Wizards of the Coast

As is my wont with the D&D adventure books, I didn't read this cover to cover, but I did read the introduction and the first couple of chapters to get the overall vibe of the adventure. I liked how Ten-Towns gives a variety of starting places for the adventure and that there was a mechanism to allow the party's order of visiting the towns to affect their reputation elsewhere (e.g., residents of the first town the party visits might think the party is great, but the residents of the tenth show more town might feel put out that the party took so long to get around to that town's quest). I liked the poster map of Icewind Dale, too. But I'm probably not the target audience for this particular campaign: just reading about how dark and cold Icewind Dale is was making me feel sad, and I was apprehensive about some of the scary/horror elements that were hinted at. Or it might be fairer to say that I wouldn't want it to be my first campaign. With the right table, it would probably work. show less

It's not perfect, but it's very, very good.

This adventure is the best I've seen from Wizards of the Coast in terms of DM ease-of-use. I'm coming to this from Princes of the Apocalypse, which is a royal mess, and this is a breath of fresh air. While PotA requires massive amounts of page flipping simply to find the basic storyline and What's Happening, Dragon Heist instead includes everything the DM needs to know up front. If you're good at improvisation at the table, you truly could read the show more first chapter to get the main ideas and invent the rest on the fly.

That being said, there is plenty here to run with and you won't run out of content. The adventure is presented flexibly enough that you can modify it on the fly, but with enough information that you don't have to.

You like flowcharts? There are flowcharts.

Encounter maps? Lots of those (older style, not like the Mike Schley maps you might be used to if you've only played hardcover 5e adventures).

Encounter variety? Check.

Factions are useful, relevant and interesting; NPCs have personalities and motivations (though modern politics seeps its way into them); players have freedom to explore; villains are interesting; and the adventure is highly replayable.

Finally, you get Waterdeep. The City of Splendors. Personally, I'm coming to the adventure with very little prior lore knowledge. But there's enough background information presented here that I can see it being quite easy to make the city real and unique at the table.

In all, it's an introductory adventure that contains an incredible amount of useful and easy-to-use information for the DM. If your players are interested in an urban intrigue roleplay-heavy campaign, give it a shot. show less

This is a very detailed guide to the world of Eberron, a possible campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. It has a very different feel to the Forgotten Realms: more steampunk, more noir, more grittiness. I liked the little excerpts from newspapers of the various cities covered by the book, and there are some great ideas for adventures. It was rather a lot for me to take in, though, and I skimmed rather a lot of the last two chapters. I also find it mildly upsetting that the lightning rail show more trains are powered by binding elementals, and the overall gritty noir atmosphere is not something I want to be reading about these days. That said, this book did give me ideas for a possible character (yes, I am perpetually stuck on the Character Creation screen for D&D), so it was worth reading. Definitely felt it was worth borrowing from the library! show less

Compared to the other D&D supplement books I've read recently (Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, Volo's Guide to Monsters), I found this one harder to get through. Perhaps the focus on one type of creature made it more challenging; maybe I'm just not THAT interested in dragons (I mean, they are obviously cool, but perhaps a little dragon lore goes a long way for me). I did like the idea of a dragonborn ranger with the Drakewarden feature (hatching a little show more dragon from a geode or gemstone! SO CUTE). Maybe someday I'll make a character for that. show less