September Article: First Impressions - Descent into Avernus

Hey folks. Dirk here reviewing the new published adventure by Wizards of the Coast: Descent into Avernus. You’re welcome to read the full review or skip to the bottom for my final statements and consensus.

This is going to be a first impressions review. My opinion may change as I run this campaign in the coming weeks. I am going to try to avoid spoilers as much as possible, with the understanding that the adventure has been officially published since 9⁄17 and, hopefully, some of you have already gotten your hands on a copy.

If you are still on the fence about buying the book, let me give you the tl;dr version of this article:

Buy it because it is awesome!

Let’s get on with the review.

What is Descent into Avernus, Dirk?

This adventure is, simply put, the adventurers traveling to hell to try to save a city and have an ultimate showdown with one or more Archdukes of Hell. Super cool. As I said, I don’t want to spoil too much about the adventure, because I think it is set up in an awesome way that leaves a lot of surprises for the players and DM to experience together that I certainly don’t want to ruin.

About half the book is the adventure itself and half of the book is split between a gazetteer of Baldur’s Gate and Avernus, the layer of hell that the players adventure to (not much of a spoiler) and “crunchy bits” like monsters, items, and cool mechanics.

Thoughts on the Adventure

The adventure is broke up into three main parts, from what I’ve seen: - Setting up the story to move the player’s into Hell - Avernus arrival and exploration - Showdown preparation and execution

The Setting & Atmosphere

There are some really cool features that the adventure points out to be able to properly set the stage for a “Hell Campaign.” For example, here are some headlines of some subsections on Life in the Nine Hells:

Later on, once the players actually reach Hell, there is another section that helps lay out some of the diabolical features of this plane of existence. Much of this is meant to help create the proper atmosphere, with food tasting like ash, spells taking on new visible features, changes to telepathy, oppressive heat and despair creating constant exhaustion, all the way to bargaining with fiends and what happens when you come into contact with demonic goo.

The interesting part about these, is that they are open ended suggestions to the DM so they can properly convey the feeling of “Welcome to Hell” to the players. In my personal opinion, I will probably run Hell more like a complete and absolute bureaucracy run in the worst possible way imaginable, rife with lies, corruption, and convoluted organizational concepts and contractual “gotchas,” but I digress.

Story Progression

Quite a bit of the main story of the game is fairly linear in construction. The players are very much open to accomplishing their tasks in how they see fit, but the adventure itself is laid out in a particular way to create a proper flow and structure. It is quite different than my personal favorite, Curse of Strahd, and even Princes of the Apocalypse, which leave things quite open to the players to travel and explore the world to decide their own path to creating a solution to the central problem.

The exception to this is when the players arrive in Hell. After a fairly brief introductory set of encounters and quest progression, the adventure becomes much less rigid after a: “find your own damn way off of cloud city, Luke Skywalker, but here are some ideas on how you can do it” moment (this comment will make much more sense once you buy the book and see what I’m talking about).

Once the adventurers finally put boots on the ground in Avernus (not much of a spoiler since the name of the adventure is Descent into Avernus) the game allows for much more wiggle room than the adventure previously allows for. It is still fairly linear, in that some preset situations are going to happen that push the players down particular paths, but the players get to eventually make a major decision that will permanently impact the direction of the game.

Once the chosen path is taken to completion, all decision merge back into a single path to the end. The players do, however, have a little bit of flexibility in their decisions and how they want the game to officially finish, none of which I have any intention of spoiling.

Mad Max: Avernus Road

I wanted to bring up that there is an extremely awesome, albeit brief section on some Warlords of Hell. Basically, these are the ones that drive Infernal Machines around the war torn plains of Hell like they are acting out a Mad Max film. The section is brief, but extremely awesome with the ideas it sparks for side quest and adventure opportunities for the players to meet some of these fantastic and terrible individuals.

Ending the Adventure

I won’t say too much about the ending, except that the players have quite a lot of power to create the ending they desire. They also have the very real capability of putting themselves in the crosshairs of a Archduke of Hell and getting themselves murdered in the process… which would either make for an extremely awesome game or an extremely shitty one. Most likely, the latter.

Closing Thoughts on the Adventure

Much of it is fairly linear, set with a specific path for the players to play out with some room for decision making to impact the final ending.

Honestly, I think this is a good thing because it gives the DMs a clear idea of what events match up where and how to rearrange things as they need.

As an additional note, the adventure gives plenty of material to be able to provide side quests and adventures if the players wish to stay longer and see more of Hell. The problem with this is both a blessing and a curse because it puts much of it into the DM’s lap for them to write if they wish to expand upon these things.

Curse of Strahd is incredible for a lot of reasons. one of those reasons is that there is an almost unlimited amount of side quests and things to do in the Barovia that every play through can be entirely different than the last. I feel that Descent into Avernus has the potential to be such, but it would require the DM to spend quite a bit of time creating their own content and stories for this.

Baldur’s Gate Gazetteer

Moving onward, let’s talk about Baldur’s Gate. The gazetteer section of this book is reeeeeeaaally good. It is so good that it certainly does arm the DM with a lot of tools to use if they wish to expand the game from it’s linear progression to create a few different branching stories that can intertwine with the main quest.

The gazetteer has everything from patrol routes, to sightseeing in Baldur’s Gate and what the lands around it look and feel like, to the organizations that run each section of the city and what their motivations are, as well as the history of the major figures that are the movers and shakers for these organizations.

Backgrounds

Something that I absolutely love, is a section for Baldur’s Gate themed backgrounds. Besides a new background that was specifically created for the adventure, the book takes the bulk of the player available backgrounds from the Player’s Handbook and styles them to fit the current game. This includes new descriptions and features to help link each background into the world more fully, not to even mention new origins for applicable backgrounds.

Party Bonds

There is an amazing section in the book about Dark Secrets. This part is a great place to read up on, starting on page 208 for those of you that have the book, because it gives the DM ideas on how to link the party together in a way that is Baldur’s Gate-ian and more fully implants the characters into the setting itself.

Infernal Contracts

It has been talked about quite a bit that this adventure includes rules for contracts… they are really, really awesome. I will be starting my own game in mid October, once I wrap up my current homebrew campaign: Nightmare at Swordfall, and once I do, I will definitely be pushing my players to sell their soul at every available opportunity.

Appendices

The rest of the book is pretty straightforward. Statblocks, Infernal Machines (Mad Max Mobiles), Magic Items (all of which are excellent and very fitting wit the “hell” theme), creatures of all kinds (mostly generic demons and devils, with some unique creatures thrown into the mix).

To Wrap it Up

The book is excellent. Yes, it is a little too linear, and I do wish it would have been more open ended in allowing the players to choose their own path to victory, but I accept the ride on the railroad because it is well written and definitely an enjoyable ride.

Personally, I will be doing a few modifications to the story. I don’t want to give too much away, because my own players read or even help write these articles, but here’s some concepts I will be more fully integrating into the story: - More time spent in Baldur’s Gate to interact fully with the organizations and terrors contained within. - More time spent in the open on Avernus. The concept I am working out is a system very much like the video game, Shadow of Mordor in which certain warlords and orc generals commanded entire armies of bad guys. I want to reward the players for investigating these groups and finding ways to dismantle them, for reasons I will not disclose. - More time around the River Styx. The adventure does play quite a bit around Styx, but not as much as I would like.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading my ramblings for the month. I’m very excited to run Descent into Avernus. I will post updates and things I would do better as I run the campaign. It should start at the end of October, assuming my current campaign wraps up on schedule.

As always, please feel free to join us on discord to talk about all things nerdy. If you like our work and want to support the Critical Game Mastery crew, then you are welcome to support us on Patreon to get a behind-the-scenes scoop on how we do things, as well as some deep cuts on what our plans are for the future and what to expect.

Thank you for reading,

Dirk

Critical Game Mastery

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