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A question I’ve been not infrequently asked is what starting date I used when running Dragon Heist using the Alexandrian Remix. A quick summary:

• PCs arrive in the Yawning Portal on Ches 1^st.
• Grand Opening of Trollskull Manor on Ches 20^th.
• Fireball on Ches 22^nd.
• Cassalanter kids get their souls sucked to Hell on Tarsakh 11^th.

Some of this timeline, particularly as it pertains to the dual festival weeks of Fleetswake and Waukeentide (with the sacrificial feast thrown by the Cassalanters being a Feast of Leiruin on Tarsakh 10^th), is laid out in Part 4 of the Remix. Other dates are given on the master timeline in Part 5. But I apparently never clearly laid out how these dates related to the events in Chapter 1 (rescuing Floon) and Chapter 2 (opening Trollskull Manor and joining factions).

Basically, there are four considerations here:

First, you want to give the PCs plenty of time to resolve the situation before the Cassalanter kids get their souls sucked, but not so much that they don’t feel any pressure. It’s not quite the illusion of pressure, but it’s close: You want the players to look at the calendar and think, “We could run out of time!” without that just kind of accidentally happening despite their best efforts.

Second, you want the Grand Game stuff to play out across the full length of the festival season to give maximum opportunities for onsite surveillance. (Jarlaxle, Xanathar, and the Cassalanters all have opportunities tied to the festivals.)

For both of these reasons, you neither want the fireball (which triggers the PCs’ meaningful involvement in the Grand Game) arriving too early (no time pressure; the onsite surveillance opportunities aren’t available yet) nor too late (no time to save the kids, fewer surveillance opportunities).

However, the third consideration is that the section of the campaign you simultaneously have the least AND most control over is the refurbishing of Trollskull Manor (and simultaneous faction missions): Least because the players can theoretically fritter away a ton of time here in unpredictable ways. Most because once they’re done frittering you can ultimately say, “Okay, and then it takes you [arbitrary amount of time] for the last of the repairs to be finished. Looks like you can open the joint on [arbitrary date]!”

This allows you almost infinite control over the date that the Grand Opening happens AS LONG AS the players don’t run past your desired date. Starting the campaign on Ches 1^st gives you a nearly three week lead time. In other words, you’ll have plenty of time with a healthy margin of error.

But why do we want the Grand Opening on Ches 20^th?

First, it allows the Grand Opening to be its own distinct day.

Second, you get a “normal” operating day on the 21^st (which you can also use to cleanly establish the beginning of the back-to-back festival weeks; see Addendum: The Twin Parades) before you blow the windows out with a fireball on the 22^nd.

You’re letting the Grand Opening be a legitimate payoff for all the hard work the players have been doing and then you’re establishing something at least vaguely resembling the new status quo before you literally blow it up.

The picture at the top of this post depicts an amazing Faerunian calendar that was made by Erik Malm, one of the players in my Dragon Heist campaign. Thanks to Erv Walter, the Patreon patron who prompted me to write up this post!

In medieval Spain, free cities would erect a gallows because the jurisdiction over the death penalty was one of the essential rights they gained when freed from feudal fealty.

This led to the gallows scaffold itself becoming a sign of freedom and independence. Communities, wanting to celebrate these liberties, would place the gallows in a prominent place where it could be widely viewed. This often meant the top of a hill. Thus the Puig de lees Forques (Hill of the Gallows) or the Tossal del Penjat (Hill of the Hanged Man).

First: This is a cool bit of lore that you can inject into your fantasy worlds. You can also spin off variants, too: Like free elf communities being allowed to plant a cutting of the white-barked True Oak. Or dragonborn displaying the skull of their dead sire to show that they owe fealty to no drake. Or lean into the gallows itself by having necromantic kings send undead gallowsmen to the cities they’ve freed from feudal lords.

Second: These high places where the gallows once stood are now ideal for wind turbines.

These turbines, of course, are sucking up the ghosts of the hanged men and women who died there and are either spewing them out across the local countryside or injecting them into the electrical grid.

MINING THE WORLD

Kenneth Hite often asserts that, “No invented setting is as interesting as the real world.” No setting is better mapped, better documented, or (as we can see above) filled with more weird little bits of lore just waiting to be injected into your game. The real world and its history also instantly resonates with your players in a way which can be very difficult (Hite might say impossible) to achieve with a fictional setting.

(For example, I’ve written whole articles about how to establish the lore of your world and make your players care about it so that you can use it to best effect for awesome pay-offs. Conversely, you don’t have to do anything for “Hitler” or “Great Pyramid of Giza” or “Shanghai” to immediately resonate and have meaning for your players.)

So how can you find cool historical tidbits like this and use them in your worldbuilding/adventure writing?

The example of the gallows above was actually a really clean cut example of how this can work, so I thought it might be instructive to break it down.

FIRST: READ HISTORY BOOKS. Writers talk all the time about how important is for creators of superhero comic to read more than superhero comics; or for writers of fantasy to read stuff that isn’t fantasy. Basically, you can’t cull fresh new ideas from history unless you’re actually reading history.

This isn’t homework. Nor is it targeted, specific research. (That’s a different thing, although all kinds of tangential tidbits are likely to crop up while you’re researching something else.) Ideally this should be pleasure reading; find history books (or science books or whatever) that you enjoy delving into.

In this case, I was reading Will Durant’s Story of Civilization.

SECOND: JOT DOWN THE INTERESTING STUFF. Durant dropped the tidbit about the free cities of Spain displaying gallows as a sign of their free rights and it struck me as a cool, macabre detail I hadn’t heard before. I wrote it down in a file full of similar notes.

THIRD: PULL ON THE THREADS. I thought it would be fun to share the gallows tidbit on Twitter, but before doing so I did a quick Google search to verify it. (Durant’s series is fantastic because of its almost unparalleled breadth, but he also wrote it in the ‘40s, so its not unusual for some of his scholarship to have been superseded by new discoveries.) The search specifically led me to an entire book specifically dedicated to the death penalty in medieval Spain (The Death Penalty in Late-Medieval Catalonia by Flocel Sabaté) with a lot more information about the gallows being displayed by free cities. That gave me both the names of the hills and the factoid about the wind farms.

FOURTH: GIVE IT A FANTASTICAL TWIST. This is more art than science, but generally you can either look at your factoid and say, “If this existed, how would magic interact with it?” (This is the sort of thought that gives you “sucking up ghosts and spewing them out.”)

Alternatively, you can look at the fantastical elements that already exist in your setting and ask how they would accomplish the same thing or achieve the same goal in different ways. (For example, elves planting cuttings of the True Oak instead of putting up gallows.)

AND THAT’S IT. It really does just boil down to being self-aware of stuff that you find cool and interesting, documenting that stuff, and then giving just the tiniest amount of thought to how it can be used or adapted.

Go to Part 1

INTO THE VAULT

They headed down the long, sloping dwarven hall and emerged back into the shadow-shrouded vault. Edana’s hooded lantern swept back and forth across the immense chamber.

Kora placed the dragon scale atop the bas relief of the bronze sun and cast daylight. The bright light gleamed off the bronze beneath her feet and glittered in the depths of the dwarven runes — as crisp and fine as the day they’d first been crafted — on the adamantine doors.

Theren stepped forward and struck the dragon scale with the mithril hammer.

In that instant, there was a deep, sonorous tone that echoed around them. The doors slid back silently into the walls, revealing a vast chamber beyond. As they stepped up into the doorway, they looked into an even larger chamber — at least a hundred feet long, with a ceiling far above their heads — lit by a silvery, magical light.

Three bridges crossed the chamber above them. These had become worn with age. Stone had collapsed from their spans, and also crumbled from the large support pillars which ran down the center of the chamber to keep them aloft. Despite this damage, they could see that the support pillars had been carved to resemble warhammers with their square heads pressed against the floor.

Down at the far end of the chamber, they could see three tall niches, at least twenty or thirty feet high, which contained chipped frescoes. An equally massive doorway of bronze near these and off to the left appeared to lead out of the chamber.

Before crossing the threshold, Kora cast a ritual which would allow her to detect magical auras and Pashar simultaneously worked a rite which would allow him to more easily translate any inscriptions they found within. The others drunk in the ancient ambience while they waited and then, when the time came, took trepidatious steps forward.

As they approached the frescoes in the far wall, they could see the scenes they depicted more clearly. The first showed the dwarven god Dumathoin placing glowing gems into a range of mountains which appeared to be a primeval representation of the Sword Mountains. The second showed Dumathoin visiting the Illithid god Ilsensine, manifested in its form as a disembodied emerald brain, and bathing with it in the greenish psionic energy of the maze-like Caverns of Thought. And the third showed Dumathoin, Ilsensine (depicted in its form as an Illithid avatar), and Laduguer, the god of the duergar, with hands clasped in a dwarven circle of friendship.

“I don’t understand,” Kora said. “Why would the dwarves depict one of their own gods being in league with the illithid?”

Theren approached the gargantuan door of bronze. Pushing lightly upon it, he discovered that it pivoted easily at its mid-point, rotating into a perpendicular position allowing them to pass to either side of it. The room beyond was only small in comparison to the chamber they had just left. A broad stairway without railing ran up the far wall and then along the wall to the left to an upper level.

“That must go up to the bridges,” Kora surmised.

“I could fly up?” Kittisoth suggested.

“The stairs look sturdy enough,” Kora said, walking towards them.

The wall behind the stairs was covered in another fresco, this one depicting a vast dwarven army battling goblins. As Kora drew near it, she realized the whole fresco was magical. She stepped closer to analyze its enchantments, and then backpedaled: The entire fresco was enchanted to mesmerize anyone looking upon it, drawing them into its ‘glorious’ details.

She quickly explained the problem to the others: The fresco was directly next to the stairs. Anyone walking up it was at risk of studying the fresco for the rest of their lives.

“I’m flying up,” Kittisoth said, and did so.

“Do we need to see it?” Edana asked. “Could we just close our eyes?”

Kora nodded. That would work, and she’d already resisted the effect. The others were quickly blindfolded, and Kora led them up the stairs to where Kittisoth was waiting.

The upper hall, with three archways that did, in fact, lead to the bridges, had a series of pillars running down its length that, like the larger pillars below, had been carved in the likeness of warhammers. The wall opposite the archways bore a cracked mosaic depicting a dwarf smith at a forge, crafting dwarves out of black metal and diamonds. (Kora detected no magic emanating from this mural, but did recognize the figure as Moradin, creator god of the dwarves.)

Looking out at the bridges, they could see that two of them, although damaged, still appeared to be passable, but the third was missing a section in its middle. All three bridges ended in seemingly identical adamantine doors, smaller in scale, but similar to the larger one below.

After a brief discussion, they decided that crossing the broken bridge actually made the most sense. “Because it makes the least sense, if that makes sense,” Kora said.

“Makes sense to me!” Kittisoth said, and flew them across one by one.

Edana discovered that the door had been magically locked, but Kora was able to dispel it. The door swung open, revealing a modest chamber (only roughly the size of the Trollskull common room!). Four suits of rusted dwarven plate stood in the corners of the room, draped in cobwebs. The floor was a mosaic in a dwarven abstract style that was no longer very popular, arranged around a circular motif in the center of the floor. Carved into the far wall, in dwarven characters which Pashar (with magical aid) could read, was an inscription: A secret never told will part Dumathoin’s lips.

Pashar pulled out his notes and read aloud one of the banal, graffitied secrets he had copied form the long hall.

Nothing happened.

“I don’t think it’s a secret any more because it was written on the wall,” Kora said.

“All right,” Pashar said. Then he took a deep breath. “I… I didn’t really do something good. I stole this crystal from my master’s collection and released a djinn. That’s the real reason he erased my name from the Book of Fate.”

The others stood in a stunned silence which allowed them to clearly hear the faint puff of air as the motif in the center of the floor began to rotate up into the room.

“I can’t believe it,” Kitti murmured.

The motif revealed itself to be a hollow pillar which recessed into the ceiling above, allowing access to a staircase leading down.

“This is why you follow the letter of the law so carefully now?” Edana said blithely to Pashar.

“Well, I… We have a treasure to find!” he declared.

“Uh-uh. No!” Kittisoth said, following him down the stairs. “I have more questions for you!”

The circular stairs bottomed out onto a large landing leading to another set of broad stairs. At the bottom of these they could see a glinting, glittering light, almost like sunlight reflecting off a pond at dawn. At the bottom of the stairs was a vaulted antechamber, and a twenty-foot-wide doorway opened into another vast chamber beyond.

There were four more of the titanic, hammer-headed pillars here, defining a central area within the wider chamber, and leaving a kind of walkway around its perimeter. In the space between these pillars was a pile… a mound… a mountain of gold. A hoard of coins eight or ten feet high, spilling down into a haphazard carpet that covered the floor.

So abruptly confronted with the treasure, they were hesitant to enter the chamber. Edana instead reached out with a mage hand and telekinetically pulled one of the coins to herself.

It was a Waterdhavian dragon. Bright, shiny, and new. It was definitely Neverember’s Enigma.

“Hello?” Kora called. Theren echoed her in Draconic and Deep Speech.

Kittisoth walked forward, slightly dazed. The others also took a few steps forward, as if drawn in her wake. Then, with a pulse of her wings, Kittisoth took to the air, as if the earth could not contain the enthusiasm bursting within her.

And then they heard the shifting of some titanic bulk.

The dragon uncoiled from behind his hoard of gold.

THE DRAGON

The red dragon’s head curled up. One heavy foot crashed down atop the pile, unleashing a cascade of coins. Its tail began whipping back and forth.

Kittisoth screamed. Kora cursed, and then cried out, “STOP! We have a legal claim to the gold!”

“Oh no,” Edana said, “I don’t think dragons—”

“MY GOLD?!” The dragon’s voice boomed.

“We can’t cluster!” Pashar shouted. “Split up!”

Edana broke left. Theren simultaneously broke right, racing around the perimeter of the room while pestering the beast with arrows from both sides. Unfortunately, their shots simply ricocheted off its thick scales.

The dragon took to the air, beating its wings. The wind from those monstrous pinions actually blasted Kittisoth back against the wall. As she, knocked slightly senseless, slid to the floor, Pashar, who had also been knocked off his feet, scrabbled across the floor and fetched up behind the thick stone of the doorframe.

He was just in time. The dragon’s chest drew in air like a bellows, and then its fire spewed out. Kittisoth reacted quickly, pulsing her own wings in order to sort of half fly, half leap across the floor, scooping up Kora in one arm as she dived behind the other side of the door. Both of them were still badly scorched as the flames washed around and past them, but they managed to avoid the worst of it.

“IT IS MY GOLD NOW!” the dragon roared. “MINE! NEVEREMBER WILL NEVER TAKE IT BACK FROM ME!”

The dragon dived to one side, looping through the pillars and circling in behind Theren, who cut between another pair of pillars and ran fleetly up the pile of gold. Theren kept up a steady volley of arrow fire the entire time and a few managed to find chinks in the dragon’s armor.

It roared again, this time in pain, and swooped up in a high arc in order to follow Theren through the pillars. Pashar, however, had been waiting for this moment: As the dragon reached the highest point of its flight, he cast a paralyzing enchantment.

The dragon froze in midflight and plummeted from the sky, barreling down straight towards where Theren stood. Theren leapt over the top of the pile, sliding down the far side of it with gold coins scattering around his feet. The dragon plowed into the mountain of gold behind him, sending a huge avalanche of glittering coins cascading down and around Theren as he landed at the bottom of the pile.

Kittisoth swept past him, flying down the length of the dragon and hacking left and right with her greataxe, her mighty thews punching through its scales and laying bare the muscle beneath the ghastly wounds.

In her wake, Theren spun around and lowered his bow. The flame sacs to either side of the dragon’s neck bulged, glowing with a pure, white hot rage… but it could not move while Pashar’s spell laid upon it. Not even to breathe.

Theren shot it in the eye. Drew again. Shot it through the other eye. His arrow lodged deep in the creature’s skull.

With a final, shuddering breath, it was done.

The dragon was dead.

AFTERMATH

“That is a lot of gold,” Edana said.

Theren had set to work preserving the corpse. (“Dragon steaks at Trollskull!”) Kittisoth claimed one of its scales as a memento.

Discussion fell to logistics. How were they going to get all of this gold out? And, once they got it out, what should they do with it? They’d promised Vajra that it would be returned to the city and the citizens of Waterdeep from whom it had been stolen. But now that they were actually faced with the physical reality of all that gold, it suddenly didn’t seem that simple.

“Do we let Jarlaxle take any of the credit for this?” Edana asked. “As a way of—”

“—of getting him off our back?” Kittisoth finished.

“Yes,” Edana said. “There’s the kid. And the Stone. And all of that. But to cut to the heart of it, what he wants is to be publicly recognized as having helped Waterdeep. He wants the political leverage.”

Theren nodded. “I think we can speak honestly on Jarlaxle’s behalf and say that he’s been of help to us.”

“But he took a kid,” Pashar said. “A kid.”

“I know,” Theren said quietly.

“And this might be the best way to recover the kid,” Edana pointed out. “Or, if he knows that the game is done and he gets nothing, does he care about any of this — any of us — any more?”

“No,” Kitti said. “He kills everyone and then he comes for us.”

“Or he might say, ‘Well played,’” Theren suggested.

“I think we should give him credit,” Kora said. “He’s worked with us in good faith. I don’t forgive him for taking the kid, but that’s also why we should broker the deal and get it done. All he wants is the Lords’ Alliance. He just wants a seat at the table.”

“Which, in all fairness, maybe he should have,” Pashar said.

“Having a neighbor that’s constantly in conflict with you isn’t great for business,” Edana said. “As we well know.”

“But is Vajra really going to be all right with this?” Theren asked.

“Does it matter?” Kittisoth snapped.

“We’re talking about negotiating a seat in the Lords’ Alliance,” Theren said. “Is she going to be all right trading that for gold? Even if it’s a lot of gold?”

“Look,” Kittisoth said. “They don’t have to. Just because Jarlaxle gets credit for this, they can still do whatever they want. If they don’t want to accept him as members of their council, bullshit, whatever… That’s on them. If we broker the deal — if we give him credit — it’s not our decision to make him a Lord Whatever.”

The others nodded.

“I think we’re agreed,” Kora said.

Go to Epilogue

Go to Table of Contents

We’ll be cleaning up the lore and structure of the Vanthampur Investigations. For the purposes of the Remix, this post should be considered authoritative: Any place where this material contradicts the published version of Descent Into Avernus is almost certainly a deliberate change made to fix continuity problems. Ignore the published version and use the continuity described here.

LORE OF GARGAUTH

Gargauth (referred to in some ancient texts as Gargoth) is currently trapped in the Shield of the Hidden Lord, which is being carried by High Observer Kreeg. A quick overview of his history:

• Gargauth first rose to prominence in Hell in the early days of the Blood War when he discovered that the demon Astaroth had infiltrated Asmodeus’ court and actually managed to become Treasurer of Hell. With his deception revealed, Astaroth fled. As a reward, Asmodeus made Gargauth the new Treasurer of Hell.
• Gargauth’s rise continued until he was named an Archduke, ruling over Avernus as one of the Lords of the Nine.
• He was overthrown by Bel, who had risen from a lowly lemure before engineering the coup that left him in charge of Avernus. (Bel, in turn, would be overthrown by Zariel.)
• Gargauth then chose to leave Hell and journey on the Material Plane. He became known as the Tenth Lord of the Nine, the Lost Lord of the Pit, the Hidden Lord, the Outcast, and the Lord Who Watches.
• Gargauth’s ancient feud with Astaroth had never truly ended. Astaroth, for his part, had become a demigod in his own right and was on the cusp of achieving godhood itself, with a number of cults scattered across Faerûn. Gargauth sought out Astaroth and slew him before he could immanentize his divinity. (Some claimed that this was done at Asmodeus’ behest, and that Gargauth, despite having been “cast out” of Hell, was actually still loyal to Asmodeus.)
• Gargauth actually assumed Astaroth’s mantle for himself, effectively impersonating the dead demon and receiving the worship of Astaroth’s cultists. It was Gargauth’s first taste of godhood.
• Perhaps overconfident in his new power, Gargauth joined an alliance of the Dark Gods (Bane, Bhaal, Loviatar, and Talona) to invade Hell itself and seize it from Asmodeus.
• The invasion failed. Gargauth himself was captured. Asmodeus offered him a choice between utter destruction and a pact. Gargauth chose the pact and Asmodeus bound him into the Shield of the Hidden Lord. In order to be freed from this bondage, Gargauth must bring thirteen cities to Hell.
• The Shield was then given to Bel, who was then in charge of the Dock of Fallen Cities (see Part 5; the charge has since passed to Zariel). He cast Gargauth out onto the Material Plane, and Gargauth has been working on his charge ever since. (Elturel may or may not have been his first success. Perhaps cities far from the Sword Coast have been taken. Or it is possible that there are, in fact, many Shields of the Hidden Lord, with Gargauth’s essence refracted across a multitude of Material Planes.)
• In the case of Faerûnian history, the Shield has been prized by Astarothian cultists (who still hear the voice of their God in it), Dead Three cultists (who honor Gargauth for his alliance with the Dark Gods), and the Cult of Zariel (see below).
• In one notable instance, Dead Three cultists managed to temporarily free Gargauth from the Shield (or possibly just manifest his Avatar from it) as part of an assault on the Sign of the Silver Harp, an inn that was used as a gathering place for the Harpers in the 11^th It turned out the entire affair was an elaborate trap set by Elminster and Khelben Arunsun, and Gargauth ended up defeated and back in the Shield. (See Code of the Harpers, p. 27.)
• In the early 14^th century, Gargauth infiltrated the Knights of the Shield. The Knights had originally been dedicated to the Shield of Silvam (one of the Kuldannorar artifacts once held by the Tethyrian royal line, see Lands of Intrigue: Book Three, p. 26), but Gargauth corrupted an inner cabal of the Knights. Because the original Shield of Silvam had been lost, this inner cabal was able to create a “secret history” that Duke Tithkar Illehhune in the 9^th century had brought the shield to be safeguarded by the Knights in their sanctum. Those inducted into the “inner mysteries” of the Knights believed that the Shield of the Hidden Lord was actually the Shield of Silvam, and Gargauth became the object of their veneration.
• Gargauth has historically been interested in seeking out the method by which Toril was sealed from the other planes during the Time of Troubles, believing that if he could replicate this it would both free him from the Shield and perhaps allow him to seize a great deal of divine power while the other powers are cut off from the Realms. His agents are reportedly scouring many ancient ruins of the Imaskari Empire, whose wizards managed long ago to partially bar the Mulhorandi and Untheric pantheons from entering the Realms (see Powers and Pantheons, p. 23).
• Gargauth has most recently been working with the Cult of Zariel in Elturel (see below). The Shield was taken to Elturel by a member of the Hhune family (who were part of the inner cabal of the Knights of the Shield).

Option: If you’d rather cleave a little closer to the established history of Gargauth — which, as we described in Part 3, featured him being an unfettered demigod until during or sometime after the Spellplague — simply flip him out for a completely different pit fiend with the same backstory described here. For more on Gargauth, check out Powers & Pantheons (p. 23).

We’re also going with Descent Into Avernus’ version of the history between Bel and Zariel. It’s completely inverted from Guide to Hell (p. 39), Book of Vile Darkness (p. 143) Fiendish Codex II (p. 35), and Rise of Tiamat (p. 10) in which Bel overthrew Zariel (the original Lord of Avernus!) and not the other way around, because the original version of the continuity is completely incompatible with the story of Descent Into Avernus. What I’ve done here is essentially insert Gargauth into the original role of Zariel in the story, creating a chain of succession from Gargauth to Bel to Zariel which, through the Shield, gives the PCs a window into the politics of Hell. 

If you want to instead maintain the “Zariel was the original ruler of Avernus” continuity, replace Zariel’s role in Descent with a different Archdevil; one of the Dark Eight would work well because they’re regularly killed and replaced (making it easy for the fallen celestial who led the Charge of the Hellriders to have become one of Avernus’ generals).

THE CULT OF ZARIEL

The Cult of Zariel is briefly described in Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes (p. 21). As Archduchess of Avernus, Zariel oversees the armies fighting at the front lines of the Blood War, and her focus is usually on the corruption of knights, mercenaries, and soldiers who can most aid her cause. It is particularly effective to corrupt entire knightly orders or mercenary companies, institutionalizing Hell’s recruitment, and it’s not unusual to find the Cult of Zariel working from within such organizations, often having hollowed out the original leadership and purpose.

There are actually two different Zariel cults in the Remix, although they’re working together closely enough that the PCs may not make the distinction between them. (They don’t really need to.)

The Vanthampur cult in Baldur’s Gate is relatively new. Their primary goal is to seize power in Baldur’s Gate. In addition to all the normal advantages to be gained from such temporal power, they particularly want to corrupt the Flaming Fist and turn the whole mercenary company into a recruitment drive for the Blood War. Towards this end, Duke Vanthampur arranged for Grand Duke Ravengard to be present in Elturel when it was sucked into Hell. She’s also planning to assassinate Duke Portyr in order to further the power vacuum.

The Cult of the Companion has been secretly wielding power in Elturel for generations. They forged the original pact with Zariel for the Companion (see Part 4B), and their current leader is High Observer Thavius Kreeg himself. They have been guided in these actions from the beginning by Gargauth, speaking from the Shield of the Hidden Lord, which has been a prized artifact of the cult.

THE MURDERS

Having been utterly triumphant in their schemes, the Cult of the Companion is now working mop up.

We’ll discuss the details and specific history of the infernal pact that doomed Elturel in Part 4, but there’s one thing we need to know now: Anyone descended from a Hellrider or a member of the Order of the Companion has had their soul forfeited to serve as a devil in Zariel’s armies after their death. Those who were in Elturel at the time of its fall have already been taken, but a number of descendants either escaped the city or weren’t in the city at the time of its fall. If they die before Elturel sinks into the Styx (and the pact is completed), however, then their souls will also be sucked to Hell.

The Cult of the Companion is therefore working with the Vanthampur cult to hunt down Hellriders and their descendants in Baldur’s Gate and murder them. Think of it as a final recruitment drive.

DEAD THREE CULTISTS

The Cult of Zariel has reached out to local Dead Three cultists for the manpower they need to identify, locate, track, and murder Hellrider descendants. This alliance was primarily forged because the Dead Three cultists still venerate the Shield of the Hidden Lord and view Gargauth’s pronouncements as coming from their dark gods, but Duke Vanthampur was able to sweeten the deal by offering them an ancient temple site dedicated to the Dead Three.

Duke Vanthampur, who manages the city’s water utilities and sewer system, originally became aware of this temple when a sewer work crew accidentally broke into it. She had the sewer breach sealed, killed the workers who’d done it, built a bathhouse over the temple site in order to gain access to it, and then killed the workers who’d done that work, too.

She didn’t really have a specific purpose for it at the time, but figured having a private underground lair would come in useful at some point. The complex has been used at various times to store drugs, slaves, and other illicit goods. The Vanthampurs have also used it to hold and torture prisoners. Unfortunately, the contamination of the air by subterranean gases (see Part 3F) has limited its utility and, therefore, value. The Dead Three cultists nevertheless consider the restoration of this holy site an almost incomparable gift, putting them deeply in Duke Vanthampur’s debt.

Note: In the adventure as published, the relationship between the Dead Three cultists and the Vanthampurs is confused. In some places it’s suggested they’re allied to common purpose (although it’s not certain what that is); in other places the Vanthampurs are just paying the Dead Three cultists to kill people. But if the Dead Three cultists are just mercenaries, then it’s unclear why the Vanthampurs have built a temple dedicated to the Dead Three in the dungeon they found/own. The revision of lore found here attempts to simplify, straighten out, and strengthen this continuity.

Go to Part 3C: The Vanthampur Revelations

Go to Table of Contents

The PCs’ time in Baldur’s Gate is entirely dedicated to investigating the machinations of the Vanthampurs. (You can try to squeeze other stuff in, but there’s not really any space to do it: The PCs are told to investigate the murders by going to the Dungeon of the Dead Three, immediately follow leads from there to Vanthampur Manor, and then immediately follow the leads from the Manor out of town. Realistically speaking, they’ll spend less than 48 hours in the city. Probably significantly less.)

In practice, these investigations are designed to lead to three central revelations:

• The murders ordered by Duke Vanthampur
• The devilish schemes involving the Shield of the Hidden Lord
• The truth of Elturel’s Fall

As written, there are significant problems with all three.

PROBLEM: THE MURDERS

The Vanthampur “plan” to seize power in Baldur’s Gate doesn’t actually make any sense: Duke Vanthampur has hired Dead Three cultists to murder people in order to “shatter confidence in the Flaming Fist” so that the city will stop paying them and they’ll… leave?

First, Baldur’s Gate is already notoriously the murder capital of the Sword Coast and has been for centuries. If “bunch of murders” was going to break public confidence in the Flaming Fist, it feels like it would have happened a long time ago.

(For context, the entire adventure begins in a tavern where everyone goes armed because otherwise you’re likely to get murdered. It’s one of the nicer taverns in town.)

Second, the Flaming Fist is a “mercenary army,” but they’re not just visiting. They’ve been a fundamental institution of power in Baldur’s Gate for more than a hundred years. They’re also the only meaningful military force in town. Historically speaking, when you abruptly stop paying the army, the result is not “they peaceably go away and leave you in charge.”

The result is that the army is now in charge.

Even beyond that, it’s entirely unclear how getting rid of the Flaming Fist is supposed to make Vanthampur the new Grand Duke. The book says that she “has brokered a deal that will enable her to claim the role of grand duke once the Flaming Fist disbands,” but brokered with who exactly? To become grand duke you have to be elected by the Parliament of Peers. Why would any significant portion of the parliament want to disband the Flaming Fist? And if they did, why wouldn’t they just vote to do it?

To sum up: It doesn’t make sense that Vanthampur is trying to do what she’s trying to do, and the way she’s trying to do it will never work.

PROBLEM: SENDING BALDUR’S GATE TO HELL

Duke Vanthampur and/or Thavius Kreeg (it’s a little vague) also have another plan: They’ve stolen the Shield of the Hidden Lord, a powerful magical artifact containing a trapped pit fiend named Gargauth which “fuels the avariace and ambitions of evil-minded folk in Baldur’s Gate.” (The book is inconsistent on whether the pit fiend does this by loquaciously convincing people to do bad things or if it just exudes an aura of evil that ramps up the murder rate citywide.) They’re going to use the Shield to suck Baldur’s Gate to Hell, just like Elturel was!

First, I just want to briefly comment on how bizarrely warped the lore of the Shield of the Hidden Lord has become. In 2^nd and 3^rd Edition, Gargauth was a demigod; he was the Tenth Lord of Hell who had been cast out by his fellow devils and chose to wander the Prime Material Plane. The Shield of the Hidden Lord first appeared in 3^rd Edition, and it was a powerful evil artifact that allowed Gargauth to communicate with and subtly influence its bearer.

Gargauth vanished in 4^th Edition, but in 5^th Edition he reappeared in Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide as “a mysterious infernal power who seeks godhood while trapped in the world within a magical shield.” Descent Into Avernus then reveals that this is, in fact, the Shield of the Hidden Lord, which is no longer an evil artifact created by Gargauth, but instead a celestial artifact in which Gargauth has been imprisoned.

(I mention this primarily to explain why, when I completely jettison a lot of this lore and replace it with something completely different, I’m not going to feel particularly guilty about it.)

Second, the Companion hung in the sky above Elturel for fifty years before the city could be sucked into Hell, but apparently you can do “much the same thing” (p. 11) with a pit fiend bound inside a celestial shield.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense, and the book’s lack of interest in providing any explanation for how this is supposed to work is really just a symptom of Descent’s lack of a clear vision for the metaphysics and continuity involved in Elturel’s fall.

For example, Descent Into Avernus is built around the central concept that High Observer Thavius Kreeg made a deal with devils to create the Companion and, in exchange, he sells the city he rules to the Nine Hells.

The problem is that this cannot possibly be true.

Thavius Kreeg wasn’t High Observer when the Companion was created because:

1. The position of High Observer came into existence after the Companion.
2. Kreeg wasn’t the first High Observer.
3. The Companion was created in order to overthrow the existing (vampire) lord of the city.

The beginning of Descent Into Avernus recognizes the problem and tries to fudge a fix: Kreeg, who was not the ruler of the city, “took credit for summoning the Companion, was hailed as the savior of the city, and rose to become its high overseer.”

By the time the book gets to Candlekeep, however, the writers have forgotten both the original continuity and the continuity described at the beginning of the book: Kreeg is now the ruler of Elturel when he made the deal with Zariel (and before the Companion was created).

On the one hand, this actually makes more sense (because otherwise you’re saying that just any random dude in a city can agree to send it to Hell, which makes it unclear why the devils haven’t scooped up all the cities of Faerun a long time ago), but on the other hand you’ve got a superpositioned continuity glitch in which both of its quantum states have really glaring problems.

(Descent Into Avernus has so little care for actual continuity here, that they somehow changed Kreeg’s title from “High Observer” to “High Overseer” and nobody noticed the error.)

It’s certainly possible to slide some continuity glitches past your players, but this is literally the entire adventure: They have to know how Elturel was damned so that they can figure out how to save it.

PROBLEM: THE TRUTH OF ELTUREL’S FALL

At the end of the Dungeon of the Dead Three, the PCs meet and interrogate Mortlock Vanthampur, who will flat out state the premise of the scenario: “If [my mom] gets her way, Baldur’s Gate will share Elturel’s fate and get dragged down into the Nine Hells.”

This is the first time the PCs will be able to learn this, so they’re going to have some questions. The GM will also have questions (like, how does this NPC know this but his brothers don’t, even though his brothers are explicitly more trusted by their mother? How much does he actually know?), but the adventure isn’t going to be helpful in answering any of them.

What I’m more interested in here is the pacing of major revelations in a campaign: This isn’t how you do it. Don’t just dump the entire solution to a major mystery into the PCs’ laps as an offhand comment in an unrelated conversation.

In Part 1, I talked about how the Mystery of Elturel’s Fate is the central, driving mystery in this first part of the campaign. We can now break this down into five specific phases of revelation:

1. Elturel was destroyed
2. Elturel was destroyed by devils
3. High Observer Kreeg is still alive!
4. Kreeg is responsible!
5. Elturel wasn’t destroyed, it was actually taken to the Nine Hells.

Once you break it down like this, you can see how each one of these revelations packs a big punch. If you do it right, each one should be a “Holy shit!” moment for your players.

But you can also see how the conversation with Mortlock short-circuits this entire process of discovery, jumping straight to the end. All those big, cool, memorable moments are just thrown away.

Everything else in this chain of revelations is similarly dysfunctional.

For example, instead of the PCs discovering that Kreeg is still alive (shocking twist!), a random NPC they’ve never met before walks up to them in the street and tells them. (It’s almost insulting how pointless this is, by the way: The PCs are literally on their way to a location where they’ll discover Kreeg for themselves when the NPC shows up to steal their thunder.)

Later there’s an infernal puzzlebox that the PCs need to take to Candlekeep and have opened. When they do, they find inside the infernal contract Kreeg signed that doomed Elturel. This should be a mind-blowing revelation of epic proportions…

…except the person who tells them to go to Candlekeep to have the puzzlebox opened literally tells them what’s in the box before they open it. (And then another NPC makes sure to reiterate it immediately before opening it.)

So there’s this big, cool mystery that the entire campaign is framed around. But Descent Into Avernus constantly undercuts the revelation of that mystery and ferociously deprotagonizes the PCs while they “investigate” it.

PROBLEM: THE INVESTIGATION TRACK

What I’m referring to as the Vanthampur Investigations consists of three nodes:

• Dungeon of the Dead Three
• Amrik Vanthampur @ the Low Lantern
• Vanthampur Manor

These are largely presented as a linear chain in Descent Into Avernus. Unfortunately, this chain is extremely fragile. This is mostly due to Mortlock: The PCs are supposed to find him in the Dungeon of the Dead Three, interrogate him, and basically get all the information they need to proceed.

There are several problems:

First, as we’ll discuss in Part 3F, it’s very easy for the PCs to never find Mortlock.

Second, if they find him, he’s being attacked by another cultist and will be killed if the PCs don’t jump in and save him. (What if they don’t?)

Third, if they do save him, the first thing he’ll say is, “I’m the serial killer you’ve been looking for.” (Odds that the PCs will now kill him without further ado? Pretty high in my experience.)

Fourth, having just confessed to being the serial killer the PCs are here to kill, Mortlock will now say, “Hey, can you help me take revenge on the people who tried to kill me?” (I’m not making this up.)

Fifth, remember that the PCs have been pressganged into a very simple job: Destroy the Dead Three cult. So the last thing Mortlock says is, “If you’ve made it this far, you’ve killed most of the leaders of the Dead Three cult. Without them, the cult will break up.” In other words, “Congratulations! You’re all done! This adventure is 100% complete!”

If you get past all of that, Mortlock tells the PCs what they’re supposed to do next: Kidnap his brother Amrik so that they can use him as leverage while negotiating with his mother.

But negotiating with his mother to do… what?

The adventure doesn’t seem to know. In fact, it promptly forgets the entire idea except to briefly tell the DM later that it definitely won’t work. (“Proud to a fault, [Thalamra] would rather die than surrender or be taken prisoner —and she happily watches any of her sons die before consenting to ransom demands.”)

The failure of the scheme doesn’t bother me. (“Go ahead and kill him,” is a perfectly legitimate moment and builds pretty consistently from her known relationship with her kids.) What bothers me is that there doesn’t seem to BE a scheme. The PCs are told to do a thing, but are given no coherent reason for doing it.

(This is a somewhat consistent problem in the adventure that we’ll discuss at greater length in Part 6.)

REMIXING THE INVESTIGATION

We’re going to largely focus on three things in order to fix the Vanthampur Investigations:

1. Revise the lore and backstory so that it makes sense
2. Do some minor rehab work on each individual node
3. Toss out the current investigation structure and replace it with revamped revelation lists, made robust by applying the Three Clue Rule

Those of you familiar with my work will probably be unsurprised to discover that we’ll also be introducing some node-based scenario design to give the whole thing more flexibility. (There’s only three nodes, of course, so we’re not going to go too crazy here.)

Go to Part 3B: Lore of the Vanthampur Investigations