Go to Part 1

We’re continuing our series of capsule reviews of Descent Into Avernus-related material on the Dungeon Masters Guild, giving a very high overview of my thoughts/impressions of each book. Unless otherwise noted, the material has not been playtested.

You may also want to review this Guide to Grades at the Alexandrian. The short version: My general philosophy is that 90% of everything is crap, and crap gets an F. I’m primarily interested in grading the 10% of the pile that’s potentially worth your time. Anything from A+ to C- is, honestly, worth checking out if the material sounds interesting to you. If I give something a D it’s pretty shaky. F, in my opinion, should be avoided entirely.

A LIGHT IN THE DARK: A Light in the Dark bills itself as tying into the continuity of Descent Into Avernus, but it’s set in Baldur’s Gate while having a suggested level at which PCs in the campaign will have long since left Baldur’s Gate behind. Its purpose, therefore, is somewhat confusing.

The maps are nice and the concept is fine, but the adventure itself is virtually unplayable. It’s more or less written as a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, consisting of literally just pages and pages (and pages!) of horribly executed boxed text. Often this boxed text is outlining literal A or B choices. It repeatedly ends with the refrain, “What do you want to do?” literally scripted in. And it is constantly either telling the players what their characters do or simply leaving them helplessly standing by while entire scenes play out without their input.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this comes when the PCs confront the villain. While the PCs stand unable to act (because the DM is reading), the boxed text has:

• The villain order a zombie girl to go punish her parents.
• The zombie girl leave the room.
• The girl’s parents scream and beg for mercy from the neighboring room.
• The sound of thumping that turns to screams of pain.
• “The noises they make will stay with you for a long time.”

This is one of those times where I wish I had more nice things to say about an adventure. But I don’t.

• Grade: F

BALDUR’S GATE – THE STRUGGLES OF STELMANE: This is another adventure which presents itself as being something you can incorporate into a Descent Into Avernus campaign, but which is nevertheless set in Baldur’s Gate with a suggested level too high to be used in the campaign. (What gives, folks?)

The Struggles of Stelmane is a fairly simple adventure: A mind flayer is attempting to take control of Duke Stelmane. The PCs are told by the Duke’s assistant to investigate some caves. They do so and find a tunnel that leads to Stelmane’s manor. (Which – pet peeve alert! – is incorrectly referred to as a villa.) The mind flayer is in the manor. The PCs kill it.

Unfortunately, the adventure spends a great deal of time spinning its wheels. (It’s about 5 pages of content in a 20 page PDF.) And when it’s not spinning its wheels, it frequently just doesn’t make sense: The mind flayer telepathically read Stelmane’s mind and for some reason this is causing Stelmane’s physical health to deteriorate. The duke’s assistant requests a meeting with the PCs, but the only thing he asks them to do is investigate a murder that doesn’t happen until the PCs show up to meet him. The adventure frequently talks about “following a series of clues,” but there are no clues to follow. And so forth.

• Grade: D-

DANCE OF DEATHLESS FROST: Dylan Ramsey delivers a clever little expansion of Descent Into Avernus, giving the PCs an opportunity to track down the mysterious phylactery of deathless frost. With it they can either control the demon lord Kostchtchie or destroy it and turn him mortal.

My one quibble with the adventure is that it suffers a little from what I call “idea guy syndrome.” A common variant is, “Wouldn’t this encounter be cool?” This often takes the form of the bad guys sending minions to attack the PCs… but the encounter isn’t actually statted up (e.g., “She could send fiendish assassins or a simulacrum to try to steal the phylactery from the characters.”) But you also get stuff like, “It feels like the NPC’s lair should have fiendishly clever defenses… but I couldn’t figure out how to do it, so here’s a couple of vague ideas.”

So, basically, you’re going to have to put some elbow-grease into Dance of Deathless Frost if you want to use it. Nevertheless, Ramsey delivers some cool ideas, memorable locales, and nifty ideas, so it’s probably worth the effort. (I will most likely be incorporating this scenario into the Remix.)

• Grade: C-

FORGES OF AVERNUS: The central conceit of Forges of Avernus is that each Warlord of Avernus maintains their own forge to outfit their warriors, and each of these forges is skilled in the creation of special, themed weapons. I like this a lot: One of the big shortcomings in Descent Into Avernus is that it details the warlords, but not their warbands. I wanted to supplement that lack, and Forges of Avernus does a lot of heavy lifting for me. Not only will the unique weapons make for distinct combat encounters with each warband, but the supplement also details the NPC forge masters (adding extra roleplaying opportunities).

The only drawback here is that the mechanical mastery of 5^th Edition is a little shaky. For example, there are several effects triggered “on a critical failure,” but there are no critical failures in 5^th Edition. This doesn’t appear to be a crippling problem, but when you see a weak grasp of mechanical fundamentals it erodes trust in the rest of the mechanical implementation, so you’ll probably want to double-check these elements as you add them to your campaign.

• Grade: B-

BITTER RIVALS: Bitter Rivals is a slick, professional-grade adventure designed to be seamlessly slotted into Descent Into Avernus. It adds a ton of lore to the warlord Bitter Breath and completely details their warcamp as part of a raid scenario. This is a no-brainer for any GM planning to run Descent Into Avernus, with or without the Remix.

The organization and level of detail, in particular, are fantastic. One example is the formatting of the mission briefing given in the scenario hook. Rather than using traditional boxed text, J.A. Valeur of Eventyr Games uses in-line headings to identify the major bullet points of the briefing while providing the written dialogue associated with that bullet point in plain text behind the in-line heading. I hadn’t seen this technique previously, but it’s best-of-both-worlds stuff.

There’s also a really nifty DM’s Cheat Sheet section of the adventure, which basically presents the entire adventure a second time but with only the essential elements (like encounter rosters, the bullet point version of the mission briefing, etc.). Stripped of the surrounding explanatory text, this is a great document for efficiently running the adventure without flipping back and forth through multiple pages.

• Grade: B

INFERNAL BOUNTY: Another Descent Into Avernus supplement from Eventyr Games, this short 2-page PDF is basically just a random encounter with a pair of bounty hunter devils (using some very lightly customized stat blocks) for $0.50. In addition to being a random encounter, the fiend duo can make a decent response team that can be flexibly deployed at need. But I just don’t see a lot of value in Infernal Bounty even at the fairly cheap price point.

• Grade: D

ENHANCED DEVILS: Another Eventyr supplement, Enhanced Devils looks at a dozen or so devils from the Monster Manual and soups up their stat blocks, giving them extra abilities that don’t necessarily make them more powerful, but do give them more options in combat so that multiple encounters with them stay fresh.

I haven’t playtested these yet, but they look balanced and useful. The important thing here, though, is the word “yet.” I’ve talked in the past about how 4^th Edition’s design philosophy of reducing the breadth of abilities possessed by monsters (which has carried through, albeit to a lesser extent, in 5^th Edition) on the theory that the typical monster only lasts for 3-5 rounds is fundamentally flawed (because, if nothing else, when you build an encounter with 5 of those monsters, the stat block immediately has 15-25 rounds of actions), so it’s probably not surprising to discover that I like what this supplement is doing and I like these stat blocks. I’ll be using them to help keep encounters in Avernus fresh and interesting.

• Grade: C

TEMPLE OF THE BROKEN PRINCE: Yet another adventure that sells itself as a plug-and-play side quest for Descent Into Avernus, but isn’t actually designed to work that way. This time, the adventure is set on Avernus, but the recommended level is too low.

In actual practice, the location is not really designed for Avernus. But it IS a fairly nice location-crawl that could easily be slotted into any traditional D&D setting. (If you still wanted to use Temple of the Broken Prince as part of the Remix, it might work well as the mission that sends the PCs out of Elturel just in time for the whole city to get sucked into Hell.) A demonic temple turned into a demonic sepulcher, the rooms are weird, sinister, and drenched with dread. There’s also a couple new monsters that look like creepy fun.

• Grade: C+

More DMs Guild Capsule Reviews – Go to the Avernus Remix

Auril the Frostmaiden has claimed Icewind Dale, laying her enchantment upon it: a terrible curse of perpetual winter. The denizens of Ten-Towns – ten settlements clustered around the lakes at the center of the Dale, nestled between the Spine of the World and the Great Glacier – grow increasingly desperate for a spring which never comes. When the PCs arrive in this gloom-riven land, they will discover that the cold of the wintry north has leeched into the hearts of men. Surrounded by darkness, can they be the flame that rekindles the light of hope?

As the campaign begins, the players are presented with an open world sandbox: They’re largely free to wander through Ten-Towns as they please, helping people and engaging with crises that present themselves in each of the settlements. A bonafide sandbox is unusual (if not unique) among official D&D campaigns, and the town-based structure used by Icewind Dale is intriguing and ripe with possibility.

Unfortunately, like several of the other official D&D campaigns I’ve seen, Rime of the Frostmaiden only flirts with being something innovative and unique before abruptly ripping off its mask and shouting, “Aha! Just kidding! I was a railroad the whole time!”

In this case, at least, the sandbox is at least fairly legitimate for as long as it lasts. But after just four or five levels, the whole thing abruptly collapses down into the linear plot. (Which is, itself, beset with problems.)

With that being said, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is bursting with a ton of cool stuff. The covers are metaphorically strained with a bevy of good sandbox material, a handful of epic set-pieces, stunning artwork, and fifty pages of chilling new monsters (plus a thematic miscellanea of other useful elements). Before we go any further, I’m just going to say that I like it. The book is not without its shortcomings (we’ll get to those), but I liked it enough that I felt comfortable launching a campaign in the Icewind Dale sandbox without first making major alterations to the material. Which is, for me, fairly high praise indeed.

THE SANDBOX

One of the primary problems with Rime of the Frostmaiden is how poorly it explains its structure. This is particularly true of the sandbox, the explanation of which is both inadequate and filled with vague contradictions that further complicate comprehension. But this is, more or less, how it works:

There are two starting quests. An easy-to-miss feature here is that these quests are tonally distinct from each other — one is tracking a serial killer that ties into the darkness that has seeped into Icewind Dale; the other is a hunt for fanciful fairy creatures called chwingas. Both, however, thematically tie into the over-arching campaign: The Frostmaiden is a dark and feyish goddess, and the two starting quests reflect that from different angles. (The DM can also use this to dial in the tone they want for the campaign, by choosing or emphasizing one quest over the other.)

In any case, these starting quests are designed as light framing devices that will motivate the PCs to move from one town to another. Each town has an additional quest keyed to it and opportunities to pick up rumors about quests in other towns. So as the PCs journey around, they will collect additional quests and most likely begin doing those while continuing to work towards accomplishing their original quests.

The starting quests thus effectively provide a default action for the beginning of the campaign: If the players have any doubt about what they should be doing next, they can simply go to a new town and look for their starting quest item (the serial killer or the chwinga).

Once the PCs have accomplished a certain number of quests, they level up and effectively “unlock” an additional rumor table (which the book confusingly refers to as “tall tales,” despite the fact that they are completely reliable sources of information) that will begin pointing the PCs towards what I’m going to call the Chapter 2 quests (because that’s where they’re described in the book). These quests are, obviously, more difficult; they also tend to take the PCs further out into the wilderness around Ten-Towns.

Now, there are some caveats here.

First, Rime of the Frostmaiden instructs the DM to only use one of the starting quests. This can be an option for aesthetic reasons, but objectively speaking it’s almost certainly wrong: The structural function of the starting quests, as noted, is to provide a default action that will move the PCs through several towns. Both of the quests, however, can end essentially at random (i.e., the players choose the correct town, find the thing they’re looking for, and the quest ends). You want both quests on the table to provide redundancy. Having both quests in play will also deepen the default interaction with each community (because they need to look for multiple things).

Most importantly, however, giving the PCs two different quests to simultaneously pursue at the start of the campaign will immediately break the players of the expectation that they’re going to be doing a linear set of assigned tasks.

The second caveat is that the way Icewind Dale handles rumors is mostly wrong. The advice in the book for using the rumor tables is radically inconsistent, and there are simply too many places where the DM is told to spoonfeed rumors to the PCs one at a time. This is more or less the exact opposite of what you should actually be doing.

See, in a sandbox campaign you want LOTS of rumors to be in play at any time. The essence of a sandbox campaign is that the players have the ability to choose or define what their next scenario is going to be. In order for that to work, the PCs need to be in an information-rich environment and rumors are, broadly speaking, how you accomplish that. If you spoonfeed them the rumors (i.e., scenario hooks) one at a time, you’re choking the life out of your sandbox. (See Juggling Scenario Hooks in a Sandbox for a longer discussion of this in detail.)

To be fair, there are other sections of the book that correctly tell you to be profligate with the rumors. But even some of this advice can go awry. For example, there’s one passage where it suggests that the GM should just randomly give players rumors out of the blue. (“Lo! From the heavens I give unto you… a rumor!”) The reality is that the acquisition of rumors should flow from the actions taken by the PCs.

(Which is also why the investigative action taken in each town related to the starting quests should, generally speaking, explicitly trigger the local rumor table.)

These are regrettable shortcomings in the book (particularly if one imagines it being used by a neophyte GM), but not seriously debilitating as you can, for the most part, simply ignore the bad instructions on how to use the material.

The third caveat, however, deals with the actual adventure material itself. While many of the sandbox adventures presented in Icewind Dale are well done, there are too many that miss the mark. (And some badly so.)

For example, consider the starting quest in which the PCs need to track down a serial killer named Sephek. The scenario hook for this quest is one of the worst I’ve ever read. It’s comically bad.

Hlin has taken it upon herself to investigate the recent murders because no one else – not even the Council of Speakers – can be bothered. Hlin is studying the characters closely, trying to decide if they’re worth her time. Ultimately, she takes the chance and draws them into conversation, asking them to help her take down her only suspect: a man named Sephek Kaltro. Here’s what she knows about Sephek and the victims:

“Sephek Kaltro works for a small traveling merchant company called Torg’s, owned and operated by a shady dwarf named Torrga Icevein. In other words, Sephek gets around. He’s charming. Makes friends easily. He’s also Torrga’s bodyguard, so I’m guessing he’s good with a blade.

“His victims come from the only three towns that sacrifice people to the Frostmaiden on nights of the new moon. This is what passes for civilized behavior in Icewind Dale. Maybe the victims found a way to keep their names out of the drawings and Sephek found out they were cheating, so he killed them. Maybe, just maybe, Sephek is doing the Frostmaiden’s work.

“I followed Torg’s for a tenday as it moved from town to town. Quite the devious little enterprise, but that’s not my concern. What struck me is how comfortable Sephek Kaltro looked in this weather. No coat, no scarf, no gloves. It was like the cold couldn’t touch him. Kiss of the Frostmaiden, indeed.

“I will pay you a hundred gold pieces to apprehend Sephek Kaltro, ascertain his guilt, and deal with him, preferably without involving the authorities. When the job is done, return to me to collect your money.”

“Hello. Yes. I would like to pay you 100 gold pieces to kill this random person because he’s a serial killer… Well. Maybe. Who knows, really? I have no actual evidence he’s a killer. Hell, I don’t even know if he was actually in the same towns where the killings happened. But maybe.. just maybe, the killer is working for the Frostmaiden. Or maybe not. But if the killer IS working for the Frostmaiden, then MAYBE he would be immune to the cold. And this guy doesn’t wear a coat. So… yeah. Definitely the killer.”

That’s pretty dumb. But then it gets worse:

Quest-Giver: I followed Torg’s caravan for ten days.

PCs: So where is it now?

Quest-Giver: No idea.

The quest-giver followed the caravan for ten days, became convinced someone in the caravan was the killer, and then… left and went to a completely different town? So they could sit in a tavern and stare at strangers until randomly deciding which ones they would ask to go kill someone on their laughable say-so?

The crazy thing is that the quest-giver is completely right: The Frostmaiden is sending Sephek to kill people who bribe officials to take their names off the lottery list.

But… only three of the Ten-Towns even do the human sacrifice thing. If the Frostmaiden wants to kill people for not being available as sacrifices, why isn’t Sephek targeting the OTHER seven towns?

There are a number of similar head-scratchers strewn about Rime of the Frostmaiden, but there’s also a fair number of scenarios that are just badly designed.

For example, in the town of Bremen there’s some sort of murderous creature in the lake that’s attacking the local fishing boats. The PCs are supposed to grab a boat, head out onto the lake, and deal with the creature. (It’s an awakened plesiosaurus.) Here’s how the scenario works:

1. Get in the boat.
2. Roll on a random table of events until the plesiosaurus shows up.

The structure itself is obviously lackluster, but it’s made worse because (a) none of the results on the table are actually interesting and (b) they simply repeat until you roll the magic numbers on the d20 that end the misery.

Here are the actual rolls I made while simulating how this scenario would play out:

• Knucklehead trout hits you in the head.
• Knucklehead trout hits you in the head.
• Knucklehead trout hits you in the head.
• Nothing happens.
• Targos fishing boat shows up, then leaves.
• Nothing happens.
• Nothing happens.
• Nothing happens.
• Targos fishing boat shows up, then leaves.
• Plesiosaurus shows up.

It’s here! Finally!

… but then there’s a 1 in 3 chance that it just leaves before the PCs can interact with it! Which is, in fact, what I rolled. So then:

• Nothing happens.
• Knucklehead trout hits you in the head.
• Nothing happens.
• Nothing happens.
• Plesiosaurus comes back!

(It should be noted that each of these checks takes an hour, so the party also presumably went back to town and slept somewhere in there.)

Imagine running this at the table!

And yes, obviously, any DM worth their salt isn’t going to actually do this. But that just raises the question of why it was written this way in the first place, doesn’t it?

And then there’s Tali, the quest-giver. They’re a raging asshole.

Before the quest they say: “Can you go out on the lake and take notes on a dangerous beast that’s killing people?”

Then after the quest they say: “Oh! You’re back? In payment, here’s a potion that makes dangerous beasts friendly so that they won’t kill you.”

(I acknowledge that the potion wouldn’t work because the plesiosaurus has been awakened, but THEY don’t know that.)

To be clear, there are many quests that don’t have problems like this. (The book has more than twenty of these sandbox quests.) But there are, frankly, too many that do — like the dwarves who offer to pay the PCs more to retrieve a shipment of iron than the iron is worth; or the bad guys who captured a castle so they could live there and immediately dumped corpses into the water supply; or the one where all the NPCs are baffled about how they can find the bad guys, so they take the PCs to the tracks that the bad guys left in the snow and scratch their heads until one of the PCs says, “Maybe we could… follow the tracks?”

Speaking of tracks, it turns out that A LOT of the quest hooks in Icewind Dale are based around following tracks. Fail the Wisdom (Survival) check to follow the tracks? Guess you fail the quest! Sucks to be you! (And it’s frequently worse than this because the designers are actively sabotaging the already fragile structure. For example, there’s one quest where the PCs can fail to successfully follow the required tracks because they did so at the wrong time of day. And another where they follow the tracks of some thieves half way to their goal, but then the tracks automatically blow away in the wind, forcing the PCs to make blind Wisdom (Survival) checks to search the hills for… well, they don’t actually know WHAT they’re looking for, but if they find anything it will DEFINITELY be where the thieves are, right?) This is sort of okay in a sandbox like Rime of the Frostmaiden because you don’t need to succeed at every quest, but it’s still not great scenario design… particularly if you’re doing it over and over and over again.

Most of the material that’s compromised like this is, ultimately, salvageable. But you will need to put in the work to salvage it.

TRANSITION TO LINEAR

Let’s talk about the dragon in the room.

There comes a point in the campaign where the PCs have tracked down Sunblight, the duergar fortress in the mountains at the southern end of the Dale. As they approach the fortress, the chardalyn dragon that the duergar have been constructing out of magical, evil crystals flies out of the top of the fortress and begins winging towards Ten-Towns.

This is an incredibly epic, awesome moment.

It is also the point where the Icewind Dale sandbox begins collapsing into a linear scenario. This is, in my opinion, a bad decision. It seems to kick in at exactly the moment where, in my experience, the most interesting emergent gameplay in a sandbox will start appearing. In other words, stuff is just going to start getting awesome when the campaign abruptly says, “Eh. Fuck it. Let’s do something else.”

But beyond that, it’s just poorly done.

The intention is that the PCs have a choice: They can finish climbing up to Sunblight and assault the fortress OR they can climb down the mountain and race back to Ten-Towns to save it from the dragon.

Except the choice doesn’t actually work because the PCs have no way of understanding the stakes: It’s extremely unlikely that they’ll know what the dragon is going to do. “Dragon flying away from fortress” doesn’t auto-translate to “it’s going to destroy Ten-Towns.” I’d argue it’s far easier to read that as a signal to “hit the fortress fast before it gets back.” So there’s an opportunity for a cool choice here, but it’s a missed one.

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the players do understand the choice: There’s a dragon flying to Ten-Towns and they have to catch it!

… except they can’t. It turns out the choice to chase it or not is irrelevant. If you use the travel times listed for the PCs and the dragon in the book, the decision to raid Sunblight is incredibly unlikely to have any impact on the outcome in Ten-Towns. And, in fact, the overwhelmingly likely outcome in Ten-Towns is that all ten towns will be destroyed except for Bryn Shander and maybe Targos. (Despite this, the book gives no guidance at all for what the post-apocalyptic Ten-Towns is going to look like.)

So the choice doesn’t work. But whether the PCs assault Sunblight first or not (and we’ll come back to Sunblight in a moment), when they come back down the mountain they find a woman waiting for them with enough dog sleds for all of them. She wants them to help her do a job and she offers them a lift back to Ten-Towns.

First: This entire setup is just inherently awkward in its execution. The players decide to head back to town and an NPC pops up in the middle of the wilderness to say, “Hey! Need a lift?”

It’s just silly.

Second: The entire back half of the book absolutely requires that the PCs hitch a lift and work with this NPC. (The book tells you this explicitly multiple times. As far as I can tell, it’s not wrong.) This is an incredibly weak structure to hang an entire campaign on!

But it’s actually worse than that, because this NPC is clearly a necromancer: She’s got undead minions hanging out with her and everything. That’s a problem, because I think it’s overwhelmingly likely that the PCs are going to kill her without a second thought.

I was interested to see what other people thought of this, so I ran a poll on Twitter. 190 people voted on the most likely action the PCs would take, and two-thirds said she was toast… along with the rest of the campaign.

It doesn’t help that even if the PCs do talk to her, she makes it clear in her pitch that she’s a member of the Arcane Brotherhood… who have been repeatedly established in the first half of the campaign as unrepentant bad guys who betray everyone who works for them.

And, again, the PCs have to agree to work with the necromancer ex machina or the rest of the campaign can’t happen. Here’s how that works:

• The necromancer gives the PCs a ride back to Ten-Towns.
• After they deal with the chardalyn dragon, she tells them that she has a cool job for them, but they’re going to have to level up first.
• Once the PCs have leveled up, she leads them to Auril’s Abode, where they have to steal a lorebook.
• The lorebook has a spell which will let them access the lost city of Ythryn.
• The necromancer leads them to the location of Ythryn and casts the spell.

In short, once the PCs choose to go to Sunblight they trigger a sharp transition from the sandbox to a linear sequence of set pieces:

• Destruction’s Light (chasing the chardalyn dragon, which we’ve already discussed)
• Sunblight Fortress
• Auril’s Abode
• The Lost City of Ythryn

For the rest of this review, we’ll be looking at each of these set-pieces in detail.

Go to Part 2

At the edge of the Rainbowlands stands the Violet City, the last bastion of civilization upon the edge of the ultraviolet grasslands. Even the civilized lands of this world are strange and alien to our eyes — teeming with a multihued humanity (of greenlanders, bluelanders, etc.), porcelain princes (who simultaneously live in multiple bodies psychically linked), body-hopping ultras, and cat lords — and here, where it comes to an end, the setting teems with a fever dream of the fantastic.

The premise of Luka Rejec’s Ultraviolet Grasslands is that the PCs will form a caravan which journeys out into these strange lands and then returns.

The group will start by selecting their reason for journeying into the grasslands. In addition to obviously motivating the expedition, this also determines how the group earns XP. Twelve default options are provided. For example:

• To make money. Provide the party with a financier that loans them the money for their first caravan (and creates a debt), then consider awarding 1d6 x 100 XP for every new profitable trade route discovered, and for every profitable trade completed.
• To learn the ancient secrets. A reason that should appeal to wizards. Give each destination a 20% chance of having lore and remains that lead to the discovery of an ancient secret. Once five pieces are recovered, a wizard can spend a week to research the lore and figure out the Teleportation of Innocents or perhaps the secret of Liquid Stone Lamps. Consider awarding 1d6 x 200 XP for every such secret learned.

The grasslands themselves are not trackless wastes. There are established routes and the players will have a map of 32 branching locations leading from the edge of the grasslands to the strange ruins of the Black City on the edge of an oily sea. Here’s one slice of what this map looks like:

The destinations indicated on the map are vast distances apart (the numbers on the trails between them indicate weeks of travel to reach them). You can think of each destination as a distinct point of light; or as the hub of a wheel, with different discoveries (i.e., adventure locations) available as spokes off of them. A simple structure is given for the PCs to make discoveries from the destination they’re currently in, and the intention is that they will add these discoveries to the map. (You can imagine it slowly expanding in detail as the campaign continues.)

Caravan travel itself is given an elegant, streamlined system consisting of:

• Time (simplified to weeks of travel, with each week given a specific resolution sequence you can easily walk through while making meaningful decisions)
• Inventory (with a simple system of “sacks” that make it easy to manage a caravan without getting bogged down in bookkeeping)
• Supplies & Survival (again, simplified to make it easy to manage an entire caravan of hirelings and pack animals)

The beauty of this is its robust simplicity. What I’m going to call Rejec’s caravan-crawl deserves to be ensconced alongside dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls as a pillar of the RPG artform. It’s an elegant and compelling scenario structure: Rejec provides a clean framework which GMs can fill with content, coupled to a clean set of default actions linked directly to a plethora of potential default goals.

The key insight, in my opinion, is the expectation that the PCs will travel these caravan routes again and again and again. If the goal of the structure was to simply travel from one end of the caravan route to the other (e.g., from the Violet City to the Black City), then you’d be looking at Choose Your Own Adventure prep, and it would be difficult to justify prepping all this branching content when most of it would never be experienced. But because the PCs will constantly be engaging and re-engaging the Ultraviolet Grasslands, all of that material become relevant.

In theory, this is obvious: Both megadungeons and hexcrawls follow similar principles, justifying expansive prep with the expectation that the material will be constantly re-engaged. In practice, though, this is non-trivial to achieve. Although you could simply mandate that the PCs mount multiple expeditions, this can easily decay into a monotonous grind. (You can see a similar problem crop up when people try to run megadungeons as if they were traditional dungeons and expect the PCs to “clear the dungeon.”)

Rejec structures and incentivizes re-engagement with the grasslands in three ways:

First, the Supply & Survival system forces the PCs to return to civilization to resupply (or to explore the trade routes in order to find places where they can re-supply along the way). Even if their ultimate goal were to simply “reach the Black City,” they would still need to repeatedly engage the grasslands in order to achieve that goal.

Second, by making each point on the branching routes an exploration hub surrounded by a cluster of discoveries (which could be theoretically expanded infinitely), Rejec ensures that the PCs don’t exhaust the routes. Like (Re-)Running the Megadungeon, re-engaging the material is always fresh and interesting; not simply a rote repetition.

Third, as a final fillip, Rejec adds a simple Trade & Goods structure. Using this structure, GMs can procedurally generate demand & supply, while the PCs can use market research to figure out the best places to sell their stuff. I have a few minor quibbles about this system (see below), but it creates a systemic pull that encourages players to explore the totality of the trade network.

Then, on top of that, Rejec provides a system for Milk Runs! “If the heroes figure out a milk run, where they can just travel the same journey over and over for profit… let them, but this is boring. Abstract this into a route a henchperson can handle, and roll for cash and complications every year.” So if the system designed to encourage the PCs to explore ever produces an error state where it starts encouraging them to do stuff that’s boring, Rejec provides a solution! This is brilliant!

Oh! Also! Starter caravans! Rejec provides a selection of pre-built caravans custom-tailored for specific purposes (scout, small trader, dungeon exploration expedition, etc.), so that you can just pick one and immediately start playing.

GLORIOUS GRASSLANDS

Laying aside how excited the book makes you to put a caravan together, the setting itself is absolutely enchanting. The book draws you in and conjures the grasslands before your mind’s eye in an alluring, all-captivating vision. It’s not just the art — which is gorgeous; landscapes like a young Hal Foster on an acid trip with characters designed by P. Craig Russell. The text positively vibrates from all of the rich ideas and evocative imagery Rejec has crammed between the covers. By the time I finished reading, I wanted to be out there exploring immediately.

Honestly, just a sample of the place names should be enough to stir the imagination:

• The Bone Mines of Moy Sollo
• The Death-Facing Passage
• The Cauldron of Revitalized Divinity
• The Grass Colossus
• The Porcelain Citadel
• The Cliff Villages of Ghost and Clan

There is a distinctive attitude and vision which simply leaps off the page. Groping for antecedents to compare the grasslands to, I suggest that this might be what you’d end up with if Hayao Miyazaki adapted Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun: It embodies a seemingly impossible nostalgia for something so alien it shouldn’t be able to resonate with our own sense of a lost past… and yet somehow does, capturing a serene beauty which is nevertheless filled with pulse-pounding savagery.

What impresses me most, though, is how incredibly accessible it all feels. The RPG industry is filled with any number of incredibly ornate and wonderful settings that are incredibly difficult to bring to the table because of how much effort it takes to onboard the entire group (Tékumel being the granddaddy of them all). But despite how fresh and unique and deep the Ultraviolet Grasslands are, I nevertheless feel that I could sit down and start playing this with little more effort than any other game of D&D.

Maybe there’s something alchemical about the borderlands — about the place where civilization (any civilization) falls away — that frees us to explore this strange and wonderful wonderland with eager and open eyes. Or perhaps it’s because Rejec encapsulates so much of the setting into immediately utilitarian elements (like equipment lists) that the players will engage with in play while making the discovery of the rest of the setting de rigeur the object of play itself.

But whatever the case, what Ultraviolet Grasslands overwhelmingly instills in me is a sense of not only how gameable it is, but how much I want to game it right now.

WHERE TO BEGIN?

There are a couple ways to begin exploring the Ultraviolet Grasslands. First, there is Ultraviolet Grasslands: Introduction, which is a free 80-page PDF. Second, there is the full-fledged Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City which is the full enchilada.

Theoretically, if you buy the full book, you should have no need for the Introduction. But I am going to STRONGLY RECOMMEND that even if you rush out and buy a copy of the Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City immediately upon finishing this review (and you should), that you should still start by reading the 80-page Introduction.

Why? Well… Remember that beautiful, crystal clear structure I was raving about? In the full book it gets a little… muddled.

First, the full book has opted to move all the location descriptions to the front of the book “for easier reference during campaign play.” Which makes sense from a certain point of view. But without the context of the structure for which this material was designed, it’s somewhat dizzying in its presentation.

Second, even once you get to the mechanical portion of the book, the material has lost focus on the core structure. In Whither the Dungeon? I talked about how D&D originally included a clear structure for running dungeon adventures, passed through a middle period where the rulebooks still included all the rules without the clear structure, and then eventually arrived at 5E where knowledge of the structure had so atrophied and/or become engrained in the designers that they even forgot to teach DMs how to key a map. It’s interesting watching UVG more or less jump from Stage 1 to Stage 2 of that process for caravan-crawls in roughly 18 months.

If you’re already familiar with the caravan-crawl structure (which you can easily be by reading the Introduction), then it’s easy to see where all of the mechanical gewgaws in the full book — including a lot of new mechanical options — fit into that structure. But if you aren’t, then the full book notably lacks that guidance.

Here’s one small example: Remember the Starter Caravans I mentioned above? In the full book they’re relabeled “Sample Caravans” and the explanation of their purpose (“if you want to skip planning and optimization”) is no longer found in the text. This may seem like a small and perhaps even insignificant change, but in practice I think it’s actually very significant. And even moreso when we’re talking about larger, more pervasive, and more innovative structures.

Similarly, there are a few places where I think the simpler systems of the Introduction are to be preferred. The system for market research is a notable example that I mentioned above: In both versions of the system, it’s problematic that the character’s skill check determines the demand for a trade good in a location (rather than discovering that demand). But the system in the full book really doubles down on this, completely eliminating the aspect of the system where players investigate specific markets. (Instead, they just make a check and get results like, “They need it, but three stops away a place pays x4.”) Systemically this both flattens the results and is significantly less useful to me as a GM.

The full book also includes the SEACAT system, an OSR fantasy system with a fair degree of deviation from D&D. It seems fine, but mostly leaves me cold, so that the best thing I can say about it is that it only takes up about twenty pages of the book. Your mileage may vary, however, and, in any case, it is easily ignored: Ultraviolet Grasslands is easy enough to use with any OSR game, and not particularly moreso with 5E. (With 3E you’d probably need to adjust some of the skill check DCs.)

My last quibble will be that the discoveries are under-developed, being more adventure seeds for the GM to develop than full-fledged content that’s ready to be run at the table. (But considerably less so than most hexcrawl products you may be familiar with, so take my critique with a grain of salt.)

Is any of this to say that you shouldn’t run out and buy Ultraviolet Grasslands the Black City?

Good lord, no! You absolutely should!

Take your first step with the Introduction, but then you need to LEAP into the full book, chock full of Rejec’s beautiful art and the incredible setting guide that will unlock all the glories of the grasslands.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Luka Rejec
Publisher: WizardThiefFighter Studios & Exalted Funeral Press
Cost – UVG Introduction: Free (PDF)
Cost – UVG & the Black City: $40 or $25 (PDF)
Page Count: 80 (Intro) / 200 (Black City)

UPDATE: As I was writing this review, word came out that Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City has been nominated for two 2020 ENnies Awards!

Go to Part 1

As with our previous installment of these capsule reviews, my goal is to just give a very high overview of my thoughts/impressions of each book. These reviews were written as part of my survey of Descent Into Avernus-related material on the Dungeon Masters Guild while working on the Alexandrian Remix of the campaign. Unless otherwise noted, the material has not been playtested.

You may also want to review this Guide to Grades at the Alexandrian. The short version: My general philosophy is that 90% of everything is crap, and crap gets an F. I’m primarily interested in grading the 10% of the pile that’s potentially worth your time. Anything from A+ to C- is, honestly, worth checking out if the material sounds interesting to you. If I give something a D it’s pretty shaky. F, in my opinion, should be avoided entirely.

WARLORDS OF AVERNUS: This supplement caught my attention particularly because I’m hoping to beef up the warlords of Avernus (we have title!), and it delivers quite nicely with four new warlords with very cool concepts supported by a full suite of stat blocks. I would have perhaps liked just a touch more flavor (more fully drawn personalities for the gang members in addition to those given for the warlords themselves), but Rodrigo Kuerten has presented a really great, tight package with high utility. Warlords of Avernus is very much worth $2.

• Grade: B-

BALDUR’S GATE – CITY ENCOUNTERS: When I was running Dragon Heist, I got a huge amount of quality play from Waterdeep: City Encounters (lead design by Will Doyle). That book contains 75 different encounter types, most of which have 3-6 variations, and a random table that splits them up across the different neighborhoods of the city. Borrowing a technique I brainstormed while writing Thinking About Urbancrawls, whenever the PCs went somewhere in the city I would just roll a random encounter for the neighborhood they were going to. It filled the city with life.

So when I saw that there was a Baldur’s Gate: City Encounters book, I snapped it up right quick. Unfortunately, this book (lead design by Justice Arman and Anthony Joyce) is considerably less useful than the Waterdeep version. It includes two sets of encounters: Neighborhood Encounters and Tension Encounters.

The Neighborhood Encounters consist of one encounter for each neighborhood in the city, which is just enough, in my opinion, to not be particularly useful. If I sort of squint at it sideways I can sort of see how you could theoretically have a one-encounter-per-neighborhood structure where the first time PCs enter or pass through a neighborhood you’d use the encounter, which would establish the tone/environment of that neighborhood for the group. (But the encounters here don’t really do that.)

The Tension Encounters are potentially more interesting: They present a five step scale modeling the current level of “tension” in the city and then support this scale with different encounters that can be had at each tension level. How the PCs choose to resolve the encounters can then affect whether the city tips more towards chaos or order!

Conceptually this sounds great, and could provide a great contrapuntal development as the PCs are pursuing their investigation and getting tangled up in Portyr politics. But there are significant problems in practice: First, the scale is supposedly between Order and Chaos, but the actual scale has Pandemonium on one side (with the Cult of the Dead Three performing blood sacrifices in the streets) and Martial Law on the other side (with a corrupted Flaming Fist declaring martial law and instituting pogroms while politicians are assassinated in the streets). It’s thematically incoherent, largely negating the whole point of the exercise.

Second, while promising a system by which the tension meter would change over time, the effort to provide such a system apparently ran aground, with the designers ultimately just throwing their hands up and saying “the DM decides what impact, if any, the encounters in aggregate had on the level of tension in Baldur’s Gate.”

Third, a lot of the tension encounters are kind of nonsensical. Like, there’s one where the PCs are walking down the street when Liara suddenly draws up next to them in a chariot, gives a speech declaring herself Grand Duke of Baldur’s Gate (not how that works), and then offers a ludicrously paltry 250 gp bounty to anybody in the crowd who assassinates any remaining dukes in town.

On that note, the biggest problem I have with the book is that many of the encounters aren’t encounters: They’re scenario hooks to much larger scenarios that the GM would then need to design. (Random encounters spawning unintended scenarios and digressions is a thing that can happen, but they shouldn’t be half-baked into the design.)

The book also includes a neighborhood map of Baldur’s Gate which, for reasons I don’t really understand, doesn’t match any other extant maps of Baldur’s Gate.

• Grade: D

MONSTER LOOT – DESCENT INTO AVERNUS: I snagged Monster Loot: Descent Into Avernus because it seemed to directly address something that I feel is, in fact, generally lacking in the 5^th Edition adventures I’ve seen: Loot. In short, Anne Gregersen supplies a loot listing for every encounter in the campaign.

The book includes two major new mechanics for equipment: First, the option to harvest body parts from foes. Second, broken items that don’t work until you repair them. Unfortunately, it’s largely on the shoals of these two mechanics that the book runs aground.

The problem with the broken mechanic, primarily, is that it’s just massively overused. Virtually every single weapon and piece of armor listed has been broken. On the one hand, this is relatively easy to just ignore. On the other hand, it feels indicative of a certain skittishness in letting the PCs get “good loot” that’s kind of antithetical to what I wanted the book for.

With a book specifically dedicated to customizing loot lists for every NPC, I was really hoping to see some unusual, eclectic, and flavorful stuff. Instead, in almost every case, it’s just “the weapons they’re carrying, the armor they’re wearing, and it’s all broken.” Which, frankly, I don’t really need. That stuff is already in the stat block.

Where Monster Loot: Descent Into Avernus really unleashes, though, are those harvesting rules: You can skin flesh, yank teeth, and cut off tails that do all kinds of crazy stuff. I was actually really interested in this because I find hunter-based play interesting in my open tables and I’m always wishing I had better support for it. But in this specific instance I found the result slightly… distasteful.

The book says that “harvesting body parts, such as hide and flesh, from humanoid creatures is not something this document covers because we don’t encourage adventurers to tear into the bodies of people.” But it means that in the most literal sense of the humanoid monster type. The book happily provides you the details on skinning angels and all kinds of intelligent creatures (including bipedal intelligent creatures).

At just $2.95 I flirted with giving this one a D, but ultimately I think I’m not going to bother having this at the table when I run the campaign. So, unfortunately…

• Grade: F

THE HELLRIDERS’ KEEP: This supplement adds a new location to Elturel. Conceptually it’s great. Not only does making Elturel a richer location for the PCs to explore make a lot of sense, but Carter VanHuss very astutely notes that the published adventure doesn’t cleanly clue the PCs into the true history of the Hellriders and designs this scenario to remedy that. The descriptions of the environment are really good, with lots of little details that are not only specific, but also packed full of lore. Exploring this space will immersively draw players into the world.

Unfortunately, the book does get a little hamstrung by a couple of structural issues. First, the hook is just another, “NPC tells the PCs to go some place, the PCs go there” affair. To some extent, I can see how his hands were tied by the published campaign itself, but it feels like with a little extra effort several hooks could have been more organically woven into the campaign to make PCs aware of the Hellriders’ Keep.

The more significant problem is the lack of a map: The entire structure of the adventure is exploring the castle, but the two maps in the product are instead battlemaps. Individual areas are keyed and an effort is made to describe how they relate to each other, but without a map it’s all needlessly confusing.

Despite this, I think it’s worth grabbing a copy of this if you’re going to run Descent Into Avernus (even if you will end up needing to draw a map).

• Grade: C

MONSTER HUNTS – AVERNUS: This book promised to be a bunch of plug ‘n play side quests for use with Descent Into Avernus. I thought this would be a slam dunk in terms of usefulness, providing all kinds of awesome content for fleshing out a hexcrawl of Avernus.

Unfortunately, not one of the one-page scenarios is actually set in Avernus. In this case, “for use with Descent Into Avernus” means that it uses the stat blocks from the appendices of Descent Into Avernus.

Ignoring the disappointing bait ‘n switch (which renders the book completely unusable for what I wanted it for), the scenarios themselves are also very poorly designed (so that I wouldn’t want to use them for anything): For example, most of the dungeon maps, instead of being keyed, are described in rambling, unfocused paragraphs. The text is frequently filled with prima facie nonsense (like a claim in the first scenario that it will take PCs forty minutes to walk two city blocks). And it’s almost impressive how many times they try to force a railroad on PCs even when they’re just exploring a simple dungeon.

The book also promises an “easy to use hunting system,” but I can find nothing of the sort. Instead, the majority of the scenarios lead off with some form of “make this skill check to find tracks or skip the rest of this adventure.”

• Grade: F

HELLTUREL: James Introcaso has really hit the nail on the head with Hellturel. This 32-page supplement presents four new locations for Elturel, nicely fleshing out the city for PCs who want to explore it. Not only are the locations well-designed, they are connected using node-based scenario design so that exploring one location will provide leads pointing to the others.

The only thing I would have liked to have seen would be some guidance for how clues could be added to the locations described in Descent Into Avernus in order to also link them to the locations in Hellturel. That creates a little bit of extra lifting. There are also some minor continuity glitches (for example, the first location says the Order of the Gauntlet has moved to the second location, but at the second location there’s only one member of the Order of the Gauntlet and, as far as I can tell, no indication of what happened to the rest of them) that probably needs to be cleaned up.

But, as I say, really good stuff. Recommended.

• Grade: B-

More DMs Guild Capsule Reviews – Go to the Avernus Remix

Go to Table of Contents

The Dungeon Masters Guild is a truly fantastic resource for 5th Edition games, and when it comes to supporting published campaigns utterly unique in the annals of the RPG industry. The ability to draw from and tap directly into Wizards of the Coast’s books is incredibly powerful, and it means that every time a new campaign comes out a whole flood of well-developed and professionally presented support material springs up.

While working on Descent Into Avernus, I made it a point to periodically survey the available material on the Guild and grab anything that looked interesting or potentially useful. (This was made possible by both my Patreon patrons and also those who click on the DriveThruRPG affiliate links here at the Alexandrian. I wouldn’t be able to justify this cash outlay without you, and as a result you’re supporting not only me, but also these other creators!)

Many of these books I have already recommended or referenced in the Remix itself. But I thought it might be useful to also offer up some capsule reviews of the various books and other products I looked at.

A few quick provisos before we begin:

• I’m generally aiming for a capsule review, which means just a very high overview of my thoughts/impressions of the book.
• Unless otherwise noted, none of these reviews represent actually playtesting the material.
• I was reading these books with a specific agenda: Can I use this in the Remix? I’ve not specifically reviewed or graded them with that in mind, but it’s probably worth your while to keep that bias in mind.

You may also want to review this Guide to Grades at the Alexandrian. The short version: My general philosophy is that 90% of everything is crap, and crap gets an F. I’m primarily interested in grading the 10% of the pile that’s potentially worth your time. Anything from A+ to C- is, honestly, worth checking out if the material sounds interesting to you. If I give something a D it’s pretty shaky. F, in my opinion, should be avoided entirely.

ELMINSTER’S CANDLEKEEP COMPANION: The Candlekeep Companion is great. Ed Greenwood himself does some writing on the book and served as a Creative Consultant, giving it a very impressive imprimatur. But where the Companion really excels is relentlessly keeping the focus on play-oriented material. In Part 4A: The Road to Candlekeep, I already described how the book’s delightful random tables can be used to instantly bring the PCs’ journey through the Castle of Tomes to life, and really the whole book is like that. It is constantly about what the PCs can do (or will want to do) in Candlekeep, what the DM needs to do to run those things at the table, and a nice set of tools to empower the DM while they’re doing it.

M.T. Black presents a “Director’s Cut” of the Candlekeep chapter from Descent Into Avernus that was actually what got me excited about buying the book, but I was ultimately underwhelmed by it. The scenario ends up just being a bunch of NPCs dragging the PCs around by the nose to little effect. There are a couple of ideas here (using the Prophecies of Alaundo to push the PCs towards Avernus and using the original gateway used for the Charge of the Hellriders to reach Avernus), but they both need a bit of TLC.

The book is rounded out with some PC character options that look very interesting to me (albeit with maybe a few too many dissociated divination mechanics for my taste) and a rich selection of original spells and magic items that just beg to be used ASAP.

Also of note is the absolutely gorgeous poster map of the castle by Marco Bernardini. The book is probably worth buying for this poster map all by itself, and I’ll almost certainly be hanging a copy of it on my wall when the PCs head to Candlekeep.

• Grade: B

SHIELD OF THE HIDDEN LORD: Written by M.T. Black, one of the co-authors of Descent Into Avernus, Shield of the Hidden Lord tweaks the continuity so that the Vanthampurs are still looking for the Shield. Following leads from Vanthampur Villa, the PCs can go racing to an abandoned temple beneath Hhune Villa and grab the shield first. I don’t really grok this hook: Since the PCs don’t find out about the Shield until the Villa, they won’t go looking for it until after the Villa… which mean the Vanthampurs have probably been eliminated and there’s no urgency in their search for the Shield. It would make a lot more sense, in my opinion, to seed the clues into the Dungeon of the Dead Three and then have the PCs race the Vanthampurs to get the Shield. (This would even allow you to add a Vanthampur delving team to the adventure.)

The design of the sealed temple is pretty good. The key is filled with a lot of evocative ideas. But it can be tricky to do a dungeon that’s been sealed up for a hundred years, and this unfortunately becomes clear as the adventure becomes overly dependent on creatures who have, totally coincidentally, all managed to accidentally stumble into the place within the last few weeks just before the PCs arrive.

I really don’t like the fact that the maps are only located as separate files (and not included in the PDF layout), but including versions both with and without numbers gets two huge thumbs up from me. (Hard to believe in an era of virtual tabletops people are still getting this wrong.)

Since the Remix gives the Shield of the Hidden Lord a different history, you’d obviously have some continuity issues here. With a little elbow grease (and some problem-solving) you could swap out the Shield in this adventure for the Tiamat relics.

• Grade: D

BALDUR’S GATE – THE FALL OF ELTUREL: The Fall of Elturel provides an alternative starting point for either Descent Into Avernus or Tyranny of Dragons. Conceptually it’s not bad: You start in Elturel, head out into the wilderness to deal with Tiamat cultists and Dead Three cultists, and go back to find Elturel a smoking crater in the ground. Along the way they stage several encounters with Elturgardians so that the PCs will have at least a light personal connection to the city’s inhabitants.

But there’s just nothing terribly exciting about the content, and the structure is problematic. The initial hook is weak and the adventure immediately saddles you with Reya Mantlemorn as a GMPC who constantly tells the PCs what they’re supposed to be doing at every single step (right down to prompting them for specific skill checks). If you’re going to use Reya later it makes sense to introduce her here, but doubling down on her as a railroading GMPC obviously doesn’t work.

It should also be noted that the adventure’s alternate hooks into Descent and Tyranny skip significant chunks of both campaigns. (The hook for Descent is only intended to skip a small chunk of material, but it missteps by immediately identifying Duke Vanthampur as being behind the Dead Three cultists, completely short-circuiting and/or deflating the whole first act.) These hooks are also completely incompatible with the Alexandrian Remix, so if you’re using the Remix I’d definitely skip this one.

• Grade: D

LULU’S GUIDE TO HOLLYPHANTS: Written by Kienna Shaw & Donathin Frye, I already recommended Lulu’s Guide to Hollyphants in the Remix because it includes a playable PC hollyphant race that will let one of your players take up the role of Lulu. The rest of the book is a little thin (although it does have a good selection of hollyphant NPC stats, including an evil variant, so you can easily add more of them to your campaign). The interpretation of hollyphants is quite twee and full of sparkles, which may limit the utility for you.

• Grade: D+

CHARACTER SHEET BY SHELBY ROSMYTH: Shelby Rosmyth designed a really nice Avernus-themed character sheet. I wouldn’t use it until the PCs actually head to Hell, but once there I think it will offer a really nice thematic feel at the table. The major drawback is the lack of equipment and spell list support, but the package does include a form-fillable PDF.

• Grade: B-

MARISA’S BLADES: Marisa’s Blades by Justin M. Cole came to my attention as being a tie-in for both Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and Descent Into Avernus, potentially serving as a bridge between those two campaigns. This turns out to not actually be the case, so the adventure was somewhat wrong-footed for me from the start. Cole does a very interesting job of taking elements from a lot of other DM’s Guild supplements and mixing them together into an original adventure (an approach which, in my opinion, enhances the value of both Marisa’s Blades and the other material). Unfortunately, the actual adventure itself is somewhat incoherent: Marisa’s brother has made a deal with a devil, so she arranges for their whole gang to be arrested by the PCs to “solve” this problem… only it’s not at all clear how it would solve anything. The tone is set early with one of the hooks: “Laeral Silverhand walks up to the party on the street.” That doesn’t quite work does it? Multiple hooks, though! That’s smart! Cole has a lot of potential, but this is, unfortunately, unusable.

• Grade: F

ABYSSAL INCURSION: The basic concept of Abyssal Incursion is that Avernus is the front line of the Blood War; thus demonic armies should constantly be pressuring the defensive lines of the Styx and occasionally making deep raids onto the Avernian plains. Thus we have three such demonic incursions designed to be injected into an Avernus-based campaign. Where the supplement excels is Introcaso’s creativity: A gargantuan, demonic worm that serves as a living troop transport/tank. A war barge that carries maze-gates linked to the Abyss which can spit out demon strike forces onto the banks of the Styx.  These are fantastic concepts.

Where Abyssal Incursions comes up a bit short for me is its actual utility: Billed as a supplement for Descent Into Avernus (a campaign for 1^st to 13^th level characters), both Baphomet’s battle barge and Yeenoghu’s worm feature impossibly difficult demon armies. Despite this, they are both primarily (and almost exclusively) presented through the lens of combat. For example, the notes for roleplaying the CR 23 Baphomet (who is accompanied by a literal horde of demons and can summon even more three times per day) are: “Unless the characters find a way to gain the upper hand, the Horned King attacks them on sight.” and the story hooks include things like, “The characters want to kill … Baphomet.”

(And if the PCs do kill Baphomet, it causes the battle barge to immediately spit out three more demon hordes.)

This would be very useful for a higher level campaign in Avernus, however. (Or perhaps scenarios in which the PCs can gather a horde of their own to go demon hunting.) And, as of this writing, I’m planning to use the third incursion (a crashed elemental galleon from Eberron that’s crashed on the banks of the Styx) in my Avernian hexcrawl. So very much recommended.

• Grade: B-

More DMs Guild Capsule Reviews – Go to the Avernus Remix