It’s out! Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus has been released!
I’ve bought it three times already. Once with the normal cover, once with the special edition cover, and once in the D&D Beyond digital format.
Two of them will likely see heavy use. The other, not so much.
I’ve been playing D&D for a long time. I played a bit in the Forgotten Realms when it was new; the campaign I ran at university for two years (1990-1) was set in the Realms. And I didn’t go anywhere near Baldur’s Gate. Had I heard of it? Nope!
Baldur’s Gate became a thing for me and most of the rest of the world when the first Baldur’s Gate computer game was released. This was something special – showing how you could do a sandbox D&D computer game that still had an ongoing story. It has its flaws. It’s tremendously difficult at the beginning, and the sandbox tends to be more interesting than the story. But it introduced us to Minsc, Boo and Imoen, so we forgive much.
Baldur’s Gate 2? Doesn’t take place in Baldur’s Gate! (Excellent game, though!)
During the D&D 5E (Next) playtest, we got to return to Baldur’s Gate, in one of my all-time favourite adventures: Murder in Baldur’s Gate.
Designed by Ed Greenwood, Steve Winter and Matt Sernett, this was an ambitious adventure. Taking up some plot threads from the Baldur’s Gate computer game (namely, involvement of the dead God of Assassins, Bhaal), it told the story of three competing factions as they struggled to crown their leader as the new ruler of Baldur’s Gate.
This wasn’t exactly an adventure for novice DMs – it requires a lot of improvisation and additional design to work properly – but it made up for it with a fascinating design that allowed the players to aid any of the three factions, with the strong possibility of changing which faction they were aiding as the adventure continued.
If you enjoyed intrigue and role-playing, this was the adventure for you!
I definitely found myself doing more and more work as the adventure continued, but the richness of the plot strands encouraged it. The basic structure of the adventure lists an event that happens each week in the city, with details on each faction’s response to it. It’s inspired design. (Steve Winter also co-designed the Tyranny of Dragons adventures, which may well be my favourite D&D adventures of all!) I loved running Murder in Baldur’s Gate, and if my homebrew wasn’t so resolutely in the World of Greyhawk, it’s a place I’d like to revisit.
Of course, with Descent into Avernus, I’ll get to see it again – for a while! It’ll be fascinating to see which elements of Murder made it into this new adventure. Certainly Ulder Ravengard, one of the main characters of the previous adventure, features heavily in Descent. (He’s the in-canon winner of the contest in Murder, but in some players’ campaigns, someone else may have won and they may need to rewrite Descent to cope!
If you look, you’ll find old session reports of Murder in Baldur’s Gate on my blog. Not all of them, alas – I forget whether I didn’t write them or didn’t tag them – but they might give you a clue as to how this old adventure played.
Old? It was only released in 2013! I’ve run a lot of D&D since then, though.