happen (or just randomly if order doesn’t seem significant). Do the same for your faction recruitment/mission assignments, Trollskull-related NPCs, etc.

As you’re running, you can now just glance at your lists and trigger something happening by just grabbing the top item off any list. (This isn’t a binding contract, of course. You can still bounce around if it makes sense in the moment.)

This significantly simplifies what you’re trying to keep track of in your head at any moment: Instead of forty or fifty different items, you only have to think in terms of “guild stuff, faction stuff, and alley stuff.”

I think of it like ordering off a menu: If you dump everything into one big category, ordering is a nightmare. So you organize stuff into appetizers, main course, dessert, and so forth.

Then, during play, you’re like, “Hmm… Getting peckish. Let me take a peek at the menu.”

And because you’ve pre-organized stuff, you largely just need to jump back and forth from one menu to the next.

FOLLOW-UPS

“Follow-Ups,” it should be noted, is a list you can use to follow-up on previous scenes: They piss off a glazier guild rep, so you think, “That guy’s gonna bring some muscle to break their new windows.” Jot that down in your Follow-Ups list.

You could, of course, just add this to the end of the Guilds list, but then you’d have to cycle through establishing everything else on the Guilds list before the PCs would start experiencing the consequences of their choices. Alternatively, you could put it on the top of the Guilds list, but then you’d have to cycle through all your follow-ups before you could introduce new stuff. It’s better to keep a mix of new stuff and old stuff cycling through.

Note that stuff from Chapter 1 – like Renaer or Floon or Volo dropping by for a visit – could also go on the Follow-Ups list. This is a good way to transition stuff from one phase of a campaign to the next and is easy to keep track of on your campaign status document.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #6

I have done remixes for both Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and Descent Into Avernus. It’s perhaps not unsurprising that I have been frequently asked how I would connect the two campaigns.

It’s not something that I, personally, had given a lot of thought to. My own run of the Dragon Heist campaign ended with the PCs poised to pursue very different goals: Some had become ensconced as leaders of the Harpers in Waterdeep. Others were heading to the Sea of Fallen Stars to pursue threads from their characters’ backstories. (Although we’re taking a break from those characters, I’m planning to return and run separate campaigns for both of those threads.)

So I guess that would be my first word of caution: It’s quite likely that connecting the two campaigns will actually be a really bad idea. By the time you get to the end of Dragon Heist, your campaign will have built up a lot of momentum, and all of that momentum is likely to be tied to Waterdeep. (The whole function of Trollskull Manor is, in fact, to give the PCs permanent ties to the city.) It probably makes more sense to follow that momentum (continuing to explore the factions and intrigues of Waterdeep) than it does to uproot the whole campaign and head south.

The other thing to note here is that the whole function of the Dragon Heist Remix is to turn the campaign into an active playground. I know where my Remix campaign ended up, but I honestly have no idea where yours did: Who are the PCs allied with? Which enemies survived? Where’s Neverember’s gold? What other resources have the PCs accrued? What enigmas are the PCs most interested in pursuing? Do they have the Stone of Golorr? If not, who does? Did they end up adopting kids or falling in love? The possibilities are almost limitless.

With those provisos in mind, here are some general thoughts on how you might connect the campaigns.

START AT THE BEGINNING

If possible, the first thing I would do is to plant the seeds of the transition from the very beginning. As the players are creating their characters for Dragon Heist, encourage some or all of them to make characters who have a connection to Elturel. This is more or less what I discuss in Remixing Avernus – Part 2: Character Creation, it’s probably just a little more difficult to explain why you’re encouraging the players to do this if the campaign is going to be taking place in Waterdeep.

First, this can easily include having Lulu as a PC in Dragon Heist. This actually fits in well with her revised backstory, in which she returns to Toril via a portal that takes her to Neverwinter before journeying south to Elturel. It might be interesting to explore that connection to Neverwinter — did she meet Neverember? Or perhaps she met Dalakhar? Alternatively, you might just move the portal so that it leads to Waterdeep (and she has likely just come through it as the campaign is beginning).

Second, you’re still going to want a Hellrider for Descent Into Avernus. Could they have been sent to Waterdeep to investigate links to Asmodean cultists who were recently captured in Elturel? Perhaps the cultists were kidnapping people in Elturel, and their interest in looking for similar disappearances in Waterdeep leads them to Volo (looking for people to investigate his missing friend) at the beginning of Dragon Heist? (This link will likely bias your Dragon Heist run towards the Cassalanters. The twist where the friendly nobles looking for help saving their Asmodeus-cursed children turn out to actually BE the Asmodean cult leaders will be great. More on this connection below.)

Third, for any Elturel-connected character the players do create, try to find ways for them to have unfinished business back in Elturel (or perhaps Baldur’s Gate). It’s quite likely that this business is what brought them to Waterdeep in the first place, but its conclusion is back home.

For example, in my Dragon Heist run one of the PCs needed to raise a large sum of money as a ransom for his mother’s freedom. (The nice thing about Dragon Heist is that literally any goal that requires large sums of money can be trivially tied to the central conceit of the campaign.) That link is part of what led half the group to the Sea of Fallen Stars (where that PC’s mother was being held). If that link had instead pointed back towards Elturel, it would obviously help a transition to Descent Into Avernus.

Check out Running the Campaign – Dragon Heist: Creating the Characters for an in-depth discussion of how to handle this type of character creation.

ASMODEAN CONNECTIONS

If I’m looking for an actual connection between the campaigns — the thing that will drive PCs from Waterdeep to Elturel — then what immediately leaps out are the Asmodeus cultists in Dragon Heist.

If you want to make the transition fairly organic, then you’ll want to seed clues into the Cassalanter faction of Dragon Heist that point the PCs towards either Elturel or Baldur’s Gate. (In the latter case, we’d most likely assume that the Cassalanters have a direct connection to the Vanthampurs. In the former, they would have connections to various Asmodeans heading to Elturel for the “Exodus.” Or you could do both.)

If the players are particularly interested in Cassalanters, finding an opportune time for the Cassalanters to flee Waterdeep and head for Elturel or Baldur’s Gate would also be a big pull. Alternatively, if the PCs are concerned about the kids, the Cassalanters might send them to Vanthampur for “sanctuary” as the noose closes around their own necks (forcing the PCs to chase them down).

For a slightly more focused experience, consider tweaking Dragon Heist to make the Cassalanters Zarielites instead of Asmodean cultists. Either way, you can seed a bunch of Asmodeus/Zariel lore into Dragon Heist (like the Averniad and the Trial of Asmodeus).

A slight risk with the “organic” approach is that the PCs might go haring off to Elturel before the Grand Game of Dragon Heist has reached its conclusion. If the PCs are in possession of the Stone of Golorr or any of its Eyes when they do this, the Grand Game will follow them. (The other factions need that stuff!) We might imagine a scenario where the PCs and a bunch of Dragon Heist-related faction members get sent to Avernus and the Grand Game continues while everyone simultaneously tries to escape Hell… but it’s probably not ideal.

Although the risk of this is, in my opinion, rather low, if you want to avoid any chance of this happening you can take a slightly less organic approach by waiting for Dragon Heist to reach its conclusion, selecting some faction that the PCs have become allied with, and having them dump a bunch of intelligence reports suggesting that those Asmodean cultists the PCs were recently tangled up with are active in Elturel. “Could you check that out for us?” (If the PCs were already heading that way to settle up personal business, all the better.)

On the other hand, if the Grand Game in Avernus sounds amazing to you, have the Cassalanters take their Eye to Elturel before the PCs can get it.

SPLIT THE PARTY

If some of the PCs are naturally interested in staying in Waterdeep to pursue their interests there while other PCs are interested in returning to Elturel to complete their unfinished business… Let them.

The players whose characters remained in Waterdeep simply need to create new PCs who can join the other characters as the other campaign begins. (If your plan is to lead with the Elturian refugee caravan, for example, the other PCs could be members of that caravan or join the other PCs in protecting it. This might also be an ideal time to introduce Lulu as a PC if you haven’t already.)

As I mentioned earlier, this is similar to what happened after my Dragon Heist run: Some of the PCs stayed in Waterdeep. Others went to the Sea of Fallen Stars. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be running both of those as separate campaigns.

THE STONE OF GOLORR IN AVERNUS

If the PCs still possess the Stone of Golorr after the events of Dragon Heist, its legend lore abilities alone offer many cool opportunities for the PCs as they delve into the deep lore of the Descent Into Avernus remix. You’ll want to give some thought to cool legend lore responses to topics the PCs are likely to ask about (like Zariel, Lulu, etc.). What stuff qualifies as “legendary” (so that the spell works) and what doesn’t?

Also decide if the spell’s description of “the more information you already have about the thing, the more precise and detailed the information you receive is” means you can benefit from casting legend lore multiple times (gaining more detailed information each time).

It might also be cool to think about how the backstory of Descent Into Avernus might be tweaked to incorporate the Stone of Golorr. Specifically, is there some big secret of the campaign that the Stone might have been used to erase from common knowledge? (For example, perhaps one of the original Hellriders decided to use the Stone to eradicate the knowledge that Zariel led the Charge of the Hellriders.) Seed some clues to that effect, so that the PCs can use the Stone to their advantage.

The Stone of Golorr might also be an alternative source for the Vision from Torm, pointing the PCs in the direction of the Sword of Zariel.

ADJUSTING FOR LEVEL

I haven’t discussed adjusting the level of challenge in Descent Into Avernus. Broadly speaking, these adjustments should be obvious. (Make the bad guys tougher and/or add more of them.)

In some ways, this will actually be to your advantage: There are wide reports that the beginning of Descent Into Avernus is too difficult for beginning characters. (And I’ve already discussed in the Remix starting the characters at a higher level.)

Speaking in very general terms, I would:

• Cap level advancement in Dragon Heist to 6^th. (It’s possible to get to 7^th in the Remix, just don’t include that final milestone advance.)
• If your group won’t get crabby, you can just hold advancement until they leave Elturel.
• Alternatively, give them a milestone level up to 7^th level when they leave Baldur’s Gate and again when they leave Elturel. (They’ll be a little higher level than they should be in Elturel and when starting out the Avernian hexcrawl, but close enough that you can probably get away without making any adjustments to those sections of the campaign.)

Alternatively, skip the Baldur’s Gate section of Descent Into Avernus entirely: Pull the PCs from Waterdeep to Elturel. Then, as they arrive, have the whole city sucked into Hell with them along for the ride and continue the campaign from there. To make this really work, seed the information and resources the PCs would have received in Baldur’s Gate into the Cassalanter sections of Dragon Heist.

For example, the infernal puzzlebox can be an artifact held by the Cassalanters. Maybe the PCs’ allies come to them and say, “Hey, we found this among the Cassalanters stuff. Sylvira Savikas is an expert on this stuff. She lives in Elturel. Can you take it to her and see if she can open it?” Or maybe they just take it to the Blackstaff and have her crack it open; then, armed with the evidence in side, they head to Elturel to expose the conspiracy… but they’re too late! The city is sucked into Hell just as they arrive!

WATERDEEP IN HELL

Why bother moving the campaign to Elturel at all? Why not just swap in Waterdeep and send the City of Splendors to Hell instead (with the PCs along for the ride)?

First, the City of Splendors is chock-a-block with high level NPCs (including many whom the PCs have been directly interacting with during Dragon Heist). There will be an obvious question of why these NPCs aren’t solving the problem themselves instead of leaving the PCs to do it.

Second, once you make all the fundamental changes to the lore of the campaign necessary to move it from Elturel to Waterdeep (no Companion, no Charge of the Hellriders as a central element, etc.), in practice you’re not really running Descent Into Avernus any more. You’re running a completely new campaign that you’re designing almost entirely from scratch.

Mark writes:

In your Dragon Heist Remix, you have changed events so that there’s some more breathing room between Chapter 1 [when the PCs investigate the disappearance of Floon and discover the real kidnap victim was Renaer Neverember] and Chapter 3 [when someone is assassinated on the PCs’ front doorstep].

As far as I can see, it’s assumed that the players will be doing faction missions, other character-related content, and fixing up Trollskull Manor.

I’m worried that the group will feel disconnected from the overarching plot and the moving parts of the factions in the Grand Game [i.e., the factions in Waterdeep that are all pursuing the half million gold pieces that were embezzled by Dagult Neverember].

What would you suggest to keep the players invested in the Grand Game in that interim period?

To start with, the expected experience is that the players/PCs won’t really know that there’s a Grand Game going on at the end of Chapter 1. What they’ll have is an introductory scenario that has been successfully wrapped up and a large, neon sign saying, “GO TO TROLLSKULL MANOR.” At best, they’ll have a cluster of loose threads:

• There’s a Zhentarim/Xanatharian gang war.
• The Zhentarim and Xanatharians are both interested in the gold embezzled by Dagult Neverember.
• There was something inside Renaer Neverember’s locket.

There’s not really a defined way for the PCs to immediately pull at these threads. They’re deliberately enigmatical elements that are meant to sort of hang around until they get paid off later in the campaign.

So if the PCs choose to pull at these threads, it’ll be through some clever angle that the players creatively think up on their own initiative. That’s great! You just need to figure out how to roll with it. The Remix almost certainly gives you all the tools you need to do this. You’ll also probably want to try to breathe a little air into it, weaving the events of their investigation into the wider tapestry of Chapter 2.

(To a certain extent, the players are likely to breathe that air into it themselves: Once you can get a bunch of balls up in the air in your campaign – e.g., the investigation, renovating Trollskull, faction missions, the orphans, the business rival trying to sabotage them – the players will be forced to start juggling their priorities. If you aren’t hearing stuff like, “We can’t do that tonight, we have to meet with the distillery!” or “Meliandre can guard the tavern in case the dire rats come back, Bassario and Francesca will run that mission for the Harpers, and I’ll head back up to the Yawning Portal to see if I can find Yagra,” then just add more balls.)

For example, my group made the intuitive leap that Renaer’s mourning locket must be connected to his mother’s tomb. So after checking out their new digs at Trollskull Manor, they headed straight to the Brandath Crypts… well, mostly straight. They had to request a meeting with Renaer. Then they arranged a time when he could take them to the Crypts (“it can’t be tomorrow, because we’ve got that… thing we’re doing”). Once at the Crypts I was actually fascinated to see if they would discover the Vault where the embezzled gold was hidden early and sort of “short-circuit” the entire structure of the campaign, but they ended up missing their Wisdom (Perception) check. Regardless, the investigation had forged a closer relationship with Renaer (who ended up marrying one of the PCs), kept the players puzzling about the Grand Game, and offered a huge pay-off when the whole campaign circled back to the Crypts at the end. (“We were right here! Oh my god!”)

A more likely alternative is for the PCs to start poking around the Zhentarim and/or Xanatharians. That more or less leads straight into the core structure of the campaign: They’re investigating a faction, so you should point them at a faction outpost. (Once again, weaving these investigations into the broader scope of everything else happening in Chapter 2.) This activity might preempt some of the “later” revelations about the Grand game, but that’s just fine. (The idea of them being “later” revelations is really just a conceptual holdover from the heavily railroaded design of the published adventure. And we’re not doing that, right?)

The most likely outcome is that the group will have a little bit of a head start in the Eye Heists that follow the events of Chapter 3. We might imagine the players patting themselves on the back for getting ahead of things, but they probably won’t think of it like that. (The structure of the campaign is obfuscated from them. They don’t see how your notes are arranged and don’t know that this was “supposed” to happen later.)

BUT WHAT IF THEY DON’T?

Other groups, though, won’t pull at those threads from Chapter 1 — either because they can’t figure out how to do it or because they just don’t care enough to do it. That’s OK. It just means that the players’ focus is somewhere else. The events of Chapter 1 are still important. They’ll either foreshadow what comes later (“If only we’d paid attention to the clues in front of our face!”) or they’ll be a mystery that eats at the back of their brains. Anticipation heightens the eventual pay-off. (“Oh my god! It’s all connected!”)

Keep in mind, too, that the Chapter 2 material isn’t completely disconnected from the Grand Game: Virtually all of the initial faction missions, for example, either involve one of the factions from the Grand Game, are directly aimed at the events of the Grand Game, or result in revelations about the same. (The exception is the Emerald Enclave, which is probably one of the reasons why I never prioritized getting that faction involved in my Dragon Heist run.)

Note: Also look at Part 1C: Player Character Factions. The Grand Games of Waterdeep usually involve ALL of the byzantine factions of the city becoming collectively fixated on something. That includes the player character factions. Even if the faction play in Chapter 2 wasn’t connected to the Grand Game, it would BECOME connected by virtue of the PCs being connected to it.

One thing I would have liked to have designed for Dragon Heist would have been a series of detailed background events detailing the evolving gang war between Zhents and Xanatharians. I didn’t get that done for my campaign, but background events like these can also be a good way to keep elements of the campaign “in the mix” even when the PCs’ immediate attention is turned somewhere else.

BUSINESS AS USUAL

One last thing to keep in mind is that this whole approach doesn’t really stop when you hit the end of Chapter 2: The faction missions continue. Now that the tavern is open, you can use A Night in Trollskull Manor to provide a constant level of activity. The PCs are going to continue pulling at threads and having to deal with blowback from their actions.

In fact, once Chapter 3 starts off with a bang (pun intended), the only thing that’s likely to happen is that you’ll be tossing MORE balls into the air for the PCs to juggle.

If you have any questions for future columns, let me know in the comments! In Ask the Alexandrian, instead of looking at general methodology, theorycraft, or prep, I try to solve specific situations from actual play by asking myself, “If I were the GM in this situation, what would I do?”

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #1 – Ask the Alexandrian #3

Go to Part 1

KORA MARWOOD

(Created by Chris Malone)

Kora Marwood was born the youngest to an impoverished family living in Waterdeep. Her father, Hogar, was a member of the guard and occasional longshoreman, and her mother cared for her four siblings and kept house in a shabby apartment in the Dock Ward. In the autumn of 1471, Kora’s mother, Samira, took a short-term field job with the Snobeedle Orchard and Meadery. In the midst of a work day, she unexpectedly gave birth to Kora in the middle of the field.

Life continued to be difficult for the Marwoods, and things finally fell apart for the family when Hogar died while working on a job on the docks, killed by a faulty bit of cargo netting and crushed to death by lumber imports from Chult. Samira, fearing for her inability to care for Kora and her siblings, brought them to the Temples for adoption.

Kora, only three years old at the time, remembers little of her mother and her family. While her siblings went to temples of Lathander and Ilmater, Kora was taken by the acolytes of Mystra. She was raised in the mysteries and teachings of Mystra, learning the histories of civilization, magic, and religion.  While life was safe and predictable, it was also boring. Kora began sneaking out at night to spend time in the city, and soon found herself enamored with a young man named Aseir Kalid, from Calimshan.

Aseir was an artist, working during the day in his father’s shop weaving and dyeing, and then working on his own projects when he had time. When he presented her with a small wooden painting of her one night, she decided that she was done with life in the temple and left shortly thereafter. She lived with him for six months, exploring the city with new eyes. It was in the Spring of 1486 that Aseir fell ill with the Weeping Plague, an illness that began with sores around the eyes and nose that wept a clear fluid, then quickly spread throughout the body, followed by a fever and, for many, death. Brought to Waterdeep from ports far away, the city respond quickly with quarantine. It was then that Kora was reunited with her brother Randal, who had become a priest of Ilmater. Despite his training and magical prowess, he was unable to save Aseir, and left Kora in quarantine to care for him until he passed.

Heartbroken, Kora returned to the temple, throwing herself at the feet of the Head Priest. She begged him to take her back, so that she could serve the temple as a lay healer. While Mystra is not inclined towards life and healing, magic serves all, and they taught her the healing arts. She took to it quickly, showing prowess and aptitude.

She was asked to accompany a pilgrimage to Myth Drannor as a healer and acolyte, and she attended to this. Along the way, she made the acquaintance of a dwarven ranger named Dain Balderk. Dain was initially standoffish with Kora, but after she had several opportunities to demonstrate her knowledge, diplomacy, and skill, he showed a grudging respect. Unfortunately, the arrival of the pilgrimage was preceded by destruction, as the city of the Netherese fell upon Myth Drannor, destroying it. Again.

The pilgrimage stayed at the Ruins of Myth Drannor for several months, caring for the wounded and exploring the wild magic of the disaster. It was during this time that Kora discovered that Balasha Asorio, one of the guides and foragers with the party, was actually an agent of the Zhentarim. Exposing the traitor forced a hasty ambush that had been in the making for some time. The Zhent were repelled, but Balasha escaped and Dain received a grievous wound to his back that would never heal completely. On the return trip to Waterdeep, Dain revealed himself as a Harper, and indoctrinated Kora into the faction.

When the pilgrimage at last returned to the city, Kora swore herself to the service of Mystra and began her life as a cleric in full. She now lives at the House of Wonder as a healer, acolyte, and doing odd jobs when asked. She serves mostly as an informational asset for the Harpers, looking to find those who look to destroy personal freedom and otherwise act out of evil. She still meets with Dain regularly, who acts as a mentor (and handler).

DESCRIPTION: Kora stands about 5’6”, tending towards a leaner frame; not scrawny, but more svelte. She has darker skin, that of a deep tan or of a more Mediterranean ethnicity, not quite brown, but not pale. Her hair is dark brown, to the point of appearing black unless under direct sunlight. Her face is more narrow than broad, with a rounded chin, high cheekbones, and green eyes.

When at home and not expecting trouble or a call to action, she wears a robe or a tunic with a simple shirt underneath and blue or black leggings. When out and about, she wears her armor with a tabbard or tunic over it, leather leggings/britches, a cloak, and her shield, mace, pack, and healer’s kit at her side. She dresses in white, silver, and blue, with red elements in linings and trim to reflect Mystra’s holy colors. Mystra’s holy symbol is emblazoned on her shield.

WHAT KORA KNOWS – THE ZHENTARIM:

• Zhentarim is a shadow organization of thieves, spies, assassins, and wizards that trades mercenaries and goods (including weapons) for profit.
• Their original base of power was among the Zhent people in the Moonsea region, primarily a place called Zhentil Keep.
• Long sought to gain political influence in Waterdeep, but the strength of the city’s Masked Lords, nobility, and professional guilds makes that difficult.
• In the late 14^th century (about 100 years ago), the founder of the Zhentarim (Manshoon) was killed and Zhentil Keep was razed. Zhentarim power was shattered, with the organization breaking down into many internecine factions.
• You’ve been trying to figure out details about the local Zhentarim for awhile, as their power and influence seems to be growing. Recently, however, there appears to have been a schism within the group.
• This schism is not widely known, because the Zhentarim are simultaneously fighting a gang war with the Xanathar Crime League, and that violence is capturing everyone’s attention. You know that that this gang war is the result of some provocative action taken by the new splinter group of the Zhentarim.

CREATING KORA

I’ve run games for and played games with Chris for a number of years now. His approach to character creation tends to be a quiet one: He likes to thoughtfully develop them in great detail, often working ahead of the group even in unfamiliar systems. In this case he was quite familiar with 5^th Edition and the Forgotten Realms, and so by the time we were getting some of the new players up on their feet, Kora was already a fully fledged character rich with details. In fact, virtually everything you see above was already basically in place by the time I tuned in on Kora for the first time.

PUBLIC INTEGRATION: There’s an anecdote that’s somewhere between gospel truth and urban legend that goes around both the movie and video game production circles. You have either a developer or a writer or a director or maybe an SFX house who’s giving a presentation to their producer or editor or investor. And so they very deliberately add one element to their presentation or edit or final render that they know is dumb: Like, maybe it’s a noir drama but there’s a shot of a guy holding a goose for no reason.

So their boss says, “Looks great, but I think you should lose the shot with the goose.” And our creator-hero takes the note and deletes the goose… because, of course, they never actually wanted the goose in the first place. The point of the story is that everybody in a decision process feels a need to give notes; either because they psychologically want to feel that they’ve “contributed” to the final product or because they need to justify their paycheck. If they just say “that’s good,” it’s not like they’ve actually done anything, right? The point of the dumb goose was to provide a lighting rod for the irrelevant-but-necessary comment they pathologically need to provide.

This is my long-winded way of saying: As a GM, don’t be the executive in this story.

If you’ve got a value-add, go for it! That’s the whole point of the “public integration” phase. In this case, Chris’ expertise and clear vision meant that Kora was already fully integrated into the setting.

No need to look the gift horse in the mouth. Ride on.

PRIVATE INTEGRATION: Chris had chosen for Kora to be a fledgling Harper and had also set up a violent history with the Zhentarim, so that bit of integration with two of the major factions of the campaign was also more-or-less automatically done for me. I simply swapped out the scripted Harper contact (Mirt) for the character that Chris had created (although I eventually brought Mirt back in as Dain’s boss; thus Kora’s background gave additional depth to the Harpers rather than vice versa).

(I guess maybe it is worth pointing out that swapping out elements you had planned and replacing them with what the players created is not only just as valid as adding relevant stuff to the PCs’ background, it’s probably MORE valid.)

You’ll note that, like Sarah, Chris got a “What You Know” handout for the Zhentarim. Some of the bullet points are duplicated (there’s no reason to rewrite or reword stuff you don’t have to), but others have unique information, slightly different information, or information with a different interpretation. The goal, of course, is for the two players to be able to actually swap information in-character. (If their handouts were perfect duplicates, the interaction is more likely to be one of them regurgitating everything know and the other player not getting any pay-off from their character’s knowledge. The unique information solves that problem. The information that slightly overlaps – or even contradicts! – provokes actual discussion between the players.)

The Snobeedle Orchard appears on the map of Waterdeep:

I had a huge version of this map hanging on the wall and Chris simply grabbed it off the map when fleshing out the story of Kora’s mother. This was a really cool opportunity, but I blew it: I completely missed the fact that Dasher Snobeedle, a member of the Snobeedle family, had become one of the wererats sent to harass the new owners of Trollskull Manor (i.e., the PCs).  I eventually noticed my oversight towards the end of the campaign when I started doing some meaningful development on Kora’s missing mother and was able to work it in. (You can read about that in more detail over here.)

BRINGING THE PARTY TOGETHER: As I mentioned in Part 1, Edana’s position as a fixer made her a natural fit for being the character who would connect the rest of the party with their contact at the Yawning Portal. Kora’s role as a Harper agent, however, also made sense for this role.

There were a few options we collectively considered, including:

• Kora somehow being undercover and investigating Edana. (Chris wasn’t really interested in playing Kora with a false identity, and this also suggested that Edana was currently involved in criminality, whereas Sarah was more interested in having her at the tail end of one of her respites.)
• Edana introducing half of the party to their contact and Kora introducing the other half. (The problem was that Kitti, Pashar, and Theren were already grouped up, so there was no “other half” for Kora to introduce.)

The final solution ended up being a somewhat convoluted web of connections: Upon arriving in Waterdeep, Kitti decided the best way she could help Pashar raise money was by joining the underground fight circuit. (I made a note to connect this to the underground fights that figure later in the campaign.) Asking around, they got pointed in the direction of Edana. When Edana realized how much money they really needed, told them to skip the fights and decided to take them to Kora, who had been putting the word around that she needed a crew.

“Mystra’s got money,” was Edana’s rationale. But it turned out the job wasn’t for the Temple of Mystra. Kora was freelancing. But the offer was better than nothing, so Kitti, Theren, and Pashar accepted. Edana decided to tag along for a little bit just to make sure everything was copacetic. (It seemed to her that young Kora was flying by the seat of her pants… She wasn’t wrong.)

And that’s when Kora took them all to the Yawning Portal to meet her contact.

Patrons of the Alexandrian can now download a collected edition of the Dragon Heist 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 used to run the campaign (as described in Part 7 of the Remix). These are presented in Word format for easy editing and re-arranging to your heart’s content.

THE COMPLETE COLLECTION

The Complete Collection contains every single article from the Dragon Heist Remix — all 25 parts, the original review, 8 addendums, and 4 Running the Campaign articles — that have been posted to the Alexandrian to date. It currently stands at 110,000 words and 318 pages.

In addition to updating the previous Preview Draft to include all of the Remix material (including corrections previously only available on the website), this release also reformats everything into the new-and-improved Alexandrian PDF format.

JUSTIN’S RUNNING FILES

This zip file contains the final campaign-ready files I prepared for actually running the campaign.

What’s the difference between this and what appeared on the website?

First, a lot of my general discussion about WHY things were designed the way they were designed have been stripped out. I’ve also removed a lot of the discussion about HOW various tools can be used during play. (I know how this stuff is supposed to be used… and so do you if you’ve read the whole series.)

Second, additional reference material has been added where appropriate to ease my mental load during play.

Third, light revisions based on actual play (some, but not all of which got reflected onto the web pages) have been added.

Fourth, and probably most imporantly, organization: The Remix series on the Alexandrian was written as a design-oriented discussion that ambitiously grew into a much more prodigious project than I had originally anticipated. The original organization was not designed for use at the table, and became even less useful for such as time went on.

The running files are organized for play: The first three chapters of play are clearly broken out, each heist is given its own focused file, and so forth. I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to just look at the file list and instantly grok how they’re meant to be used.

The only thing to particularly call out, I think, is that the props for each scenario can be found at the end of the file. You’ll note that these are files are “watermarked” with the numerical code for the chapter (for example, “DH1 Props”). Why? Well, there are a lot of props. Something I learned when running my Ptolus campaign (which has literally HUNDREDS of props) is that my players will often ask me questions about a prop which they received weeks, months, or even years earlier, and I won’t necessarily remember exactly where they got that specific handout. I learned to mark on the prop what scenario they came from (using a numeric code which doesn’t spoil anything for the players) so that I could quickly and easily locate my notes regarding the prop.

These files remain dependent on actually owning a copy of the Dragon Heist book, of course.

WHY’D THIS TAKE SO LONG?

People have been asking me for a collected edition of the Dragon Heist Remix for a little over a year. Why’d it take so long?

First, I was hoping to authoritatively finish the Remix before collecting everything. (I probably haven’t. I still have a list of value-add addendums that I’d like to create at some point.)

Second, and more importantly, the Dragon Heist Remix was the last major project I launched on the Alexandrian before completely revamping my workflow. (And I revamped it largely in response to the problems I had with the Remix.)

For over a decade, I had been drafting copy for the Alexandrian in a vanilla Word file. My basic process can honestly be traced even further back, to when I was writing reviews for RPGNet (circa 1998). It had evolved over time, but was fundamentally the same thing. This draft would include notes like “ADD LINK to [hyperlink]” and “[INSERT PIC HERE]”, which would be implemented only as I transferred the draft onto the website. As a result, the website became the “definitive” copy, and if I spotted errors or needed to make updates, I would make them directly to the website.

When I started my Patreon in 2015, this inadvertently led to a Rube Goldbergian process in which I would:

• Do my traditional draft in Word.
• Transfer the draft to the website to create the “definitive” version.
• Copy the definitive version off the website into a new Word file, reformat it, and generate the Patron-exclusive PDF.

In addition, I still considered the version on the website to be definitive, so when I noticed errors or needed to make updates, I would only make them on the website. The PDF version (and the Word document it was based on) was a “dead” document — it existed to be distributed once, but once it was forked it was done.

In March 2019, I revamped the formatting of the Patreon-exclusive PDFs. There were a couple reasons for this:

• It was prettier.
• I was reworking the format so that I could draft the definitive version of an essay in it and then, with far less effort, transfer it to WordPress before generating the PDF from the same file.

One source document instead of a sequential process with a dead fork.

What had finally motivated me to trash my twenty-year-old web-copy writing process was the Dragon Heist Remix. I wrote the whole Remix in a single Word file, but I was (a) following my old workflow and (b) uploading installments as they were complete (rather than waiting for the whole series to be done). This kind of “post as I’m writing” approach had become more common after launching my Patreon. Back when I wrote the Game Structures series, for example, I’d written and polished the entire series before posting it… which meant that there had been a 10 week gap in which no new content was appearing on the site and then the whole thing appeared in like a week and a half. That approach didn’t work with Patreon, so I could either abandon long series (bad idea) or figure out how to serialize their creation.

But this meant that each installment would be:

• Written up in my draft document.
• Posted to the website.
• And then, because the website was the definitive edition, any future changes or additions to those installments would only be made on the website, even while I was continuing to draft new content into the draft document.

Which, of course, meant that I did not have a file that contained the actual Remix. I had a weird reverse-palimpsest in which the earliest sections of the document grew more and more out of date as the Remix evolved.

My twenty-year-old process was no longer rickety. It was broken.

Thus, the fundamental revision.

The Avernus Remix, in particular, has benefited from this: The definitive version of the Remix is written up in a single file and I am scrupulous in making sure that any corrections on the website are simultaneously made in that document (and vice versa). This has allowed me to effortlessly produce regularly updated collected editions as the Remix has evolved. (Looks like I’ve done 15 of them to date.)

But the Dragon Heist Remix was still in a rather hopeless state. Back in 2019, as the core of the Remix was wrapping up, I did my best to provide something workable via my running files and a Preview Draft that attempted to correct my draft document as much as possible to reflect the “definitive” version on the website, but it was clearly a stopgap effort.

Creating the Complete Collection, however, meant pulling all the content back down from the website, reformatting it, and then proofreading it. This was not particularly difficult work, but it was incredibly time-consuming — remember the bit where I said it was 318 pages and 110,000 words? — particularly if it was going to be done right. (And what would be the point if it wasn’t done right?)

I actually started work on this at the end of February 2020, at the same time I started working on Dragon Heist: The Final Session. Checking my calendar, I see that was actually the same day I started live-tweeting my reaction to Descent Into Avernus. A couple weeks later I started the Avernus Remix… and then literally the day before the first Avernus post went live, we went into COVID-19 quarantine. Three days later, my wife was in the hospital with an infection from the surgery she’d had the week before, which would lead to another surgery, which would lead to a cancer diagnosis, which would lead to chemotherapy, which would…

Shit. That got dark fast.

But everything’s fine now (except the general background malaise of 2020), most especially my wife. I’ve been slowly chipping away at this project all along, so I’m very excited to finally be able to get these collected editions out to people who have been hoping to see them for a very long time now. And my apologies to anyone who wasn’t able to get them in time to be of use in their own campaign.