This weekend is the Stream of Many Eyes (hashtag #SOMEDND ), where the new adventure for Dungeons & Dragons is revealed.

Which means Wizards has officially confirmed the new adventure is Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. I’m writing this as they talk about it – I had no foreknowledge of its content.

It functions as an urban toolbox, which means that it’s going to be useful for running adventures in Waterdeep even if you aren’t using the adventure’s storyline. It includes a lot of new downtime abilities, with material that links into Xanathar’s Guide to Everything.

The adventure has four potential villains, and is intended to be replayable.

This is something that very much excites me. My home campaign has been using more downtime activities recently, as I attempt to make the world more “real” for me and my players. A typical D&D game in my hands has a lot of the adventurers reacting to other events. Every so often, I want the players to lead the action, for the quests they go based on their character’s desires. Downtime activities help build into that; which ones are used is a choice the PCs make rather than the DM dictating things. And there are downtime activities that lead to further adventures.

One feature of the campaign that will very much test me is the amount of role-playing in it. This is for two reasons. The first is that I’m not the most natural of role-playing DMs, which is also the case for many of my players. Our role-playing (acting and improvisational) abilities aren’t brilliant. So, I’m going to have to spend more time crafting role-playing situations so that my players have an easier time of dealing with them, and that I have a better skeleton to work with.

The second is due to where I’ll play this adventure. I love my local game store. It’s brilliant. But, it’s not big enough for all the RPG players we get these days. It’s often very noisy. Role-playing when you can’t hear the other players is painful. I may have to drop the number of players we can cater to in this upcoming season, just so we can do it justice.

One feature of the adventure that will excite a lot of my friends is that their characters get to own a tavern. This is something we did in one of my home Greyhawk games. When that campaign ended and a new one started, the new PCs were patrons of the old PCs’s tavern! With any luck, that’s something like that will get to happen in your games as well.

Release date? September 6^th is the WPN release, and September 18^th in other stores.

Best news of the day? James Introcaso and James Haeck worked on the book! I’m very excited about what they’ve added to it!