Sourcebook Mashup: Ghostwalk & Waterdeep

Over at Amazon, prices on used 3.0/3.5 supplements have dropped to fire-sale levels, so I’ve been snapping up a couple of books I missed the first time around. This past week was spent thumbing through City of Splendors: Waterdeep.

I have a confession to make: Waterdeep has never made a lot of sense to me.

To my mind, Waterdeep shouldn’t be such an important city, if one considers pure geography. As the entrance to the Heartlands, Baldur’s Gate should be the vastly more important site. Waterdeep simply sits too far from the rest of the action in the Realms to be the hub that it supposedly is. (The Silver Marches are a new confederacy, and I can’t believe there’s all that much trade pouring in from Icewind Dale and the Moonshaes.) And subsequent reasons we’ve been given for Waterdeep’s importance—proximity to the High Forest and several ruined elf kingdoms; ease of entry to Skullport, Undermountain and the Underdark; trade with Evermeet (um, do idyllic island paradises hidden from the world need to export...?)—have all felt like over-fantastic and too-late justifications.

Of course, I could be wrong. After all, Waterdeep is analogous in many ways to London, who certainly didn’t let being stuck on a cold, rainy island stop it from becoming a world power. Also, maybe Waterdeep’s isolation worked for it. When you’re the only city in the area worth talking about—take that, Luskan!—perhaps it’s a bit easier to become a world power.

That said, what if we supplement Waterdeep with one of my favorite books (as I’ve mentioned before): Ghostwalk?

Ghostwalk is centered around the city of Manifest, where the dead walk as ectoplasmic ghosts. Manifest sits on an interesting (and disappointingly unmapped) peninsula developed by Monte Cook and Sean K Reynolds, but can by adapted to other settings. Cook and Reynolds suggests placing Manifest in the Realms in Lantan, the Moonshaes, Tashalar, or Maztica. But there’s no reason Manifest couldn’t be Waterdeep—and a lot of reasons why it should be.

Ghostwalk also solves the problem of Undermountain. There’s always been this sense that, if you missed the original the original The Ruins of Undermountain box set, you missed out big. (I was in middle school and still playing “basic” D&D at the time.) In 3rd Edition, Wizards of the Coast’s website barely scratched the surface and Expedition to Undermountain has been lambasted as being mere CliffsNotes. If you’re trying to create Undermountain for devoted Realms fans, you have a lot of work and a lot of catching up to do.

At the same time, Undermountain is also kind of silly. “Mad wizard creates super-dungeon? Could you be any more 1st Edition?”

Ghostwalk alternately frees DMs from the psychic burden of Undermountain—“Sorry, the Deathwarden dwarves have the place locked down”—or gives it a proper reason to exist. A path to the Land of the Dead is totally worth a super-dungeon…worth dozens of factions fighting….and worth countless adventures.

More on Thursday about specific ways to turn Waterdeep into Manifest (and vice versa).