Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus is the newest book from WOTC, it clocks in at 256 pages. The book is full of all sorts of devilish goodness!
The book on the left is the Limited cover only at your local FLGS
The main adventure takes place over the first 155 pages, here is a quick break down
- The City of Baldur’s Gate gets 60 pages of history, government, economy, places of interest, maps, and images. You also get new features for character Backgrounds and rules for your party’s Dark Secret, which is a nice new little bit of character-building that ties your party together.
Diabolical Deals gives a bunch of rules around devils making deals with the party.
Infernal War Machines, rules for creating, riding, and destroying magical vehicles. There are four sample vehicles to get your creative juices going.
Magic Items are abundant, Weapons, armor, wondrous items–all the bases are covered. There are some AMAZING items to use in your games here.
Creatures, about 15 pages worth. Demons, fiends, and devils and other horrors you might face are listed out here.
Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus Infernal Script guide, if you have ever wanted to learn speak Infernal here ya go.
Appendix E has a pair of handouts
The book is rounded out with some concept art and an amazing 2 sided map
Players starting the campaign at level 1 will find themselves around level 13 at the end of the book.
The player characters have arrived in Baldur’s Gate just as its gates are shut and martial law is declared. Refugees from Elturel have flooded the city, and death cultists devoted to the Dead Three (Myrkul, Bane, and B’haal) are stalking the streets. The characters have been drafted into the Flaming Fist mercenary company and are put in charge of finding the source of the death cultists…which leads to a trail of conspiracy, betrayal, and deals made with devils.
I don’t want to spoil any of the adventure, but it looks like it’s going to be amazing to run and or play in. The players will start in the city proper, and you will slowly move toward hell it’s self, and face all sorts of devils, demons and other monsters. There are choices to be made, that will make the story that you play, maybe different from what others are playing, the choices are yours.
The campaign has over six possible endings that all have lasting impact on the lore of the Realms, both for the good or maybe the evil.
My biggest complaint is the first about 3 or 4 levels are very straight and railroad, you will do what the authors wanted you too, about 5th or so level is where it looks like you will have choices and the road forks for what you want to do, so keep that in mind, if you have players that don’t like this sort of thing in their games.
The maps you will find here are the black and white style the past books have had.
Final Thoughts
Artwork
Once again, I must give some kudos to the art team at WOTC, they chose some amazing art and it shows all throughout the book. Some art made me want to put on some blast some metal and just stare at the art as I was soaking up the music, it’s very dark and metal in parts!
Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus is going to be a hell of a good time. There are many nods to fans of the Baulder’s Gate series here as well. I for one can’t wait to take my trip to hell.
The book is available now, at your FLGS or via Amazon.
A big thanks to WOTC for providing the review copy for this review, this as always had no effect on the outcome of the review.
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