Love’s Fickle Arrow is an investigative, urban adventure for level 3 characters set during the events of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, although I see no issue with adapting it for use as a stand-alone adventure. In it, the characters are hired to protect a famous bard from an assassin, as he participates in performances of the play “Love’s Fickle Arrow”.

This is an impressive adventure. I haven’t been able to run it, but its innovative structure makes me very curious as to how it plays. In a recent blog post, I wrote about designing situations rather than a strict encounter-based adventure, and this is a good example of the former. However, having said that, there’s a lot of work to do on the DM’s side of things.

The adventure presents the NPCs and their motivations, as well as the main location where the adventure takes place. It then describes a set of events that occur for each of the performances of the play. In each performance, events occur that can engage the players; not all are relevant to the investigation, but they provide a glimpse into the life of the city, and provide the challenge of the adventure: How do the characters determine what’s important to stopping the assassin?

I love this structure. It’s so fascinating. It also appears challenging to run. You’ll need to do a fair bit of improvising and reacting to the players’ actions. I feel that the adventure enables such improvisation, but prereading is essential. I would hate trying to run this on the fly!

The adventure’s formatting is quite basic, but it is well written.

If you love running role-playing-heavy scenarios and bringing life to multiple NPCs, this is a scenario well worth investigating. Love’s Fickle Arrow makes the world around the investigation a living, breathing affair, and I highly recommend it!