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In Part 1 we briefly discussed the idea that players should create characters for Descent Into Avernus that were either from Elturel or had other strong connections to the city. Although we concluded that such connections cannot singlehandedly make the players care about the city, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t encourage players to create characters like this. Quite the opposite, in fact. Although stuff that actually happens at the table will always be more relevant than stuff that just exists in a character’s backstory, establishing stuff in a backstory provides a vector for bringing it to the table.

(Could we turn “at-table” into a word just like “onscreen” or “onstage”? Feels like it would be useful. But I digress.)

On the other hand, don’t feel as if EVERY character needs to have that personal connection. It’s fine if they do, but I’d actually argue it’s probably better if they don’t. It may feel like having all those personal connections will make for a richer experience, but by eliminating the outsider’s point of view you’ve actually narrowed the range of available experiences.

(This advice can be generalized: If I’ve said “this game is about X, everybody create a character who is Y” and one of the players comes to me and says, “I was wondering if I could actually play a not-Y?” I’ve learned to actually stop and think about how we can make that work. Partly because, like most “default to yes” practices, it’s inherently a good idea to follow the players’ lead on what they’re interested in, but also because I’ve learned that having a not-Y at a table of Y’s creates valuable diversity.)

GMPCs

Mostly, though, we’re here today to discuss the GMPCs of Descent Into Avernus.

GMPCs are not the same thing as NPCs. A GMPC is where the GM essentially tries to be a player in their own campaign by running a character that’s indistinguishable from being another PC in the party. Although technically possible (and you can find success stories here and there), this tends to fail spectacularly for one of two reasons:

First: The GMPC becomes the unabashed star/spotlight hog of the entire campaign and/or is used to forcibly railroad the players.

Sometimes the GM specifically chooses to do this, but it’s often not intentional. The root of the problem is that the GM has privileged information unavailable to the other players. When they’re prepping the adventure, the fact that they can predict what the GMPC will do with 100% accuracy can become a crutch that’s easy to rely on. When they’re “playing” the adventure, they know how the scenario was designed and what the intended course of action is, which unavoidably biases their decision-making. Furthermore, the other players know that the GMPC has this privileged relationship with the adventure, so even if the GM can successfully firewall the character side of their decision-making from the GM side of their decision-making, it will still influence the PCs’ relationships with the GMPC.

The other common outcome is for the GMPC to become a weird half-character who awkwardly doesn’t participate in group decisions and/or frequently “vanishes” from the game world because everyone forgets that they’re there.

This usually happens because the GM is specifically trying to avoid the first problem. For example, they know that if they say, “I think we should go check out the Nattic Wood,” that the other players will interpret that as, “The GM is telling us to go check out the Nattic Wood.” So their GMPC never offers opinions. (This scenario often arises when the GMPC is being played to fill something that’s perceived as an “essential” role in the group. The GM would basically prefer to not have the GMPC there, but feels compelled to do so for some reason.)

I’ve previously written an article about this, but the short version is that I try to avoid both GMPCs and NPC allies in general. (When running games with henchmen or hirelings, for example, I prefer to let the players run them.)

Regardless of how you feel about GMPCs, the ones in Descent Into Avernus are generally being used as design crutches and it would be great to eliminate them. The easiest place to eliminate them is in character creation: If you can take any essential role being fulfilled by a GMPC in a scenario and incorporate it into a PC, then you can easily delete the GMPC.

REYA MANTLEMORN

Reya Mantlemorn is the most obvious GMPC in Descent Into Avernus. She fulfills three functions:

• She walks up to the players in the street and says, “Hey! High Observer Kreeg is still alive!”
• When the group plane shifts to Elturel, Reya Mantlemorn needs to say, “We should go to the High Hall.”
• As a Hellrider, she gets to have all kinds of cool, “I can’t believe it?!” emotional reactions whenever the big twists in the campaign happen.

The first of these is just bad design in general: Instead of the PCs discovering that Kreeg is alive (shocking twist!), a random NPC they’ve never met before just walks up and tells them. So we can just eliminate this whole thing.

For the second, we’re going to be completely revamping our approach to Hellturel in Part 5 of the Remix, so we won’t need her for that either. If you decide not to go with these changes, then you can just have literally any NPC in Elturel tell the PCs the same thing (“Lo! The GM has spoken unto me and said that thou must journey unto the High Hall!”).

For the third, it’s clearly very effective to have a Hellrider who can feel personally betrayed in her oaths and then later shocked by the revelation that the entire history and identity of her order is based on lies told by traitorous cowards. (Oddly, the adventure as written has Reya leave the group before the latter bit can happen, but nonetheless.)

It’s probably fairly obvious, though, that it will be even MORE effective if it’s a PC who’s been positioned to have those reactions.

So, in short: Encourage at least one player to play a Hellrider.

And just like that, we’ve eliminated Reya’s whole reason for existing. Delete her from the campaign.

Note: Make sure to give anyone playing a Hellrider or a knight of the Order of the Companion a copy of the Creed Resolute (see Part 4B).

LULU THE HOLLYPHANT

Slightly more unusual is the case of Lulu the Hollyphant.

Lulu, in her form as a golden mammoth, served as Zariel’s warmount during the Charge of the Hellriders. After the Hellriders were defeated, Zariel gave Lulu her holy sword and ordered her to hide it somewhere in Hell. Lulu was later betrayed and sprinkled with the waters of the River Styx, causing her to lose her memories.

Recovering Lulu’s memories is one of the major pillars of Descent Into Avernus, which we’ll be looking at in more detail in Part 6 of the Remix. Playing Lulu as an NPC works just fine, actually: She’s more of a cute sidekick or familiar than a true GMPC.

But there’s no reason that Lulu couldn’t be a PC.

The players are far more likely to get invested in Lulu’s lost memories and the mystery of her past if she’s “one of them.” And playing a small, glowing, gold pachyderm will definitely be a cool and memorable experience for the player.

If you’ve got a player who’s willing to play non-traditionally, just grab the stat block for a hollyphant on p. 237 of Descent Into Avernus and let them go. (Restore her abilities slowly over time as per p. 50.) Alternatively, you could try to rework the hollyphant into a playable PC race. Donathin Frye and Kienna Shaw have done the work for you here.

Of course, the stat block is only one part of the challenge: In the campaign as written, Lulu doesn’t show up until Part 4: Candlekeep. What’s the solution?

Just have her show up sooner.

One option would be to use a very short version of the “Prelude to Disaster” opening: The PCs (who might not even know each other) are walking down a street in Elturel. One of them happens to be a small, flying elephant. Suddenly something goes wrong with the Companion in the sky. “Oh no!” the elephant says. “I know what this is!” Out of sheer, instinctual fear she teleports herself and the people closest to her (i.e., the other PCs) into the wilderness just outside of town.

Once there, she doesn’t know why she did it. She also doesn’t know how she did it (she doesn’t regain her teleport ability until later). She just knows that they needed to get out of that city ASAP! (And a moment later the entire city crumples into the ground and vanishes, proving that to be true.)

(You could even use this setup if Lulu isn’t a PC, but it may need some additional thought about how her presence in the first few scenarios will affect things.)

Isn’t it very convenient that the PC group just happens to include Zariel’s amnesiac ex-warmount? Well… yes. But no more so than Lulu just happening to be hanging out with the guy who the PCs randomly get sent to in order to plane shift them to Avernus. If you want to justify it more than that, give Lulu a holy vision that told her she needed to be at such-and-such a place or needed to seek out such-and-such a PC. But you probably don’t need to.

If you don’t have a player willing to fly into Lulu’s shoes, I recommend nevertheless giving her a physical presence at the table with Gale Force 9’s statuette or Beadle & Grimm’s plushy.

TARINA

Tarina is not a GMPC. She’s the spy that Flame Zodge sends the PCs to meet at the Elfsong Tavern. Her function in the campaign is to point them to a bathhouse where Dead Three cultists have been seen.

But this is actually an ideal way to introduce a PC: Instead of being sent to meet with Tarina, Zodge’s contact is the last PC. Give that player the information Tarina was supposed to have and let them brief in their fellow players. (Unlike Tarina, of course, they’ll be accompanying the group on the op.)

There are a couple reasons this can be a good idea:

• The player who gets to have the “secret” information and perform the briefing feels special; they’re getting to do something cool and unusual.
• From a metagame perspective, the players will all feel more invested in this mission because it was another PC telling them about it and not some random NPC.

Organically introducing PCs to each other like this at the beginning of the campaign can get a little tricky, but, once again, by putting this stuff at-table you make it more meaningful. (How much more interesting is it to see Luke and Obi-Wan meet Han Solo and Chewbacca for the first time compared to the GM saying, “So you’re all on a space freighter heading to Alderaan.”?)

If you’re using the refugee caravan scenario described in Part 1 of the Remix, swapping out Tarina like this is less convenient and may not work. So I mention this here mostly as an interesting opportunity I noticed, particularly for people who are running the campaign closer to “by the book.”

With that being said, you could still make this happen. Obviously if you’ve got a player who has to miss the first session… ta-da. Problem solved.

Alternatively, you can pull this off by just getting the player a little more onboard: Ask them to play one of the refugees in the first scenario. Maybe they get brutally murdered by the Cult of Zariel near the end of the session. Or they survive just fine and simply say goodbye when they reach Baldur’s Gate. Then a few scenes later, the party meets their new PC at the Elfsong Tavern.

I’ve not infrequently used a similar technique when I need to introduce a replacement character or new player to a campaign. Most recently, in my second run of Eternal Lies, I had a new player coming onboard but the group was on an expedition far from where there could be any reasonable explanation for how the new PC could have found them. So I had the player take on the role of a local guide with the expedition.

He played this character for several sessions, and because both I and the player knew that this character wasn’t permanent we both took big risks with him: He eventually ended up completely insane and needing to be institutionalized after gnawing off several of his own fingers.

The rest of the group was shell-shocked: We didn’t plan it this way, but we had never explicitly told the other players that this wasn’t the new player’s PC, and while we assumed they knew, they didn’t. So the complete unraveling and destruction of this character hit them really hard, because they thought it was a PC.

(We can all pretend that players should care as much about every NPC as they do a PC; or that the audience cares as much about Random Mook #23 getting mowed down by machine gun fire as we do about Iron Man dying. But that’s not the way our brains are wired. The PC/NPC divide is particularly real because you empathize with what the other player at the table is “going through” as their character. I’ve seen people literally break down crying at the game table because of an NPC; I’m not saying no one ever cares about NPCs. I’m just saying that the line between Josh at the game table and Santino in the game world is a little less well-defined than the lines between creators and created in other mediums.)

But I digress.

Go to Part 2B: Elfsong Tavern