My local group has just started playing Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus. We began with an hour or so of character creation and background determination before moving into the adventure proper.

I consider it fairly important to determine the party’s makeup together. You want a party that can handle the threats that a published adventure throws at them, because you don’t have the same flexibility of choosing threats to fit the group. Well, not without heavy rewriting, which often defeats the purpose of using a published adventure.

I also like the players determining what their characters’ backgrounds are and how they know each other. Even if it ends up not being that important to ongoing play, it gives a baseline for the determination of their role-playing personae. Individual group dynamics will determine how much immersive role-playing there is but having everyone creating material together gives it a better chance of being relevant.

Sesson 0

Before we got going, I gave them a basic overview of the set-up for the campaign. They were in the city of Baldur’s Gate, working for the Flaming Fists, the mercenary company responsible for law and order in the city. This might not be entirely willingly, but their backgrounds had to allow for the possibility. In addition, I described Baldur’s Gate briefly: a merchant city where there’s a great gap between the nobles and the commoners, which is currently afraid it is going to be overwhelmed by refugees from nearby Elturgard.

Here are the five characters that the group created. We’ll have a sixth player join us next week, and we’ll create his character sometime before then.

• Carlamin Amakiir, a chaotic neutral, wood elf fighter (soldier) who specialises in archery and has moved south from the far north to Baldur’s Gate. Carlamin’s flaw is that he can’t admit he’s wrong.
• Chrysanta, a chaotic good, tiefling bard (entertainer) native to Baldur’s Gate. Chrysanta can occasionally be a bit too sharp with people and when she loses her temper, says things that land her in trouble.
• Gae Bold, a lawful neutral, human warlock (criminal), who is actually the sentience of a magic sword that has possessed the body of an unwitting adventurer. Gae doesn’t quite understand lying. He came from the north and met Carlamin on the way.
• Helgred Greatbrand, a chaotic good, hill dwarf forge cleric (far traveller), who worships Haela Brightaxe and has been studying at the Temple of Gond in Baldur’s Gate, when he doesn’t get in trouble for his chaotic acts, one of which has landed him on secondment to the Flaming Fist.
• Yvrine von Shaakrawt, a chaotic neutral, fire genasi barbarian (dragon casualty), who lost family to the Cult of the Dragon attacks a few years ago and has come north in search of work.

After working out some basic relationships between the characters, we were ready to begin. (All the characters were set up on D&D Beyond, so I have access to them).

We did not use the Dark Secret beforehand.

The Adventure Begins (actually part of the same session!)

There’s a lot of boxed text to begin Descent into Avernus, but I read it all to the players as we started to give them the proper background to the adventure. I read it slower and more clearly than I often do, taking pauses for dramatic effect. I very much wanted them to understand everything: the state of the city, and the situation that made the Flaming Fist come to them for help.

The initial presentation of the characters’ patron is problematic if you have a good-aligned party. In fact, the entire situation is. Baldur’s Gate is a cruel place, and paladins, in particular, may question why they’re here. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case for my party.

I didn’t dwell on his cruelty to the lawbreakers, but instead went straight into the briefing. “There are cultists who are killing people. The Flaming Fist would deal with it, but we’re trying to track down the Hellriders, because if we don’t, more people will die. So, you’re the ones who I’ve got, so go do the job. Talk to this contact at the Elfsong Tavern. She’s a spy for the Thieves’ Guild, but she owes me a favour.”

One of the good things about my group is that Gae Bold asked if he knew the contact, after all, he was a criminal and so was she. I delight in having NPCs already known to PCs and so said yes.

So, the characters reached the Elfsong tavern, they found the contact, Gae and she reconnected, and they were told, yes, she knew about the cultists, and she could direct them to their lair, but first she had one little matter to clear up.

That little matter was a group of pirates who wanted her dead. Probably for good reasons, but pirates just can’t be allowed to murder anyone they want! They’re not the Flaming Fist! So, once they arrived, the party was waiting for them and the combat started.

This is a difficult combat. You have nine regular pirates and the leader. Only a few good hits from the pirates can make things go very bad very quickly, especially if one group of pirates win initiative. In general, I roll each type of combatant separately – so I’d roll once for the leader and once for the other pirates. In this case, separating the regular pirates into three groups may work better.

Our combat saw Helgred in the front line, and he went down after a couple of critical hits from the pirates. Chrysanta used vicious mockery effectively on the leader, and Yvrine was fighting a lot of the regular pirates – four on him at once was common. Even raging, Yvrine was taking a lot of damage. Healing word was used liberally, and eventually Damo came into her own with the use of thunderwave to knock the leader and another pirate into the street. The leader was slain, and only one other pirate survived.

It was quite noticeable that the characters weren’t trying to knock out the pirates. They were trying to kill them. This means that the campaign began in a very different place than Dragon Heist, where killing was against the law. Here, they had been deputised by a Flaming Fist officer, and they were taking an uncompromising attitude towards lawbreakers.

With the combat over, their contact told them where the cultists were hiding, and that was the end of level one. Milestone levelling!

Combat Notes. Two pirates stay outside the door stopping outsiders intruding, while the captain (if not stopped) barges through the Elfsong Tavern looking for his prey. Keep this in mind if you feel this combat is too difficult.

O Rest Ye Merry Gentleman

In fact, there was one other matter to deal with. The Song of Elturel, which the characters heard the ghost haunting the Elfsong Tavern sing while waiting for the pirates to arrive.

M.T. Black is likely to be disappointed that I did not, in fact, sing the song to my players but only recited it. There may exist video of me singing it to the tune of a certain Christmas carol, but it won’t become available unless large sums of money are involved.

Only one of the characters could understand the elvish lyrics. They may or may not have described them accurately to the others.

Cleaning Up the Cultists

I made sure all the characters had a long rest (and had levelled up their characters, mostly courtesy of D&D Beyond) before we moved into the next section of the adventure: a dungeon crawl and infiltration.

I was quite permissive with the information they gathered about the location, as I believe walking into things blind should only be employed when the characters can’t learn what’s going on. That happens a lot of the time, so they should be rewarded with information that they could learn.

So, the players learnt that the place would be closed at midnight, but not locked. I asked the party if anyone could see in the dark. There was only one human in the group, and he had just gained devil sight, so they were fine! Off they went after midnight.

And they discovered the guards. This section is made up of several smaller fights and a lot of exploration, so the individual fights were nowhere as challenging as that with the pirates.

Insert Star Wars Sewer Joke Here

One of the funny things about the player version of the map on D&D Beyond is that it shows the secret door and room. This is one of those times when you absolutely want the characters to find the secret door. Without it, you’re not going to be able to continue!

So, it’s into the sewers and the secret lair. With any lair of this many rooms, it’s worth noting in advance where the monsters are and whether they’ll notice combat in nearby areas. Doors block sound quite well, but corridors can transmit sound quite some distance.

This is a fairly sparsely inhabited map, so it’s unlikely the inhabitants will reinforce each other.

It’s also a really big dungeon. A total of 33 rooms is huge, and will take an entire four-hour session or more to explore. Given we had one four-hour session to create characters, play through the Elfsong material, then get to the cultist lair, it’s no surprise that we didn’t complete this dungeon.

While there are relatively few combats, there’s a lot of exploration in this section. I’m trying to play up how creepy the setting is, with the devotional objects to the Dead Three, and the wrongness of the inhabitants when encounter.

The session ended with the group finding two cultists of Bane torturing a captured patriar from the city above. The cultists were slain in a difficult combat – having the sewers flooded makes movement very challenging – and the patriar rescued. Then the players set off a trap as they released him, but it proved ineffective. Rather than escort the patriar to the surface, the party just pointed him in the right direction.

Thoughts and Comments

I greatly enjoyed this first session of Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus. There are many references to historical events, which, even if you don’t know the specifics, base this adventure very much as part of the Forgotten Realms.

I believe that it’s a good idea to play up the desperation of the inhabitants of Baldur’s Gate. The Flaming Fist are trying to maintain order in a city falling apart. Their leader (who is also the Grand Duke of the city) is missing. The city is failing to cope with refugees. And some maddened cultists are murdering citizens.

This is the environment that the characters are dropped into. It occurs to me that you could have one of the characters know someone who was murdered.

The adventure suggests the use of a Dark Secret, but I’m not entirely sure that’s the way to go. However, immersing the characters in the desperation of the environment may help structure the journey they’ll go upon. I’m a big believer in heroic paths, and in this adventure in particular, I think the adventure should start dark, move darker, and through that emerge into the light.

We’ll see how well we manage that as the adventure continues over the weeks and months to come!