Now that my players completed their fireball investigation, and had their sights set on the Stone of Golorr, I was ready to start the final chapter of Waterdeep Dragon Heist. In Chapter Four, players should be chasing after the Stone of Golorr, hunting down the vault keys, and entering the Vault of Dragons. In my campaign, this was the chapter where I made the most changes from what is written in the book, so I am excited to organize my thoughts on it all.
Chasing After the Stone
To be honest, I was not a fan of several ideas in the Summer encounter chain. This is the encounter chain that I ended up using for my campaign:
Mausoleum -> Converted Windmill -> Alley -> The Brandath Crypts
I liked the storyline presented in the Cassalanter Mausoleum, and ran this mostly as written. However, the rooftop chase encounter seemed like filler to me, so I cut it from my encounter chain. From there, I decided to end my encounter chain with the alley. The street urchin and courthouse encounters were not that interesting to me, so it made sense to end after the alley. On paper this looks like a small encounter chain, but in play it still felt like a chase.
The Vault Keys
The vault keys frustrated me when I first read about them, it seemed unnecessary that the Stone of Golorr itself was not the key to enter the Vault of Dragons. For my campaign, I replaced collecting the vault keys with the missing eye plot from The Alexandrian Remix. When my party retrieved The Stone of Golorr it was missing one of its eyes, which I gave to my chosen villain, the Cassalanters. In my last article, I described how I went about Running Cassalanter Villa, so I won’t cover that again here.
The Vault of Dragons
As you may have guessed from my encounter chain, I moved the location of the Vault of Dragons to underneath The Brandath Crypts from The Alexandrian Remix. I was much more excited by the story of this location when compared to other options, I would highly recommend looking into it even if you are not running the remix.
Otherwise, I wanted to give my players a fun fight to end the campaign with. For me, fighting a dragon sounded more fun than talking to one, so I restructured the story a bit to accommodate this. In my campaign, rather than tricking a gold dragon into guarding his gold, Lord Neverember bribed a red dragon into doing it. This seemed reasonable to me, a red dragon is selfish, and a young one might accept a job to guard the gold just to have a pile of gold to sit on. To represent this, I swapped Aurinax from using an adult gold dragon statblock to a CR appropriate young dragon statblock. For my level five party, a young copper dragon was a reasonable challenge, I just made sure his breath weapon did fire damage instead of acid damage.
After a fun final boss fight, my players and I have finally completed Waterdeep Dragon Heist! I want to finish off this series with my final thoughts and review of the module, but that will be a future post.