Here's What's In That $500 Beadle & Grimm Platinum Edition of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist

If you've been wondering what you'll get for your $500, wonder no more! Footage and images straight from Gen Con reveal the expensive box's contents!

Click the image to watch a video!

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What you get in the box:

• Waterdeep: Dragon Heist broken down into 8 smaller books
• A selection of important maps and all the major artwork
• A custom DM Screen -- "Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is a city-based adventure, and that means tons of NPCs for a DM to keep track of. The exclusive Platinum Edition DM screen will be packed with quick reference guides to help you keep track of who’s who, who’s aligned with whom, and where they’re likely to be found. On the player side, we feature some of our favorite artwork from the module."
• 22 miniatures (2 large, 20 regular sized) including the beholder shown below.
• A range of battle maps.
• A stack of encounter cards including stats for creatures and more.
• Custom handouts including letters, journals, newspapers, and more.
• Two large canvas maps, one of Waterdeep and the other secret for some reason.
• A dragon coin.
• Other stuff they can't tell us about.

DM Screen

Beholder Miniature

Faction Objects

Volo's Guide to Waterdeep

Encounter Cards

Canvas Maps

Dragon Coins

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[R_J_K75]

Thats my point, but I forget off hand WD has 150K off season and up 5x that in summer. Thats alot of ppl. Summer time tent city.

 

[Hussar]

If you look at historical cities, they really are small - walking distances. Rome was tiny compared to a modern city. Ankor Wat (or the city that surrounded it) was about a million people at its height and was still only a couple of miles across.

When you don't have to account for cars, trucks and buses, and your roads are basically not much wider than hallways, you can cram a LOT of people into a very small space. Never minding that only the very richest of people would have personal rooms. Most buildings would house multiple families living in one or two room homes.

 

[R_J_K75]

I agree. So 1/2 mile wide x 1 mile across seems about right?

 

[Hussar]

Well, it depends. Rome around 300 AD was about 800 thousand people and the Aurelian Walls which circumnavigated the city coverd about 13 square kilometers, about 5 square miles. So, that's roughly 2x2.5 miles. Give or take. At least, that's what my 5 minutes of Google research found.

So, yeah, it really depends on which source you take for Waterdeeps' population. I've seen all sorts of estimates, depending on which sourcebook you want to pick up.

 

[Storyteller Hero]

[*]Other stuff they can't tell us about.

A few lucky buyers may find golden tickets that will gain them entry to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

Shhhh.

 

[Ymdar]

Too expensive.

 

[R_J_K75]

Interesting that I never noticed that the population of Waterdeep varied from sourcebook to source book. Ill have to look into that.

 

[timbannock]

I bought the "Rats of Waterdeep" off DMs Guild. Ran it for a group of players, 2 Ive been playing with for 20-some years, another about 5 and 2 players who have never played before. Its a short and sweet adventure, but has a few flaws. The beauty of it was the brevity and all stats were included. Actually lead to one one side quest with only 2 PCs. For the $5 it was a good starting adventure for a campaign, we had a lot of fun which is the most important thing. There were some famous one-liners which came out off that. I had one PC tipping over the statue at thevtemple of rot telling the infected ward folk, "Youre worshipping Garbage. Im just trying to clean up the streets".

My point being I think short, affordable, non linear adventures are the way to go from WotC. Some suggested encounters, stat blocks for NPCs/Monsters, suggested rewards, spells and magical items in about 20 pages would be great at the base price point. Then after that add additional things you can buy ala carte as you like. Im never going to pay for for some Whaterdavian Toal pieces, But Id buy the map. I like that WotC is only releasing a few products a year to prevent edition bloat but I think they need to re-evaluate this "all or nothing" approach; third party companies included. Best survey they could run is how much is the gaming population willing to spend and on what type of product?

I think they are already doing exactly that, but rather than in survey form, that's the point of DMsGuild existing and (again, finally) having POD options. And to a lesser degree, having items cross-sold on DnDBeyond (Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron) and the various cartographer's own sites (maps for sale from Mike Schley, for instance). Instead of just asking, they are throwing this stuff out there and seeing what sells.

...and IMHO, they probably already have their answer. Production cost-wise, WOTC can publish big campaign books that double as campaign settings and compilations of maps/encounters/new monsters/new items that DMs can and will rip apart for their own use. They know this, and they are cool with it, and it's way better as an investment considering the cost to produce; shorter stuff that doesn't sell as well is going to be a money and time sink for their designers and production chain. Meanwhile, their Adventurers League stuff consistently sells well (whether or not people use AL rules) as short adventures and are written by their own staff and "the chosen few" (DMsGuild Adepts). On top of that, the rest of DMsGuild product is primarily made up of adventures, so that's where folks can get their shorter adventures that by nature are geared toward a huge audience. Not each adventure, per se, but because there are so many authors pumping out so much stuff, there's something there for everyone if you look for it. (And the best way to look for it is adventurelookup.com, which has a billion great filters and features a hefty amount -- though hardly all -- of the official *and* DMsGuild content.)

It'd be nice if they consolidated where you can find this stuff, or maybe did some kind of more "official" support for adventurelookup.com so that people actually knew about it and it was well-funded and updated even more regularly, but this is what we've got for now, and it's pretty darn good if you don't mind having 3 or 4 bookmarks in your web browser of choice ;-)

 

[R_J_K75]

I think they are already doing exactly that, but rather than in survey form, that's the point of DMsGuild existing and (again, finally) having POD options. And to a lesser degree, having items cross-sold on DnDBeyond (Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron) and the various cartographer's own sites (maps for sale from Mike Schley, for instance). Instead of just asking, they are throwing this stuff out there and seeing what sells.

...and IMHO, they probably already have their answer. Production cost-wise, WOTC can publish big campaign books that double as campaign settings and compilations of maps/encounters/new monsters/new items that DMs can and will rip apart for their own use. They know this, and they are cool with it, and it's way better as an investment considering the cost to produce; shorter stuff that doesn't sell as well is going to be a money and time sink for their designers and production chain. Meanwhile, their Adventurers League stuff consistently sells well (whether or not people use AL rules) as short adventures and are written by their own staff and "the chosen few" (DMsGuild Adepts). On top of that, the rest of DMsGuild product is primarily made up of adventures, so that's where folks can get their shorter adventures that by nature are geared toward a huge audience. Not each adventure, per se, but because there are so many authors pumping out so much stuff, there's something there for everyone if you look for it. (And the best way to look for it is adventurelookup.com, which has a billion great filters and features a hefty amount -- though hardly all -- of the official *and* DMsGuild content.)

It'd be nice if they consolidated where you can find this stuff, or maybe did some kind of more "official" support for adventurelookup.com so that people actually knew about it and it was well-funded and updated even more regularly, but this is what we've got for now, and it's pretty darn good if you don't mind having 3 or 4 bookmarks in your web browser of choice ;-)

You make some good points Id not thought of. Will definitely checkout that website. Got me thinking about a good book/.pdf/POD would be an updated 5e version of the old 1e-2e book of lairs single page one-shot adventures. But Im sure its out there if I look hard enough

 

[timbannock]

You make some good points Id not thought of. Will definitely checkout that website. Got me thinking about a good book/.pdf/POD would be an updated 5e version of the old 1e-2e book of lairs single page one-shot adventures. But Im sure its out there if I look hard enough

For something very much like that, check out Jeff Stevens "Encounters in the..." series: Encounters in the Savage Jungles, ...Savage Cities, etc. He specializes in getting writers to collaborate and offer encounters and maps for those releases (I'm in Encounters in the Savage Jungles), so they have a great range of adventure types, encounter types, inspirations, and locales. Helps make them exceptionally easy to drop in anywhere. Some are a single encounter or even single NPC/monster, some are a small dungeon, a single shop, or (like mine) some are a short adventure unto themselves.