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 1st to 13th 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-
