Thread by @justicearman

Last night we finished Descent into Avernus, a 5th Edition D&D adventure about devils, dark secrets, and redemption.

In this post-campaign thread, I'll summarize some of my thoughts about the campaign, how I ran it, and what I learned in no particular order.

Heavy spoilers.🧵

As a general disclaimer, this is not intended to be a review thread or a critique of the adventure's design.

Creating a 14-level campaign is a herculean feat. There will ALWAYS be something to nitpick, but I'd rather talk about what's to like. The team did a wonderful job. ❤️

I'm a bit of a Nine Hells expert! I got my start on the #DMsGuild before this book dropped, and before the players ever reached the Avernus section, I'd written or contributed to 5 hellish supplements, three of which are now Mithral Best sellers (in the top 1% of the guild)!

Those supplements are:
- Devil's Advocate: A Guide to Infernal Contracts
- Hellbound Heists (contributor)
- Baldur's Gate: The Fall of Elturel
- Baldur's Gate: City Encounters
- Elminster's Candlekeep Companion

Shout-out to my friend @Thrawn589 who co-led a bunch of these w/ me.

I also had access to the Platinum Edition of the module by @BeadleAndGrimms, whose contents were the spoils of my first time working for this amazing company. Most of the prop pics you see in this and other threads from me come from that sold-out box. (Silver is still available!)

I kicked off our adventure with a Session 0 using the document I created in this blog post. That information and images come from D&D and are permitted through the Fan Content Policy. (It's completely free.)

justicearman.com/2020/05/04/bal…

The module's dark secret component really united the party early on in the adventure. Two of our players' characters were brother and sister (think Sam and Dean from Supernatural), which drove themes of family throughout the adventure. 4/5 party members came from Elturel.

Session 1 was "The Fall of Elturel" by Anthony Joyce and me. This alternate start invested the characters in the campaign by giving them alternate backgrounds (Flaming Fist and Hellrider) and having them present to witness Elturel being dragged into hell. dmsguild.com/product/294663…

I'm going to keep going, but I'm slightly paranoid Twitter will delete everything, so this thread will come in waves.

It's going to be long-ish.

By the way, it took us 41 sessions to finish this campaign!

After the alternate start, it was off to Baldur's Gate! I changed a few things since the party already contained two Flaming Fists.

I wanted to really sell the feel of Baldur's Gate, so I reworked their first encounter there. It's on my blog here: justicearman.com/2020/05/17/run…

I loved the Keith McCollough's rendition of the Song of Elturel (here: drive.google.com/file/d/1OFB5d8…) and really wanted to work it in.

I actually played it on my guitar for my players during the encounter above. Here'sa vid of me playing it many months ago:

All in all, my players LOVED Baldur's Gate. It has a fantasy Gotham feel to it, which gave them room to be a bit more reckless without worrying about the Watch (we'd just finished Dragon Heist before). In BG, the law is more complacent and/or corrupt.

Avernus kicks you right in the teeth with how miserable it is. The designers did a fantastic job of making it feel hopeless while also injecting some morbid humor, like having a cambion from Cania with a frozen face who pours boiling water to thaw it each time they speak.

One lesson learned came from my partner, Sam, who said that after such a long stint in Hell, she really missed just going to a tavern with no strings attached.

Despite a robust session 0, the themes of the campaign are quite heavy and can weigh down on you. She didn't want to...

grapple with the realities of trading someone's soul for a warm-cooked meal at the Wandering Emporium anymore. She just wanted a mug of ale!

At one point, I felt like BG: DiA could have been two books—one for BG (levels 1-5), one for Avernus (6-15). However, I think having...

a section set in the Material Plane helped mitigate some of that hell fatigue.

That said, my players were awesome as always. They really leaned into the hell aesthetic, and it made everything seem more metal.

Ultimately, Descent into Avernus is a tale of redemption, and whether intentional or not, there's some excellent foreshadowing in the book that my players picked up on.

The dark secret threaded through the entire campaign. My players would reference it when grappling with moral quandaries.

Biting exchanges like, "Oh, so NOW you have a conscience? Will you finally acknowledge our horrid act?" and comparing Zariel's fall to that of their own.

There's also a theme of good-aligned creatures being imprisoned to stave off greater evils.

Mooncolor, a unicorn trapped in the demon zapper, an angel trapped in Bel's contraption. Even Zariel is in a prison, fighting endlessly to keep the Blood War in check.

Pretty dope.

I asked my players after the finale what they thought of the campaign, and how it ranked to past adventures.

What was interesting was while other adventures seemed to outrank Avernus, multiple players said it was their favorite finale yet. Super interesting, right?

I think that's a sign that the narrative bones of Avernus are really good. There's resonance between this dark secret, an angel's fall, and the characters slowly learning that some questions don't have right answers. Sometimes it's just grey, and you always lose a little bit.

There's a moment in the adventure where the characters witness the circumstances of the angel's fall, and it was really great to see how they answered her question in this flashback/memory scenario.

In her shoes, 4/5 characters would have done the same.

Player retention of the main quest was pretty solid throughout the whole adventure. We've run other adventures, and the main quest in DiA is deceptively simple. Get the sword, free the city. Maybe redeem an angel in the process.

Then hell just keeps getting in the way.

I homebrew a lot between the lines, so there were a bunch of personal arcs. The Shield of the Hidden Lord being Pharyon, Prince of Dis (and Dat), an imp getting its halo, Hellrider family quests spanning 75+ years, and lots of flashback sequences at the beginning.

The MVP of pivotal moments was the high-variance die from @WyrmwoodGaming, which has now become a staple of party inspiration for clutch moments. I had my doubts about its swingy-ness, but I am a high-variance convert after seeing its beauty during some of the most epic scenes.

This thread is getting really long, so I'm going to start wrapping it up. I can tell finale stories later.

Three more things.

1) I was blessed to have a group who knew next to nothing about the Hellriders/Zariel. It made for some pivotal, emotional campaign reveals.

My players are huge nerds, but I'm glad they don't steep themselves in as much D&D as I do. It makes those lore surprises SO much sweeter.

2) The saga of Zariel is tragic, relatable, and beautiful. Depending on your group, you may want to abridge some of the multi-event sequences in the adventure to keep that narrative tension high. I was surprised by how much of an impact her story had on my players.

3) It's a heavy story. The campaign literally puts the characters through hell, and even with a robust session 0, I could feel it weighing down on my players at times. It probably didn't help that large swaths of the campaign were affected by the pandemic, which was its own hell.

Originally, I had a REALLY COOL post-campaign planned dealing with Pharyon, but after talking with my players, I think I may place that idea on the shelf for another day. There's a sense of finality to the campaign that wasn't present in Material-Plane campaigns like SKT or WDH.

This is our 3rd campaign book and 4th adventure completed together. Though I've yet to issue my post-campaign survey, I get the sense that my players would prefer a hybrid homebrew of linked adventures (maybe a stronghold, too).

Then again, one of them just became High Rider.

Also look! They got me a post-campaign gift! 🥲

It's an inside joke from our first campaign when the players would get confused and repeatedly ask me "what does the bloodstone do??"

That's all for now. More adventures to come. 🥂

/thread