As the PCs leave Elturel, I think the time has come to take a step back and look at the big picture: They’re in Avernus now. So what are they trying to do, exactly?
This post takes a close look at how the adventure is currently structured (and the problems I have with that structure). Then the rest of Part 6 is going to present the big picture of how we’re going to remix this structure. We’ll want this big picture to get us oriented in Part 7: Exploring Avernus and keep us pointed in the right direction as we wrap things up in Part 8: The End.
QUICK SUMMARY: THE ORIGINAL CAMPAIGN
- The PCs indirectly get a vision from Torm which reveals that (a) Lulu helped hide the Sword of Zariel before she lost her memories and (b) she talked to a couple of kenku at some point after doing so. (The NPCs are all convinced the Sword of Zariel will save Elturel, although it is not explained how or why.)
- Lulu remembers that she met the kenku at Fort Knucklebones, so the PCs go there.
- Lulu remembers that the Sword of Zariel was at Haruman’s Hill, so the PCs go there. (It isn’t.)
- Lulu remembers two other locations that will lead to the Sword of Zariel, so the PCs choose one of them and go there.
- Each location is the starting point of a different linear railroad. If the PCs follow the railroad they’ve selected, they eventually get the Sword of Zariel.
THE PROBLEM WITH LULU’S MEMORIES
As you can see above, recovering/following Lulu’s memories is the key to the entire adventure.
When the PCs first meet Lulu and she starts tagging along with them, we’re given the back story of what actually happened (DIA, p. 51) and a little table of random memories that she can intermittently recover during the adventure. This is clever, giving the DM a simple tool for keeping this central theme/plot gimmick consistently in focus as the campaign progresses.
Having made Lulu’s memories the central plot gimmick of Descent Into Avernus, however, you might conclude that the designers would make sure that her back story is crystal clear to the DM, ensuring that this absolutely vital continuity is easily handled without error.
You would be wrong.
In fact, Lulu’s back story doesn’t even make sense. For example, the vision from Torm says, “The elephant knows! After hiding the Sword she met some kenku!” And Lulu says: “I remember! The kenku live at Fort Knucklebones! Let’s go!”
But:
- If you flip back to the summary of Lulu’s story (DIA, p. 51), neither the kenku nor Fort Knucklebones appears. This is an egregious oversight. However, you can eventually conclude that her visit there MUST have happened when “Lulu wandered Avernus for months” after Zariel’s fall.
- Those kenku, although still alive, should definitely be dead. Zariel’s fall happened in 1354 DR and Lulu “wandered Avernus for months.” That means she met the kenku 140 years ago. Kenku only live for 60 years.
- The kenku are at Fort Knucklebones because they work for Mad Maggie. But when Mad Maggie first came to Avernus (and before going to Knucklebones), “she “found pieces of a beautiful tapestry that chronicled the fall of Zariel.”
So within a few months of Zariel’s fall:
- Someone made a tapestry;
- The tapestry was ripped to shreds;
- Mad Maggie found the tapestry;
- Mad Maggie founded Fort Knucklebones; and then
- Lulu came to Fort Knucklebones (meeting some kenku who are, I guess, immortal).
You can kind of shuffle things around so that this makes sense (change it so that Maggie didn’t find the tapestry and become interested in Zariel lore until recently, long after founding Fort Knucklebones; which also explains why she didn’t pump Lulu for all the information she knows about Zariel the FIRST time she met Lulu), but it’s still a massive continuity glitch sitting right in the middle of a crucial scenario hook in the middle of the campaign.
And this is just one example! Lulu’s timeline is filled with contradictions and inconsistencies!
Descent Into Avernus positions this as THE central mystery of the campaign, but then it basically doesn’t have a coherent solution to the mystery. It’s like a murder mystery that can’t quite make up its mind about who committed the murder.
DIA: You MUST figure this out!
Players: Yes! We NEED to find the answers to this!
DIA: Find the answers to what now?
We’ll be sorting this out in Part 6D: Lulu’s Memories.
THE KENKU PROBLEM
Remember those kenku?
Descent Into Avernus says, “Find the kenku! They knew Lulu back in Ye Olde Days! They’ll have valuable information that will help you to find the Sword!”
So the PCs go to Fort Knucklebones. They find the kenku. The adventure says, “The kenku Chukka and Clonk instantly recognize Lulu, since they’ve met her previously.” And then… nothing.
Literally nothing.
The kenku remembering Lulu is, as far as I can tell, never mentioned again. And if the players decide to push the issue and try to get the valuable information they were promised, there’s absolutely nothing for the DM to give them.
This isn’t just a dead end either: Remember that the kenku DO remember Lulu. Even if they don’t have any vital information, there’s still a story to be told here — a lost fragment of Lulu’s memories to recover in a scenario which has been explicitly positioned as being about recovering Lulu’s memories. It’s not that Descent Into Avernus says “nothing to find here”; it’s that Descent Into Avernus just completely forgets the reason the PCs came to Fort Knucklebones.
It was almost incomprehensible to me that such an egregious oversight could have made it into print… until I took a step back and tried to understand the designers’ mental paradigm.
What we are, in fact, talking about here is the scenario structure. I’ve talked in the past about the fact that D&D (and RPGs in general) do a pretty terrible job of teaching scenario structures to new DMs. In fact, they’ve historically only taught one (dungeoncrawling), and in 5th Edition they’ve even failed to do that. (5th Edition notably doesn’t teach a new DM how to key a map — or even provide an example of a keyed map! — let alone teach them how to use it in play.)
Without primary sources, new DMs are largely learning their scenario structures from published examples. But it’s been decades now and the communal knowledgebase is atrophying. It’s gotten so bad that even a lot of professional designers don’t know how scenarios are supposed to be structured, so even the published examples that DMs used to be able to learn from are degenerating.
Which brings us to Descent Into Avernus: The designers don’t actually have a functional scenario structure. They’ve instead flailed themselves into a sort of malformed scenario structure which consists entirely of:
- An NPC tells the PCs where to go.
- The PCs go there.
The entire campaign is just this one “structure” repeated infinitely: An NPC tells you where to go. You go there and you find another NPC who tells you where to go.
So when it comes to the kenku, the designers aren’t designing a situation; they aren’t thinking of the game world as a real place. They aren’t even thinking about what the players’ actual experience will be (what they’ll be thinking, what they’ll want, etc.). They’re thinking of the kenku strictly as another McGuffin in a long string of McGuffins: They needed a mechanism to move the PCs from Elturel to Fort Knucklebones. The kenku were that device. The PCs are now at the Fort. Therefore, the kenku are done.
And, thus, the kenku are immediately dropped.
Furthermore, because this malformed structure is apparently ALL THEY HAVE, it seems to have become a kind of cargo cult for them: They know that NPC A has to give some sort of “explanation” for why the PCs need to go to NPC B, but they frankly don’t care what the explanation is.
And they assume the players won’t care either. The presumption is that the players are onboard; that the players share their understanding that “the NPC tells me where to go and then I go there” is the one and only way that things work.
The designers expect that players to immediately transition to the “make Mad Maggie happy” mini-game they’ve designed without ever questioning the kenku about the thing they came here to question the kenku about because they literally never gave a shit about the ostensible reason the PCs were looking for the kenku.
I call this the Kenku Problem. And once you’ve seen it, you really can’t unsee it. It explains A LOT of the problems Descent Into Avernus has:
- Why do they keep putting Must Have Encounters™ behind secret doors? Because if the PCs haven’t found the NPC to tell them where to go next, clearly the players will know to keep looking until they find them!
- Why are the PCs told to go talk to people without being given any reason for doing so? Because the REASON is irrelevant. It’s white noise surrounding the operative phrase of “go talk to <insert name>.”
- Why are the PCs told what will be inside the puzzlebox by the same guy who tells them to “go talk to <insert name> to have the puzzlebox opened” (thus murdering the pay-off for doing so)? Because they don’t care about the mystery and they don’t think you’ll care either. The only reason the “mystery” exists is so that you’ll go talk to <insert name>.
- Why does the adventure assume the PCs will simply plane shift to Hell without having any reason to do so? Because an NPC told them to! (Why not have the NPC give them a coherent reason? Because it doesn’t matter!)
This superficially makes it seem as if the NPCs are all-important! But, ironically, they’re not. They’re just cogs in the machine; their sole function to point you to the next cog. This is why the adventure doesn’t care enough about Kreeg’s history to make it consistent. Nor Zariel’s. Nor Lulu’s. Nor Ravengard’s. Nor the kenku. Nor… well, anybody.
Ravengard tells you to talk to the kenku. The kenku tell you to talk to Mad Maggie.
Nothing else matters.
Note: There are twenty-nine (!) writers credited in Descent Into Avernus. It is quite plausible that when I’m ascribing creative decisions to the “designers” here what I’m actually doing is anthropomorphizing artifacts from whatever development process was used to create and stitch together all of those contributions. By the same token, the book still managed to get to press without anybody saying, “Hey… What do those kenku know about Lulu? Isn’t that the whole reason the PCs came here?” And it won’t stop a DM from getting wrong-footed by the adventure-as-written in actual play.
THE KNUCKLEBONES PROBLEM
Fort Knucklebones itself suffers from a common problem I see in adventure design: Interstitial content that’s not supported by the main line of activity.
The fort is filled with encounters that all start with some variation of, “While the PCs are here…”
- “At some point during their visit, the characters see the kenku…”
- “Characters who witness this can…”
- “As events play out in Fort Knucklebone, the characters notice…”
And so forth.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with interstitial content: The world should not be strictly reactive (the PCs do something and the world reacts); it should also be proactive (stuff happens in the world and the PCs can react to it).
But for interstitial content to work, there MUST be enough stuff for the PCs to actively engage with so that there’s enough time for the interstitial encounters to be triggered. And this is not the case here. Instead, as soon as the PCs enter Fort Knucklebones this happens:
They immediately meet Mad Maggie. They tell her what they want. She immediately takes them to a dream machine and recovers Lulu’s memories. Lulu immediately declares she knows where the Sword is. The PCs will then immediately leave. (Why wouldn’t they?)
No narrative space is given for the PCs to just hang out at Fort Knucklebone, which means that all of the “hanging out at Fort Knucklebone” encounters will never happen.
It’s possible that the fort was originally intended to be some sort of hub or home base for the PCs so that these interstitial encounters would play out over the course of several visits, but as written it isn’t. In any case, the encounters as written are supposed to play out before Maggie gives them supplies (because their outcome is supposed to influence that), even though there’s a continual stream of uninterrupted interaction with Maggie from the moment they enter the base until she gives them the supplies.
You can kind of half-ass a solution by simply injecting extra time into the main line of Maggie’s activities. For example:
- Instead of immediately meeting the kenku and having them immediately bring Maggie to the PCs, the PCs have to find the kenku and then go to Maggie (so that they explore the fort a bit and meet some of the people there before meeting her).
- It will take Maggie some time to assemble the dream machine. Probably a few hours should suffice, during which time the PCs can do all the other things.
If you want to full-ass a solution, though, you’ll want to figure out some sort of active agenda the PCs could be pursuing at the fort while waiting for Maggie to finish the machine. Otherwise they’re just twiddling their thumbs. Instead of Maggie automatically giving them supplies, for example, maybe they need to get properly outfitted for Avernus here.
As described in Part 6C: Quest of the Dream Machine, the Remix will, in fact, make Fort Knucklebones a de facto hub that the PCs are likely to make their homebase and return to multiple times.
THE CHOOSE YOUR RAILROAD PROBLEM
Let’s be blunt: Choose Your Railroad is a terrible scenario structure.
It’s almost an oxymoron. You recognize that choice is important, but then you immediately discard it in favor of a long string of Kenku Problem interactions lightly spiced with meaningless fetch quests.
(A quick digression on fetch quests: A fetch quest is any time an NPC tells a PC to get a Plot Coupon and return it to them; or, vice versa, when the NPC gives the PC a Plot Coupon and tells them to take it some place else. A meaningful fetch quest is one where the PCs care about the Plot Coupon and its disposition. A meaningless fetch quest is one where only the NPC cares about the Plot Coupon and the only reason the PCs are delivering it is because they want the NPC to do something else for them; as a result, the actual Plot Coupon and what you’re doing with it is inconsequential and could easily be swapped out for any other arbitrary items/locations.)
This is very much a variation of the broken Choose Your Own Adventure design technique, and it’s particularly painful here because Descent Into Avernus actually promises to deliver this incredible, open-ended exploration of Avernus before yanking it away.
But the problems with the adventure’s Choose Your Railroad go much deeper than the fact that it’s just a bad idea in principle. It’s actually difficult to explain how poorly this is done.
So the PCs have Mad Maggie use her dream machine on Lulu. Lulu wakes up and says, “The sword! The sword! I know where it is!”
(Spoilers: She doesn’t.)
Her “dreams lead the characters on a wild goose chase to Haruman’s Hill.”
First: There’s no clear reason given for why Lulu thinks Haruman’s Hill is where the sword is.
Second: Given the timeline, it’s fairly clear that Haruman’s Hill did not and could not exist when Lulu was in Avernus.
But, OK. Fine. This thing that makes no sense happens. The PCs go adventuring at Haruman’s Hill for a little while, they figure out that Lulu took them to the wrong place, and Lulu says:
“I’m so sorry! My memory is a little hazier than I thought! Having pondered my dreams further, I think there are two sites in Avernus that are important to finding the sword! Choose between a place where demons manifest and one where demons are destroyed.”
These are, of course, the two railroads.
But, once again, there’s no reason given for why Lulu thinks either of these locations have anything to do with the Sword.
And that’s because they don’t.
They have nothing to do with the Sword. They have nothing to do with Lulu’s memories.
THERE IS NO REASON FOR LULU TO SAY YOU SHOULD GO TO THESE TWO LOCATIONS.
And this becomes abundantly clear as soon as the PCs go to them.
The first one is a harvesting station for abyssal chickens. Four (presumably redneck) devils are harvesting the chickens and bullying another devil who is mentally impaired. These guys explicitly know absolutely nothing about what the PCs are trying to do, but if the PCs bribe them they can tell them where to find a guy who MIGHT know something that can help them.
Okay. What about the other location?
Here the PCs meet a devil who knows absolutely nothing about what they’re trying to do, but if they go on a meaningless fetch quest for him he’ll give them a letter of introduction to another guy who MIGHT help them do a thing that they’re NOT doing.
So to briefly recap here:
- Lulu takes you to the wrong location.
- Lulu tells you two more locations to go to, but can give no reason why you should.
- If you go to those locations, it is immediately clear that there’s no coherent reason for you to be there.
So Lulu:
- Demonstrates she can’t be trusted to give accurate directions.
- Fails to give accurate directions AGAIN.
- Descent Into Avernus than assumes the PCs will just continue along the “Path” they’ve “chosen,” even though there’s no discernible reason for them to do so.
And obviously this is a “reasonable” assumption because there are, after all, NPCs telling the PCs where to go and this is a Kenku Problem.
Fixing this was non-trivial. I wasn’t sure there WAS a fix without starting over from scratch, because the adventure had really backed itself into a corner here.
If I hadn’t solved it, of course, then we wouldn’t be doing this Remix at all.
The actual railroads themselves are filled with a plethora of problems (as railroads always are), but since we’re defenestrating the whole structure there’s not a lot of value in breaking it down point by point. Our alternative structure will be laid out in Part 6C: Quest of the Dream Machine, and Part 7: Exploring Avernus will look at how to run Avernus as a true exploration campaign.
Most minor of quibbles but I wonder if there’s any precedent for Avernus altering one’s lifespan? It’s definitely outside-of-D&D baggage but I find it weird to talk about characters dying of natural causes in Hell. Then again, the PCs who journey there don’t do so as spirits, or w/e, and all their stats work as normal, so I guess one can presume that yeah, given a long (and lucky) enough life you could just putter out as normal, maybe even set up a heavily guarded Avernian retirement home. It just runs counter to my assumptions re: Hell as a malevolent force in itself.
Extremely looking forward to Part 7, in particular.
I honestly don’t understand how DiA got published. D
id anyone actually playtest the WHOLE THING?
Or did 29 people create separate little bits, each of which got playtested in isolation with a railroad baton-pass relay stitching them together?
I love the premise of this campaign. My players love them too. The fact you are putting so many hours of your life into fixing this mess and making it into an incredibly enjoyable adventure is wonderful.
For anyone who hasn’t done so already, please take a look at Justin’s Patreon page and pledge. Creatives need paying for their work!
https://www.patreon.com/justinalexander
Wholeheartedly agree – a great premise (two, actually), poorly executed.
One of my players gets all the WotC stuff to review, often the whole thing or at least big chunks of it; we’ve been on their playtest list since 5e was being developed. This one is the only exception I can recall, where a whole new adventure was not sent to us for some kind of review / playtest. Not a single scrap of it. The first we heard of it was when they went public with the usual big marketing push, which focused on chapter 6+ and mostly ignored all the prior stuff which is actually most of the campaign.
So yeah, significant lack of design oversight, editing, and playtest (I can only assume the few playtesters named, were internals who playtested little chunks), all of which shows in an adventure / campaign, which has loads of great ideas, put together really poorly. God help any DM who tries to run it as written, you’d have to end up like Adam Koebel on his roll20 livestream, where re regularly called out the stupid design aspects, and played up how inept the cultists are etc. Certainly an option, but not one that I’d like to do myself.
So yeah, super happy to have this blog as a source of much inspiration for my own campaign; I’d say I’m using (or planning to use) about 60% of what’s written here. Given we’re only two session in so far, 3rd session tonight. Here’s a couple of my own observations, based on this blog, my own game, and also having recently read someone else’s update (where they did a great review last year, then pretty much ignored their own advice and ran it as written, even allowed their 6 players to all be paladins, ie. basically didn’t brief the players on what the game as about and didn’t help guide them to make a useful party for any of it).
Firstly I did my first ever session zero, and it worked really well. The Dark Secret was a good lead-in, it’s something that’s easily missed in the book. I think you can use it an as ongoing motivation, for example my group chose “Murderers”, and now they are off investigating murders, so good tension; they murdered a Guild kingpin’s cousin, and now a different kingpin is watching and blackmailing them etc e.g. he took dead-eye away after the PC’s subdued him (and, off camera, took his ship and crew).
Also, I made sure I pitched the adventure as a city-based adventure, where you start off as employees, or prospective employees, of the Frosted Fist. You care about your city, likely it’s your home (I did end up with two ‘imports’, but they were basically indentured servants of the frosted fist marshal). You’ll have some reason to care about the city. So my players knew there was some “Descent into Avernus” at some stage, but I made sure that was not part of the “elevator pitch”, it wasn’t going to feature in the known future, so I made sure we ended up with a group of PC’s who were all definitely “dodgy” in various ways, but who had ties to the city and would care about it ongoing.
I also changed it from Baldur’s Gate, to Luskan. Something I did earlier, with Murder in Baldur’s Gate. In my game, there is no Alturel, it’s Luskan that gets dragged down into Hell, and it doesn’t happen until the PC’s are somewhere towards the end of the city-dungeons, likely when they are dealing with the Vanthampur Mansion in fact. So no refugees, just cultists and murders to start with, leading to when the Ritual is completed and Luskan is pulled down into Hell. At which point, the PC’s are about the only chance the city has of being saved. Or that’s the vague plan so far – I don’t like to plan much detail more than a couple of session out.
Anyway, kudos to Justin, he’s doing all the hard work for me, giving me loads of great ideas on how to turn a stupid linear set of fetch-quests designed for lazy-murder-hobo-players who can’t be bothered thinking or paying too much attention, into a compelling, nuanced campaign where the players have the feeling of just enough agency and everyone gets to engage their brains.
Another thought-provoking analysis. And I don’t even intend to run this adventure.
I do plan to run Rime of the Frostmaiden when it comes out – I’d love to hear your suggestions on what you look for when reading an adventure for the first time.
Editing note: “.. wrong with interstitial content: The would should be not..” Possibly “The world..” for second sentence?
I really appreciate these remixes. I have always considered fixing something that is broken to be an amazing learning opportunity. The way you identify the problem, say why it’s a problem, and talk about how to fix it/avoid it is incredibly helpful and informative to me as I try to be a better DM. You have a great way of explaining things that clicks with how my brain works. Thanks!
Minor typos in the first sentence: “As the PCs leave _Elutrel_, I think the time has _com_ to take a step back”. Thanks for another excellent analysis.
Typos fixed! Thank you! (Apparently my fingers really love “Elutrel,” so I’ve also caught 8 other instances of that typo in the Remix as a result of the heads up here. So thanks several times over!)
@Savage Wombat – re: first thing I look for in an adventure. Honestly, the first thing I’m looking for is cool ideas. You can have the most perfectly structured adventure in the universe, but if your ideas don’t get my blood pumping it doesn’t really matter.
Then I’m looking at structure. I both want the structure of the scenario to be robust and I’m thinking about how the weak places in that structure can be made more robust.
Right off the bat, any place where an adventure says, “The PCs must then…” the first thing I think to myself is, “What if they don’t?”
Next, I’m looking at the flow and pacing of information. This is often closely related to structure. I talk about about it a bit in Arriving in Hellturel.
Getting the Players to Care is also often about sequencing information: They have to know who Robin Hood is before they’ll give a crap about meeting Robin Hood. Many adventures overlook this and it’s often the easiest way to dramatically improve the table experience.
Most adventures are either mysteries or contain mystery elements. So once I’ve decided to actually run something often the first thing I’ll do is draw a revelation list. This is, of course, closely related to the flow of information; it also immediately reveals many weak points in the scenario structure.
Next, look for any places where there’s a bunch of amazing back story or behind the scenes shenanigans that the PCs have no way of finding out about. Figure out how to show it to the players and, ideally, make it matter to them. (Often this stuff can be/should be added to your revelation list.)
On a similar note, look for any place where the PCs are doing something just because somebody tells them to (the “meaningless fetch quest” I talk about in this post) and see if you can find a way to directly motivate the PCs to do it instead.
Keep in mind that often you can achieve a lot while doing very little: For example, in Dragon Heist you can accomplish a lot by just looking at which NPCs the players really like and then putting one of them in the blast radius of the fireball. That takes virtually no effort whatsoever; you probably did it as soon as you think about it.
I write these giant blog posts explaining my thought process and my design decisions because part of the point of the Remixes for me is helping new GMs see how to do this stuff. But nobody should be misled into thinking they need 70,000 words of blather to accomplish this stuff. 😉
Same thing with buffing up a revelation list: Doing three clues isn’t three times the work of doing single clues. The bulk of a mystery isn’t the clues. A clue is often literally one sentence in your prep notes.
I wonder, is it possible that a significant portion of the players doesn’t actually care about the cohesive story, choices and motivation? Perhaps they do want to go from an NPC to an NPC, fighting monsters along the way, getting the McGuffin and defeating the BBEG? They don’t remember what happened 3 sessions before – they just know that a city is going to hell, they are in hell and they are fighting devils in various cool locations. All the remaining details are unimportant.
@Hastur: “Frosted Fist”? What’s the story behind the name change?
@gru: There probably *are* players like that, although it does make you wonder why they aren’t playing Diablo instead.
@gru – I have not DM’d or played since the 90s, 2nd Ed., until now, and the group of players I have are all first timers, except one, who has played a number of campaigns with several DM’s, but all since 4e was released. I’ve been following the Remix as closely as I’ve been able given some game play prior to starting DiA, but my players are all super into the story, story-telling, and RP opportunities. Not Critical Role level, but neither am I. Anyway, the one player who has some experience has said that I am his best DM ever, and I think that has a lot to do with this Remix and things making sense versus typical 5e modules. His prior DM’s were all railroaders and games were heavily combat game mechanics focused, so players were all as OP as possible, and combat was everything.
@Wyvern, it’s a long story, kind of like “you had to be there”, but since you asked…
At its most simple, I just thought “Frosted Fist” sounds more appropriate for Luskan which is way up north, rather then “Flaming Fist” in Baldur’s Gate which isn’t exactly Chult but is certainly not very frosty.
At a broader level, I wanted to use Luskan as my main Urban setting, because there was very little published material, as opposed to Baldur’s Gate which has computer games etc and for me that’s baggage I’d rather not have to care about, I’d like a few high-level details to be common knowledge (e.g. my players can all read the Sword Coast book, and get no spoilers). Then the adventure itself provides all the details required for us all to enjoy the experience, including a lot of ad-lib. I’m a big fan of making stuff up as we play the game; @Justin’s work here helps be more prepared, but there’s always some level of “oh, I hadn’t thought of that” required of me when I DM for my players, and I love it. Anyway, having too much “canon” gets in the way of that, for me, especially if some of my players know all that better than I do (and other players know none).
Anyway, in my campaigns, the Frosted Fists are an off-shoot of the Flaming Fists. They were actually founded by Ulder Ravengard, who left Baldur’s Gate and formed a new, and very similar, organisation in Luskan. Then he turned traitor towards the end of “Murder in Luskan (BG)”, and was executed. So in my “Descent” campaign, he’s dead, and Liara has been running the Frosted Fists for about three years already.
As others have noted, Luskan fits the bill much better than Baldur’s Gate, if you want to use the published “Gotham” kind of vibe, where the cops are all crooked, yada yada. In my previous campaign, early on the PC’s were briefly enrolled as Frosted Fists, but overall they thought Luskan was a dirty old corrupt city that they only saved because they were heroes and it was a gateway to further chaos if they didn’t, not because they liked the place.
Now, in the new “Descent” campaign, they are all Frosted Fists, willingly signed up, following orders, and killing cultists. They are part of the corruption. But they have good motivations lined up for caring about the town, even if it’s only something like “one day, I want to run a Ship or the Guild”.
Is there anything in this book that even makes it worth salvaging?
@Yora:
If there weren’t, there wouldn’t be a Remix. It might be worth checking out Justin’s post of “Strip-Mining Adventure Modules” for better understanding what’s happening here. Except this time, he’s not just ripping out all the stuff that’s good, but then glues it back together.
@SomeoneLivedHere – I have a slightly different way of handling the transmigration of souls. In my campaign, outer planes beings inherit the souls of the dead to act as theiur servants or soldiers. So if a being on the material plane dedicates their life to a deity, or sells their soul to a devil/demon on the material plane, they become that outer planes being’s “property” in their afterlife. For good-aligned beings, that means an eternity of worship and praise, willing dedication to their cause, etc. For evil-aligned, that means becoming a soldier in the Blood War or otherwise. Death at the hands of a devil or demon results in the same thing – so a Spined Devil killing you means you become its slave, unless your soul is willingly dedicated to a stronger power, in which case your soul becomes more valuable to that stronger power due to holy sacrifice etc. Suffering or martyrdom adds value to your soul – making the devil or demon who claimed your soul more valuable if they get to keep you, or your death attracts more followers to a saint/demigod/god. This is how devils and demons gain power and evolve, by gaining slaves/servants/soldiers, and the same with dedication of souls to saints/demigods/gods. If you die of natural causes in hell, your soul defaults to the duke of that layer of hell, again, unless your soul is dedicated to a stronger power and you’ve stayed true to their cause. Incentive for clerics and paladins to maintain their code of conduct, worship the “best” god, and so on.
I’ve also implemented a new homebrew rule – the “wages of sin” rule. Avernus focuses on wrath and pride, so I am allowing players to choose to use the wrath rule to add an extra die for Advantage – so if they naturally have disadvantage, they roll one die, if they naturally have advantage, they roll three. However, choosing wrath has a toll on one’s soul, the more times they take this choice, the more likely it is that I as DM start making that choice for them until every time they roll a D20, it is with wrath and is inescapable.
So living out your life in a retirement home in Avernus might seem like a tempting idea – bu not in my campaign world. You’ve gotta make hell hellish, it isn’t just a strange landscape with tough fire resistant monsters.
You are so spot on with your analysis. I am running this right now for our regular group, and I feel like I probably should have just scrapped it all and wrote it from scratch (something I am NOT qualified to do…). I’d argue I am having to do an almost equal amount of work for this to make sense for my players.
Amazing stuff, I really enjoy reading how you break things down..I wish I would have found this remix before session 0 but I have sprinkled some of your stuff into my campaign. First time DMing and having a blast it is a combat heavy campaign but am really putting effort into pushing more story and creating tense moments the more we play, my PCs are reacting nicely to it. My only issue is we are going to descend down to Avernus most likely next session and they are about to create hang gliders. I also think fort Knucklebone will make a nice hub and I am patiently waiting your view of it o_O.
Debating having an issue mid flight that takes them off course and having 3 separate areas they could land depending on their choice.
Anyway thanks for sharing with us, any chance of a general idea when 6c will be finsihed?
6C should arrive on Monday if all goes according to schedule!
(Of course, it was also supposed to arrive last Wednesday, but I got distracted by soul coins.)
Come onnnnn Monday!
Unusual for me to look forward to a Monday.
Any chance you’ll drop 6C *and* D on Monday?
Hi Justin,
Good post here, but I think you may have overlooked the following bit of text from the adventure re. How the PCs find time to interact with NPCs at Fort Knucklebone:
“Before she does that, however, Mad Maggie tells the characters she needs to gather supplies for the ritual of memory unlocking. This gives the characters a chance to interact with the other members of Mad Maggie’s gang and maybe earn some good will with them as mentioned under their individual descriptions below.”
You spent a bit too much time on that critique, so I wanted to point this out. There IS “narrative space” for PCs to hang out in Fort Knucklebone, and this text lines up well with your suggestion of “a few hours” to get the machine ready.
@finn, just fyi, “a few hours” is the “half-ass” solution. The better solution is in Part 6C.
@bill, I love the idea of the Wages of Sin. What’s your Pride rule?
@Finn: Having run my players through Fort Knucklebone a month or two back… there isn’t really narrative space.
In real life, if you have nothing to do, you can just wander around to see if something catches your eye. If DnD worked like this, your players could dynamically see something happening, move in that direction, and have an encounter occur to make the area feel more alive. Hurray!
But DnD does not work like this.
Worst case: Your players say “Oh, you need a few hours? Okay… we… wait a few hours then.” At which point you either force an encounter, or you nod and say, alright, eventually Mad Maggie comes back.
Best case: During the course of your atmosphere-setting, the players spot something of interest to them and decide to engage with it. If you’re aiming for this, you’ll have a ton of bloat in your description as you describe the kenku, the imps, the redcaps, the flameskull floating in the distance, the flesh golem hopping awkwardly in Maggie’s wake… none of which are as interesting as the fact that the fort itself is a giant pile of scrap worked into a machine shop that churns out Mad Max vehicles.
Without reworking Fort Knucklebone heavily, it doesn’t function as a hub world at all because there’s nothing to buy, there’s nobody to talk to, and the one thing you “accomplish” when going there (the dream ritual) leads you on a wild goose chase.
In my game, I added a vehicle upgrade system, a soul coin exchange, scavenged loot sellers (for magic items of varying quality), a safe place to stay, a pseudo-tavern for information collecting, and *a character’s long-lost mother, thought dead for years,* and nobody has so much as mentioned the place by name since they left.
Insofar as hub worlds are necessary, I’ve found the Wandering Emporium works way better… and I feel with a bunch of tweaking, Elturel itself could be even better than that. But Fort Knucklebone accomplishes nothing that other locales don’t perform better.
And that’s what I’ve been waiting for from the moment I started reading the Remix!
Even though DiA is going to be my first published adventure experience, my jaw completely dropped when I saw these two neat rails of seven locations.
Thanks for this great work, maestro.