This article contains major spoilers for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, especially the Cassalanter storyline.
Things can get dark in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. But the darkest moment of all is not in the story with the beholder crime lord. It’s not even in the story with one of Faerûn’s greatest dark wizards. This grim honor belongs to the new villains on the block: Lord Victoro and Lady Ammalia Cassalanter. The most horrific moment of the entire story happens when the player characters make a no-win choice at the end of the Cassalanter storyline.
If you want your players to consider the consequences of their actions and the weight of their duty as heroes, set Dragon Heist in summer with the Cassalanters as your villains. At the end of this story, the following choice lies with the heroes. Who dies: one hundred unsuspecting people, or two innocent children?
Let’s back up.
The Cassalanter’s Bargain
This is your last chance to turn back before the spoilers really kick in. Seriously, if you aren’t DMing Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, you should consider backing out now. Because we’re about to crack open this adventure and pick through its guts for the seeds of this bleak, decisive moment. It all started when Victoro and Ammalia were younger. Victoro Cassalanter was the heir to one of Waterdeep’s wealthiest noble families, and he and his beautiful and clever wife had one son, Osvaldo Cassalanter. Even by this time, however, the Cassalanters were devil worshipers. Yet even with all their privilege, Victoro and Ammalia longed for more.
Some time ago, “Ammalia and Victoro signed a contract with [Asmodeus], trading the souls of their children for power, good health, and long life. The soul of Osvaldo, their eldest son, was taken immediately, and he was transformed into a chain devil” (Source). Victoro and Ammalia are not good people. They did not make a deal with Asmodeus out of desperation. They were already wealthy beyond imagining, and they traded the soul of their eldest son for an embarrassment of temporal riches. But as with all Faustian bargains, the Cassalanters’ greed would come to haunt them.
The Cassalanters did not just pay for their power, health, and longevity with the soul of their eldest son. They promised the souls of all their children. And as the Dark One’s own luck would have it, Ammalia bore twins. Terenzio and Elzerina Cassalanter are now eight years old, and their parents have learned that Asmodeus plans to take their souls when they turn nine years old later this summer. Ammalia and Victoro are not heartless. They are selfish, cruel, and greedy, but they do love their children. They regret losing Osvaldo to Asmodeus’s bargain just as much as they love the power they have gained from it.
In short, the Cassalanters owe Asmodeus the souls of their twin children, Terenzio and Elzerina, and he will come to collect before the end of the summer.
The Way Out
But the Cassalanters do have a way to renege upon their deal with Asmodeus. I wouldn’t put it past Asmodeus to have included this clause fully understanding that the Cassalanters would want to back out after seeing how Osvaldo suffered. (Osvaldo has been transformed into a chain devil, and the Cassalanters keep him hidden away in the rafters of their house.) Asmodeus stands to profit greatly off of this secondary clause of the deal, for he will agree to spare the souls of the Cassalanters’ present and future children if they deliver to him “one shy of a million gold coins and the sacrifice of one shy of a hundred unfortunate souls.” Simply by the numbers, 99 souls is a much better deal than two, and he needn’t so much as lift a finger to obtain them!
And if you select the Cassalanters as your villains for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, their plot to save their children’s souls requires them to find the Stone of Golorr, enter the Vault of Dragons, and abscond with the half-million gold pieces interred there. The players need to stop them… right? They’re the bad guys. They’re devil-worshipers planning on paying nearly one million gold coins and sacrificing nearly one hundred innocent people to Asmodeus as tribute in order to make up for their mistake! That seems like a more than worthy adversary for any group of adventurers.
“Aye, There’s the Rub”
Perhaps you’ve seen the trolley problem this poses to any would-be heroes who seek to defeat the Cassalanters. It’s actually a sort of reverse trolley problem; if the characters actively oppose the Cassalanters, their actions will save the lives of 99 innocent Waterdhavians from being sacrificed to the Hells, and they will also recover the cache of gold for the city. However, in doing so, they condemn the Cassalanters’ innocent children to damnation. The Cassalanters’ greed has not damned them. If they covered their tracks well, they will emerge from this entire sordid affair as—still—one of Waterdeep’s wealthiest, best respected, and powerful families. Their children, however, will suffer for eternity.
It’s a grim day for the player characters to see their actions—their victory!—lead to the loss of two innocent souls.
But the characters have to take action. After all, defeat is—by the numbers, anyway—much worse than victory. If they do nothing, or worse, lose to the Cassalanters, 99 souls will be sacrificed, and the half-million gold they fought so hard to protect will be handed over to Asmodeus on a silver platter.
Are your players willing to make this choice? Over the course of their adventure, they will have likely met Terenzio and Elzerina. They may have even befriended them. The “goal” of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is to claim the half-million gold pieces for yourself and keep it out of the hands of the villains. But if victory means losing your two friends, would you still seek victory? Would you instead seek to ally yourselves with the villains just to save their innocent children? Even if it meant sacrificing 99 other souls you’ve never met?
If your game has already passed their crucial juncture, which path did your party choose? Which choice do you suspect your party will make? Or will they make another choice altogether?
“I Don’t Believe in the No-Win Scenario”
A truly determined party might seek a third option. The heroes have found themselves in a Kobayashi Maru situation, but in the word of James Kirk, some parties “don’t believe in the no-win scenario.” How would you go about saving not only the 99 innocent souls and 999,999 gold pieces the Cassalanters plan on sacrificing and the souls of their two children? Osvaldo, I regret to opine, is probably a long-lost cause. Consider some options, and maybe you’ll be ready for your players when they try to pull a fast one on you.
Pulling one over on the Supreme Master of the Nine Hells himself is no small feat, especially for 5th-level characters. Will you wait ‘til 15th level or so and launch an attack on Nessus itself to reclaim Terenzio and Elzerina’s souls? Will you try to challenge Asmodeus to a fiddling contest? (In the right game, with the right DM, that might work!) What would you offer in exchange for the souls of these children?
Something to think about.
James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and the Critical Role Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, the DM of Worlds Apart, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and Kobold Press. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his partner Hannah and his fiendish yowlers, Mei and Marzipan. You can usually find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.
Worst case scenario, your party just became responsible for the souls and the children. And with interest. You can decide the interest.
It's a devil. It's not interestd in wasting it's time.
I don't have my copy right in front of me, but I think there's a typo at the very beginning of this article when you wrote, "Lord Victoro and Victoro Ammalia Cassalanter". I'm pretty sure the second victoro isn't meant to be there, but I haven't properly read through the Cassalanter section in the guide yet.
I was thinking the same thing. Especially if the party wouldn't enjoy a 23 level super dungeon, it would be a good bridge into the Out of the Abyss adventure.
I never thought about that!!!!
You just saved my creativity!
Because you stopped the evil mom and pop duo, you now owe the devil his due. And the undermountain is the only way to save those kids, the souls of the good in the dungeon and your own souls!
I could kiss you Xanderriggs! (not rly, but a cyber high-five will do)
I've been racking my brain on how to come up with a "no-lose" solution. In researching Asmodeus on the Forgotten Realms Wiki, the DM definitely needs to have ALL of the details of the Cassalenter contract in place. After all, "read the fine print" seems to be a character trait of the devil.
But, I'm thinking that perhaps a 3rd option would be for a new contract to be agreed upon by the party, the Cassalenters, and Asmodeus in which the party & the Cassalenters agree to endure the challenges of the 23 levels of the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and those who fall there become Asmodeus's servants. Those who make it to the end of the Mad Mage's Dungeon get to keep their lives, but if all fail, then the children are damned also. If the Cassalenters make it through, their children get to live, but they lose ALL of their wealth and prominence, and are cursed in that when they touch anything made of gold, it instantly turns to dust. But before the group is to endure the 23-level dungeon, Victoro asks for some time to prepare for their entry. Asmodeus agrees, but takes their children as "escrow" to ensure their end of the bargain.
Then, once the agreement is made, Victoro tells the party about the lost laboratory of Kwalish where there is rumored to be strange but advanced magical items that may help them survive. So, I'd run the party through there, get them to level up to about 8-10 possibly, as well as get some unique items for their foray into the Mad Mage's Dungeon, and go from there.
Curious what everyone else might think. Not having the two Waterdeep modules, I'm not sure what DotMM has for plot hooks or motivation.
My players solved the trolley problem by running over the trolley.
To begin with, it doesn’t sit right with me that the Cassalanters were ever able to strike this bargain. You can put your own butt on the line in a contract to benefit your children (as with co-signing a lease), but you can’t unilaterally put their butt on the line to benefit you. That kind of thing may fly with some Chaotic Skeevy fey like Rumplestiltskin, but not with a legitimate businessman like Asmodeus, imo. So, while I appreciate the film noir thing the writers were going for and was planning to end with the “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown” vibe of the alternative presented here, I was willing to meet my players at least halfway if they came up with a plausible solution to the problem as written (which I couldn’t do).
Here’s what they came up with (bear in mind, we used to play a lot of Shadowrun, so they like an overly complicated scheme now and then): The vengeance paladin and the arcane trickster got jobs as an upstairs maid and a groom at the Cassalanter villa, after paying 50 gold each to the Xanathar Guild to create new cover identities for themselves (which I thought showed impressive foresight). This gave them the opportunity to run around scouting the place. The wizard used the ritual found in Ammalia’s study to ask the fiend why a family of bankers with everything to lose would insert themselves into the middle of a gunfight between the Zhentarim and the Xanathar. The story as written says the ritual has the same effect as a commune spell, but I decided to be a bit more forthcoming, since, short of flat-out asking the Cassalanters, there doesn’t seem to be any way of finding out about the moral dilemma in the first place. That got them the details of the arrangement.
They went back and forth on possible solutions, as expected, but ultimately, they let the Cassalanters rob the vault. Then they swapped the vials of poison in the desk for a harmless substitute which was fed to the poor people at the feast and arranged for the chefs to unwittingly put the real poison in the cultists’ food instead. I took the liberty of massaging the size of the cult from about 45 to 100+ (which made sense to me, moving 1,000 20 lb. sacks of gold from C29 to A7 would take a long time). I was also willing to say that all the guests at the feast were cultists, rather than nice people duped into attending a mass murder, as the book suggests. That also made sense to me. The Cassalanters need to make the event disappear for their own sake and you can’t blackmail people with their presence at an event that never happened.
Anyway, the cult poisoned 100 people. Victoro dumped the gold in the bowl. Everything went according to the cult’s plan, just the wrong people died. The scoreboard at the end read: 1) Letter of the contract fulfilled. Kids completely in the clear. 2) Poor people get a fun show to go with their nice dinner, then go home safe and sound. 3) Enough actually important people die that the Cassalanters can’t cover it up and all their dirty laundry comes out (especially since all of their emergency money somehow disappeared from the villa in the confusion). 4). The whole cult is wiped out and decades of Asmodeus’s work in Waterdeep is undone by his own agents. 5). The characters false IDs were burned and no one the wiser.
It was all nicely heist-movie-ish and I honestly can’t think of a better result for the party, even if I did fudge things a little. The players forwent the gold jackpot for a more modest payday of the silver bars and the golden table service, but I’ll certainly find a way to make that up to them. This is an insanely long post, so I’ll spare you all the details, but it was a blast. We all had that Oasis song from the end of Snatch playing in our heads during the Founders Day session.
Bravo! What an amazing way to untie this Gordian knot. Kudos to you and your players!
Agreed. Your player's scheme has a very Ocean's Eleven feel. Complex enough to require skill and foresight while simple enough not get lost in the detail. Clean, elegant, and poetic.
Thanks so much! I had to come back to this thread and brag about them. I can't wait to pass along the compliment! Thanks for a very fun couple of weeks!
Kill Victorio and Ammalia, then adopt the children. Children no longer belong to the Cassalanter's, and Asmodeus can have Victorio and Ammalia's souls. Serves them right for offering up what doesn't belong to them. :)
Another good idea
We played this and our solution was a bit different. We legally stripped the Cassalanters of parenthood and adopted the children ourselves, and argued Asmodeus had no rights to OUR children, and the now childless Cassalanter’s were dragged to hell.
Bravissimo! What a splendid solution!
It's "Kobayashi Maru". :)
....Now I really need to play W:DH.
I've been wanting to play. A campaign that would traverse all of the 9 hells and I think going after the twins' souls would be a great reason to go on that trek. Can use the Descent into Avernus stuff too for that excursion.
That book was The Monster Manual 5e
I know one group that would
likeLOVE this storyline. 3rd option, here we come!If I do Dragon Heist as a DM, I would lead the characters to tricking the Cassalanters into sacrificing the Xanathar Guild