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Waterdeep: Dragon Heist
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<blockquote data-quote="Loren the GM" data-source="post: 7497437" data-attributes="member: 6882721"><p><strong>3 out of 5 rating for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist</strong></p><p></p><p><span style="color: #111111">[FONT=&quot]Waterdeep: Dragon Heist provides a solid level 1-5 adventure. The city setting is very evocative, with lots of hooks for great stories. Over the course of four main chapters (all of which are very strong, although chapter 2 has some caveats I'll get to in a bit), the adventure sets up a treasure hunt in the city. It provides four different villains that can oppose your adventuring party, and each villain receives a custom written version of events for your players to work through. There is also a great section at the end that gives an overview of the city, providing nice details to help understand life and major locations in Waterdeep. And to cap it all off, there is a beautiful fold out map in the back of the book of Waterdeep that is very well crafted.[/FONT]</span></p><p></p><p><span style="color: #111111">[FONT=&quot]Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with this book. First, despite the promising title of "Dragon Heist," there is no real heist contained in this adventure. Finding the hidden treasure smacks more of Indiana Jones than it does Ocean's 11. It is still very entertaining, but for those seeking something a little different, this will require quite a lot of customization to bring it in-line with expectations.[/FONT]</span></p><p></p><p>[FONT=Amazon Ember, Arial, sans-serif]<span style="color: #111111">The next issue is the maps. In this edition, Wizards has switched cartographers from Mike Schley to Dyson Logos. This is polarizing to say the least. Schley's maps were rich in detail and color, but some people complain that they were overly complicated and difficult to understand or reproduce at the table. Logos' new maps are the opposite of that style. They are spartan and bare bones sketches with very little detail or nuance. I personally much prefer the style of Schley over Logos (especially for online or digital tabletop play), and feel the new maps fall short in what is otherwise a premium product. Your mileage will vary depending on how you feel about the styles. Either way, this feels at a minimum like WotC made a mistake in their pre-release marketing by not setting expectations, and at the most like they made a poor design choice for their product. (Please note, these criticisms are not aimed at Dyson directly. I appreciate the work of Dyson for the gaming community over the years, and he is certainly a master craftsman of his style of maps. His trove of free maps available on his website are a bounty of riches for tabletop DM's. However, to me his maps feel out of place in the context of the book they find themselves in - they are rather more suited to Adventurer League or DM's Guild type titles and feel out of place in a premium product that has already established such rich visuals through the previous volumes.)</span>[/FONT]</p><p></p><p><span style="color: #111111">[FONT=&quot]Villains and their lairs each get a separate chapter in the book, which is great. These lairs are very well designed with lots of fun options, and are maybe the closest thing to a heist the whole book has. The only downside is that if your party sticks to the adventure as written, they will likely never venture one foot even remotely close to these lairs. These are kind of last-resort settings (or options for a resourceful DM who wants to customize the adventure), a way to wrap things up if your party fails at the main "heist."[/FONT]</span></p><p></p><p><span style="color: #111111">[FONT=&quot]Last but not least is the page count. Clocking in at 224 pages, it is well short of the 256 pages used for Tomb of Annihilation. It feels like those last 32 pages could have really been used to flesh out the city of Waterdeep beyond the basic primer that is included, or to really flesh out Chapter 2. The second chapter of the book details the running of a business that the players will receive, and also focuses on side quests for the various factions that are represented in Waterdeep. Each quest is a paragraph of description that sets up a problem and includes the DC of the success roll to solve whatever problem is presented. While I love the idea of this section and can't wait to run players through this open-world portion of the adventure (which seems like the whole point of being in a city setting), it is also a bit disappointing that more pages weren't devoted to developing the city or those faction quests more so this part of the adventure could really open up. Someone cynical could assume that WotC might have kept this section light as a push for DLC on the DM's Guild. Hopefully that isn't the case, as a city setting already has the potential for unlimited amounts of expansion.[/FONT]</span></p><p></p><p><span style="color: #111111">[FONT=&quot]All in all, I really do like this book. It has a few major flaws that are worth pointing out, but it is still a case of the good out-weighing the bad. The city feels lively in the pages, and is a great setting for an adventuring party to start in. It is a good adventure to take a party from level 1-5, providing a good alternative to experienced DM's who want something different than Lost Mines of Phandelver from the starter set. This book is a good start for a new campaign (especially for moving on to Storm King's Thunder or Princes of the Apocalypse, both of which it could very easily flow into) but it could have been Starter Set Version 2 good with a bit more care and work. As is, it would be hard to recommend to new DM's or those looking for a complete out-of-the-box experience. For anyone else, it should be a good adventure - just be prepared as DM to do a little more heavy lifting than you might have expected to fill in for some of the shortcomings.[/FONT]</span></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Loren the GM, post: 7497437, member: 6882721"] [b]3 out of 5 rating for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist[/b] [COLOR=#111111][FONT="]Waterdeep: Dragon Heist provides a solid level 1-5 adventure. The city setting is very evocative, with lots of hooks for great stories. Over the course of four main chapters (all of which are very strong, although chapter 2 has some caveats I'll get to in a bit), the adventure sets up a treasure hunt in the city. It provides four different villains that can oppose your adventuring party, and each villain receives a custom written version of events for your players to work through. There is also a great section at the end that gives an overview of the city, providing nice details to help understand life and major locations in Waterdeep. And to cap it all off, there is a beautiful fold out map in the back of the book of Waterdeep that is very well crafted.[/FONT][/COLOR] [COLOR=#111111][FONT="]Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with this book. First, despite the promising title of "Dragon Heist," there is no real heist contained in this adventure. Finding the hidden treasure smacks more of Indiana Jones than it does Ocean's 11. It is still very entertaining, but for those seeking something a little different, this will require quite a lot of customization to bring it in-line with expectations.[/FONT][/COLOR] [FONT=Amazon Ember, Arial, sans-serif][COLOR=#111111]The next issue is the maps. In this edition, Wizards has switched cartographers from Mike Schley to Dyson Logos. This is polarizing to say the least. Schley's maps were rich in detail and color, but some people complain that they were overly complicated and difficult to understand or reproduce at the table. Logos' new maps are the opposite of that style. They are spartan and bare bones sketches with very little detail or nuance. I personally much prefer the style of Schley over Logos (especially for online or digital tabletop play), and feel the new maps fall short in what is otherwise a premium product. Your mileage will vary depending on how you feel about the styles. Either way, this feels at a minimum like WotC made a mistake in their pre-release marketing by not setting expectations, and at the most like they made a poor design choice for their product. (Please note, these criticisms are not aimed at Dyson directly. I appreciate the work of Dyson for the gaming community over the years, and he is certainly a master craftsman of his style of maps. His trove of free maps available on his website are a bounty of riches for tabletop DM's. However, to me his maps feel out of place in the context of the book they find themselves in - they are rather more suited to Adventurer League or DM's Guild type titles and feel out of place in a premium product that has already established such rich visuals through the previous volumes.)[/COLOR][/FONT] [COLOR=#111111][FONT="]Villains and their lairs each get a separate chapter in the book, which is great. These lairs are very well designed with lots of fun options, and are maybe the closest thing to a heist the whole book has. The only downside is that if your party sticks to the adventure as written, they will likely never venture one foot even remotely close to these lairs. These are kind of last-resort settings (or options for a resourceful DM who wants to customize the adventure), a way to wrap things up if your party fails at the main "heist."[/FONT][/COLOR] [COLOR=#111111][FONT="]Last but not least is the page count. Clocking in at 224 pages, it is well short of the 256 pages used for Tomb of Annihilation. It feels like those last 32 pages could have really been used to flesh out the city of Waterdeep beyond the basic primer that is included, or to really flesh out Chapter 2. The second chapter of the book details the running of a business that the players will receive, and also focuses on side quests for the various factions that are represented in Waterdeep. Each quest is a paragraph of description that sets up a problem and includes the DC of the success roll to solve whatever problem is presented. While I love the idea of this section and can't wait to run players through this open-world portion of the adventure (which seems like the whole point of being in a city setting), it is also a bit disappointing that more pages weren't devoted to developing the city or those faction quests more so this part of the adventure could really open up. Someone cynical could assume that WotC might have kept this section light as a push for DLC on the DM's Guild. Hopefully that isn't the case, as a city setting already has the potential for unlimited amounts of expansion.[/FONT][/COLOR] [COLOR=#111111][FONT="]All in all, I really do like this book. It has a few major flaws that are worth pointing out, but it is still a case of the good out-weighing the bad. The city feels lively in the pages, and is a great setting for an adventuring party to start in. It is a good adventure to take a party from level 1-5, providing a good alternative to experienced DM's who want something different than Lost Mines of Phandelver from the starter set. This book is a good start for a new campaign (especially for moving on to Storm King's Thunder or Princes of the Apocalypse, both of which it could very easily flow into) but it could have been Starter Set Version 2 good with a bit more care and work. As is, it would be hard to recommend to new DM's or those looking for a complete out-of-the-box experience. For anyone else, it should be a good adventure - just be prepared as DM to do a little more heavy lifting than you might have expected to fill in for some of the shortcomings.[/FONT][/COLOR] [/QUOTE]
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