Waterdeep: Dragon Heist - Winter Thievery
This was an exciting weekend for me, because I finally published my first D&D adventure on DMsGuild!
DMsGuild, if you’ve never used it, is a place where the D&D community can legally buy and sell fanmade D&D material, like homebrew adventures or monsters, supplements to officially produced adventures, and so on. I found my first few adventures on there, when I started DMing.
Last year I started running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, which was Wizards of the Coast’s official campaign for 2018. It’s a bit different from any other official D&D adventure I’ve read; instead of a single big bad villain to defeat, there are four villain options for the DM to choose from, and instead of taking the players on a romping adventure through the wilderness, the entire story takes place inside the industrial city of Waterdeep.
When the book was announced I heard the word ‘heist’ and immediately went about wrapping up my current campaign so we could switch over. I made sure my players were OK with it, of course, and let them know ahead of time what we were getting into. Then I had to decide which of the four villain options I was going to go with in our game.
Each villain is tied to a different season, and the Winter villain is the one I ended up going with. However, the Fall villain was actually my immediate favorite (in fact, the only reason I didn’t use that villain is I thought he was TOO obviously my favorite, and I wanted my players to be surprised). With the way Dragon Heist is written, if you run the adventure the way the book is written your players never meet the other three villains, which I thought was a shame.
That’s where I get to Winter Thievery. I wanted my players to get to meet some of the other villains, without breaking the narrative of the game I was running, and I also wanted to give a couple other friends of mine a chance to play D&D with us. So I started writing Winter Thievery as a one-shot side story (working title: Dragon Claus Heist) a little over a year ago.
The framing story is loosely based on the Santa Claus story, since we played this at the end of last December. Hlal, a dragon goddess of wit and trickery, has announced that she’s planning on breaking into Waterdeep for winter solstice - a feat that should be impossible, since the city is protected by a dragonward. After breaking past the dragonward, she plans to drop copper dragonscales into 100 different chimneys around the city, as proof of her visit. The nobles of the city are inviting the lower classes to their parties in an effort to attract Hlal’s attention.
The players are thieves, working for the Xanathar Guild, who have been tasked with stealing as much as they can from the Cassalanter Villa during their party.
I don’t want to say much else about what happens in the game, in case any potential players get spoilers, but both games I ran last year got a really good response. Getting to run a proper heist was delightful, as was finally getting to play some of my favorite characters in the book.
I’ve spent the last couple months reformatting Winter Thievery to be published on DMsGuild. I like writing games, and I realized that building up my portfolio of games is the best way to find myself in a position where I can make money doing so. With that in mind, I’m currently planning additional seasonal one-shots within the Dragon Heist campaign, to give myself more ways to use the different villains. The Spring game, sans Xanathar, should be next.
Winter Thievery is only $1.95 on DMsGuild. It’s 13 pages and easily adaptable for any time frame. It’s also low combat, focusing more on stealth and subterfuge (though thieves who desire combat could easily make that happen). If you pick up a copy I’d love to hear any thoughts or critiques you may have!