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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

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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 – Maps

AREA 2-11 – OFFICE

A large desk on the far side of the room has been smashed to pieces. The once-luxurious carpet is stained and soiled. Surprisingly, nothing here looks particularly rotten or aged — merely damaged.

SEARCH (DC 18): A concealed trapdoor in the floor hides a safe.

• OPEN LOCK (DC 30): The safe is empty except for a scroll – Ghul’s Commission.

GM Background: This area is protected by a preservation spell, but the ichorclaw has inflicted damage in random bouts of rage over the years.

GHUL’S COMMISSION
(ORCISH – UNTRANSLATED)

This heavy roll of parchment unrolls to reveal a text of thick, reddish-black Orcish characters. Despite being written in Orcish, the entire document appears to be elegantly scribed. Near the bottom of the page an immense black seal has been set — impressed in the wax is a skull-shaped sigil, and the wax also attaches a piece of black-and-gold ribbon to the parchment.

GHUL’S COMMISSION
(ORCISH – TRANSLATED)

This heavy roll of parchment unrolls to reveal a text of thick, reddish-black Orcish characters. Despite being written in Orcish, the entire document appears to be elegantly scribed. Near the bottom of the page an immense black seal has been set — impressed in the wax is a skull-shaped sigil, and the wax also attaches a piece of black-and-gold ribbon to the parchment.

The parchment reads:

By the divine hand of Ghul – Skull King, Banelord’s Heir, Sorcerer’s Get, and Blue Lord of the Arathian Stock – Ulthorek tal Yattaren is thus set down as the Chieftain of the Laboratory of the Beast. Within such domain, he shall rule by the Hand of Ghul.

                                                                GHUL THE SKULL KING

AREA 2-12 – GREAT HALL

A massive table of stone stands in the middle of this room. Massive, yet elegant, high-backed chairs stand around it. A large ambry of oak stands against the north wall.

AMBRY:

• 18 silver goblets (worth 25 gp each)
• 3 bottles of ancient orcish bloodwine (worth 250 gp each)

GM Background: The room is protected by a preservation spell.

AREA 2-13 – TORTURE CHAMBER

This room is filled with implements of torture, including a bloodstained rack, iron maiden, and manacled chair. (The room is protected by a preservation spell, so the blood is still fresh.)

AREA 2-14 – PRISON CELLS

The bars of each cell are activated by a switch on the wall opposite the doors.

SHATTERED CELL (A): This cell is empty and the bars have been broken and bent outward. (This is where the ichorclaw came from.)

SKELETON (B): An orc’s skeleton lies in this chamber.

SKELETON (C): An elf’s skeleton lies in this chamber.

AREA 2-15 – BATTERED BLUESTEEL

This bluesteel door has been battered from the outside, bending it hideously inward. However, it has lost none of its strength and remains equally impassable. No password is written nearby.

AREA 2-16  – SMASHED CENTURION CHAMBERS

The centurions are absent from these chambers, but the smashed remnants of their machinery is still present. (See Area 2-10.)

AREA 2-17 – EMPTY CHAMBER

This chamber appears empty.

SEARCH (DC 18): There is a keyhole in the center of the southern wall. Cleverly hidden.

KEY: The key for this secret door is located in Area 2-8.

AREA 2-18 – VAULT SECURITY

Four iron rods, each topped by a ball of brass, stand in the corners of this room. The iron door in the far wall has no handle. Instead, a large impression in the shape of an orc’s hand is in the center of the door.

IRON DOOR (3 in. thick): hardness 10, hp 90, break DC 30. The door will open if anyone holding Ghul’s Commission (from Area 2-11) places their opposite hand in the depression.

• It can also be fooled with a Use Magic Device check (DC 30).
• Any other attempt to open the door will trigger the trap.

TRAP (CR 4): magic device, proximity trigger (alarm), automatic reset, spell effect (lightning bolt, 5^th-level wizard, 5d6 electricity, DC 14 Reflex save half damage); Search DC 28, Disable Device DC 28. (Cost: 7,500 gp, 600 XP)

• A lightning bolt bursts from each of the four iron rods.

AREA 2-19 – THE RESEARCH VAULT

The walls of this iron-shod chamber are lined with numerous shelves both little and small. The shelves are covered with small, carefully crafted niches, each of which was clearly designed to hold some unique item. All of the niches are now empty.

GM Background: The vault was emptied when the complex was abandoned. It once held a variety of odd artifacts and the like, waiting to be analyzed by Ghul’s researchers, but now nothing of value remains.

AREA 2-20 – BEAST KENNELS

These were once beast kennels. The wooden doors leading to them are almost entirely rotten away through sheer age.

The kennel rooms contain feeding troughs and watering troughs.

Large channels from each room lead out to a 6-inch-wide gap in the middle of the hall’s floor. Beneath this gap is a 50-foot-deep pit down which charnel waste was washed. (There’s nothing on interest down there.)

AREA 2-21 – THE ARENA

This bloodstained arena was once used to test the creations of the laboratory and instill a blood-thirst in the hounds. It is an open pit, with the upper level described in Area 1-19.

AREA 2-22 – WEAPONS STORAGE

Hanging from the walls and iron racks down the middle of this room are a great variety of weapons, all designed for beasts: Tines, serrated harnesses, and the like. All of them have been crafted to appear as vicious and merciless as possible.

There are also a selection of short iron spears, designed to enrage creatures.

The vast array is impressive, but a closer inspection reveals that most of them are unusable — either custom-crafted for unusual creatures; with important bits rotted away; or their metal rusting and fatigued from age.

AREA 2-23 – COLLAPSE

The ceiling of this room has been weakened by the fissure (which was created by an earthquake many years ago).

OPENING THE DOOR: Opening the door to requires a Strength check (DC 18), but also causes the ceiling to collapse.

• TRAP (CR 6): mechanical, location trigger, repair reset, ceiling falls down (8d6, crush), multiple targets (all targets in room), never miss; Search DC 20, Disable Device DC 16

FISSURE: The fissure leads down to Area 1 of Goblin Caverns of the Ooze Lord.

Go to Part 1 – Maps

AREA 2-1 – THE COLD THRONE

GLOWGEMS: The vast chamber is filled with an eery, silver, sepulchral light emanated from countless small glowgems in the ceiling.

• The glowgems magic is failing with age, but each would still be worth 5 gp. (There are a total of 600 such gems, although prying them out would be a major undertaking.)

POOL: Most of the room is filled with a large, but shallow pool of dark, silvery-grey liquid.

• UNHOLY WATER: The pool is unholy water. (Elestra and Dominic will suffer damage as if exposed to acid.)

AROUND THE POOL: A ten-foot-wide walkway circles the pool, with various hallways and doors leading out of it. A bluesteel door can be seen along a wall near a recessed edge of the pool.

PLATFORM: In the center of the pool there is a raised platform surrounding a large pit of some sort. Several large rods of iron with large brass balls at the end of them are positioned around this platform. An arch of stone rises over the pit and, at the apex of the arch, there is a huge throne wrought from intricately detailed and gothic steel.

• BOTTOMLESS PIT: The pit seems to be bottomless. Lights dropped down it seem to go on forever before finally passing beyond sight. (It’s actually 10,000 feet deep, ending in an immense pit of Pits of chaos are described in The Complex of Zombies.)
• PITONS IN THE PIT: The goblins have driven pitons to climb up more than a hundred feet from a fissure below. This leads down to Area 2 of the Goblin Caverns of the Ooze Lord.

THRONE OF THE OVERSEER: The throne is kaostech. The metal is cold to the touch, but not harmfully so. A hidden panel (Search DC 25) can be recessed, revealing a long, spongy cable with a plug at one end of it (which could be plugged into a headclamp).

• If activated, 12 separate spheres emerge from the throne of the overseer. The operator of the throne can control these spheres to fly anywhere within this complex. The operator can see and hear through them and even manipulate objects through them with an effect similar to telekinesis.
• The throne is a fully tainted (not faintly tainted) object.

AREA 2-2 – LARDER OF GREEN SLIME

Various pieces of ancient and scarred wood lie scattered here and there, suggesting that this might have been a storeroom of some sort.

SPOT (DC 18): The green slime on the ceiling.

GREEN SLIME: Currently quiescent, but 1d4 rounds after someone enters the room, the presence of life rouses it and it drops from the ceiling.

• 5-foot square deals 1d6 Con per round or 2d6 damage vs. wood/metal (ignoring hardness). It does not harm stone.
• First round of contact, it can be scraped off. After that it requires cold damage, fire damage, sunlight, or remove disease. Can also be hacked off, but this causes at least 1d6 points of damage to the victim and requires 1d3 rounds.

GM Background: The preservation magicks on this larder wore out and the green slime got in. It devoured everything edible and then entered its quiescence.

AREA 2-3 – JEWEL SCARABS

The walls and floor of this chamber glitter. It takes a moment to realize that they are completely covered in the gleaming carapaces of large scarab beetles. Each carapace appears to be studded with large gemstones.

JEWEL SCARABS: There are 10 surviving jewel scarabs in this area — 3 ruby scarabs, 5 emerald scarabs, 2 opal scarabs.

• +15 racial bonus to their Hide checks from being able to scuttle through the “dead” shells covering the floor.
• GM Note: Jewel scarabs were a personal pet project of one of the researchers here. He used this area to display them, but the shelves they once occupied have long since rotten away.

TREASURE: There are 54 scarabs here. Each is a beautiful work of art. Although some of their gems have been destroyed or lost, they have an average value of 350 gp each. They weigh 10 pounds each. (Total Value: 18,900 gp. Total Weight: 540 lbs.)

CONSTRUCT LORE: Three successful Knowledge (arcana) checks (DC 25), each requiring eight hours of work, could reverse engineer the workings of a jewel scarab. An additional eight hour session for each of the other two jewel scarabs would discover their gem-type properties. Such techniques could probably fetch another 5,000 gp for each type of jewel scarab if explicated.

JEWEL SCARAB (CR 2) – N Small Construct
DETECTION – tremorsense 30 ft., Listen +6, Spot +4
DEFENSES – AC 16 (+1 size, +1 Dex, +4 natural), touch 12, flat-footed 15; hp 17 (2d10)
ACTIONS – Spd 30 ft., fly 40 ft. (average), burrow 15 ft., climb 10 ft.; Melee bite +1 (1d4-1); Ranged +2; Space 5 ft.; Reach 5 ft.; Base Atk +1; Grapple -4; SA spell-like abilities
SQ –

STR 9, DEX 12, CON –, INT 1, WIS 15, CHA 10
FORT +6, REF +4, WILL +2
FEATS: Alertness
SKILLS: Climb +9, Hide +7 (+15 in sand), Listen +6, Spot +4

Spell-Like Abiltiies

Ruby scarab: 6/day—flare (DC 14)

Emerald scarab: 6/day—acid splash (+3 ranged touch, 1d3 acid)

Sapphire scarab: 6/day—ray of frost (+3 ranged touch, 1d3 cold)

AREA 2-4 – LAB OF CONSTRUCTS

A large forge is built into one corner. Strange metal frames are built up here and there throughout the room. The middle of the room is dominated by a large stone worktable.

GM Background: This room was once used as a lab for building constructs.

TOOLS: The material here is badly damaged, but could still be of some use (2,000 gp). The transportable goods weigh 5,000 pounds.

AREA 2-5 – PARTS STORAGE

The walls of this room have been carved out with numerous cubbyholes, cabinets, shelves, and other storage areas. They are covered in a great, eclectic variety of materials.

KNOWLEDGE (ARCANA) (DC 15): Identifies the material as golem construction parts worth 5,000 gp. (Total Weight: 1,000 lbs.)

AREA 2-6 – RUINED CONSTRUCTS

Several large, rack-like structures run down the length of either side of the room. Most of them are empty, but two of them contain mechanical constructs.

CONSTRUCTS: These contructs have been opened up and have either been disassembled or were never complete to begin with.

• The lazuline razor that patrols this level was also built in this lab. The two constructs here clearly come from a similar school of design, but are quite distinct in form and (presumably) function.

AREA 2-7 – THE ADAMANTINE DRILL

A large drill (literally ten feet long and half as thick) is suspended from a scaffolding in the center of this room. It’s flanked by two workbenches.

DRILL: The drill is clearly unfinished, but enough of its mechanisms are intact to show that it would be some sort of self-propelled drilling construct.

• APPRAISE (DC 15): The drill’s cutting surfaces are edged with 9,000 gp worth of adamantine.

SEARCH (DC 15): Turns up a stasis box of cedar inlaid with Ghul’s skull sigil in blackoak on its lid. Within the stasis box:

• Half of the schematics for the drill (worth 500 gp). (The other half were left out have rotted away centuries ago.)
• The schematics are titled, in Orcish: DRILL OF THE BANEWARRENS.
• There are also several arcane notes, also in Orcish, that can be understood with a Knowledge (arcana) check (DC 18). These describe, in general terms, the properties of walls sealed with incredibly powerful spells and exotic materials far beyond mortal ken. Whoever was writing them seemed unsure of the exact characteristics, but the tensile strength of the drill seemed calculated to overcome them.
• GM Background: This drill was designed to penetrate the walls of the Banewarrens (a mega-adventure by Monte Cook).

AREA 2-8 – RESEARCH QUARTERS

These are similar to Area 1-10, but are under the effects of a preservation spell. The furniture is pristine, as is the floor of white tile with Ghul’s skull sigil worked into it as a mosaic.

SEARCH (DC 12): In one of the bedside tables there is a key (which goes Area 2-17).

AREA 2-9 – GHUL’S TELEPORTAL

The walls of this chamber are carved from pitch-black stone. A strange spiral pattern has been carved into the floor. Orcish letters have been carved into the far wall (reading “LABORATORY OF THE BEAST”).

TELEPORTAL: These teleportals appear throughout Ghul’s Labyrinth. The teleportal network was powered through the Tourbillion (Ptolus, p. 453). After the Signet of Shallamoth Kindred was removed from the Tourbillion, the teleportal network was left unpowered and useless. (If the teleportal network were active, one could stand on this teleportal, say the name of any other teleportal, and appear there.)

AREA 2-10 – BLACK CENTURIONS

All eight of these areas hold a black centurion. They are suspended from metal machinery bolted to the wall.

MACHINES: These kaostech machines are powered by the pit of chaos beneath the complex (thus avoiding the dangers of chaotic failure). The black centurions are connected to the machines by headplugs.

ACTIVATION: When activated, the centurions simply drop to the floor and begin moving sinuously.

• If anyone disturbs the throne in Area 2-1 they will activate in waves: 2, then 2, then 4.
• If anyone passes through this area, one will automatically activate. If it meets with difficulties, the rest in the local area will activate. If two of them are destroyed, the four in the other area will activate.

Go to Part 10