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

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

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

A few quick provisos before we begin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Grade: B

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

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

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

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

• Grade: D

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

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

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

• Grade: D

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

• Grade: D+

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

• Grade: B-

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

• Grade: F

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

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

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

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

• Grade: B-

More DMs Guild Capsule Reviews – Go to the Avernus Remix

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We’re going to use a game structure called streetcrawling. You rarely want to track movement in an urban environment street by street (see The Art of Pacing), but there are occasions where the city is perilous, confusing, difficult, and/or treacherous enough that the PCs have to crawl through the streets (in much the same way that they might crawl through a dungeon or explore a hexcrawl). Lost in a post-apocalyptic city trapped in Hell definitely counts.

STEP 1 – SET GOAL: Establish the goal the PCs are trying to reach. This goal can be either specific (e.g., Helm’s Shieldhall) or generic (e.g., ‘someone who knows what’s going on’ or ‘a source of clean water’).

STEP 2 – GENERATE STREETS: Use the Street Generator (below) to determine the local street layout and the relationship between where the PCs are and where their goal is located.

STEP 3 – ORIENT: The PCs need to figure out how to go to where their goal is located. Options include:

• Their goal can be spotted from a distance. (For example, if they look around for a high tower to climb, they’ll probably be able to spot one.)
• They can ask the locals for directions.
• They can attempt an appropriate skill check to make an educated guess.
• They could use magic (like a locate object spell).
• They know the city (or have a map) and they know where their goal is.

If they can’t figure out how to go to their goal, then their first goal is actually going some place where they CAN figure that out. Or they’re randomly wandering (see below) and just hoping to stumble across something that will point them in the right direction.

STEP 4 – RANDOM ENCOUNTER: Check for a random encounter (see below).

STEP 5 – ARRIVAL: The PCs arrive at their goal.

If their goal was figuring out a way to get their bearings, then this will likely conclude the streetcrawling and transition to pointcrawling (see Part 5C: Pointcrawl in Elturel).

Design Note: What if the players don’t make orienting themselves a priority? What if they want to achieve some other goal? That’s fine. Use the streetcrawl structure to resolve whatever goal or goals they set for themselves.

In the process of pursuing other goals, they may unintentionally get their bearings. (For example, one of them might fly up into the air for some completely unrelated reason and see the city spread out below them.) That’s great. An equally likely outcome is that they’ll get frustrated trying to navigate the city when they really don’t know where they’re going and eventually figure out that they need to do something to get their bearings.

STREET GENERATOR

If you have a highly detailed map of your city, you can just grab a chunk of the streets depicted on the map and use those for your crawl. If you don’t have a map of the city or if that map is not particularly detailed, however, you can use this simple system to generate local street maps. (For a lengthier discussion of this, check out Random GM Tip: Visualizing City Block Maps.)

In the case of Elturel, the maps we have for the city arguably straddle the line between these two types of depiction. For example, look at this chunk of map:

You might look at that and clearly see streets, like this:

If you do, great. You can just sketch those local streets out on a sheet of paper and use that for your crawl.

For the sake of argument, however, I’m going to instead focus on the shape of the major streets which define the borders of this particular locality and sketch that onto a sheet of paper:

If you don’t have a city map at all to base these outlines on, you can either arbitrarily sketch the major streets bordering the area or just treat the edges of the current sheet of paper as the locality’s edge.

ROLLING THE DICE: This is a tablemat system, so you are now going to take a handful of street dice and location dice and roll them directly onto the sheet of paper. The locations where these dice land on the paper are as important (or more important) than the numbers they roll. If a die rolls off the paper, you can either re-roll it or ignore it.

Tip: You generally want to have the dice spread out across the available space, not clustered together.

STREET DICE: Take an arbitrary number of d4’s to be street dice. The larger the number of street dice, the larger the number of streets and the more convoluted the street plan you’ll generate. I’ve generally found that rolling 4d4 produces a good result.

The location where each die lands is an intersection and the number of streets attached to that intersection is equal to the number rolled on the dice.

LOCATION DICE: Location dice are d10’s. You roll a number of location dice equal to the number of locations where the PCs’ goal can be achieved in the current locality. If this is the beginning of the streetcrawl, add an additional location die (and the lowest die rolled will be the PCs’ starting location).

Tip: Streets can curve. Adding a curve when one is necessary for a street to intersect with a location die is a good prompt for adding a little variety to your street map.

For example, using the block outline from above to start our streetcrawl, we’re going to roll four street dice and two location dice (one for a goal location and one for the PCs’ starting location):

That’s not the only set of streets that could have been generated from that particular die roll. There is no “right answer.” The point is to be able to very quickly generate local street maps during the session by tossing some dice on the table and sketching out a few lines.

Here’s what the final locality map looks like with the dice swept aside (and surrounding streets added for context):

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS

If you’re familiar with using random encounters in dungeons, you’ll want to make a mental adjustment for streetcrawls for several reasons:

• Cities are usually filled with a lot more activity and encounters should be more common.
• Navigational choices in the city are usually trivial or random, which makes them less inherently interesting.
• There are no rooms keyed with interesting content in a streetcrawl; the encounters need to carry more of the weight.

For example, in an old school dungeon a random encounter often happens 1 in 6 times per check. In a streetcrawl, you might want to have encounters 1 in 4, 1 in 2, or even 2 in 3 times.

Tip: For a short, simple streetcrawl like the one we’re most likely using for the PCs’ arrival in Elturel, I’d recommend just automatically slotting in an encounter. You might actually want to take the initial “woman running from devils” encounter (DEVILS!) and use it as the encounter for their initial streetcrawling move.

ELTUREL RANDOM ENCOUNTERS: I’m going to discuss the random encounters we’ll be using for Elturel in more detail in Part 5C.

DISTANT GOALS

If the goal the PCs are trying to reach is not local, then the immediate goal is actually ‘move one chunk of city closer to the goal.’ When generating streets, only roll one location die to determine the PCs’ starting location. Their immediate goal can obviously be achieved by reaching the appropriate edge of the current crawl map. (You’ll want to determine the number of chunks necessary to reach the locality of their goal.)

Note: When dealing with distant goals it will often be more appropriate to exit the streetcrawling structure while the PCs travel to the general vicinity of their goal and then resume crawling. (Imagine the PCs in a city they’re familiar with. If they’re in Oldtown and know that Old Tom is hiding somewhere down by the Docks, they don’t need to crawl their way across the whole city: They can just go to the Docks and then start crawling to find Old Tom.) In the case of Elturel, the point where this would become appropriate is likely also the point where we’ll be switching to a pointcrawl structure (see Part 5C). But it is possible for the PCs to strike out before getting their bearings (for example, they might head straight towards the High Hall after spotting it towering above the city).

CRAWLING WITHOUT A GOAL

If the PCs don’t have a goal:

STEP 1: Use the street generator to determine the local street layout, rolling a location die only to determine the PCs’ starting location.

STEP 2: The PCs choose a direction to walk. (Presumably at random.)

STEP 3: Check for a random encounter on each street they walk down.

If they reach the edge of the local map, use the street generator again to extend the map and continue crawling.

Generally speaking, this style of play should not persist for long. Context should prompt the PCs to begin setting goals. (Even if they’re just “wandering around looking for something to do,” the random encounters or street descriptions should eventually give them something to do or become interested in pursuing.)

RANDOM WANDERING

If the PCs are hoping to find something but have no idea where it might be or how they might get there, they are randomly wandering. Follow the same procedure as crawling without a goal, but roll location dice normally to determine the location(s) of what they’re looking for.

At any time, of course, they may be able to figure out how to orient themselves (running into an NPC they can ask for directions, etc.), at which point they’ll no longer be randomly wandering.

Note: Wandering randomly is generally a terrible way of finding a specific location. (Since you can easily go in completely the wrong direction and never find it.) It works better if they’re looking for a generic type of thing, since even if they miss one such thing they can stumble across another. (For example, there are any number of hardware stores you could hit up for supplies during a zombie apocalypse.)

WANDERING THE CITY: Some goals can be found almost anywhere you look in a city (e.g., someone to talk to). Other goals might be rare or found in only certain locations of the city. As the GM you can arbitrarily decide this based on your understanding and knowledge of the city (there’s one local alchemist nearby; the alchemists are over in the Dewberry neighborhood and they’ll have to crawl there; etc.). Alternatively, you can make a ruling for how likely they are to find the thing they’re looking for in a particular chunk of city and then roll to randomly determine if there’s one local to them. Examples include:

• 1 in 100 chance (for perhaps a specific location that they know is somewhere in the city, but have no idea where or if they’re even close to it).
• 1 in 6 chance (for something that is known to be “around here somewhere”; or that’s relatively rare in the city)
• 1 in 4 chance (for something that’s fairly common in the city, like a public fountain)
• 1d4-1 per locality (for something that can be found almost anywhere in the city, like bodegas in Manhattan)

And so forth.

CONCLUSION

I’ve dropped an entirely new scenario structure on you. That may be a lot to process, so let’s take a step back and do a quick recap on how this is likely to work out in play:

• The PCs show up in Elturel.
• They look around for a high place to get their bearings from.
• You generate a local street map.
• As they walk from their current location to the location of the tower they’ve spotted, you trigger the “woman running from devils” encounter (contextualizing the encounter based on the street map you’ve generated).
• After that (likely a fight) scene, they continue on their way, reach the tower, climb the tower, look around (WE ARE FLOATING IN THE GODDAMN AIR!), receive the poster map, and transition to pointcrawling (see Part 5C).

That’s it.

So what’s the deal with the whole streetcrawling structure? Isn’t it overkill? Couldn’t we just prep a locality street map of the area where the PCs appear with the location of the tower indicated? Possibly. But the reason we want the structure is because this might NOT be the way it goes in play: Players are fickle and unpredictable generators of random chaos. As we’ve already discussed, they might go in any number of unexpected directions.

This structure can easily generate the likely outcome described above, but it can just as easily handle anything that the players choose to throw your way.

Without this kind of structure (either formal or informal), your only option would be to have a GMPC tell the PCs what to do. (And then get frustrated when they don’t.)

Go to Addendum: Streetcrawling Tools – Part 5C-A: Pointcrawl in Elturel

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The PCs are plane shifting into Elturel blind: They know the city has been sent to Hell, but they have no way of really knowing what the situation on the ground is (so to speak).

Let’s talk about the use of maps in RPGs. Actually, that’s too broad a topic. Let’s talk about the use of city maps in RPGs. Broadly speaking, there are two scenarios: First, you have diegetic maps. Like the map of pre-Fall Elturel that I mentioned the PCs might want to grab in Part 4C, diegetic maps are those actually possessed by the characters. They can be:

• Not represented in the real world. (The map is something your character possesses and references, presumably to some effect, but you, as the player, cannot see it.)
• Given as a prop in the real world which attempts to accurately represent exactly what the map would look like to your character.
• Given as a prop in the real world which is analogous to what your character would see, but not the same thing they’re actually looking at.

In practice, this is more of a spectrum than distinct categories. For example, even Thror’s Map from The Hobbit ultimately makes concessions to the reader by being an English “translation” of the diegetic map:

Second, there are non-diegetic maps. These are maps which the players can see, but not their characters. For example, when I was running Dragon Heist I put a huge map of Waterdeep up on the wall. This didn’t represent a map that the characters were carrying around with them; it was a reference that existed purely in the physical game space (along with a Harptos calendar and a map of Faerûn).

Non-diegetic maps may represent character knowledge (i.e., the map they have in their head). But they can also simply be a concession for easy reference. In much the same manner that handing the players a picture of an NPC can be the quickest way to distinguish them (even though their characters don’t have a pocket portrait of them in hand), so, too, have I found that the most efficient way to conjure up a cross-town trek in the minds of the players is to simply point the laser pointer at the poster map on the wall and trace the route with brief descriptions.

Which, finally, brings us to the poster map of Hellturel included in Descent Into Avernus. When should you give this map to the players?

ARRIVING IN ELTUREL

First, a brief digression. By and large, we are not going to be changing the initial beats of what happens in Elturel:

• The PCs arrive.
• They get a first impression of the city.
• The person who brought them to Avernus (probably Traxigor) panics and abandons them.
• A woman with two toddlers comes running around the corner, pursued by a couple of bearded devils.

But we are going to finesse them a bit.

Let’s start with this chunk of boxed text from the book:

When looking at a BIG MOMENT like this, it can be tempting as a GM to just pile the whole thing up on the players. That can work, but I’ve found that it’s often more effective to break the BIG MOMENT into its distinct parts — each major detail, each revelation, each meaningful moment — and then space them out (even if only a little).

This is partly about pacing, but it’s also about slowly building up a mental image for the players over time. By layering in additional details sequentially over time, in my experience, it’s easier for the players to really immerse into the environment. You get more buy-in.

I’ve been doing this long enough that I kind of do this instinctively. But in breaking down the arrival in Elturel, I identified these moments:

• Arriving in the street. Hot air. Crumbling buildings. The sky of Hell and the transformed Companion above you.
• Traxigor is nervous.
• Spotting the High Hall on a distant bluff.
• Huge clouds of smoke to the east; the city is on fire.
• DEVILS!
• Traxigor panics and flees.
• The first earthquake.
• WE ARE FLOATING IN THE GODDAMN AIR!

(That last beat probably happens much later. We’ll come back to it.)

Note that there’s nothing sacred about this sequence. For example, you could easily rearrange and remix the middle beats:

• Spotting the High Hall on a distant bluff.
• DISTANT EXPLOSION! to the east. There’s huge clouds of smoke. The city is on fire. Traxigor panics and flees.
• DEVILS!

And in actual play the players could easily shift these things around. For example, if they immediately look up into the sky and try to get their bearings you can immediately mention them seeing the High Hall and the huge clouds of smoke to the east before mentioning Traxigor getting nervous or triggering the distant explosion. The basic idea, in fact, is to give the players at least a couple of beats to react to what’s happening.

This might be even clearer if we look at the next block of boxed text (which actually happens in the middle of this sequence):

Although all glommed up as one moment here, imagine it lightly restructured as:

• You hear a scream from around the corner.
• [Players have a chance to quickly declare one thing they do in response.]
• A woman with two toddlers runs around the corner.
• [Players have another chance to quickly declare their response to this. Maybe the woman can shout out something to them in response.]
• Devils come around the corner.
• [Ask the players to roll for initiative.]
• Traxigor panics and flees.

I think you can see how this draws the players into the scene: By the time the devils actually show up, they’re already involved and invested in the actions that are playing out.

Here’s the key thing: When the PCs arrive in Elturel they are confused, disoriented, and need to get their bearings. Traxigor abandoning them should escalate that feeling, isolating and trapping them. They should feel simultaneously claustrophobic and overwhelmed by the vast unknown which surrounds them.

The take-away here is that simply whipping out the Hellturel map as soon as they arrive would cause most or all of these distinct moments to collapse into each other, simultaneously undercutting the emotional tension of the situation.

GETTING THEIR BEARINGS

So when should they get the Hellturel map?

First, this is obviously a non-diegetic map. (Nobody is doing cartographical surveys in the middle of the apocalypse.) Second, we’ve framed the PCs into a situation where they’re effectively lost and need to get their bearings. So the real question is: What is the meaning of the map? And the meaning of the map is that the PCs have gotten their bearings.

So when the PCs have gotten their bearings, you should give the players the map.

How can they do that? Well, I can think of a few options (and your players might come up with something else):

• They could seek out a tall building and climb to its top, allowing them to look out over the city.
• They could use magic to similar effect (a clairvoyance spell, for example).
• They could question NPCs in Elturel. (The initial woman they run into is clueless about the wider state of the city, but others might be well-informed enough to give them a briefing on the current situation.)
• They could use their diegetic map of Elturel (if they have one) to attempt to figure out where they are in the city.

What constitutes enough knowledge for them to be considered to have gotten their bearings? Well, it probably depends on their approach. On the one hand, we want to look at the type of information the map is giving them: Have they gotten that information in-character? On the other hand, while the map does contain information on every single block in the city, it’s overkill to withhold the map until they’ve somehow gained that block-by-block knowledge.

What I would do is look at the key revelation: Remember how “WE ARE FLOATING IN THE GODDAMNED AIR!” was the final moment we identified above? Well, the map is going to reveal that. So we want to make sure that the characters have experienced that moment before revealing the map. (And that could happen by them climbing a building and seeing out over the edge of the city, being told the situation by an NPC, etc.) That moment might be simultaneous with them getting their bearings, or it might happen before they get their bearings (so they don’t get the map until later) depending on how it plays out.

Go to Part 5B-B: Streetcrawl in Elturel

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As both a writer and a GM, I often use the Random Name Generator at Behind the Name. In the case of Descent Into Avernus, I began hitting the generator hard in Part 3 of the Remix when I needed names for murder victims. The generator ended up randomly giving me a couple of Limburgish names, and after diving into that a little bit I thought it would be a fun way to give the Elturians a distinct flavor.

Having done this, of course, I realized I would need to stick with it. And that would notably include improvising names for incidental NPCs in both the refugee camps outside Baldur’s Gate and in Elturel itself.

Which, of course, brings us to this addendum of Elturian names (which is somewhat idiosyncratic and not purely Limburgish). A full list of male, female, and last names appears on the next page for convenient printing and reference at the game table.

You might also check out my ol’ trusty list of fantasy names, Infinity: A List of Names, and The Names of Legend for other discussions of names (improvised and otherwise) in RPGs.

ELTURIAN NAMES

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Before the PCs arrive in Elturel, we need to talk about the current state of the city, because there are some basic issues that should be addressed.

First, the city is broadly described as if the Fall of Elturel just happened. There’s one reference to a family’s supplies running out (although not how many supplies they had to start with), but other than that pretty much everything in Chapter 2 is described as if the city were still in the earliest hours and confusion of the crisis.

Except this isn’t true: It would take at least ten days for the first refugees to reach Baldur’s Gate. Even if we assume the gates were immediately closed (although that’s an iffy reading of the text), the PCs still need at least a couple of days to investigate the murders. Then it’s four days to Candlekeep. So Elturel was actually taken at least 15-20 days ago by the time the PCs show up.

On the flip side, when the PCs are done in Elturel they’re going to head out on a quest to find the Sword of Zariel. As they leave, they must suspect that they will be gone for at least days. In point of fact, it’s likely that they will be gone for weeks before they can return to save the city.

The problem is that nothing about the current situation in Elturel makes it seem plausible that there will be anything worth saving by the time the PCs get back: Demons and devils are freely roaming the streets of the city, more or less systematically slaughtering people in their homes. There’s no organized resistance and no reasonable expectation that there’s going to be one. (Ravengard supposedly “organized a defense,” but has actually just spent 2+ weeks cowering in a basement and now his meager retinue of guards has been wiped out.)

This creates a situation where the PCs need to do X in order to save the city, but have no reasonable expectation that they can actually achieve X in time to save the city. The result is not a sense of urgency, but rather a conclusion that the plan can’t work. A plan that doesn’t work, of course, will be discarded, and the PCs will end up looking for a different solution: They might stay in Elturel and try to spearhead a defense themselves. Or they might abandon the entire idea of “saving the city” and look for other alternatives, like simply escaping themselves or organizing some kind of inter-planar evacuation for as many people as possible.

Of course, you could use an NPC to say, “I promise you, as the Dungeon Master, that you’re supposed to go on this quest and I guarantee that the city will not fall and a bunch of people won’t be slaughtered in a devilish genocide while you’re gone.”

The result, however, still won’t be urgency: The players will probably go and do the thing, but Elturel will lose any sense of reality for them and the “crisis” will lose all meaning. Like a video game where the world remains frozen in a state of status quo until you hit the button labeled Next Plot Point, the world will be reduced to two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs.

So what we need are two things:

1. A clear understanding of what’s been happening in the city in the fortnight since it was sent to Hell, and what the current situation is when the PCs arrive.
2. Some form of status quo in which the city seems secure enough that the PCs can leave, do their quest, and have a reasonable expectation that there’ll still be a city to save when they come back.

However, we don’t want the status quo to feel too safe. The city is in Hell and being dragged to its destruction in the River Styx. There’s a very fine line that needs to be walked here between the PCs feeling that Elturel will still exist if they can hurry up and save it and the PCs feeling like there’s nothing to worry about.

For similar reasons, although we can easily imagine a scenario in which the status quo has already been firmly established by the time the PCs arrive (most likely some variant of Ravengard actually securing the city), that’s probably also the wrong direction to go: The PCs are walking into Hell. We want them to feel that; not enjoy some weird Pax Elturian.

WHERE ARE THE LEADERS? In the adventure as written, the highest surviving authority of Elturgard is supposedly a lone acolyte named Pherria Jynks. Descent Into Avernus tries to explain this with a meteor that fell out of the sky and destroyed most of the High Hall.

But that still doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? Even in a Designated Survivor situation where the “entire” government is in a meeting that explodes, you still have the vast majority of the military and civilian infrastructure and chain of command intact. You don’t end up in a situation where the entire government is just one DMV clerk.

WHERE ARE THE DEVILS? Descent Into Avernus tries to explain why the legions of Avernus haven’t overrun the city already with the Battle of Elturel. At the very moment that Elturel popped in, a huge army of demons crossed the Styx and attacked the assembled legions. A huge battle broke out.

The battle has continued, without change, for 15-20 days.

It will continue, without any change, for the next several weeks.

Despite this, the battle is incredibly isolated: No reinforcements are arriving. No one in the area even seems to be aware of it.

In short, the Battle of Elturel is a valiant effort to explain why Elturel remains largely unmolested, but it actually contributes greatly to the sense that Elturel can’t possibly survive long enough for the PCs to save it. Yes, we know that the battle is just a permanent, unchanging video game instance with the same actions playing on an endless loop, but if you accept the situation at face value, then it would seem as if the battle would certainly conclude shortly and the city would be overrun.

THE PHYSICAL & METAPHYSICAL

The Companion now hangs low and large in the sky, basically on a level with the High Hall. It emits a strange, purplish-black light that mixes kaleidoscopically with the reddish light of Hell itself. Thunder from the lightning crackling across its surface intermittently cascades across the city.

Elturel is floating in the sky above the Avernian plains, connected to the Dock of Fallen Cities by huge chains.

THE CHAINS: The chains obviously have a physical reality, but they are also a metaphysical construct. They both represent the corruption of the city and are operant upon it. They are not just physically dragging Elturel down into Hell, they are also dragging down the souls of everyone in the city.

This is possible due to the influence of the Companion and the Writ of the Pact. To be clear, this process doesn’t mind control the people in the city or somehow make them evil. It’s subtler than that; a contamination of the city’s collective souls with something akin to original sin. Conversely the city remains afloat because the souls of the city are fighting against this taint.

As described in “The Metaphysics of Elturel’s Fall” (Part 4B), the final stroke comes when the city completes its descent into both sin and the Styx: The population drowns not only in the waters of the river, but in their own sin at the very moment that their minds are wiped clean and the Pact completes.

DOCK OF FALLEN CITIES: Elturel is not the first city to suffer this fate. It is actually tethered to an ancient facility known as the Dock of Fallen Cities. The chains are connected to huge pillars that rise out of the Avernian plains. Between and around these pillars are the overlapping layers of countless cities which have been pulled down and drowned in the Styx. The river still floods their broken and forgotten streets.

These cities are most likely drawn from across the multiverse, so when the PCs pick their way through the ruins you should feel empowered to get romantic with your descriptions of the melancholic, cyclopean ruins. They are most likely haunted by strange will o’ wisps, which are perhaps related to the Many Colours Out of Space that are here the spiritual detritus left behind by a dozen dead civilizations.

WHERE ARE THE DEVILS? The Dock of Fallen Cities here takes the place of the Battle of Elturel: There was no demonic invasion. There is no endless, looping confrontation.

So why hasn’t Zariel sent her legions into Elturel to pacify the city?

Largely because she doesn’t need to. With a few key exceptions (described below), killing the population before they can drown in the Styx is actually contradictory to her goals. There are some devils stationed around the pillars to make sure no one messes with the chains (not that there’s actually anything the PCs or anyone else in Elturel can do to the chains without a lot of help, see Part 6), but they honestly don’t care if a few people manage to “escape” the city.

HOSTILES

Even though Zariel isn’t motivated to stage an invasion of a city she’s already conquered, that doesn’t mean that the city is in any way safe.

ZARIEL CULTISTS: Zarielites from across Faerun had learned what was coming and made the city a sort of pilgrimage site in the final days before its Fall. (They knew it was going to Hell and they hitched a ride.)

Once they arrived in Hell, groups of these jubilant cultists emerged onto the streets in a millenarian orgy of sin and destruction. Many have indiscriminately pillaged and burned. Others have set up little gangland fiefs of oppression and misery. Regardless, they all know the party ends when the city hits the Styx, and they’re mostly okay with that (believing that in the moment of the Pact’s completion they will be exalted as powerful devils).

In addition, while many members of the Cult of the Companion (see Part 3B and Part 4B) fled the city before its Fall (much like Thavius Kreeg), others remained. Many of those became Hell Knights (see below), but others remain as a sort of fifth column. (Adding such a fifth columnist to the refugees in the High Hall is an obvious choice.)

Devil cultists have the shadows of devils here. Those in the former group tend to delight in this; those in the fifth column will obviously take efforts to hide it.

HELL KNIGHTS: Before the Fall, the High Knights were the upper echelons of the Elturian government. The term originally applied to those who could lead (or had led) a grand expedition of the Hellriders, including the High Rider and the High Watcher of Helm’s Shieldhall. The use of the title formalized and then expanded over time until essentially every senior member of the government was a High Knight (along with a fair number of lower positions as well).

By the time Thavius Kreeg became High Observer, many of the High Knights were already Zarielites, and Kreeg made sure that most of the remaining High Knights were also replaced by cultists.  By the time of the Fall, the High Knights were largely synonymous with the inner circle of the cult. These cultists had sworn special oaths above and beyond the Creed Resolute, and as Elturel was pulled into Hell they immediately transformed into devils, becoming Hell Knights.

These Hell Knights had two immediate goals: First, they began slaughtering the other knights under their command. As noted previously, any Elturian knights who had sworn the Creed Resolute and were killed after Elturel was sent to Hell had their souls immediately claimed by the Pact. Here in Hell itself, this meant that any knight killed was immediately transformed into another Hell Knight.

Second, as their ranks swelled with devils, the Hell Knights targeted wizards, clerics, and other high-level or important characters who might pose a threat. Most of their targets were eliminated within the first few hours of chaos, and the Hell Knights continue hunting for those who escaped the initial purge.

(You can use any devil stats for a Hell Knight, with specific recommendations being given in Part 7G. They generally still wear the armor of their former orders.)

DEVIL RAIDERS & DEMON INVADERS: Although Zariel is not sending in her legions, Elturel is not free from devils. Small groups of devil raiders from the Avernian plains have snuck into the city to loot and rend what they can before the city’s final destruction. (Would you sell your soul to escape Hell? They can offer that, too.)

In addition, a lieutenant of Yeenoghu named Liashandra has led a platoon of demonic troops into the floating city. They’re perhaps the most immediately dangerous to the common people of the city, reveling in wanton destruction as is their demonic wont. However, Liashandra’s primary mission is to sabotage the Fall of Elturel if she can and prevent Zariel from recruiting the entire city into the ranks of her legions.

This means that all of these hostile factions (Zarielites, devil raiders, and the demonic incursion) are as likely to be fighting each other as anyone else. Liashandra might also be an unexpected ally in saving the city.

THE VAMPIRE LORD: When the Companion first appeared in the sky above Elturel, the vampire lord High Rider Ikaia was not destroyed. He fled into the vast cavernworks beneath the city and lurked there for decades. Now the Companion is gone and the High Rider has emerged.

He does not, however, command a slavering horde of vampires. He and a select few “sons and daughters” are actually a bastion in the northeast of the city: Elturgard maintained vast storehouses in the caverns beneath the city, with supplies that could support hundreds of thousands of people for months if the surrounding farmlands had to be evacuated into the city and a heavy siege were laid. Ikaia has secured some of these storehouses that were scooped up along with the rest of the city and is now distributing them to people in need (see Part 5C).

A STABLE ELTUREL

Last but not least, what needs to happen for the situation in Elturel to feel stable enough that the PCs will feel comfortable leaving?

Well, to some extent I think we’ve tweaked things enough so that the city still feels like a warzone without feeling like such a genocidal horror that the PCs would reasonably expect everyone to be dead within a week. So it’s possible that you’ll just glide past this point without the PCs thinking about it.

Failing that, there’s also the clear cosmological deadline of the city being drawn down into the Styx. Yes, you could help here, but it’s all meaningless unless someone can get the sword and save the day!

But it’s quite possible that the players will still feel it necessary to help stabilize the situation in Elturel. Or maybe you’re just interested in exploring that idea.

Unless you want to radically expand this section of the campaign, what you’ll want is a Grand Gesture That Turns the Tide; i.e., one big thing that the PCs can do (or help do) that can be framed as essentially putting things on the right track. Possibilities might include:

• Joining the east and west sides of the city. This might be leading attacks on the bridges, clearing them of demon infestation, and helping Ravengard set up garrisons there.
• Forging alliances between the surviving enclaves. This would send the PCs around the city essentially as ambassadors.
• Securing the supplies necessary for survival. Ravengard, for example, might know that somebody on the east side of the city has a cache of supplies. When the PCs investigate, they find High Rider Ikaia. They might negotiate with him for access to the supplies; or they might track Ikaia’s people back to the cache they’ve secured and then clear them out.
• Some sort of mass combat (most likely with Ravengard and his men). That might be leading a siege on Helm’s Shieldhall and shattering the stronghold of the Hell Knights. Or returning to the cemetery and cleaning it out.

I’d recommend following the players’ lead here: They’re unlikely to just say, “We need to secure the city… but how?!” Rather, they’ll have some specific problem that they’re looking to solve (the population is starving, Ravengard doesn’t have enough soldiers, etc.). They might even have a plan. You just need to make sure to give them the opportunity to carry out that plan and then frame the outcome as the city turning a corner in its struggle for survival. “This has made all the difference. Now go get that sword!” says Ravengard (or whoever).

If you DO want to radically expand this section of the campaign, then you’ll want to provide a structure for the PCs’ efforts. This will most likely consist of specific needs that the city has and flexible options for how those needs can be achieved. Off the top of my head:

• Food & Water. Seizing or gaining access to Ikaia’s storehouse. Finding alternative storehouses. A magical fountain. Organizing rationing.
• Security. Eliminating specific threats. Forming alliances. Restoring one of the demonseals which once protected the major citadels of the city by scavenging components from each.
• Shelter. Forming neighborhood patrols. Securing citadels which can house refugees in safety away from the demon-infested streets.

Once again, be flexible in responding to and empowering ideas the PCs come up with to fulfill these needs. I would go so far as to track these needs with specific gauges; i.e., put hard numbers on this and let the PCs’ schemes score points towards filling those gauges. (And, conversely, allow enemy factions to damage the gauges.)

THE RETURN TO ELTUREL

Later in the campaign, the PCs will return to Elturel. What do they find when they come back? How has the situation developed?

To a large degree, the answer to this should be extremely idiosyncratic and heavily based on what the PCs did: The version of Elturel where the city ended up divided between Ravengard in the west and Ikaia in the east is very different than one where the PCs managed to form a Council of the Resistance which included Liashandra as a prominent member.

If we’re talking about a baseline situation where the PCs did very little to shift the status quo in Elturel, then here’s what I’d suggest:

• High Rider Ikaia has secured the eastern side of the town. Citizens have volunteered to become vampires in order to have the strength to defend themselves and their fellow citizens, and these Vampire Riders run regular patrols and control the bridges.
• Things are much worse in the west. The Hell Knights have mustered their forces and laid siege to Ravengard in the High Hall.

Go to Part 5B-A: Arrival in Hellturel