Lords of Waterdeep is one of a host of board games set in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for the popular tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons, although I will be referencing the computer version for the purposes of this post. Players take on the personas of the eponymous Lords, the shadowy masked members of the ruling council of the premiere trading city of the Forgotten Realms, as they compete for prestige and control. It is a fairly basic worker placement game, considered appropriate for newcomers to the genre; players send their agents to various locations in the city to recruit adventurers and to the Cliffwatch Inn to claim quests which they then send these adventurers to complete for victory points and other rewards. They can also construct various buildings which provide more attractive options to all players at the cost of giving free resources to the player that owns them, and finally, may send agents to Waterdeep Harbour to play intrigue cards with a wide variety of game effects. Skilled play lies in predicting and playing around other players' strategies, managing continuously decreasing and expanding options, and building a foundation that will serve you well in the late game.
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| A mere hint of personality for my hidden scoring card - a strong, independent woman with the cunning to swim with the sharks and the learning to fly with the eagles. |
As Lords of Waterdeep is not a particularly deep example of the Euro-style game, a lot of the appeal lies in the Dungeons and Dragons flavour and the evocation of the theme and world of the Forgotten Realms. Quests range from the relatively mundane -- lure dwarven craftsmen to the city, domesticate owlbears -- to standard fantasy-adventure fare -- raid an Orcish outpost, expose a hidden temple to the demon-goddess Lolth -- to underhanded political subterfuge -- destroy a rival criminal organization, infiltrate Waterdeep Harbour with a spy. Intrigue cards also evoke a variety of espionage tactics, from innocuous actions like calling in a favour or offering free drinks at your tavern to lure away opponents' adventurers to assassinations and other dark double-dealings. Thus, every game tells a story of who betrayed whom, who saved the city from the rampaging beholder, who was a glory hound, a craven blackguard, a wheeler-dealer on the make. And players literally construct the city of Waterdeep, making it their own with iconic locations that players versed in the lore of the world will readily recognize. The combination of theme and mechanics does an excellent job of evoking the idea of influential eminences grise manipulating events behind the scenes and pulling the strings of power to their own ultimate benefit.
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| A mid-game board state. Often you must make choices that are sub-optimal for your game plan and still come out ahead. |
And this is kind of fascinating on a number of levels. In the typical Dungeons and Dragons campaign. the focus is on heroic adventurers on a quest for glory, striving to set wrongs right and save the world from destruction at the hands of dangerous tyrants (or alternatively, the focus is on murder hoboes, depending on the nature of your gaming group). Those at the behest of whom the player characters take on these mighty deeds, the humble merchants, village mayors, lords, kings, mighty wizards, and more exotic denizens, definitely play second fiddle, usually given the status of "quest givers", an entire person with their own hopes and dreams reduced a plot contrivance. In the hands of a good Dungeon Master, these characters can become much more fleshed-out and three-dimensional, and a really good one can evoke the background of power and influence which lie behind the feats of derring-do required by the plot. But ultimately, these people are necessarily secondary characters in someone else's story, accessories to the heroes' need for dragons to slay and princesses to rescue.
Lords of Waterdeep flips that script right onto its head. Adventurers here become mere wooden cubes, nameless and faceless pawns to be used in the plots and counter-plots of shadowy benefactors they might never even know the identity of. The glorious quests they undertake become moves in a game of power, radically recentered from those that undertake them to the much more interesting individuals that sponsor them. It is not even known if the adventurers live or die when confronting the foes of Waterdeep or engaging in skullduggery for their hidden masters. It brings to life the sub-rosa world that lies beneath the surface of the simple and straightforward heroes' journey in a way that is very difficult for a standard tabletop roleplaying campaign. And in so doing, it reveals some interesting things about the nature of political institutions in the setting it portrays.
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| The final score. My Lord has come out on top - this time. But there will always be another game. |
Everyone is the hero of their own story, but all of us are caught up in the network of institutions and power relations that make up the social world. In Lords of Waterdeep, adventuring and questing itself seems to be an institution; adventurers are defined types with an infinite supply waiting around in taverns to be recruited in a standardized process of undertaking dangerous deeds. This is not an uncommon social structure to exist in role-playing games, but it is interesting in the way it subverts classic heroic fantasy tropes in which the characters are exceptional individuals destined to make their mark on history. And the game also says some very enlightening things about institutional power in Waterdeep. The very fact that such people as tavern keepers, real-estate speculators, and hidden doppelgangers must take up the reins of power and send their hired mercenaries to do what must be done to keep the city running is indicative of the nature of government in this unstable and constantly threatened city. It is a city-state of canonically weak central authority, more like a Renaissance Italian city than a classic medieval-fantasy kingdom, a continual power vacuum of constantly shifting factions and alliances, as is appropriate for a setting in which players may be challenged by webs of intrigue and deception. And although in this story the wealthy and powerful take centre stage, in such a setting even they are caught up in a web of competing interests, condemned to play an eternal power game in which the final scoring round is never truly reached.
