Go to Part 0: Set-Up

Edana, Theren, Kora, and Pashar leave Trollskull Manor – the inn that they own – and head down to the Docks to get into position for their heist to steal Captain Zord’s crystal ball from the submersible attached to the bottom of the Eyecatcher.

They leave behind Kittisoth Ka’iter, the winged tiefling pirate who has been asked by Renaer Neverember to accompany him to the Shipwrights’ Ball. Renaer arrives in a personal carriage, dressed in practical finery and with his scarlet hair pulled back in a long plait down his back.

As Kitti steps up into the carriage, the rest of the group arrives dockside. Their plan is for Edana and Theren – one an elf of the city; the other an elf of the wilds – to go under the waves and infiltrate the Eyecatcher while Kora and Pashar provide whatever oversight they can from Dock Street.

As they’re making their final preparations, off to their right they can see there’s a lot of activity around the pier where the Sea Maidens Faire has set up. They see the carnival’s griffon take flight, signaling the start of a parade which marches off the end the pier. They’re worried for a moment that the parade will turn towards them, but instead it heads straight into the city towards Fish Street.

The dragon Zellifarn arrives, thrusting his head up out of the dock waters and plopping it down on top of the Dock Street retaining wall. “Are you ready?”

Swallowing their potions of invisibility and water breathing, Edana and Theren leapt down and grabbed on the wing-joints of the dragon. As they disappeared into the dark waters—

CUT TO: Renaer and Kitti’s carriage pulling up in front of Shipwright’s House.

Splitting the party is great. Swapping back and forth between simultaneous scenes is the easy mode for effective RPG pacing. This technique is described in more detail in The Art of Pacing, but generally speaking I’m looking to cut frequently from one set of action to the other.

You may see people express ideas similar to this as trying to “avoid players become bored” or something like that. If you’ve got a good game going, though, that generally won’t be true: The really good tables are entertaining not merely in participation but ALSO in the role of audience. In other words, if things are going well, players enjoy watching what happens in the game regardless of whether or not they’re in the current scene.

A good cut, in fact, is often about targeting that audience stance: The appeal of the cut for players not in the current scene is not primarily about them getting to act again; it’s in the suspense of wondering what happens next. When you’ve got a group firing on all cylinders and you pull it off right, you can get players wanting their scene to end because they have to know what happens next in the other scene.

And when it really works, you can get everyone at the table feeling that way all the time – not only engaged in their current scene, but driving the action forward and constantly looking forward to the next.

You can get that effect without cutting between simultaneous scenes, too. But, like I say, doing it with simultaneous scenes is the easy mode.

The carriage pulls up. Kitti looks up the long stairs toward’s Shipwright’s House: The stairs cut between the buildings facing Dock Street, leading up to the strange opulence of Shipwrights’ House where it’s nestled between the more typical dockside businesses and tenements.

Renaer took her arm and, as they began walking up the stairs, Kittisoth saw the griffon in the air off to her left. She reflected on her own encounter with one of the city’s griffon-riders a few days earlier.

The griffon is a crossover. As noted in The Art of Pacing, you want to enrich the experience of simultaneous scenes by including elements from one scene into the other. This is a very simple crossover: The PCs in Group A see the griffon leave the Docks. The PC in Group B sees the griffon flying into the city.

At this point I’m also triggering the Arrival. This is kind of a universal first beat in the party planning structure: It’s a chance to establish the geography of the event so that the players can orient themselves for the action that follows. I’ll often have the Arrival marked by some sort of big event or announcement, but in this case I don’t. This gives Kittisoth and Renaer a chance to chat with each other as they head up the stairs. Which they do, dropping a number of references to past events and in-jokes. And then…

Kittisoth had been watching the flight of the griffon. It seemed to have almost circled Shipwrights’ House and was now off to her right. “What’s with that griffon?”

Renaer looked up. “I think it’s part of the parade.”

And we CUT BACK TO Edana and Theren.

This was an effective place to cut because the players had earlier, out of character, joked that the Sea Maidens Faire parade might be going to Shipwrights’ House. So when Renaer announced that the griffon (which the group, although not Kittisoth, knew was part of the Sea Maidens Faire) was “part of the parade,” the entire group immediately realized that the crossover wasn’t just incidental; the two scenes that they had thought were going to be wholly separate affairs were, in fact, on a much more significant collision course.

So we move away from that revelation and give the audience/players a chance to really process the implications.

Meanwhile, under the Eyecatcher, Edana and Theren could now see the submersible that Zellifarn had told them about. Unfortunately, they couldn’t see any direct means of access, so they were going to have to figure out some way to infiltrate the submersible from the Eyecatcher.

Following a suggestion that Kittisoth had made, they decided to climb the anchor chain and enter the chain house. Invisible as they were, this was easily accomplished. The chain house had no immediately obvious egress, but a little exploration quickly revealed a concealed access hatch that let them out into a narrow passageway on the lower deck.

If you look at the maps of the Eyecatcher, there is no chain house. But there should be, right?

I already knew going into Dragon Heist that I was going to have to improvise around certain shortcomings from the maps. (They don’t include any windows. Windows are very important to a heist.) I had not thought about this particular absence, but this is just good advice in any case: The map is not necessarily the territory. If your players ask where the privy is, you didn’t put one on the map, but logically a privy should exist… figure out where the privy goes!

This is somewhat similar to what I discussed in “Whoops, Forgot the Wolf,” but the gist is that you’ll want to figure out how to integrate your errant chain house seamlessly. In this case I saw the compartment included for the whipstaff steerage and decided that the chain house would basically piggyback in that space.

As you can see, there’s no door there. Easy enough to add one (as it wouldn’t contradict any previous onscreen continuity), but just as easy to hypothesize that it’s actually a concealed access panel since this compartment would rarely need to be accessed.

Meanwhile, up on Dock Street, Pashar had also been watching the griffon circle towards Shipwrights’ House. He got a very bad premonition that something terrible was going to happen at the Ball, and there was little he could truly do to help here if anything went wrong on the Eyecatcher in any case. So he and Archimedes, his owl familiar, peeled off and headed towards the party to put eyes on Kitti’s date.

The other thing about cutting between scenes is that your players will often start playing through moments that don’t require your attention as the GM: While I was running the scouting and infiltration of the Eyecatcher with Edana and Theren, Pashar and Kora, who were sitting at the far end of the table, played through a detailed discussion of Pashar’s fears regarding the party and his decision to leave Kora alone.

Once again, this is great for pacing and also opens up opportunities for interactions that I, as the GM,  might have otherwise skipped over. Great stuff.

The Further Adventures of Pashar and Archimedes won’t enter into the chunk of the campaign I’m discussing here, but this did put them in position for some very funny play-by-play commentary on Kittisoth’s date with Renaer later on.

Back at Shipwrights’ House, Kitti and Renaer had circled off to one side of the large lawn that lay in front of the mansion. As they continued discussing Kitti’s recent history with griffons, a Chultan woman approached them. Renaer introduced her as Obaya Uday.

At this point, I’m letting the party begin to play itself. As I describe in Party Planning, most of this process boils down to:

• Which NPCs are talking to each other? (Consult your guest list.)
• Who might come over and join a conversation that the PCs are having? (Again, guest list.)
• What are they talking about? (Look at your topics of conversation.)

In this case I’m just looking at the guest list and pulling Obaya Uday out more or less at random. I put a checkmark next to her name, and then I look at her character write-up:

Obaya, a priest of Waukeen, has traveled from Chult to sponsor expeditions into Undermountain, with the goal of bringing its magical treasures back to her employer, the merchant prince Wakanga O’tamu of Port Nyanzaru.

(Normally I’d use the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template, but in this case I was running the party on-the-fly and so I’m just using Obaya’s write-up from the Dragon Heist book.)

What would Obaya talk about? Expeditions to Undermountain. Who’s present? Renaer. So contextualize the topic she’ll talk about to the characters who are present and…

“Have you given any thought to my proposal?” Obaya asked.

“I have,” Renaer said. “But I don’t think an expedition to Undermountain is something that my current schedule will allow for.”

And then relate it to the PCs, bringing them into the conversation (if they haven’t already injected themselves):

“You know who you should talk to?” Renaer added. “My friend here. She and her companions rescued me from Zhentarim, and they could do very well in Undermountain.”

Kitti blushed at the compliment.

Now I look at my guest list again and plan my next move while continuing to play through the current conversation. This sets me up to introduce the next element before the conversation ends. You don’t always have to do this, but it’s often more effective in a party to add a new element to an interaction rather than allowing the conversation to run its course to awkward silence.

(By the same token, you don’t want to never have a social interaction end so that the entire party just happens in one big conversation. Have NPCs excuse themselves. Give the PCs prompts to leave and engage action somewhere else. Cut away and, when you cut back, simply move past the end of the conversation and ask who they want to talk to next. But I digress.)

As Kitti and Obaya began discussing the details of Obaya’s proposal, Mirt the Moneylender circled in. Kittisoth’s friend Kora had recruited all of them into the ranks of the Harpers, and she had met Mirt as a Harper agent. It was partly on his behalf that they were attempting to shut down Captain Zord’s nimblewright operation.

Since there was no way that Kittisoth should know any of that, she wisely acted as if she had no idea who this lecherous man was and allowed herself to be introduced to him.

“I am so glad, Renaer,” Mirt declared, “that you’ve stopped chasing those thin waifs and found yourself a woman with… wings.”

Before anyone could respond to that, a trumpet sounded. Turning, Kitti saw that Captain Zord had just ridden up onto the lawn atop a polar bear. The griffon circled above. The Sea Maidens Faire had arrived.

Kitti pulled Renaer urgently off to one side and whispered fiercely. “That’s the guy with the automatons!”

CUT TO: Edana and Theren making their way through the Eyecatcher.

This is both a dramatically appropriate cliffhanger (everyone wants to know what will happen next), but also a great moment to cut away because I, as the GM, need a moment to figure out what Renaer’s response to this information is going to be.

I had, in no way, anticipated that this might be Kittisoth’s reaction to Captain Zord’s arrival. And I had no way of imagining what was about to happen as a result.

I love roleplaying games so much.

Go to Part 2

Back in 2015, I shared Game Structure: Party Planning. This is an incredibly flexible scenario structure that GMs can use to design and run large, dynamic social events without being overwhelmed by their complexity.

In getting ready to run one of these social events — whether it’s a bounty hunter trade conference, a political fundraiser, the Ilvermorny debutante ball, or a pleasure cruise to the center of a Hollow Earth on a flying ship — a GM can certainly pour a lot of prep into them. And the scenario structure is a powerful one which will reward that prep.

But I also included a quick ‘n dirty version of the structure that GMs can use with about 5 minutes of prep when they don’t have a lot of time to pour into it: If a big social soirée crops up in the middle of a session, you can call for a quick break and rapidly get your social event set up.

That’s the situation I found myself in while running Dragon Heist last weekend, and I thought it might be illuminating to walk through how it played out at the table.

(This post will contain copious spoilers for Dragon Heist.  I will do my best to make it comprehensible to those not familiar with the campaign, but check out the Alexandrian Remix if you’re feeling lost. Part 1 of the Remix alone should give you enough context to fully grok the proceedings.)

PROLOGUE TO THE OMEN COMING ON

Before we dive in, let’s take a moment to briefly establish the given circumstances of the situation.

The PCs — Kittisoth, Pashar, Kora, Edana, and Theren — had aggressively pursued their investigations into the nimblewrights which were being sold throughout Waterdeep. As such, they had (a) identified Captain Zord, the leader of a small fleet of carnival vessels based out of Luskan, as the person selling them and (b) discovered that Zord, or the Luskans he was working for, had implanted clairvoyant crystals into the nimblewrights and were using them to spy on various noble families and organizations throughout the city. They’d also made contact with a young dragon, Zellifarn, who had also been spying on Captain Zord, and could tell them that the crystal ball the clairvoyant crystals were bound to was located in a submersible underneath Zord’s flagship.

The group had also recently become invested as agents of the Harpers, and therefore felt honor bound to shut down Zord’s operation. As such, they began planning a heist to seize the crystal ball from Zord.

Largely by chance, the night they chose for their operation was Ches 25th. As noted here, this is also the night of the Shipwrights’ Ball, an event that was once a guild celebration, but which has now turned into one of the biggest social events of the Fleetswake festival season.

This is important because, elsewhere in the campaign, Kittisoth had been relentlessly flirting with Renaer Neverember (the young noble that the PCs had saved several weeks earlier). And I had decided that Renaer was going to ask Kittisoth to attend the Shipwrights’ Ball with him.

This was a great complication for the planning of their heist, so I fully embraced it.

All of which leads us up to the current situation:

• Theren and Edana, using a stockpile of invisibility and waterbreathing potions that the group had used all their resources to acquire, would infiltrate Captain Zord’s ship and steal the crystal ball.
• Pashar and Kora would provide what support they could from the shore (and be ready to step in if the shit hit the fan).
• Kittisoth would simultaneously go on a date with Renaer to the Shipwrights’ Ball.

Only problem? At least in part because I was running the campaign in big, marathon sessions, all of this had developed over the course of a single session. I didn’t have the Shipwrights’ Ball fully prepped, and I knew that — particularly with it playing out simultaneously with the Eyecatcher heist — I needed a strong structure for everything to play out to best effect.

So that’s when I called a 10 minute break, grabbed a sheet of paper, and quickly sketched out the Shipwrights’ Ball.

SET UP

The quick ‘n dirty version of party planning looks like this:

• Make a list of 3-5 places people can congregate
• Make a list of 10 characters
• Make a list of 5 events
• Make a list of 5 topics of conversation

And I basically ran straight down this list.

LOCATIONS: The Shipwrights’ Ball takes place at Shipwrights’ House. I took a few minutes to dig through the existing lore for the Shipwrights’ House hoping there would be some material to pilfer, but there wasn’t much. The House had been briefly described, a century earlier, in the City of Splendors boxed set as:

D19 Guild Hall: Shipwright’s House
2-story Class B building
HQ: Order of Master Shipwrights

As a Class B building, it’s a “larger, more successful and elaborate building,” and most likely freestanding. Briefly looking into the Order of Master Shipwrights, I discovered that in the 14th century they had been rivals with the Master Mariners’ Guild. I decided that, at some point in the last century, the Master Mariners’ Guild had been wiped out, and the Order of Master Shipwrights had grown rich indeed with a near-monopoly of shipbuilding in Waterdeep.

I stuck some Post-It flags to mark the appropriate pages in case I needed to reference this scant reference material and moved on.

On my single prep sheet, I quickly sketched out a “map” that basically looked like this:

Except, of course, sketched in pencil and with my sloppy handwriting scrawled across it.

I knew that the Bigass Staircase went down to Dock Street near Asteril’s Way (based on the 2nd Edition and 3rd Edition maps), which it turned out was surprisingly near to where I had placed the Eyecatcher (Zord’s flagship) in the previous session.

The Ballroom and Dinner Wing kind of speak for themselves. (The latter were a “wing” because I knew there would be lots of small, private dining areas and bars jutting off from the main dining hall, just in case that would be useful.) Galleon Hall was so called because it had about a half-dozen full-sized ships inside it as installation pieces. (You know that scene in Moana with all the ships in the cave? That was my visual touchstone. Except in a giant room of marble-encrusted wealth instead of a cave.) Private Rooms off to one side of the ballroom because it would give me smaller spaces for conversations to move into as necessary. And the Garden Terraces were 4-5 huge terraces jutting off the back of the building with winding paths leading through them; bioluminiscent plants would give the terraces a “Pandora from Avatar” kind of feel, and the whole complex would be hemmed in from the rest of the city by a “wall” of huge, dark, old-growth pine trees.

I didn’t write any of that down: Too time-consuming. A quick sketch-map for reference and the rough images that had been conjured up in my head were all that I needed. I had the 3-5 locations.

CHARACTERS: As I mentioned in Party Planning, “If the social event is growing organically out of game play, then you’ve probably already got the NPCs…” And that was definitely true here. Basically I just flipped through Dragon Heist and wrote down this list:

• Rubino Caswell – Guildmaster
• Renaer
• Laeral (207)
• Vajra (216)
• Jalester Silvermane (20)
• Obaya Uday (20)
• Cassalanters
• Mirt (211)
• Remalia Haventree (215)

The numbers in parentheses were page references to their write-ups. Several of these characters had already appeared in the campaign (Renaer, Jalester, Mirt) and several others I had already planned on introducing in the near future (Vajra, the Cassalanters). The only new character was the guildmaster.

As the party progressed, I would simply place a check mark next to each name as Kittisoth had an interaction with them. (It’s not that she wouldn’t be able to continue having additional interactions with them, but this helped me keep an eye on which characters I hadn’t used yet so that I could make sure that everyone got brought “onstage” at some point during the evening.)

EVENTS: At this point in the campaign, I knew that the Cassalanters needed to make contact with the PCs and invite them to a meeting at their villa. I decided this was as good a time as any for that to happen, and I quickly included that in a list that largely consisted of the Ball’s social agenda:

• Grand Promenade
• Rubino’s Speech
• Cassalanter’s Approach
• Zero-G Dancing (Vajra & Laeral)
• Dinner

I’d indicated Vajra & Laeral in parentheses because I had an image of those characters being introduced to Kittisoth while she was dancing with Renaer. (The zero-g dancing is exactly what it sounded like: A cool magical effect where everyone could literally dance their partners off their feet.) As it turned out, this is it NOT how Kittisoth ended up meeting Vajra the Blackstaff and Laeral the Open Lord of Waterdeep.

Now, honest to god, while I was planning all of this, I completely forgot that Captain Zord’s carnival was scheduled to perform a parade from their ships to the Shipwrights’ Ball! It was only after returning to the table and beginning to review my notes for the heist portion of the evening that I realized that the two events were going to feature this dramatic and unexpected crossover event.

This is one of those incredible moments of serendipity that can only really happen when you have a truly robust scenario prepared and you’re actively playing it hard for all its worth. You keep setting things in motion, and the billiard balls inevitably start colliding in amazing patterns that you never anticipated and had no way of planning.

In any case, I reached back over to my list and added “Sea Maidens Faire Parade” as the first entry.

TOPICS OF CONVERSATION: “If the social event is growing organically out of game play, then you’ve probably already got the NPCs and the topics of conversation…” This was also basically true. I quickly jotted down:

• Embezzlement [meaning Lord Dagult’s embezzlement of 500,000 dragons]
• Explosion [meaning the fireball that the PCs were investigating]
• Black Viper robberies [this had not yet come up in the campaign, but was part of my prep]

This wasn’t quite enough, though. You really want to have a range of topics that you can cycle through to keep a party alive. Also, it would be more interesting to have more topics that the PCs weren’t already aware of. AND it would be good to have some topics that weren’t directly related to the plot of the campaign. So I added two more kind of out of left field:

• Misra Tesper eloped to Daggerford (with a half-orc) [this whole thing, including Misra Tesper, was made up out of whole cloth; I pulled her last name from a list of Waterdeep noble families and I pulled her first name from the list of fantasy names that I keep on hand as a GM tool]
• Black Gold in Moonshae (extrusion of the Feydark) [meaning that a new Black Gold rush had begun in the Moonshae Isles; I’d previously pulled this really obscure reference to MOON1-3: Black Gold, a 4th Edition Living Forgotten Realms scenario, as an explanation for why a house was abandoned in Part 2: Gralhund Villa, and here I was simply flipping through the binder containing my prep notes for inspiration, saw the reference and decided to foreshadow the later development if it ever came up… which it probably wouldn’t, but it doesn’t really matter]

And that was it. I now had everything I needed to run the Shipwrights’ Ball on a single sheet of paper. As I mentioned, the whole thing took me less than 10 minutes. In fact, I’ve spent far more time explaining the whole process here than I did actually jotting down my lists at the time.

Next: Run-Time

Go to Part 1

Our time with Dragon Heist is drawing to a close. I have a few more Addendums I want to explore, and there are a number of Running the Campaign columns based on my actual play that I think are likely to provide useful insight and cool ideas. But the core of the Alexandrian Remix is complete.

When I wrote my original review of Dragon Heist in November last year, I did not anticipate that the campaign would become the central focus point of the Alexandrian for the next several months.

Even when I started writing the Alexandrian Remix of the campaign a few weeks later, I wasn’t expecting to still be writing about it in February. My rough plan was that it would run through December and wrap up. What happened?

One of the major shifts was the decision to do full adversary roster breakdowns for each heist in the campaign. This was basically essential for me actually running the campaign, and it turned out to be a great opportunity to introduce a wide swath of new GMs to these really powerful techniques. But it was also the seed which saw my original intention of more-or-less briefly saying, “Use this lair to run a heist!” grow into a much more expansive concept of breaking down the entire heist structure and showing how each lair could be fully adapted to that structure.

The Faction Outposts also outgrew their original scope. My plan had been to highlight how material from the chase sequence in Chapter 3 of the book could be repurposed, and my expectation had been that I could basically say, “Use the Autumn Version of this location.” In order to balance the number of outposts between each faction, however, I ended up adding several all-original locations to the campaign. The process of making the clue-progression of the campaign more robust also meant including significantly more material with each outpost.

For something that stuck much closer to the original spec, look at the Faction Response Teams: The Faction Outposts were supposed to look more like that, with one post for the outposts and one post for the response teams. (Although the response teams actually expanded, too, as I realized that response teams should be included for factions beyond the four villains.)

In the end, a feature that I had originally thought would be perhaps 10,000 words ended up being more than 55,000 words. Seeing this, some have suggested that my early comments that the Remix primarily represents what the campaign could have been and arguably should have been was in error. (That clearly adding all of this new material would have considerably expanded the size of the book.) I don’t think this is accurate; reshaping material (and explaining the design choices I was making) is often more costly in terms of word count.

I primarily mention this length, however, to explain why this final installment of the Remix is necessary.

You see, when the original intention was a fairly short series of a little over half a dozen posts, I decided that the best structural organization was design-oriented:

• Discuss general principles (how the factions are organized and the new, heist-oriented structure of the campaign)
• Introduce adversary rosters and a proto-heist (Gralhund Villa)
• The path from Gralhund Villa to the Eye Heists (Faction Outposts & Response Teams)
• The Eye Heists (the heist structure and the four villain lairs)
• Making the Three Clue Rule and node-based scenario design of the campaign more robust (revised revelation lists tying all of the material together)

Most of these, with the exception of the Eye Heists themselves, were visualized as being one post. In actual practice, only one of them – Gralhund Villa – actually achieved that goal, and the tail end of the series also saw feature creep (adding full remixes of both Finding Floon and the Nimblewright Investigation, plus reference timelines and faction reports).

As the length increased, the original intention became obfuscated. The material had also become more specific than originally intended, encouraging GMs to simply pick up the Alexandrian Remix and run it… except the material wasn’t actually organized for doing that. It was organized as a design discussion.

All of this created a lot of confusion and frustration, particularly as the series began attracting new readers who weren’t necessarily familiar with the Alexandrian or the discussions out of which the Remix had arisen.

RUN-TIME ORGANIZATION

As I’ve discussed these issues with people, there has been some confusion about what the distinction is between a design-oriented structure of the material and a run-time organization of the material.

Here’s what the final organization of the Remix series here at the Alexandrian looked like:

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

(To aid with navigation, this table of contents has also been added to the first post of the series now that it’s wrapping up.)

As noted, this was a design-oriented structure: I was grouping the material, and discussing the material, by the method of design. For example, the revision of the Floon investigation came almost last because it was part of the discussion about how to structure revelation lists in investigations throughout the campaign.

From a run-time perspective, of course, this makes no sense: The Floon investigation should come first because it’s the first thing that happens in the campaign, and it shouldn’t be grouped with the Nimblewright Investigation because they have virtually nothing to do with each other. So when I actually sat down to run the campaign, this was how I organized the material:

0.0 Campaign Overview
1.0 Finding Floon
2.0 Trollskull
3.0 Nimblewright Investigation
3.1 Gralhund Villa
4.1 Faction Response Teams
4.2 Faction Outposts
5.0 Heist Overview
5.1 Bregan D’Aerthe – Sea Maidens Faire
5.2 Cassalanter Estate
5.3 Xanathar’s Lair
5.4 Zhentarim – Kolat Towers
6.0 Brandath Crypts
6.1 The Vault

The difference is stark, and I suspect abundantly clear to anyone who has been reading the Alexandrian Remix.

(Patrons of the Alexandrian can find my own run-time files on Patreon as a patron-exclusive example of this.)

It should be noted that I largely don’t regret presenting the Alexandrian Remix in the way that I did: A design-oriented approach was valuable and allowed the presentation of material that would not have been possible in a run-time presentation. A run-time presentation, by its very nature, is stripped down and utilitarian, and I believe there was value in actually discussing and exploring the design choices I was making in a step-by-step fashion.

But if you’re actually looking to run the Alexandrian Remix (which I heartily recommend), you’d probably benefit from ripping it apart and putting it back together in a run-time organization. In many ways, this was always my intention: That GMs would take the Remix and then put in the work to finalize it into their own campaign.

HOW THE REMIX WORKS

To that end, allow me to wrap things up with a concise summary of the structure of the Dragon Heist campaign.

If you’re running Dragon Heist as it was published, the structure of the campaign looks like this:

This structure is lightly accented with contrapuntal Faction Missions unrelated to the core structure of the campaign, although the application of these missions is limited because the Nimblewright Investigation, Gralhund Villa, and subsequent chase sequence are likely compressed into a very limited span of time (probably 24-72 hours at most), which means that faction missions will largely occur between Finding Floon and the fireball explosion. (And, of course, the lairs are completely absent.)

If you’re using the Alexandrian Remix, on the other hand, then the macro-structure looks like this:

(click for larger version)

This macro-structure is accompanied by two strong contrapuntal elements: The Faction Missions and the Faction Response Teams. What is essentially the expansion of Act III of the campaign (the investigations culminating in the Eye Heists) also allows these contrapuntal elements to be more thoroughly interwoven with the core structure of the campaign. In other words, the PCs will be called upon to complete faction missions while continuing their ongoing investigation into Neverember’s Enigma, thus complicating the action and possibly requiring them to make some tough choices.

(It can also be argued that the event timeline of the Fleetswake & Waukeentide festivals also constitutes a third weak contrapuntal element.)

It should be noted that the distribution of clues throughout the Alexandrian Remix will belie the straight, parallel lines of investigation implied by the diagram above. For example, here’s what a tiny selection of possible investigatory paths looks like in detail:

But in terms of actually running the campaign, it’s the macro-structure you need to pay attention to: The PCs investigate a villainous faction. You point them at an outpost. The outpost will contain clues that point them to a lair. Performing a heist at the lair will get them the Eye in the lair. Repeat to obtain the other Eyes.

If the players are struggling, use one of the proactive elements of the campaign (their faction allies or the faction response teams) to dump a lead in their lap.

Beyond that, just follow the players’ lead and everything else will take care of itself.

A SIMPLE CHECKLIST

A number of GMs — particularly new GMs — have told me that the ideas of the Remix excite them, but they feel overwhelmed by its complexity. In practice, however, the Remix can all be boiled down into a very simple structure:

1. Are the PCs looking for a lead to one of the Eyes? If yes, pick a Faction Outpost and point them at it.

2. Did the PCs just piss off one of the Factions? If yes, pick a Faction Response Team and have them target the PCs.

3. Are the PCs floundering and don’t know what to do next? If yes, pick a Faction Response Team and have them target the PCs. (If you’re not sure how they might target the PCs, just have them show up and try to kill them.)

Repeat until the campaign is done.

A GUIDED TOUR

With all of  that in mind, let me just briefly walk you through the design-oriented posts on the website from a run-oriented perspective:

FIRST: “Finding Floon” is the beginning of the campaign. The revised “Finding Floon” investigation is Part 5B. An enhanced opening scene for the campaign is presented in Addendum: First Impressions.

SECOND: The PCs are rewarded with Trollskull Manor and are recruited into one or more factions. Spend some time allowing them to fix up their new home/business and run perhaps 1-3 faction missions. This is discussed briefly in Part 1C .

THIRD: The explosion happens. The Nimblewright Investigation which follows is covered in Part 5C and Part 5D.

FOURTH: The investigation leads them to Gralhund Villa. This scenario is given an adversary roster and other tweaks in Part 2.

FIFTH: After Gralhund Villa the PCs will either have the Stone of Golorr and need to find the Eyes (leading to the Eye Heists), or one of the factions will have obtained the Stone of Golorr and the PCs will need to find that (as an “Eye” Heist) and find the Eyes.

This is the core investigation loop: Point them at Faction Outposts (Part 3 and Part 3B) which will lead them to the Faction Lairs (Part 4).

SIXTH: With the Stone reconstituted, the PCs will be able to go to the Brandath Crypts (Part 6B) and access the Vault (Part 6C).

PROACTIVE ELEMENTS: In addition to the faction missions from the Dragon Heist book, use the Faction Response Teams (Part 3C and Part 3D) to actively bring the Grand Game to the PCs.

REFERENCE:

• Part 1: The Villains and Part 1B: Other Factions provide a high-level overview of the major players in Dragon Heist.
• Part 5: Clues and Timelines has a reference timeline and revelations pertaining to the macro-mysteries of the campaign.
• Part 5E: Outpost and Lair Revelation List has revelation lists you can use to track the primary investigation paths in detail.
• Part 6: Golorr Artifacts provides an overview of how the Stone of Golorr operates and how it can be used / has been used.

LEVELING UP

This is alluded to in various places through the Remix, but I recommend leveling up:

• After Chapter 1 (when they rescue Floon).
• After the Gralhund raid.
• After each of the heists.

There are four available heists, although the PCs may only need to do two or three of them. So the PCs will either be somewhere between 5^th and 7^th level going into the Vault. (In the case of my campaign, the PCs did all four heists, but we were on a race to the end and I forgot to have them level up. So they were 6^th level heading into the Vault.)

This means that heists done later will be easier. This seems to either provide a satisfying experience (“we’re getting better at this!”) or allows players to kick a heist they find particularly daunting or difficult down the road until they’re more powerful.

Check out Addendum: The Dragon of Dragon Heist for a detailed look at how the Vault itself can be handled.

A FOND FAREWELL

And so we come to the end of the Alexandrian Remix of Dragon Heist.

If the Remix has brought you to the Alexandrian for the first time, I hope you’ll stick around. Not only for more Dragon Heist material (as I mentioned above, there are several addendums and Running the Campaign columns that are likely to still appear over the next few weeks), but for all the other cool stuff we do here. If you haven’t checked out Gamemastery 101, it’s a great place to take a deep dive into a lot of the material that underlies the work I’ve been doing on Dragon Heist.

If you liked what I did with this remix, you can check out a very different one with the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies for the Trail of Cthulhu RPG. The Eternal Lies remix is much less about fixing the structrure of the campaign and much more about enhancing it – adding 300 + props, 150+ diorama elements, 450+ pages and 130,000+ words (including two completely new scenarios) to an already amazing campaign by Will Hindmarch, Jeff Tidball, and Jeremy Keller.

As you get your Dragon Heist remix campaigns to the table, I hope you’ll also come back here and share your own stories, tips, and modifications. Not only because I love hearing stories like that, but because I’m a big believer in GMs sharing their lore. It benefits the community and it encourages you to think deeply about your own campaigns, which is the first step towards improving your craft as a Game Master.

Good gaming, my friends!

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

Forgotten Realms: A Textual History of the Yawning Portal

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

PDF – Go to Part 1

This PDF contains “fancy” versions of the props from the Alexandrian Remix of Dragon Heist. Some of these may be useful for Dragon Heist campaigns that aren’t using the Alexandrian Remix, but probably not many of them. (Most of the props take the form of clues added in the process of making the campaign more robust and interconnected.)

These props are all designed to be simply printed out on letter-sized white paper. Many of them, however, could benefit from being printed out on alternative/more evocative paper stocks with their headings removed.

HANDWRITING REFERENCE

Each NPC has a distinct “handwriting” used in their props. Writers do not always identify themselves in their writing. This reference can be used by the GM as needed.

SUGGESTED PROPS

In addition to the props found in the PDF,there are additional props which I prepared for my own campaign but which I can’t duplicate here without stepping over the bounds of fair use. These additional props, primarily featuring cool visual references, are listed here. In creating these props for your own table, you may find the Fantasy Grounds package for Dragon Heist useful. (It gives you raw image files that you can either use directly or modify using Photoshop/GIMP with greater ease than trying to scan material from the printed book.) In other cases, the images are not specific to the campaign and you may be able to find suitable images through a Google Image search.

In some cases, the PDF includes a link to an online piece of art that I used that you may find similarly useful.

Go to Part 1

A BRIEFING FOR XANATHAR CONCERNING THE GRAND GAME

I am very sorry that we have failed you lord Xanathar. You should not have been surprised by the revelations of the emissaries of the Zhentarim.

The litany of what we now know—

The Eye you hold is one of Three which belong to the Stone.

The Eye which should have been yours has been taken from Neverember’s get by Manshoon to Kolat Towers. We currently seek to capture a Zhentarim lieutenant and take possession of one of the pass-amulets which would allow us access to the Towers. Unfortunately, Manshoon’s agents are well-trained and have either evaded our attempts or destroyed their amulets before we could secure them. Through Nihiloor’s enhanced interrogations, however, we have ascertained blueprints for the Towers which will prove essential when it comes to time to take that which by right belongs to you.

The disposition of the Final Eye is uncertain to us at this time.

The gnome Dalakhar was an agent of Lord Neverember, seeking to reclaim Neverember’s Engima, which you had by rights taken from our former Open Lord.

The Enigma is, in fact, the Stone of Golorr. I have agents en route to Candlekeep to delve deeper into its secrets. The Stone once belonged to the Abolethic Sovereignty, and was reputedly stolen from the Vaults of the Floating City of Xxiphu by Mask, the Lord of Shadows. As a Xxiphuan Artifact, it is likely that the Stone predates the creation of Toril itself, granting it, within the circles of mysticism, a position of primacy. Its true powers, and thus the reason why Neverember sought to blind it, are unclear to us, but from a position of primacy it would be capable of feats impossible to duplicate even by Mystra herself in this Age.

(You will want to attach a set of blueprints for the Kolat Towers.)

MANSHOON’S REPORT ON THE GRAND GAME

Ritual of the Stone of Golorr

The use of the Stone to magically eliminate a memory or piece of knowledge from the realms of Abeir-Toril requires a special casting of the legend lore rite which requires twelve hours to perform. In addition, one must possess a second Abolethic artifact, a small tetrahedron of red jade which I am certain is still held by Lord Dagult in Neverwinter.

During the ritual, burn incenses infused with the blood of an aboleth. The sides of the tetrahedron will unfold, revealing slots into which four ivory strips may be inserted. The Stone is then placed within the tetrahedron and the sides will close upon it.

As the ritual is completed, the tetrahedron will open once more, revealing the Stone of Golorr as it releases a burst of psionic energy. This energy will refract through the person attuned to the Stone, translating the knowledge they focus upon and erasing it from the known world.

The Stone of Golorr has been blinded by Lord Dagult.

The Neverwinter Eye was obtained from the Protector’s Enclave in Neverwinter, but was taken by Xanathar’s treachery. It remains in the beholder’s possession.

The Waterdeep Eye has been taken from Renaer Neverember and secured within the library’s Astral Vault.

It is apparent, based on interrogations of their impish agents, that the Cassalanters possess the third eye, although it is uncertain where the Cassalanter Eye originated. Perhaps Lord Dagult entrusted it to them?

Go to Part 7: How the Remix Works