My Roll20/Discord replay of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is continuing very enjoyably. The characters are more involved with the factions than when I’ve previously run it, and they’re doing other side quests as well.

I’m going to keep them involved with the factions and other quests not related to the main plot of Dragon Heist for longer. Having a complex city life can make for great play, especially when the characters get used to interacting with the city’s personages.

As I’ve noted before, the main change I’ve made to the adventure is to remove the gift of a run-down tavern. Instead, the characters have free room and board with the Yawning Portal. This keeps them in the adventurer mode (rather than suddenly shifting gears to be business owners) and also means they’re in a place everyone goes.

Seriously: there’s a LOT of NPCs visiting the Yawning Portal and having the PCs there all the time is so useful.

I’ve also instituted a quest board. The D&D Essentials Kit implements the quest board nicely, and I’m using a similar idea here. There’s one difference – not all the quests are level-appropriate! I’ve warned the players, so they know to pay attention to the descriptions (and the rewards).

Here are the three quests that were on the board for this session:

“Seek adventurers to recover lost goods. Inquire with Sewena at the Costumer’s Hall, corner of the High Road and Spendthrift Alley in the Trade’s Ward. 50 gp reward!”

“Adventurers needed to help guard a shipment of fine goods on a delivery to the Wayfarer’s Inn on the High Road (expected three-day journey). Contact Brackvort in the Yawning Portal. Reward: 100 gold pieces.”

“Wanted – Adventurers to help with a wilderness situation. Ability to create fire recommended. Contact Lubos of House Brossfeather for more details. 500 gold piece reward!”

The last? That would have been a tough mission for level 2 characters to engage in! But it’ll stick around until they think they can cover it.

When you add those potential quests to the faction-based quests available to the PCs (there were three active quests at the beginning of the session, for the Harpers, Order of the Gauntlet and the Gray Hands), they had a lot of choice as to what to do next.

My development of the new quests was light – each took only a few paragraphs – but there was enough there so I could expand according to which the PCs did and what interested them in the quest.

In addition, I also determined a few random encounters for them on the streets of Waterdeep. Falling tiles from a decrepit building. Was it an attack? It seemed not – but the characters have been interfering with the plans of criminal guilds, so it could be possible. And then they interposed themselves between a High Priest of Mask and a city watchman who had seen him steal something. He, of course, denied it. How do you deal with that? I didn’t know, and so let the situation unfold as the players intervened on the side of order (while the rogue of the party talked in thieves’ cant to the priest!)

I haven’t made this clear to the players yet, but they’ll likely discover it soon enough: Not all the missions they’ll be asked to do are on the side of law and weal. There are some quest-givers that may be trying to deceive them!

With so much going on, it’s tremendously important to connect a lot of this. Thus, when the group met with Sewena to help recover the goods, they found they’d been taken by the Zhentarim – one of the major factions in the story of Dragon Heist. They apprehended the Zhents responsible and gave them to the city watch – and the watchman they gave them to happened to be the person who was later confronted by the High Priest of Mask. The mission for Mirt? It led to the Yawning Portal, and a character they’d met before – as well as one new one (both of these Zhentarim). Things link together.

Certainly not everything will but keeping a view to the feuding forces of the Xanathar’s Guild and the Zhentarim is going to be useful as the strands come together for more of the plot. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll integrate it yet, but it’ll be another session or two before I do.