D&D Waterdeep Dragon Heist HC (Dungeons & Dragons)

This review includes spoilers.The good: the basic setting is truly excellent. A former lord of Waterdeep embezzled a massive amount of gold, and the PCs are hunting for a sentient stone that holds the secret about where the gold is hidden. At the same time, several nefarious groups in Waterdeep are also hunting for the stone/gold. So there's a great ticking clock element. The authors have also done a superb job bringing Waterdeep to life, with more than a dozen truly outstanding (often funny) nonplayer characters. For example, the players are likely: to own a tavern run by a moody poltergeist, to run afoul of the law embodied in the person of spluttering Capt. Hyustus Staget (and then to be tried for crimes in court), to be targeted by the slanderous accusations of a shrewd owner of a competing tavern, to be invited to join one of several really cool factions vying for power in Waterdeep (including factions run by the drow, a beholder, and devil-worshipers), and to discover that several powerful Waterdhavian nobles are deceitful or worse. My players -- particularly the ones that like role-playing as opposed to combat -- have absolutely loved all of these parts of the adventure. Even more than in Phandalin, Waterdeep feels like a place for new adventurers to make a real name for themselves in a complex, fully realized world. In this Waterdeep reminds me of Barovia in Curse of Strahd and the Underdark in Out of the Abyss. Perhaps it's not quite as memorable as either of those places, but it's close, and that's a MAJOR achievement in my view.The bad is that this book is difficult to DM. The main problem is that, as others have pointed out, the book primarily describes not places with maps to be explored by the players, but sequences of events for the players to witness, where the players are fated to remain one step behind the stone as various people run off with it through Waterdeep. I thought this setup denied the players any real chance to change how the story ends. In the case of my own campaign, my players did something really smart and got the stone before they were "supposed" to, which obviated my using a lot of the most interesting material in the book. Another little problem for DMs: I think urban environments, because they are full of NPCs who must be given interesting things to say to move the plotline along incrementally, are just inherently more difficult to DM than most monster lairs. The book also has lots of material that is bound to be discarded -- unless the DM comes up with her own way of integrating it into what's going on her game. In a way this is good, because I feel kind of proud that I've been able to make the material my own, but it is time consuming. Final quibble: players who like combat will at times get a little antsy, as it's hard to pull out swords on the streets of an apparently "civilized" place like Waterdeep.Anyway, overall I say it's still five stars. Clearly better than a good solid adventure like Storm King's Thunder, because more original and fully fleshed out, but slightly inferior to my favorites, which are Out of the Abyss and Strahd. It's more interesting than Lost Mines of Phandelver for 1st level characters, which is high praise as Lost Mines is really good. But at the same time, unlike Lost Mines, the DM must be prepared to do a lot of work!

Before my copy of Dragon Heist arrived in the mail, I was skeptical. I'd heard the DM or players have to choose which season the campaign begins and which villains the players face off against. To me, that sounded like too much randomness for an adventure module.Boy, was I wrong. Dragon Heist takes everything I loved about the Lost Mine of Phandelver and pumped it full of intrigue, compelling back-stories, and a cityscape that is teeming with possibilities. Chris Perkins did a masterful job of curating the most interesting historical details about Waterdeep, the City of Splendors, while breathing new life into its old grandeur. In terms of balancing a linear storyline with creative freedom for DMs to improvise, Dragon Heist lands right in the sweet spot, giving DMs many colorful NPCs to choose from, faction intrigues and quests to stir up players' involvement in the heist, and a very well conceived relationship between the book's four major villains.If there is one thing to grouse about, it's the very simple black-and-white maps. At first, they struck me as amateurish and lacking detail. But, after using them in play, I changed my mind. The rudimentary just-the-facts depictions of the game's important locations are very handy and user-friendly.Polygon called Dragon Heist the "state of the art" in tabletop roleplaying. I tend to agree.

Very fun game for beginners. Book came in very good condition. Bought a used copy of the book. Which prompted me to buy more d & d books.

The absolute biggest problem I have found with these D&D adventures is they take so much time and work to run correctly; however, this book is not at all like that. This book is very easy to read, run, and play on the fly.I usually run my own campaigns but with 5e have started with these modules as I read that I requires less time and I want to play D&D but life happens and its hard to plan and flesh out stuff as much. I have only ran parts of other modules and ended up just derailing myself and making it my own as I found that running modules proficiently takes even more time than making up my own sessions. When running other 5e pre-made adventures I found that unless I read sections of the book many times and memorized tons of pages it was hard to run without stopping and flipping back and forth to find the maps or block text I needed. Rage of demons was a nightmare starting with so many NPC, trying to get across how evil the drow are, and let the players plan on escape methods.This book is so easy to follow all you need is to: read the text before chapter one, pick who you want to be the bad guy (the book is written so you can change this whenever), give the players the laws, share the map with the players, and you can basically run the rest of the adventure on the fly. The adventure can be played TONS of ways with different antagonist, exploring any or non of the lairs at any time, the book even briefly details players possibly getting court cases thrown out if they get in trouble with the law. However ideally the book wants to be played with very little combat and is VERY RP focused.For groups that want more role playing and perhaps even a general town/hub area for future campaigns this book is a must. I think you could with the correct group have the PC do the entire campaign without doing any combat at all and manage to still have a super engaging story told!