2 out of 5 rating for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist
I was really excited to run this adventure. It sounded like a lot of fun, and the art is some of the best produced for 5e yet. Unfortunately, I am finding it to be an absolute nightmare. This adventure has turned out to be a hot mess that I feel does not deserve the rave reviews it's been getting.
For starters, the adventure suffers from an identity crisis on several fronts. It calls itself a "heist" when it is really about stopping one. It claims there's a treasure hoard that's "yours for the taking" when it actually expects you to hand it over to the authorities as if you'd found someone's lost wallet stuffed with cash. It also can't decide if it wants to be a linear action adventure or a sandboxy urban adventure.
There are also some serious pacing issues. The opening chapter is pretty action-packed, as are chapters three and four, but chapter two has pretty much no pacing whatsoever. It's mostly just a bunch of half-baked sidequest ideas, most of which technically can't even be run in chapter two since they're meant for characters of levels 3-5 (and, to be honest, given the action-packed nature of the later chapters, it's hard to see how the PCs will have time to do these later sidequests anyway).
What's more, these sidequests vary wildly in level-appropriateness. For instance, the 3rd level Harper quest involves a lone gazer in an old lady's shop. My group wasted the gazer in the sewer in chapter one, and they were only 1st level! Even a single 3rd level PC shouldn't have much trouble with this. What a joke! [I ended up replacing the gazer with a spectator, which still went down rather easily.]
On the flip side, PCs who join the Gray Hands are tasked at 5th level with infiltrating the Xanathar's lair in order to kill a mind flayer. Although the villains' lairs supposedly are designed for 5th level PCs, this could prove to be more than they can handle. [And what's more, it most likely won't happen until after the main adventure is finished -- possibly not even until you've begun a different adventure, since this one can technically end while the PCs are still only 4th level!]
On top of this hodge-podge of faction-related quests, the PCs are given a rundown old tavern. There is a page or two talking about how the PCs can get the tavern up and running again. Players are always wanting to own property. (At least, my players are. Several of them have commented that I'm *finally* letting them own property!) And yet, it seems like a total distraction in the overarching context of the adventure. In addition to the high cost (which my players nevertheless somehow managed to cover at 2nd level) of refurbishing the tavern, the focus of the adventure is elsewhere -- and the main plot can come to fruition in less time than it takes to make one roll on the Running a Business table. The tavern very much feels tacked-on.
Then there's the business rival. He's just a suggestion, and there's a little table showing his plan of attack, but there's really nothing to it. If you want to use it, you'll have to flesh it out yourself.
Chapter three starts with a bang, literally, and gets us back into story mode. This part seems mostly OK.
Chapter four is the most modular, with a bunch of "encounter chains" that depend on the chosen season/villain. Some are better than others. To me, autumn seemed like the most fun. However, in actual play, it turned out to be more than a little disappointing. The adventure heavily emphasizes obeying the law, so when my group got to the courthouse, they followed the rules, which resulted in the magister stealing their agency by interrogating the criminal on their behalf while they got bored sitting in the waiting room. (Yes, the module allows for players to break into the courthouse to speak with Fenerus themselves, but it also strongly discourages them from breaking the law.) Furthermore, they were rather frustrated that the drow got to the stone first, wondering aloud how they learned where the stone was, and then got even more frustrated when they discovered that there was really very little possibility of them stopping the drow and retrieving the stone. This encounter chain played out with the worst kinds of railroading on brazen display. [What's more, if the PCs somehow do manage to get their hands on the stone early, the book flat out instructs you to make them get rid of it so they have to go through the rest of the encounters before finally "earning" it at the end. This is railroading of the most egregious kind!]
Chapter four concludes with one of the most disappointing anticlimaxes I've yet seen. The "Vault of Dragons" dungeon is small and pedestrian. There's very little to it. And all the PCs really get to do is talk to the vault's guardian. Furthermore, depending on who the main villain is, which faction(s) the PCs have joined, and which high-level NPCs they've convinced to help, there's a real possibility that player agency will once again be snatched away from them as the NPCs resolve the adventure's finale themselves (e.g. Why would the Open Lord of Waterdeep let some low-level nobodies do the negotiating for her instead of doing it herself?). There's also a good chance you could wind up with a massive multi-directional battle full of fiddly, hard-to-run high-level NPCs and their minions. Or you could end up with no battle at all, as Laeral's mere presence is enough to make sure most of the villains are on their best behavior.
Next up are four chapters detailing the lairs and schemes of the four possible villains. These chapters are entirely optional. In fact, the book actually tells you outright that you might not use any of the material here! Say what?! [That aside, each lair is actually pretty cool and could easily be cut-and-pasted into another adventure with ease.]
The book ends with a neat little fluff piece about Waterdeep. This is probably the best thing in the book, and I'm super-glad they released it as a separate pdf on the DMs Guild.
Before starting this adventure, I had run the first two adventures in Tales from the Yawning Portal followed by Tomb of Annihilation. That was a fun but exhausting campaign, and I was struggling to figure out how to follow that up for my group's 11th level PCs. I felt like it was getting to be too much work.
Unfortunately, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is proving to be even more work. So much of it is just a rough sketch. In many places, it's more like an outline than an actual adventure!
Furthermore, there are lots of places where things don't make sense or various elements just don't line up or there are obvious gaps.
Take the Sea Maidens Faire, for example. Aside from the one parade they hold on the Day of Wonders (which won't even happen if you're not running the adventure in the autumn), what exactly do the people involved in the faire do? The third-party Guild Adept Waterdeep Encounters assumes they hold nightly carnivals on board the ships, but this is not corroborated by the adventure. As far as I can tell, they all just hang around waiting.
There are so many cool elements in the adventure that just aren't utilized to their full potential either: The street urchins who appear in much of the artwork, the Black Viper, even Lady Laeral herself. (Speaking of Laeral, why is she dressed in full plate and wielding a greatsword in both the silly Yawning Portal picture and her miniature? She never appears this way in the adventure text.)
What else? The opening encounter is pretty lame: a fistfight between a half-orc and some thugs. The PCs can try to intervene but don't really need to. Then a troll climbs up out of the well! Except the 1st level PCs aren't expected to deal with it. Durnan the immortal barkeeper with his magic sword of slicing will deal to the troll while the PCs can be brave heroes and kill a couple of stirges! Yay! They're so brave that the infamous Volo asks them to go find a foppish friend of his who's been missing for two days and yet is still being tortured when they finally catch up with him!
Stuff I like:
*The art is gorgeous
*The minimalist maps
*Volo's Waterdeep Enchiridion
I'm sure there was some other stuff but overall the bad really outweighs the good in this adventure.
It's definitely *not* an adventure I would recommend to a new DM. It is *not* at all easy to run and therefore cannot compete with Lost Mine of Phandelver as a good first adventure. I mean, I'm a pretty experienced DM, and even I'm finding it difficult to run, whereas I was practically able to run LMoP in my sleep. Heck, I’m even finding Storm King’s Thunder to be easier to run than Dragon Heist!