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

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

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

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

GMPCs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REYA MANTLEMORN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LULU THE HOLLYPHANT

Slightly more unusual is the case of Lulu the Hollyphant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just have her show up sooner.

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

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

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

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

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

TARINA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I digress.

Go to Part 2B: Elfsong Tavern

Go to Part 1

RETURN TO THE SEVEN MASKS THEATER

They didn’t have a lot of time to do everything they suddenly needed to take care of before infiltrating Xanathar’s that night, so they grabbed a carriage and rode to the Seven Masks Theater.

Arriving at the theater, they found it under guard. Suspicious looking thugs were watching the front door from across the street, and a couple more were loitering around the side entrance. The thugs looked human, but… They shrugged and headed down the alley, passing by posters still advertising performances of Sapphiria’s Booty and identifying themselves to the thugs. “We’re here to meet with Rongquan. Is he in?”

The thugs knocked on the side entrance. A moment later Rongquan cracked open the door and peeked out. He broke into a big grin. “Big five!”

The Trollskulls, recognizing the anti-doppelganger code they had set up with him, answered with smiles of their own as they were ushered into his office.

“How can I help you?” Rongquan asked. “Can I get you a drink?”

“That’s all right,” Kittisoth demurred. “What’s with all the guys outside?”

Rongquan, having grabbed a drink of his own, flirtatiously laid his hand over Kittisoth’s own. Kittisoth resisted the urge to roll her eyes out of her head… mostly. “To tell you the truth… it’s a cover story!”

“Really?!” Kittisoth said with faux adulation and naivete. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not really sure,” Rongquan said. “Some very secretive business with the investors. I’m not even allowed to leave my office!”

“Could we speak with the investors?” Kittisoth said, batting her eyes. (The others barely concealed their laughter.)

“Well… I suppose!” Rongquan knocked on the inner door of his office and spoke with some people on the other side. A few minutes later another knock came, Rongquan excused himself, and a dark elf entered. They were surprised to see it wasn’t Jarlaxle.

“Is Mr. J here?” Theren asked.

“No,” the dark elf said. “No he’s not.” He flopped down into a chair and kicked his boots up onto Rongquan’s desk. “Elves,” he muttered. “It’s always elves…”

Theren frowned. “You are an elf.”

“Don’t insult me,” the dark elf said.

“We need to speak with him,” Edana said.

“He has plans this evening,” the dark elf said. “But you could leave a message for him.”

“Where are his plans taking him this evening?”

“If I told you that, I don’t think ‘Mr. J’ would be very happy with me.”

“Well, Mister… What was your name?” Pashar asked.

“Soluun.”

“Well, Mister Soluun, give Fel’Rekt our best, and when you hear back from Mr. J, if you could be so kind as to—”

“If you have a message, I’ll take it,” Soluun said bluntly. “And then get out.”

Kittisoth fumed. “Excuse me? Do you have better things to do? Because—”

Edana restrained her. “Just let him know that we have a concern. About a neighborhood matter.”

“All right,” Soluun said. “I’ll pass it along.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Kora said. “We’re here about the kid.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” Edana said. “And I’m sure that if any harm comes to that kid, it will not be in Mr. J’s best interests.”

“I don’t know who this kid is,” Soluun said. “But I’m sure he’s somewhere safe.” He gave a little smile… and Edana was certain that he kid was here, in the theater somewhere.

But there didn’t seem to be anything they could do about it. They’d played their little dance, but now the music was coming to an end.  They stalked out of the office and back to their carriage.

THE HARPER CACHE

It wasn’t hard to identify the warehouse Dain had been talking about. It was, in fact, backed directly against Yellowspire Tower. Approaching it from the court north of Turnback Court, they found that its windows were boarded up and there was a big padlock on the front door that Edana made quick work of.

The interior of the warehouse was one big space, with various stacks of crates and boxes here and there. Everything had a thick layer of dust on it. The place was clearly ill-used.

“Everyone take your Harper pins off,” Kora said. She slipped their pins into a bag of holding, removing them from this plane of existence, and then cast locate object and zeroed in on a Harper pin underneath a nearby crate.

With a shrug, Kittisoth lifted the crate out of the way, revealing a trap door with a heavy iron pull ring. Hauling the trap door open revealed stairs down to a small basement room. Kora redistributed their Harper pins as they went down the stairs.

At the bottom, they found an empty room. It only took Edana a few moments, however, to find an illusory patch of the wall concealing a small indentation. Following a hunch, she pressed her Harper pin into the indentation: The wall slid back silently, revealing the supply cache. It was packed with useful stuff. There was a rack of swords, shelves filled with iron rations, a small box of Harper pins, several chains shirts, a number of potions, and fourteen bags, each containing a hundred gold dragons.

They rapidly emptied all of it into a bag of holding and reversed their tracks, replacing the crate and the padlock on the front door as they left.

Now they were out of time. They needed to head to the fights.

THE XANATHAR RAID

It was back to the beginning. They returned to the warehouse where Floon and Renaer had been held by the Zhentarim and slipped through the same sewer grate they had dropped through so many weeks (and what seemed like a lifetime) ago.

The Xanatharians had apparently destroyed the chalk marks which had guided them originally, but Theren remembered the path they had taken through the sewers and led them back to the hideout. As he drew near, he motioned the others to silence and slid up towards the intersection.

He knew there were four arrow slits looking out over this intersection from the last time they’d been here. Observing them carefully now, he ascertained that there were two goblins behind each. He waved Edana up and she cast a spell to put them to sleep.

They hugged the wall of the sewer (metaphorically speaking) and came up to the lair’s secret door. Theren slipped through it first. As he approached the landing leading down into to the chamber with the teleportation totem, however, he heard the distinctive buzz-humming of stirge wings ahead.

Peeking around the corner, he saw a goblin leaning up against the teleportation totem with a pair of stirges buzzing around his head. The goblin absentmindedly reached up and patted one of the stirges affectionately on the head.

Stepping out into landing, Theren put an arrow through the goblin’s skull, sending a spray of blood across the stone floor. The stirges immediately swooped down into the pool and began slurping up the blood, but two more arrows left them dead in the midst of their “feast.”

Edana slid across the landing and through another door into the guard chamber where the other goblins were still snoring. She efficiently slit their throats and then returned to the others, who had gathered around the totem. They clasped each others’ arms and Edana slid the teleportal key into the totem. She twisted the key and…

…they were elsewhere.

They had appeared standing in the middle of a large, fifty-foot long chamber with vaulted ceilings. They were standing between four large stone pillars that ran from the floor to the ceiling. The key was inside a depression in one of the pillars, one of several identical depressions which ran around the circumference of that pillar and the others.

There were several halls and a stairway leading out of the chamber. At the far end of the hall directly in front of them they could see two burly men wearing studded leather armor, thankfully facing away from them and looking out into a crowded hallway. The sounds of a party washed over them — people talking, glassware clinking, merry laughter.

Edana and Theren quickly shoved the others behind one of the pillars, where the guards couldn’t see them. Edana peeked out. They hadn’t been noticed.

Kora took the moment to cast locate object, searching the last of the Eyes. She quickly had a vector: It was on the same level they were, roughly in the direction of the guards (“Of course,” Kittisoth said), but somewhat off to the left.

“Which way do we go?”

They’d prefer not to have to try to sneak past the guards. The staircase, even though it led down, was roughly in the right direction. “There might a way down and around,” Edana suggested. “So that we could come up behind or even right on top of the Eye.”

The others agreed and they slipped over to and down the stairs, which curved down to a T-intersection. Edana peeked around the corner: Thirty feet to her left was a door. Fifty feet to her right was another T-intersection. It was a maze down here. And, worse yet, between her and the other T-intersection, hanging down from the ceiling, was a spectral eyestalk.

“I don’t like that,” she muttered and headed back to the others.

Neither Kora nor Pashar had any idea what the ghostly eyestalk might be. “If it’s magic, I could dispel it,” Kora suggested. “But that might just alert Xanathar that we’re down here.”

“What about an illusion?” Theren suggested. “Make it look like the hallway is empty?”

Edana agreed and raised the illusion. Cloaked by the vision of the “empty” hallway, she slipped over to the door at the end of the hall. From the far side of the door she could hear metal clashing against metal… and the smell of something cooking. She came back to the others. “Do you think we can slip through the kitchens?”

“This hall isn’t going the right way,” Theren said. “We’ve gotten twisted around coming down the stairs. I think we should go back up to the main level?”

The others agreed and headed back up the stairs, re-entering the teleportation chamber.

They spread out to check the other hallways, to see if they could figure out a better way of circling around the guards. Unfortunately, the other hallways all went in basically exactly the wrong direction. As they considered their options, however, the sounds of several people shouting came from the direction of the party. Theren darted over to one of the pillars and glanced out. The two guards had turned towards the raised voices… and they were moving away!

“Let’s do it!” Kittisoth declared and stepped forward. But Theren grabbed her and yanked her back behind the pillar. Just moments after the guards vacated their post, three figures — looking back over their shoulders towards the party — had rounded the corner into the hall and were heading their way.

The figures headed towards the stairs. Theren slid to the other side of the pillar and tracked them. As they reached the top of the stairs, a beam of light caught them and he could see their faces plainly: They were drow.

“Jarlaxle’s men,” Kittisoth murmured.

The drow disappeared down the stairs. The Trollskulls darted out, down the hallway the drow had just left, and into the party.

The party filled a grand promenade nearly thirty feet across that curved out of sight to both the right and left. Down the middle of the hall were pillars carved with eyes which seemed to track those who passed nearby. At the moment, those eyes were darting back and forth, as the entire hall was filled with an eclectic, cosmopolitan crowd of ritzy elites rubbing shoulders with scarred gangsters while servants bearing trays of food and drink passed between them.

Off to their left they could still hear the raised voices and confusion of whatever altercation had distracted the guards. Off to their right, they could see other hallways with guards posted on them. Directly ahead, however, a ten-foot-wide circular door led to a smaller passage. The party spilled down this hall and into a larger chamber beyond: That was more or less the direction Kora was detecting the Eye from.

They slid through the crowd. No one seemed to give them a second glance as they passed through the stone door and came to the top of a short flight of stairs led down to the floor of a forty-foot-high dome that was at least eighty feet across. The floor was tiled in black marble, inset with in gold with the circle-and-eyestalk sigil of Xanathar. Jutting from the ceiling was bell-shaped protuberance. On the far side of the dome, directly across from them, an identical set of stairs led up to another open, circular door, this one with two guards flanking it. Off to their left, directly in line with Kora’s vector to the Eye, was another circular door — this one shut, but also with two guards. Small clusters of people were happily chatting here and there throughout the dome.

They walked across the room. Kora pulled out the rod of rulership they had taken from Victoro Cassalanter when they arrested him and discreetly waved it in the direction of the guards. “Would you be so kind as to let me and my friends in?”

The guards came to sharp attention. “Yes, sir!”

They pushed open the stone slab of the door and the Trollskulls strode through it. As they went, Kittisoth glanced nervously over her shoulder to see if anyone was paying undue attention to the exchange. No one was. But at just that moment Jarlaxle walked into the dome, accompanied by two men.

Kittisoth cursed and darted in after the others. It didn’t look like Jarlaxle had noticed them, though. Instead, he seemed to be focusing his attention on the two guards on the other side of the room, albeit while attempting to disguise his interest.

The Trollskulls found themselves in Xanathar’s sanctum. The room was magically lit with a bluish light. Luminous violet particles drifted through the air like mist. A twenty-foot-wide fishbowl dominated the center of the room. Filled with water it also contained a small coral reef, a miniature shipwreck, and a sunken treasure chest. On a small table next to this huge fishbowl they saw a smaller fishbowl, this one containing a single goldfish: Sylgar. On one wall of the room hung a huge mirror with the word XOBLOB carved into its silver frame. In a small chamber beyond an arch in the other wall of the room they could see a huge device of twisted crystal.

“Where is it?” Edana asked.

“There,” Kora said, pointing at the large fishbowl. “In the goddamn treasure chest.”

Kittisoth had fetched up just inside the door and was watching the dome outside. Several Xanatharian guards came rushing out of the door on the far side of the dome — the one Jarlaxle was still keeping one eye constantly fixed on. These guards spoke with a quick but quiet urgency to the two guards stationed there, and then all of the guards there rushed back through the door. No one else in the room seemed to take any note of this, but Jarlaxle, of course, immediately put his drink down and, with his men, beelined to and through the door.

Kittisoth stepped back from the door. “I’m not sure where Jarlaxle is going, but—”

Pashar suddenly dropped to his knees and began babbling incoherently in the Tongue of the Beholders… or at least what he thought was the Tongue of Beholders. It was really just nonsense.

“Dammit,” Edana cursed. “We need to get out of there. Maybe I could use mage hand to try to clear the treasure chest out? It’ll take me forever to sift through it, but I need to see the Eye before I can actually grab it telekinetically, though.”

“I’ll go in,” Kittisoth said. “I’ll just climb up on this table and try to– Wait. I can fly. Devil’s breath, I am so stressed out!” She leapt and flew and dived down to the chest.

Kora, meanwhile, used a quick spell to purge whatever poison had gripped Pashar’s mind.

“I’ve got it!” Kittisoth declared, splashing out of the top of the fishbowl.

Edana snatched it and thrust it into her bag of holding, removing it from the Material Plane.

“Go! Now!”

They walked out of the room. “Close the door, please,” Kora said to the guards. “And kindly escort us to the teleportation pillars?”

“Yes, sir!”

The guards stepped away from the door and took them across the dome, through the door, and into the promenade. The disturbance they had heard earlier had apparently come to an end and they could see that the guards had returned to their posts. But it didn’t matter: Kora’s guards escorted them right through the checkpoint and into the pillar room.

Behind them they heard a gruff voice call out: “Someone has broken into the master’s sanctum! Seal the lair! Find them immediately!”

But they were at the pillar. Edana thrust the teleportation key into the pillar.

They were out.

THE THREE EYES

They would have cheered, but as they reappeared in the sewer hideout, they found four goblins kneeling over the corpse of their dead friend. Reacting instinctively, the Trollskulls lashed out with their swords and cut them down before the goblins even realized they were among them. Then they rushed out through the secret door, back through the sewers, and emerged into the clean, exhilarating air of Waterdeep.

They’d done it!

Kora sent a magical message to the Blackstaff: “We have all of the Eyes and the Stone of Golorr. We believe that the Enigma is located beneath Brandath Crypts. Going there now.”

A moment later, Vajra sent a reply: “Good luck!”

They jumped in a carriage and headed across Waterdeep, racing the sunset to the City of the Dead. Passing through the gates before they were closed for the night, they made their way quickly to the Brandath Crypts, through Lady Alethea’s tomb, into the secret crypts, and down the long, ancient passage to the vault doors.

Standing there, atop the bronze sunburst and facing the dwarven-carved doors of adamantium, Edana drew out the blinded Stone of Golorr and placed it in the palm of her left hand. Taking a deep breath, she pushed the first of the Eyes into the Stone.

A warmth spread through the palm of her hand and she heard a voice murmur in the back of her mind: “Oh… I have returned.”

She took the second Eye and pushed it into its socket.

“You have the Eyes! Unblind me, mortal!”

The voice seemed stronger now.

“Will you give me the knowledge I seek?” Edana said aloud.

“Yes,” replied the voice. “That is my purpose.”

“Wait… what?” Pashar said. Instinctively, he reached out and touched Edana’s shoulder. The other’s, following his example, also reflexively reached out; not certain whether they were warding their friend, seeking to stop her, or volunteering to ride with her into whatever danger she might face. Only knowing that they needed to be together in this moment.

Edana pushed the third Eye in.

Go to Part 4

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Descent Into Avernus begins by having the PCs stand around doing nothing while the GM describes an NPC doing awesome stuff. It then proceeds almost directly to, “If the players don’t do what you tell them to do, the NPCs automatically find them and kill them.”

It’s not an auspicious beginning.

THE PREMISE

Let’s back up for a second and briefly sum up the essential back story:

• 140+ years ago, an angel named Zariel convinced the holy knights of the city-state of Elturel to ride with her on a glorious charge into Hell itself.
• This went poorly: Many knights deserted the campaign, fled home, and shut the gate behind them. The rest of Zariel’s army was wiped out, Zariel herself was captured.
• After her capture, Zariel was tempted to evil. Swearing fealty to Asmodeus, she became the Archdevil of Avernus. Still filled with hatred for the knights who had betrayed her, she watched Elturel from afar and waited for an opportunity to present itself for revenge.
• Meanwhile, the knights who had fled back to Elturel lied about the glorious battle they had fought on the other side and their order became known as the Hellriders.
• Many decades later, Elturel was plagued by a new evil: The High Observer of the city was secretly a vampire lord. In this, their darkest hour, the god Amaunator responded to their holy prayers and the Companion appeared in the skies above the city: A second sun that burned through the night and whose light no undead could endure.
• Except this was a lie: The Companion had actually been crafted by Zariel, who had cut a deal with someone in Elturel (more on this later). Under the light of the Companion, the city of Elturel was bound to an infernal pact. After fifty years, the city and the souls of all its inhabitants would belong to Zariel.
• A few days ago, that happened: The entire city of Elturel was pulled into Avernus, the first layer of Hell.
• Among those lost in Elturel was Grand Duke Ravengard, ruler of Baldur’s Gate, who had been visiting the city on a diplomatic mission.
• Refugees fleeing the catastrophe head down the River Chionthar to Baldur’s Gate. The city is overwhelmed and orders the gates closed.

Descent Into Avernus opens with a blob of boxed text that informs the players that, due to the crisis, they have been drafted into the Flaming Fist, the mercenary guard who has served as Baldur’s Gate’s military and police force for hundreds of years, and ordered to report to Flame Zodge at the Basilisk Gate.

(The adventure actually refers to him as “Captain Zodge,” but there are no captains in the Flaming Fists. Their ranks are: Fist, Gauntlet, Manip, Flame, Blaze, and Marshal. Later on a “Commander Portyr” similarly shows up who should actually be either Blaze Portyr or Marshal Portyr.)

The PCs show up at Basilisk Gate just in time to stand around while the GM describes Flame Zodge jumping into the middle of a riot, kicking ass, and being awesome. Once the cut scene wraps up, Zodge comes over to the PCs and tells them that cultists worshipping the Dead Three (Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul) have been taking advantage of the current crisis to go on a murder spree. They need to go meet with an informant named Tarina at the Elfsong Tavern.

If the PCs refuse to do it, he has them “executed on the spot.”

If they accept the gig, but then don’t follow through, he sends a squad of soldiers to track them down and “kill anyone who refuses to go.”

If the PCs escape, Zodge sends two more squads to murder them.

REMIXING

The “do what I say or I’ll arbitrarily kill your characters” motif is problematic for what I’m hoping are fairly obvious reasons. The fact that Descent repeats it three times in rapid succession here, however, mostly serves to point a big, flashing arrow at the more significant problem:

Neither the players nor their characters are given any reason to care about what’s happening.

What you have here, basically, is a broken scenario hook that the designers have so little confidence in that they feel the need to hold a gun to the players’ heads.

So how do we fix it?

As I wrote in my design notes for scenario hooks in Over the Edge, a scenario hook should be specific: What is the specific thing that gets the PCs involved in the current situation?

“You’ve been drafted by the Flaming Fist” is specific, but its first failure is our next requirement: The players should experience the hook. By having the PCs get drafted off-screen before play even begins, Descent distances the players from the hook. Not only will this make them care less about the hook, it will also make the hook less memorable. This should be particularly avoided with the hook for an entire campaign, because you don’t want the players to get three or four sessions into things and completely forget why any of this is happening in the first place.

Ideally, the PCs (and players) should also be motivated by the hook. And it’s better if this motivation aligns with what you want them to do. (This is less critical if you design situations instead of plots because then you don’t actually care what the PCs actually do; you just want to expose them to the situation so that they can begin interacting with it.)

Being press-ganged and threatened with death can certainly motivate you, but what it’s primarily motivating you to do is get out of that situation. That’s why Descent is obsessed with tracking down PCs who bail out on the job: On some level it recognizes that it hasn’t motivated the PCs to investigate the murders; it’s only motivated them to escape the Flaming Fists.

(Designing the scenario hook so that it motivates the PCs in multiple ways is also pure gold if you can pull it off. Or, alternatively, simply align multiple hooks to all point in the same direction.)

Finally, the best scenario hooks won’t be transitory or disconnected from what happens next. Instead, they will continue to resonate — thematically, structurally, meaningfully — not only with the adventure, but with the campaign as a whole.

None of these are hard-and-fast rules. But they’re useful rules of thumb.

Now, I don’t want to completely toss out Flame Zodge or the mission he gives to the PCs. (That would require a much more thorough transformation of the first act of the campaign.) But what we will do is restructure the opening beats of the campaign to get a hook that will drive us all the way to the Gates of Hell.

REFUGEES

The central pillar of Descent Into Avernus is the city of Elturel: What happened to it? Why did it happen? How can it be saved?

Everything revolves around this city… or, at least, it should. In practice, it is curiously absent from the campaign, particularly during the first act. The PCs need to care about what happens to Elturel, but they’re never given a reason to do so.

The easy solution here, of course, it to simply have the players create characters from Elturel or with strong connections to Elturel. That’s fine, but you again run into that off-camera problem: You’ve told the players that their characters care about Elturel, but you haven’t actually shown that. You need to actually bring that connection to the table and let the players experience it.

Our method for doing this is obvious: The refugees.

Instead of starting the adventure with Flame Zodge, we’ll start with the PCs guarding a caravan of refugees trying to reach Baldur’s Gate. Broadly speaking, there are four ways to do this:

• IN MEDIA RES: We open the campaign with the PCs already journeying along the road with the refugees heading towards Baldur’s Gate.
• REFUGEES ON THE ROAD: The PCs are riding along the River Chionthar when they begin encountering refugees coming from Elturel. One group of refugees is put in danger (an attack by bandits perhaps), and the PCs have to respond to it. The refugees then ask them to guard them the rest of the way to Baldur’s Gate, “where we are sure to find safety and refuge.”
• NEAR MISS: The PCs are journeying to Elturel. At the top of one hill they see the gleaming city ahead of them. They go down into a valley, there’s a cataclysmic clap of thunder, and when they reach the top of the next hill they see that the city has vanished! They are right there at ground zero as the crisis begins.
• PRELUDE TO DISASTER: The PCs are actually in Elturel when something goes horribly wrong with the Companion in the sky above. Black lightning seems to be attacking the guardian of the city! Then black lightning begins lancing down, as well, striking buildings, streets, and people. Panic sets in and some people begin trying to flee the city. The PCs barely escape when the city suddenly vanishes!

Generally speaking, the further down the list you move the more immediate and visceral the crisis becomes, but it also becomes more difficult to ensure that the PCs end up heading towards Baldur’s Gate. Having them actually in the city sounds amazing, but there’s a risk that they won’t take the cue to get the hell out of Dodge (pun intended)!

Option: Start with the “In Media Res” option, but then flashback to earlier scenes so that the players can actually roleplay through the crisis, triaging survivors, organizing the caravan, etc. You can alternate these flashback scenes with various Crisis on the Road scenes.

Option: Instead of just opening with “Near Miss”, launch the campaign as if it’s a perfectly normal campaign based out of the city of Elturel. Send the players out of the city on a typical 1^st level quest. Something simple like a 5 Room Dungeon. (Maybe this dungeon could actually include some subtle clue or foreshadowing of the Cult of Zariel, see Part 3 of the Remix.) As they ride back towards Elturel—BAM! Cliffhanger. End of session.

PREPPING THE CARAVAN

You’re going to prep and run the refugee caravan as if it were a party. (See the Party Planning game structure for more details.) This might seem weird at first glance, but structurally it makes a lot of sense.

REFUGEES: At a minimum you’re going to want to prep 4-6 refugees. I’d actually recommend 10-15. Use the Universal Roleplaying Template to make these characters really come alive. It may make sense to start with a smaller caravan that slowly gathers more people as time passes. In either case, there are likely more refugees than just the ones you’ve prepped, but the ones you’ve prepped will be the “face” of the crisis that the PCs interact with the most.

MAIN EVENT SEQUENCE: Many of your events will be crises that the PCs have to face along the road, but they can also include landmarks, encounters with other refugees, etc. A few thoughts along these lines:

• Bandits attack.
• They find the corpses of other refugees who were ambushed.
• Alyssa, one of the refugees traveling with them, is pregnant and goes into labor.
• The axle of one of the wagons breaks.
• They pass Fort Morninglord. It remains a cursed place that even refugees shun instead of using for refuge. The nearby temporary fort of the Order of the Companion has been overwhelmed by refugees.
• Mischievous fairies are stealing their food.
• They pass a campground where a large number of refugees are gathering.
• They encounter a ship sailing up or down the River Chionthar.
• A large number of ships come sailing up the River; word has reached Baldur’s Gate and an impromptu alliance of fishermen has gathered supplies and is sailing up river to see what they can do.
• A group of Hellriders goes galloping past (either towards or away from the city).
• Cult of Zariel members attack the refugees. (They might have actually been traveling with them as refugees.)
• A platoon of Flaming Fist is marching towards Elturel. They are stopping refugees and roughly questioning them, attempting to ascertain the fate of Grand Duke Ravengard.

Include the need for food and water here. I wouldn’t recommend a full simulation: Just include a few events where food or water is running short and the PCs need to figure out how to solve the problem.

As you’re creating your refugee NPCs, you’ll also discover interpersonal conflicts that can be seeded into the main event sequence.

The distance from Elturel to Baldur’s Gate is nearly 200 miles. Given the pace at which the refugees are likely to be traveling, it’ll probably take ten days for them to reach Baldur’s Gate. Don’t feel like you need to pack in a lot of events every day. Two or three is more than enough to set the tone, and many of those can be very brief. Once the PCs manage to establish a routine, it might also feel right to sum up a couple days of travel in a short bit of narration before zooming back in for the next crisis.

RUNNING THE CARAVAN: When running a party, there’s a persistence of action as you’re generally playing things out in Now Time. For the caravan, things are going to be more abstract; you’re going to be using eliding narration and doing sharp cuts between interesting moments. Make sure to both give time and frame scenes for the PCs to interact with the NPCs. The mental checklist for running a party remains useful:

• Which NPCs are talking to each other? (Consult your refugee list.)
• Who might come over and join a conversation the PCs are having? (Again, refugee list.)
• What are they talking about?

You might find it useful to habitually frame an “evening camp” scene each day – a sort of “mini-party” where you can pack in a bunch of different social interactions. Other opportunities include:

• While traveling the road.
• While relieving yourselves on the side of the road.
• While sharing a night’s watch.
• While sharing a meal or filling waterskins in the river.

If the players are enjoying themselves, let them feel the full ten days of the journey. If they don’t seem to be getting into it, make sharper cuts and move the clock forward, but still try to make sure they get a chance to really interact with the refugees.

Design Note: At some point, I recommend having one of the refugees mention that Elturel has never faced hardship like this; not even during the Night of the Red Coup and the rule of the Vampire Lord Ikaia (see Part 4B).

AT THE GATE

When the refugee caravan arrives at Baldur’s Gate, they find the situation as described at the beginning of Descent: The gates have been shut. A huge refugee camp is growing outside the walls, but it’s clear that supplies are short out here. If they want to keep their refugees safe, they’ll need to figure out how to get them inside the city. (If nothing else, from there they could arrange passage on a ship sailing to safer ports.)

If they approach the gates directly, they meet Flame Zodge. Otherwise, someone will point them in Zodge’s direction as the “guy who can solve your problems if you can make it worth his while.” Alternatively, Zodge hears rumors about how the PCs kept their caravan safe on the road and comes out into the refugee camp to find them.

ZODGE’S DEAL: Basically, Zodge sizes them up, concludes they might be useful, and offers them a deal. If they agree to be deputized as members of the Flaming Fists and investigate the killings, he’ll let their refugee caravan into the city.

This is important: Deal-making is another central theme of the campaign.

The deal Zodge is offering isn’t literally a diabolical one (it’s actually quite reasonable and there’s no hidden loophole waiting to stab the PCs in the back), but it’s a minor echo of the infernal pacts that are coming later. So don’t just shake hands on this: Have him actually produce enlistment papers and make sure the PCs sign them.

Option: Produce the enlistment papers as actual props and have the players sign them at the table. Once they’ve done so, whisk them away and make a point of tucking them away somewhere safe where they can’t get to them.

The enlistment contract contains a reddish sigil in the form of a watermark. Once the papers are signed, Zodge will produce a symbolon knife and make an irregular cut through this watermark, giving the half he slices out to the PCs along with their badges. (The irregular edge of the watermark can only be uniquely matched to that specific contract, allowing all signers to verify the agreement. This interaction foreshadows the contract sealed between Zariel and Elturel, as described in Part 4 of the Remix.)

In addition, as we’ll discuss in more detail in Part 3 of the Remix, the killings are specifically targeting refugees. Here, again, we are tying the details of the scenario hook to the wider themes of the campaign.

LEVEL UP: Once the PCs have signed their enlistment papers, they can advance to 2^nd level.

One of the problematic elements in Descent Into Avernus is the pace and timing of the PCs leveling up. For example, the PCs are supposed to level up after the first SCENE of the adventure. (So you create your characters and then maybe 20 minutes later you pause the narrative so that they can level up.)

We’ll probably do a more in-depth discussion of this issue in Part 8 of the Remix as we’re wrapping things up, but we’ll get started by cleaning it up here.

(If you don’t want to run the full-fledged refugee caravan adventure described above, then I recommend just having the players create 2^nd level characters straight out of the gate.)

THE MYSTERY OF ELTUREL’S FATE

The last element we want to strongly establish for the campaign here is the mystery of Elturel’s fate. This can actually be broken down into three separate revelations:

• What happened to Elturel? (It was taken to Hell.)
• Why did this happen? (The city was sold as part of an infernal pact.)
• The true history of the Hellriders. (They betrayed Zariel and left her for dead in Avernus.)

In my opinion, the PCs should NOT know (or even suspect) any of these answers when the campaign begins. (If you’re using the “Near Miss” or “Prelude to Disaster” openings, you’ll want to give careful consideration to exactly what the PCs actually witness when Elturel vanishes.)

In Getting the Players to Care, I discuss a number of ways in which GMs can get their players to actually care about the lore of the world. These include:

• #2: Make It Plot
• #4: Make It Mystery
• #5: Make It Personal
• #7: Make It Repetitive

And we’re going to use all of these to make them care about Elturel’s fate.

RUMORS OF ELTUREL: We’re going to create a sense of enigma around Elturel’s fate primarily by making it the #1 topic of conversation. Virtually everyone the PCs talk to has a different theory or has heard a different version of what happened to Elturel. (And what’s going to happen next? Are more cities going to be destroyed? Is Baldur’s Gate in danger? Did you hear that Waterdeep has been destroyed, too?) You can find twelve fully developed rumors of Elturel’s fate in the Rumors of Elturel addendum to the Remix.

Seed these rumors into:

• Conversations with the refugees, and with others met along the road to Baldur’s Gate.
• People desperately asking for fresh news as the PCs arrive in the refugee camp outside the city.
• Flame Zodge’s briefing.
• Town criers shouting out the latest headlines on the street corners of Baldur’s Gate.
• Conversations at the Elfsong and Low Lantern taverns.

And don’t just have the NPCs deliver these rumors. Flip it around and get the players involved by having NPCs ask the PCs what they think happened. (This will force the players to actively engage with the rumors and really think about them.)

ESTABLISHING THAVIUS KREEG: Among the rumors and other discussions, make sure to repeatedly establish that Thavius Kreeg was (a) the High Observer of Elturel and (b) he’s missing and presumed lost with the city. (We’ll discuss this more in Part 3, but you want to firmly establish these facts so that the players will understand the significance of finding Kreeg alive later.)

THE SOLUTIONS: The PCs will be able to gather clues to the first two revelations (What happened to Elturel? and Why did this happen?) throughout Part 3: The Vanthampur Investigations before getting definitive answers in Part 4: Candlekeep.

The true history of the Hellriders can be discovered in Part 5: Hellturel and Part 6: Quest of the Dream Machine. (This is deliberate: We want them to learn and fully care about the official history as it’s been known for hundreds of years before revealing the truth. You can’t yank the rug out from under them if you don’t let them walk onto the rug first!)

We’ll discuss these mysteries in more detail (and probably look at complete revelation lists) as they come up.

Go to Part 2: Character Creation

SPOILERS FOR DESCENT INTO AVERNUS

If you’re a local player in my campaigns, you might want to steer clear here. I may be running Descent Into Avernus in the future, but not for people who’ve read the plot.

Last year I wrote the Alexandrian Remix of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. It sought to revise the published campaign in order to create a richer, more dynamic, and (importantly) more robust scenario. People seemed to like it. They liked it a lot, in fact, and I’ve been repeatedly asked to do a similar remix for Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus.

Which is obviously why we’re here today.

I’ve done a few of these in-depth remixes in the past, and they’re generally of two types:

• Expansive remixes, like I did for Eternal Lies, where I’m primarily creating lots of cool new stuff (props, dioramas, new spin-off scenarios) to enhance an already great experience.
• Design remixes, like the one I did for Keep on the Shadowfell, in which I’m primarily focused on fixing the flaws and shortcomings of a scenario.

In the latter, the flaws I’m looking at are usually in the scenario structure. This is not because shortcomings in the scenario structure are the only problem published adventures suffer from. Rather, in order for me to want to spend the considerable time and effort necessary to remix an adventure, there must be both (a) something about the adventure that needs to be fixed and (b) something that makes it worthwhile to do so.

This almost always means that the adventure has some really cool stuff in it. It’s worth remixing specifically so that you can bring that cool stuff to your table in the best possible way. If there wasn’t any cool stuff to start with, it wouldn’t make much sense to spend a lot of effort remixing it: Just move on and either find better material to start with or make something new from scratch.

(For example, there was no mystery about how the scenario structure for Hoard of the Dragon Queen needed to be fixed: Ripping the railroad apart and reassembling it into a node-based structure would have been pretty straightforward. I describe how you can do it in Remixing Hoard of the Dragon Queen. But I never actually did it because the actual material in Hoard didn’t excite me.)

When I started looking at Descent Into Avernus, it was almost immediately clear why people were asking me to remix it. Its structure was badly, badly flawed. There was, in fact, a goodly span of time where I thought it was going to end up being  more like Hoard of the Dragon Queen than Dragon Heist. Its structural flaws were so significant that it seemed as if fixing them would mean throwing out virtually everything of value in the adventure and starting over from scratch with a vaguely similar premise. (At which point, again, why bother?)

Fortunately, thanks in large part to a vigorous discussion with the patrons of my Patreon and also my followers on Twitter,  I had a series of key insights that, at the end of the day, will radically transform Descent Into Avernus, but do so in a way that still leaves a lot of the meat on the bone (so to speak). It is primarily because I think these insights will be useful to others that this project is happening.

With that being said, the Alexandrian Remix of Descent Into Avernus will probably be a bit more “hands on” than my previous remixes. My plan is to critically look at each section of the adventure and then lay out what steps are necessary to redress the problems we’ve found. In some cases, those fixes will be specific and detailed. In others, though, you may have some “homework” to do before actually running the adventure.

(Of course, I basically said the same thing about Dragon Heist and then I ended up diving into all the nitty-gritty details. So we’ll see how it goes!)

One thing I learned from doing the Dragon Heist remix, though, is that it’s a lot easier for people if I tackle the material sequentially instead of topically. So rather than, for example, looking at all of the heists and then looking at all of the mysteries (like we did with Dragon Heist), we’ll instead be largely walking through the book step by step. This might mean that some of our early installments get a little top-heavy, but I think it will all work out in the end.

ACT I: BALDUR’S GATE
Part 1: The Beginning
Part 2: Character Creation
Part 2B: Elfsong Tavern
Part 3: The Vanthampur Investigations
Part 3B: Lore of the Vanthampur Investigations
Part 3C: The Vanthampur Revelations
Part 3D: Investigating the Murders
Part 3E: The Poisoned Poseidon
Part 3F: Dungeon of the Dead Three
Part 3F-B: Key – Part 3F-C: Roster – Part 3F-D: Handouts
Part 3G: Xandering the Dead Three
Part 3H: Trafficking Amrik
Part 3I: Vanthampur Manor
Part 3J: The Portyr Assassination
Part 4A: The Road to Candlekeep
Part 4B: The Road to Avernus
Part 4C: At the Threshold of Hell

ACT II: HELLTUREL
Part 5: Hellturel
Part 5B-A: Arrival in Hellturel
Part 5B-B: Streetcrawl in Elturel
Part 5C-A: Pointcrawl in Elturel
Part 5C-B: A Very Brief Gazetteer of Elturel
Part 5C-C: Elturel Locations
Part 5D: The High Hall
Part 5E: The Grand Cemetery

ACT III: AVERNUS
Part 6: The Rest of the Remix
Part 6B: The Avernian Quest
Part 6C: Quest of the Dream Machine
Part 6D: Lulu’s Memories
Part 6D-B: Zariel’s Crusade – Part 6D-C: Zariel In Hell
Part 6D-D: Legend of the Hellriders – Part 6D-E: Lulu’s Memory Mystery
Part 6D-F: Triggered Memories – Part 6D-G: Memory Revelations
Part 6D-H: The Four Memory Dives – 6D-I: The Dream Machine
Part 6D-J: Claiming the Sword – 6D-K: Zariel’s Spark
6D-L: Questioning the Hellriders
Part 7: Exploring Avernus
Part 7B: Avernian Hex Map – Part 7C: Avernian Hex Key
Part 7D: Raid on the Flying Fortress – Part 7D-B: Fortress Raid Map
Part 7D-C: Fortress Locations
Part 7E: Warlords of Avernus
Part 7F: Factions in Avernus – Part 7F-B: Demonic Powers
Part 7G: The Devils of Baldur’s Gate
Part 7H: Avernian Random Encounters
7H-B: Designed Encounters – 7H-C: Procedural Encounters
7H-D: Advanced Encounter Options
Part 7I: Avernian Rumor Tables

THE END
Part 8: The End
Epilogue: The Elturian Wars
Epilogue 2: Elturel Returns

ADDENDUMS
Addendum: Rumors of Elturel
Addendum: Corpsedamp Zombies
Addendum: A Textual History of Elturel
Addendum: Playing Gargauth
Addendum: Streetcrawling Tools
Addendum: Elturian Names
Addendum: Soul Coins
Addendum: A Textual History of Zariel
Addendum: The Ranks of Hell
Addendum: The Grand 5E Devil Index
Addendum: 3rd Party Resources
From Waterdeep to Avernus

MAPS
Map Pack: Flying Fortress – Brig
Map Pack: Flying Fortress – Command Deck
Map Pack: Player Hexmaps
Map Patch: Avernus Players’ Map
Map Patch: Hellturel

REVIEWS
Review: Descent Into Avernus
Capsule Reviews: DMs Guild
Capsule Reviews: Rhodarin Avernus
Capsule Reviews: Adventurers League (Season 9)
Review: Rescuing Lulu From Elturel

FAN ADDENDUMS
Song of Elturel (Cami-Cat)
Poisoned Poseidon Key (Tominar)

RUNNING THE REMIX

Descent Into Avernus is a big campaign. If you look at the table of contents above, you can see that the Remix is a big project. You may feel overwhelmed by it.

Here are some tips for how you can grapple it to your will.

READING THE CAMPAIGN: First, I do recommend reading the full campaign (Descent Into Avernus, pg. 1-154) and the Remix. (You can skip the addendums for now, although you may find the detailed addendums for Gargauth, Elturel, and Zariel will help orient you.)

That’s a lot of reading, but ultimately knowing where you’re going is vital. Don’t feel like you need to memorize everything. You’re just trying to gain some familiarity with all of it. Keep a notebook nearby where you can jot down any cool ideas or questions you have along the way.

PREPPING THE CAMPAIGN: Once you’ve read everything, you can start prepping. But you don’t have to prep everything all at once. Broadly speaking, the Remix is organized into three acts (each of which uses a different scenario structure to remove the “go where the NPC tells you” railroad of the published adventure, as discussed in my review of the book), and you really only need to prep one act at a time.

So, for example, you can start by just prepping Act I. As the PCs wrap up their investigation in Baldur’s Gate and head towards Candlekeep at the end of Act I, you can start prepping Act II and have it ready by the time they plane shift to Elturel. Similarly, as they wrap things up in Elturel at the end of Act II, you can start prepping Act III and have the hexcrawl ready to go by the time they arrive in Fort Knucklebones.

ACT I: BALDUR’S GATE reorganizes the investigation into the refugee murders and the Vanthampur cultists into a node-based mystery scenario. Everything has been reorganized and expanded into a robust investigation. The core structure is described in Parts 3, 3B, and 3C.

ACT II: HELLTUREL remodels Elturel using a streetcrawl followed by a pointcrawl. The factions and history of the city are also expanded. These structures allow the PCs to freely explore the city, while choosing which factions to ally with and which factions to oppose in their efforts to figure out how the city can be saved.

ACT III: AVERNUS is built around the Avernian Hexcrawl, which provides a structure for freely exploring the Avernian wastelands. But the primary structure of this act is the Avernian Quest, which requires the PCs to (a) break the Pact, (b) sever the chains holding Elturel, and (c) return Elturel to the Material Plane. There are several ways to achieve each of these goals (allowing the PCs to chart their own course in solving the problem), but it’s likely the Quest for the Dream Machine, in which the PCs need to explore the Avernian Hexcrawl in order to find the parts necessary to repair the dream machine which can restore Lulu’s memories, will play a part.

A key thematic structure in the Remix is that of faction: The factional strife of Baldur’s Gate is revealed to have a dark mirror in Hell, and there’s a ladder of feuding politics that the PCs will climb from the squabbling gangs of Elturel to the Mad Max-style gang warlords of the wastes to the titanic powers which rule Avernus.

ADDITIONAL READING: If you’re new here at the Alexandian, you might also find it useful to dive into these articles, as they include deep discussions of topics we’ll be visiting here:

• Three Clue Rule
• Node-Based Scenario Design
• Xandering the Dungeon

There are many more articles at Gamemastery 101 that you might also enjoy! Please also consider becoming a patron if you’d like to support this type of work in the future!

COLLECTED EDITION

Patrons of the Alexandrian can download a complete edition of the Avernus Remix as a bookmarked PDF, including all of the addendums, map patches, and reviews.

REMIXING AVERNUS: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION

Go to Part 1: The Beginning

Go to Part 1

A QUIET MORNING AT TROLLSKULL MANOR

Returning to Trollskull Manor, they found the ghost Lif overseeing the unseen servant mopping the floor of the tavern.

“Welcome home,” Lif said.

“How was everything last night?” Theren asked.

“We had a good crowd,” Lif said. “Master Floon was here and inquired after Kittisoth.”

“The one with the great jawline?” Kitti asked. “Did he say what he wanted?”

“Was his wife with him?” Edana asked.

“She was not,” Lif said. “And he simply said that he regretted missing Kittisoth.”

“Gross,” Kitti said. “I do not regret it. But thank you for telling me.”

They headed upstairs and checked in with the kids. Jenks was still asleep after staying up late working at Amara’s bakery, but Nat and Squiddly both excitedly regaled them with tales of their apprenticeships from the day before.

Theren actually headed over to Amara’s and found a well-sized crowd had gathered. She was just wrapping up a croissant for Fala Lefaliir, the herbalist from farther down Trollskull Alley, as he came in.

“How are things going?” Theren asked. “Do you need anything?”

“No,” Amara declared cheerfully. “We’re having a wonderful morning! And I’ll have the order for Trollskull Manor over in the mid-afternoon.”

Fala thanked Theren for his part in making this happen. “We used to have to walk over to the far side of the High Road for a decent bakery. It’s wonderful to have one right here in the alley.” Theren spent a few minutes chatting with her about his plans to convert the alley into greenspace. The whole alley was excited about that, too.

TEAM RESEARCH

Meanwhile, Pashar and Kora headed out to research more details about the Vault. Kora suggested they go to the Font of Knowledge, a Temple of Oghma, since their queries seemed to be primarily religious in nature. They split up, with Pashar researching the Maroon Brotherhood and Kora focusing on Dumathoin.

Kora learned little she did not already know: Dumathoin was one of the first members of the Mordinsamman, the council of dwarven gods. He was known as the Keeper of the Secrets and was the patron of the shield dwarves. Locally, he had been worshipped by Clan Melairkyn, the dwarves who had first begun excavating under what was now Waterdeep. The earliest portions of Undermountain were, in fact, the Underhalls in which the Melairkyn had made their homes and wrought their mithril-craft. The age of the construction they had found beneath the Brandath Crypts certainly suggested that it was likely built by the Melairkyn.

Kora also dug into the strange association of the holy symbols of Dumathoin, Laduguer, and Ilsensine. Here, however, she found little: A few scraps of legends referred obliquely to even older legends, now lost to the earliest mists of time, that suggested that, in the first days of the Mordinsamman, there was a great and bitter rivalry between Dumathoin and Ilsensine. And another reference to Laduguer “as the once-brother of the Secret Keeper.” But these explained little.

As for Laduguer himself, he had once been a member of the Mordinsamman. But when Moradin discovered that Ladueguer had created the duergar, he was cast out from the council.

Pashar’s research was a little more rewarding: The Maroon Brotherhood were a secret brotherhood, primarily centered in Waterdeep and most likely founded during the 12^th century, although there are many sources suggesting that their true origins lay even earlier in history. In the early 14^th century, the Brotherhood became caught up in the Shadow Thief Affairs: Their members were implicated in an assassination attempt and the group was broken up by then-Open Lord Lhestyn.

Rumors persisted for the better part of a century, however, that the Brotherhood of them Maroon Pin had actually survived the purge and were secretly controlling Waterdeep (or even all of the newly formed Lords’ Alliance). Some even claimed that every single Masked Lord was, in fact, a member of the Brotherhood — or perhaps that the Brotherhood and the Masked Lords were one and the same.

The rituals of the brotherhood largely remained secret even after their precipitous fall — or perhaps because of it. It was clear, however, that they had accumulated any number of ancient rituals, symbols, and the like. These included their namesake alexandrite pins, dwarven compasses (often hidden within works of art, leading many to conclude that any piece of art with a dwarven compass in it must also contain encrypted messages or secret truths of the Brotherhood), a serpent’s forked tongue (representing the telling of secrets), scarab beetles, and the like.

Pashar found one particular example of this sort of thing. Beneath the picture of a broken arrow was an enigmatic phrase: “In beam of sun, strike dragon’s scale with mithril true upon the anvil sun.” Mid-14^th century scholars had exhausted great amounts of work trying to puzzle out what the imagery of “anvil sun” alluded to, with most concluding that it must refer cryptically to a site somewhere within Calimshan, possibly dating back to the lost empire of Coramshan. Debates raged endlessly about exactly which site (or sites) the passage might refer to, until the Maroon Brotherhood conspiracy scholarship slowly faded away by the end of the 14^th century.

SHOPPING AT THE MARKET

A little later in the morning, Edana, Theren, and Kitti headed to the Market. Edana tracked down Nardis, the fish seller Ott Steeltoes had told her about. Nardis was a merman. His entire stall was a pool of water. It took a fair bit of haggling, but Edana was able to convince him to sell her the Sylgar look-a-like he was holding for Ott.

As they walked way, Kitti leaned over. “What’s the plan here, exactly?”

“If we get caught,” Edana said. “We threaten the goldfish.”

“Just pretend it’s actually Sylgar?”

“Exactly.”

Theren, meanwhile, was scouring the stalls looking for a very particular item and, when it proved quite expensive, asked Edana and Kitti, who were just walking up, to pool their money with him to purchase it. Then they returned to Trollskull Manor.

They found Kora and Pashar waiting in their sitting room. Theren walked over to Kora. “Here,” he said. “These are goggles of the night. They’ll grant you darkvision. Just like the rest of us.”

Pashar gasped with glee and then applauded. Kora blushed. “Thank you.

“Now you have a soul,” Pashar said.

“What?”

“Oh, yes,” Pashar said. “Elves believe that only those with souls can see in the absence of light.”

It took them all a moment to notice the small smirk on Pashar’s face and realize he was joking. They collapsed in general merriment.

LETTERS OF THE MORNING

A letter arrived by messenger. It was written in silver ink upon black parchment:

“He’s so nice to us,” Theren said. “I don’t understand. We should buy him a thank you gift.”

“How can we shore up defenses here?” Kittisoth asked. “Especially when we’re gone. She’ll target us here. At home.”

“That makes sense,” Kora said.

“We could send her a letter,” Theren said. “’We’re letting all of our contacts know that doppelgangers have been appearing as us. And, just in case you’ve been had interactions with us, that that was not use.’”

They laughed. But quickly sobered once more.

“We need to hire someone to guard the house,” Edana said. “On short notice.”

“What about the Zhents?” Pashar suggested.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Kora said.

“I thought we told them to stay out of our neighborhood,” Theren objected.

“No, he’s right,” Kittisoth said. “I trust them more than just about anybody else we’ve met in this town.”

They quickly agreed that it was, in fact, their best option. As they were about to leave for Kolat Towers, however, there was another knock on the door. Another letter had arrived.

Kora sighed. Her Harper contact had the worst timing.

They needed to split up, but Kora didn’t want to go entirely by herself, so Theren agreed to accompany here, while Edana and Kittisoth headed to Kolat Towers to negotiate with the Zhents. Pashar would stay at Trollskull to watch over things there.

AN UNHAPPY HARPER

Kora and Theren found Dain in his usual spot at the far end of the narrow, dockside bar.

“Dain,” Kora said.

“I’m glad you could come,” Dain said. “We need a strike team with some muscle behind it that can strike fast, and I knew you already had some history with the Zhents. We have reports that the Zhents are moving into a place called Yellowspire on Turnback Court. I don’t think you’re aware of this, but directly behind the north side of Turnback Court — just beyond Yellowspire Tower — the Harpers have a supply cache. It has magic items and other resources. We believe that the Zhents are moving into Yellowspire in order to make a move on this cache.”

“You want us to attack the Zhents?” Kora said. She couldn’t believe this was happening.

“We need them out of Yellowspire. However you can make that happen.”

“All right,” Theren said. “The good news is that the cache is perfectly safe. The Zhents don’t even know it’s there.”

Dain frowned. “What do you mean?”

Kora sighed. “You remember when I told you that we killed Manshoon? It was the Doom Raider Zhentarim who helped us do that. And in the process of attacking Manshoon, we discovered a magical conduit between Yellowspire and the Zhentarim headquarters. Our allies — the Doom Raiders — now control Yellowspire.”

“Legally,” Theren added. “They have a deed.”

Dain was stone-faced.

“If you’re still concerned, I’d suggest simply moving the cache,” Kora said. “

Dain shook his head. “It would be a security risk, no matter what short term alliances your may have made. And moving the cache would potentially expose it.”

Kora shook her head, too. “We can’t do it.”

Theren was exasperated. “You can’t just attack people in a building they legally own!”

“You’re new to the Harpers, stripling,” Dain said dismissively. “But we do what’s necessary, whether it’s legal or not.”

“I understand that,” Kora said. “But we can say with absolute certainty that they are not there for the cache! There’s no risk to it!”

“Fine,” Dain said. “If your team isn’t up to handling this, then we’ll find someone who can.”

“I don’t think you—”

“It’s fine,” Dain said acidly. “Leave.”

Kora shoved her stool back from the bar and left.

RETURN TO KOLAT TOWERS

Edana and Kittisoth arrived at Kolat Towers. From the edge of the energy field protecting the grounds, they waved to two Zhentarim guards standing at the front door of the towers. One of them jogged over and, with their pass-amulet, ushered them through.

While they waited near the door, one of the Zhents — a man they recognized from their raid on Manshoon’s inner sanctum —ran up the stairs. A few minutes later he returned with Ziraj, who greeted them with a friendly (and toothy) grin. After a few pleasantries, he led them back up the stairs.

“Yes,” he said, responding to a question from Edana. “We staged a raid into the upper levels of the tower yesterday. It looks like Manshoon didn’t go up there very much. We mostly found a bunch of crap belonging to the Kolat brothers who originally owned the tower and a few of their old wards.”

They came to a chamber that was in the middle of being refurbished into an office or operations center or something of the like for Tashlyn Yafeera. She looked up and smiled as they came in.

“It’s good to see you again,” Kittisoth said.

“And you!” Tashlyn said. “What brings you by?”

“We’re having some trouble at Trollskull,” Edana said. “We’ve upset a powerful figure and we have cause to believe they’re going to come in the next few days to attack us. We need someone to guard the manor — and our children — when we can’t be there.”

Tashlyn threw herself back into her chair. “That shouldn’t be a problem. We’d be happy to do you a favor. Istrid should be available and… Ziraj, you’re probably free to head over with a few of your boys tonight, too, right?’

Ziraj nodded.

“Of course, diverting that kind of manpower will slow down our efforts to hunt down the rest of Manshoon’s loyalists. What would help,” Tashlyn said suggestively, “is if we had a powerful spellcaster to call upon. But with Davil out of action… Well, you see the problem. Now, a little birdie on the street has told me—”

“Was it a raven?” Edana asked.

Kittisoth nodded sagely. “Or an owl?”

Tashlyn blinked. “It’s a metaphorical bird.” She took a second to regroup her thoughts. “Let’s say a voice on the wind. A voice on the wind told me that you’ve gotten friendly with the Blackstaff. And I’m sure that the Blackstaff would be able to free Davil.”

Edana thought it over. “I can’t speak on behalf of the Blackstaff. And I’m sure that the Blackstaff herself would want payment for such a service.”

“You can broker a meeting?” Tashlyn said. “That’s enough.” She clapped her hands and stood up. “It’s settled.”

They spent a few more minutes working out the details and then headed home.

THE THIRD LETTER

Back at Trollskull Manor, there was a knock on the door.

Pashar nervously answered it. It was another messenger. With another note. This one from the Gralhunds.

Pashar told the kids to stay in their room and then rushed out to Gralhund Villa. An ashen-faced servant led him upstairs to the Gralhunds’ bedchamber. Entering, Pashar saw that the glass doors leading out to the balcony had been smashed in. Broken glass glittered from the plush rugs.

Lady Yalah was sobbing on the bed. Lord Orond was standing over her trying to comfort her, but seeing Pashar come in her walked over to him. “Pashar! Everything Kora and Edana said! It was true! We weren’t able to protect them! The dark elves came! They took Zartan!”

“And your other son?” Pashar said quickly.

“Greth is in the next room. He’s all right.”

“What happened?”

Lord Orond ran his hand through his disheveled hair. “The dark elves attacked. We weren’t expecting them during the day. They broke in through these doors. They children were in here playing. The guards weren’t able to come quickly enough. They couldn’t get here before… they… They took my boy! They took…” He sobbed.

“Did they leave anything?”

“Yes,” Lady Yalah said, swallowing her own sobs. She held up a slip of black paper. Black paper with silver ink on it.

Pashar gingerly stepped over to her, took the note from her hand, and read.

“We just don’t know what to do,” Lord Orond said.

“Are there any unique objects that we could use to perhaps magically trace Zartan?” Pashar asked.

“He had a stuffed unicorn,” Lord Orond said.

“Did you see which way they went?”

“They crossed the roof,” Orond said. “But they had snipers and they kept us pinned down until they were gone.”

“We’ll do whatever we can,” Pashar reassured them.

“Whatever you can do,” Lady Yalah pleaded. “We’ll do anything! Please! Just save my son!”

Pashar excused himself.

PLANNING BETRAYALS WITH THE BEST INTENTIONS

The others arrived back to find that Pashar was missing.

“He’ll be back,” Kittisoth said with confidence. “What did Dain have to say?”

Kora quickly explained.

“Can we just talk to the Zhents and ask them to leave?” Kittisoth asked.

Edana shook her head. “I don’t think we’ll be able to convince the Zhents to leave when there’s no good reason for them to do so.”

“The Harpers are in the wrong here,” Theren said bluntly.

“I actually agree with you,” Kora said. “They’re valuing property over people because they don’t want to deal with someone finding out their secrets.” She paused and thought about it for a moment. “I think we should move the cache ourselves.”

Kittisoth grinned. “Sure. Why not? We just do it and tell them later. Didn’t they just make you a Harpshadow?”

“That’s right,” Edana said. “You’re empowered to make these kinds of decisions.”

“That’s true,” Kora said. “I’m supposed to use my initiative and my discretion. And using my discretion, we’re going to solve this problem. They’ll thank me later.”

“Where do we put it?”

“I think we can move it to Thunderstaff Manor,” Kora said.

That’s when Pashar walked in. “I have great news! The ruse continues! They have no idea that we were responsible for taking the Stone of Golorr! Also, Jarlaxle has stolen one of their children.”

“Oh my god,” Kittisoth murmured.

“Who?” Kora said.

“The Gralhunds.”

Pashar quickly filled them in on everything he’d learned from the Gralhunds.

“Didn’t we convince them that Jarlaxle had taken the Stone?” Theren said.

“We convinced them that Jarlaxle took their nimblewright,” Edana said. “So, from their perspective, he must not know what he has.”

“Or he’s trying to figure out how to open the nimblewright and access it.” Theren nodded.

“And what does Jarlaxle actually know?” Kittisoth asked. “Does he know we have the Stone?”

“I don’t think so,” Kora said. “Some people might know that Vajra took it, but I think only Vajra — and Renaer — knows that she gave it to us.”

But what now? They could tell Jarlaxle the truth. They could cut a deal to give him credit for helping to recover the stolen gold (if they could convince Vajra and Laeral to go along with it). They could use the Stone, empty the vaults, then pluck the Eyes back out of it and turn the blinded Stone over to him.

The truth was that they sympathized with him. He’d helped them several times despite having every reason not to. “And he’s just trying to gain protection and leverage for his city,” Kora said. “Just like any ruler would for his people. Even if his people are a bunch of pirates.” (“Pirates are not bad,” Kittisoth said. “Well…” Edana said. “What’s that supposed to mean?!”) His motivations seemed honorable.

“But he took a child,” Edana said. “He crossed a line.”

“Either way we need to do something right now,” Pashar said. “The child is already in danger.”

“We just need to reassure him,” Kittisoth said. “We just need enough time to get the third Eye from Xanathar and then access Vault. After that, we’ll have all the leverage. This whole thing can be done by tomorrow morning.”

“All right,” Kora said, “then we need to seek a meeting with Jarlaxle at the Seven Masks Theater. We’ll reassure him that we’re all working for the same ends, and that we just need a little more time to ‘find him what he needs.’”

“Perfect,” Theren said. “Even if he later finds out everything we’ve been up to, we’ll still be able to honestly say that we didn’t lie to him. I think he’ll respect that.”

To be continued…