A few months ago, I began my journey as a DM by deciding to run the prewritten module Waterdeep Dragon Heist. As we now begin to wrap up the campaign, I wanted to start recapping my experience from each chapter in order to document my thoughts, and potentially give some insight for other DMs interested in the module. Before starting the first session I ran a session zero and my players rolled up a Bard, a Paladin, a Rogue, and a Warlock. I found the “Setting Expectations” section of this session zero article to be very useful, it does a great job of explaining what style of adventure WDH is, and what types of characters would suit it.
Chapter One of Waterdeep Dragon Heist took us a little over two sessions that lasted four hours each. I ran the chapter mostly as written, however I made two key changes. The most important change I made was letting the party reach level two midway through the chapter. My first session ended as the party was ready to leave the Skewered Dragon and this served as a good spot to level up. Leveling the party early was a suggestion I frequently saw for this chapter, and I found it made the later combat encounters in the chapter less stressful.
The only other change I made while running the chapter was adding a clue to who the villain of the campaign is, which I hoped would tie the chapter into the story more. For my campaign I chose The Cassalanters as my villain, to hint at this I added some ceremonial robes masks and daggers to the offices in the Zhentarim Hideout.
Overall I would say that Chapter One of WDH was rather straight forward to run. I wouldn’t recommend trying to add too much extra content to the chapter, as the main goal should be to get the players ready for Chapter Two, where I feel the campaign really begins.