The ‘Dead Waterdeep’ was never my initial plan for the campaign. Since my first time ever running a D&D game, in July 2009, I had a concept for a story taking place within a city like the one Waterdeep is described as. It would involve a highly influential elfin figure, who uses his stature to manipulate politics within the city. He would create strong racial divides within the city, gaining much support from the elves, and attempt to convert the city into his own personal elfin stronghold. As the group I was a part of was swapping Dungeon Master with each game however, I didn’t have the opportunity to run the storyline for more than a single game. I used the basic premise as the narrative for my turn as DM, but it came across more as an introduction for the villain rather than a story within itself - by the end of the session, the manipulative elf Pelial was utterly loathed by the party, and became an established villain, popping up in other games.
While I did enjoy the reaction Pelial garnered, I was never satisfied with the story’s execution - its scope having been far narrower than I would have liked, due to squeezing the whole event into about five or six hours. However, several months later, opportunity knocked. A new group of players came together, with the intention that I would be a permanent DM. Realising I had my chance to explore the full potential of the story; I decided to run it as the plot for my campaign’s entire heroic tier.
Unfortunately, this group was ill-fated. While we did make it more than half-way through the story-line, even making it that far was difficult. After the first few games, the group’s tank resigned - his work was piling up, and free time became an issue. When another member was due to become a father, games became fewer, further apart, and eventually stopped altogether. We simply couldn’t find a time that suited everyone to get together. Frustrated by the split, I lost interest in telling the story - to me, it had run its course. I didn’t want to re-run all of the set-up without any reason to believe that the same thing wouldn’t happen again. Thus, my Waterdeep campaign was dead.
In late 2010, however, two of the players proposed that we find another friend of ours who could join us, and continue the storyline with a three-person party, instead of the hard-to-organise five-person. Not wanting to contrive some reason for three members of the party to suddenly be replaced by one complete stranger, yet also not wanting to reboot the entire concept, I devised a new plan: Start a new campaign, set in the same world as the original, but taking place years later. The old story would be part of the history of this new one, with events having played out exactly as I imagined they would if the party had gone as far as they did, but then quit where the did. This would allow me to both tell a new story, yet also, finally unveil the ending of my original plot. There was only one problem: my players desire to stay playing their original characters. Like me, they didn’t want all of their hard work to be for nothing.
With an update in the character builder introducing several new races, I came up with the perfect solution - Revenants. The party didn’t simply quit, when the players’ group fell apart, but died, in an epic struggle. And now, roughly two centuries later, they were coming back to life. Returning to right the wrongs of their destinies. Only now, they couldn’t remember how they had died. They couldn’t remember very much at all of their previous life.
Thus, a lot of this campaign would be about self discovery. Finding out how they died would require finding out about the history of the city. And so, the ‘Dead Waterdeep’ campaign was born out of the remains of my old Waterdeep storyline.
