Waterdeep: Dark Winter
The Dungeons & Dragons city of Waterdeep on the Sword Coast is a solid favourite of mine. When Waterdeep: Dragon Heist was released, I delved into the book and ended up with two groups to GM for.
For one of them, I ran the adventure essentially ‘by-the-book’. At least for the first session. I love expanding on settings and storylines when I GM, customising things to the players and creating new NPCs and storylets for them to consider.
The other group got a heavily customised version of the campaign- locations, NPCs, story paths, items… And it was great to be able to write custom things for my friends and players to make it more meaningful to them.
Though the campaign never saw its end (I lost my confidence as a GM for a while), I have been slowly re-working things and converting it to a possible Pathfinder 2 system setting.
What’s in a name?
‘Dark Winter’ is so-called because it’s set in the winter season. Which is a feature of the pre-written Waterdeep: Dragon Heist campaign; there are variants of the storyline based on what season it is set in. Which is great for replayability, and was something that made it less repetitive for me as a GM running it for two groups concurrently.
The ‘dark’ part. See, my online tabletop group are all friends I’ve made purely through tabletop, so we’ve gotten to know the kind of vibes and themes that we get on with and what we prefer to avoid. So I felt comfortable adding a few more darker elements to the game than the original pre-written material could afford to do. But still never anything that would make my players uncomfortable.
Casters Collection - an ‘NPC building’
Not a building of NPCs. The building itself IS an NPC. It has a stat block, it has abilities, it has a permanently-prepared held action. I can’t remember what god-awful time of night or early morning I had that idea, but I ran with it. It’s a magic shop, it would stand to reason that some of the latent magical essence of the things being made there would seep into the very building itself.
So what does it MEAN? Well, for my players, it meant that any unnecessary violence enacted upon them while within the walls of Casters caused the whole building to shake. It would also trigger if any of the players critically failed at an activity that could have harmful consequences to themselves or the building as a whole, but thankfully that never had to happen.
Casters had secrets and hidden elements in every single room. My players never found all of them, though they did find all of the ‘big’ ones (and a good amount of the ‘lesser’ ones). It’s been fun re-writing them in a new way now I’m turning the exploration of Casters into a playable interactive narrative.
“Bring the three keys - the silent sound, the living weapon, the image of innocence”