Alley - Waterdeep Dragon Heist - Encounter 1 (All Tiers)

Alley. A non-descript alley of Waterdeep. A old, small one-story windowless house is tucked in the middle of the alley and surrounded by taller buildings and shops - including the peculiar doll shop and in winter, cutter's pies.

Map Notes. Firstly, I'd like to lodge a complaint with the Waterdeep Carpenters guild. Or at the very least I'd like to make a donation to them for a few carpenter's squares as there were some odd shaped roofs in this map. In reality, stuff like this adds character and interest to the map, but those were not the easiest things to make.

There are 2 somewhat blank areas on the map in the sourcebook - the one at the east alley entrance and the other under the North arrow - I thought about making these plazas or walled spaces, but I decided that took away from the alley feel - day/night, regardless season, I wanted it to seem like a dark and intimidating place - there is a gradient sitting at street level that darkens towards the middle of the alley that further tries to convey this. The sourcebook mentioned 3 storey buildings surrounding the alley which would provide shade/natural darkness in both day and night and dropping a wide open plaza at either of these locations takes away the no-escape alley feel. So instead, we have some weird roofs (luckily 3 storeys gave me a bit of freedom here to make the shapes work better. For the night versions this also meant keeping the in-alley lighting to a minimum with just a single light above the shop entrance.

I extended the map 25 ft (5 squares) north to show the end of the building housing L2. It seemed a little odd to me that with the debris blocking the narrow passage to the west of L1 and the only door to L1 on the north side of the building that you don't actually see the entrance to that back alley. The map is also 10 ft wider on both sides (+4 squares total) to show just a little more street to better convey this is an alley and not the main road.

Included in the files below is the hired horse carriage being pulled by the 2 draft horses. This is a .png image that can be placed as a token wherever you'd like, and be moved if Willifort orders the driver to move the cart.  It is NOT embedded in the map like it is in the image above, if you download the files below.

Summer. For the random shop I decided to go with dolls. Why? Because it's weird, it'd be kind of creepy, everything found is going to be pretty useless for players, and well why not. Once your players enter the shop and through the small entry room, the main area of the shop has several display tables with a few dolls laid out on each. Along the west wall there are various doll clothes available for purchase; here and there around the room you notice a doll limb that has been misplaced. Heading north into the dollmakers workshop, you see an assortment of tools sprawled across the 2 tables/workstations. Magnifying glasses are affixed to each table to allow the dollmaker to complete detailed work. On the west wall there is a smaller desk that has been set up to paint where a couple of doll heads stare at you, body-less, from their resting place. The north half of this room is mostly crates for both outgoing doll shipments as well as incoming supplies. A messy table against the north wall contains a pile of doll body parts. This is of course replaced with the meat pie shop, Cuttle's Pies in winter.

Spring. Puddles, lots of puddles. Let's hope players don't wonder why there are so many puddles (they should be common sight in the spring now if you've been using my earlier maps), but even here there are a lot. Just blame it on an older part of town that didn't benefit from some advances in road and alley design which leads to extra puddles or something....until they step in a bear trap. Then you can tell them it was to hide bear traps. Given this mechanic for the combat, I wanted to keep options open for DMs to have a choice of where to place their bear traps within puddles - the result was lots of puddles. As with the other seasons we have the peculiar doll shop occupying L2 and the alley residence in L1.

Autumn. For Fenerus's House I relocated the sign of Xanathar (drawn in fresh blood) to the center of the kitchen floor as drawing on walls is not easily done in top down maps. I put a few more pools of blood on the floor (in full visibility) as that DC12 perception check for blood seems kind of pointless - there's literally a symbol drawn in blood on the floor (wall); finding a few more drops of blood is not going to crack this case. I'd recommend using an investigation check for knowing it's fresh (and perhaps medicine check is a better fit here?). As with the other seasons we have the peculiar doll shop occupying L2 and the alley residence in L1.

The apple cart is provided in the files below in both 'careening towards the party' version and 'recently runover the party and crashed' version. This is a .png image that you can use as a token to move around the map as required.

Winter. With winter, the lovely Sora Cuttle is the proprietor of L2 and gone are the creepy dolls. Cuttle's Pies serves up delicious meat pies (just don't ask about the meat). The entryway remains with coat racks, before entering the main pie shop with a few small tables for those who dine-in. The northernmost room of L2 is her prep area, with an added large fireplace for baking and additional counterspace and supplies for prep and clean.

For the Zhentarim Safehouse at L1, I added a chair and an extra pile of rope for the bound shield dwarf who is being held there. Now on to the big issue - when you read the encounter, players see Avareen in the front doorway exchanging the Stone with Vevette - except there is no front door. I checked the map, googled, and rechecked more times than I care to admit and I still have no idea how this is supposed to play out. As such, I've added a variant with a second door on the front of the residence at L1 to give DMs an optional way to run this encounter so that the bugbears and Avareen are at least on the same side of the building (filename has ADDED-DOOR in it, hard to miss). When Vevette scrambles up to the rooftops, she (assumingly) uses the pile of clutter to the west of L1 - I debated adding a ladder here but I saw an opportunity for DMs to delay the chase slightly by having a failed athletics/acrobatics check to scramble up the pile of debris instead of the pretty well guaranteed success of climbing a ladder (of course there are always ways to fail using a ladder...)

Files.  The zip files below are organized in 4 seasons and 3x folders per season: Roll20Free for smaller 70px images; Roll20Paid for larger 140px images; FoundryVTT for 100px dd2vtt files compatible with multiple VTTs. There is an additional folder for the Printable maps which are 140px gridded images in color and black and white.  

Alley - Waterdeep Dragon Heist is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC