It's Always Sunny In Watedeep

From Pop-Culture Uncovered's Tabletop Tuesday

  My D&D group swept through chapter one of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist in a calamitous wave of havoc and mayhem that was contained just enough to keep them out of jail and with it, an early end to the campaign. Fortunately, logic prevailed and rather than go all in on "murder hobo" mode they were intrigued with their reward for rescuing one of Volo's pals (and for holding the son of a disgraced lord hostage) and they temporarily suspended their capering.   Before you read further, this is your one and only spoiler alert. I am about to reveal some minor (I think) details about Chapter Two of Dragon Heist. If you are going to play this adventure out or run it and you don't want anything ruined for you stop reading. Or don't. I can't stop you.   Ok, so here's the thing about Chapter Two. I, personally, I think it's actually pretty boring. At least the early exploration of Trollskull Manor is kind of unremarkable. The players are given the deed to a rundown manor that also happens to be haunted by the poltergeist of the manor's former owner. They have many options of dealing with the entity and the book points out a few options that normal, rational player characters would take. My group was understandably jittery given the events of Chapter One which I am the first to admit I turned up to 11. The players that have had me as a DM before went into this wary of me and the new players were now stupidly suspicious of everything. Normally this wouldn't bother me but going into this rather unremarkable encounter with a party already on edge was going to turn something simple into a gruelling chore.   I decided to still run with the setup of a dilapidated manor with a ghost but for some reason I decided to make this part of the story not only go out of the heist genre but... well, things got dark. Fast.   Running a party through a dungeon, or in this case a house, plagued with ghosts is hardly novel and it takes some skill as a DM or even as a writer to make that sort of encounter interesting, much less scary. I decided that this ghost, known for keeping the place clean and spotless in life would be trying to keep the party out of the house not because he thought they would make it a mess but rather, to keep anyone from uncovering what he had really been up to before he died.   I think it is also prudent of me at this point to warn you, dear reader, that I am a true crime JUNKIE and that what this innkeeper had done in life was derived from actual crimes and a smidge of arcane magic. So it ended up being a weird episode of 'Forensic Files' except the killer was a necromancer the whole time. So, if you have a weak stomach for blood, gore and that sort of thing, stop reading go to Netflix and turn on 'Watership Down.' It has cute little bunny rabbits. You'll love it.   So anyway, I had the maps of each floor of the mansion and no descriptions that were critical to the core of this encounter, that being its a beat up old house with a neat-freak poltergeist roaming about inside. The best written adventures will be set up like this. They allow for a certain amount of shoot from the hip, free form description for the DM so if you ever decide to run a prewritten module, don't be afraid to lean into the lack of description and let things get weird.   As my players explored the manor, I filled each room with a series of puzzles based around mirrors or oil paintings facing or not facing each other. The inhouse poltergeist did some obligatory ghost things. Tossing objects, making loud footsteps and writing cryptic phrases in dust. As they explored, I rewarded their successful attempts at these puzzles to find a series of notes, personal journals, magic tomes etc. that indicated that the last innkeeper had not taken the death of his wife well. Indeed, they found a series of letters from her relatives asking when the funeral services would be held. They were elves of course, who (in my setting) cremate their dead. So findings these letters sent their insides turning.   As they made their way to the top floors they found, underneath some sheets suspended from the ceiling some of his early versions of his undead wife puppet. While there were three sheets in the top most "lab" the first two contained only some haphazardly strung together puppet bits which, while horrifying were non-functioning. It was in the basement that our dwarf used an ability that I rarely ever see called upon, that of being able to detect the age, construction method and type of stonework around them. She spotted a newer wall of brick put up by unskilled hands. This split the party for longer than I would have thought. They argued for some time as to whether or not they should excavate and see what was behind the wall. In the end, half decided to rip apart the brickwork while the others investigated some old, sealed barrels in the cellar which the module says were merely denatured spirits. Which they were... of course when they opened them they found some picked parts of elven bodies at about the same time as they found the half-flesh, half-puppet monster that had been walled up "alive" so much so that they could see wear her wooden fingers had scratched themselves to splinters and etched the stone in an old cooling room beneath the tavern's common room.   They immediately sent word to the nearest church of Corellon Larethian for a full ritual cleansing and removal of the remains of what turned out to be about a dozen people. They refused to spend the following week at the house. This proved advantageous since they went back to the estate of one of the player's families where they are unofficially keeping Lord Neverember's son, hostage and they were able to get some of the funds needed to renovate their house of horrors. What they don't know yet is that a lot of that money will now have to go to paying the clerics of Corellon Larethian for their services and will leave little to pay for any meaningful transformation of the old Trullskull Manor.   When the session was over, my players breathed a very real sigh of relief. They confessed that this story of the necromancer innkeeper and his wife had them legitimately scared and in suspense. I didn't plan on it, it just sort of happened. I think that perhaps because I didn't spend the adventure chasing them through the house with ghosts or a flesh golem and that getting any progress in this part of the story required solving relatively simple puzzles which revealed more and more pieces of a sick, though tragic love story rather than just chasing them from room to room demanding initiative rolls every time. Could that have happened? Sure. I didn't have anything written in stone but with a little abstraction and willingness to let the players own fear and suspicious write their story for them we had an incredibly fun session with very little dice rolling.   The moral of this story? There isn't one. This is just a suggestion from me as a veteran DM that no matter the type of adventure you're running, in this case a heist, you should always be ready and willing to surprise your players with elements of something they aren't expecting. I mean, who expects a 'House of Wax' segue in the middle of 'Ocean's Eleven?' Nobody. That's what makes doing it so fun.