I’m going to go in depth, so there will be major spoilers throughout this review.
The Good
I am a big fan of the planes in D&D, especially the Nine Hells, so I was very happy when I first heard about this book. I was even more thrilled when I found out they were going to flesh out Zariel, a D&D entity that had been around for a long time but was barely ever described in any of the old books.
Zariel: I just think Zariel is cool, both in her angel incarnation and in her devil form. She’s a bad guy with depth, someone who has specific goals in mind. She’s not necessarily someone you have to fight - she’s someone you have to interact with. Some groups might want to save her, while others might want to destroy her. I really like that she’s not a generic “bad guy”.
I’m a little torn on the hollyphant sidekick. It just seems a bit too silly, even for me.
Stat Blocks: In each book, they change up how they present the adventure. This time around, some stat blocks and items are presented in the immediate text rather than in an appendix in the back. I prefer this, as I always like it when all the information I need is right there on the page in question.
Running a D&D session is complicated enough without having to flip all over the book to get the information I need.
Also, I should note that while I have virtually no interest in the Baldur's Gate section, the "Cultist of the Dead Three" stat blocks are phenomenal. They're short, but each has some kind of cool power that sets it apart.
The Art: I think this is my favorite cover of them all so far. One of my biggest beefs with 5e art is that too much of it lacks a certain “badass” quality that older editions had. This cover definitely works in that regard..!
I still maintain that for whatever reason, the best art in 5e is of landscapes, not people. I’d also say that the item art is better, too. The soul coin on page 226 is great, as is the battle standard of infernal power on page 223. I could do without the shadow of it, but no big deal.
I also like the inclusion of concept art. I guess it is not particularly useful, but it feels like a valuable addition. I love D&D art, so maybe I am biased.
War Machine Rules: Looking at them now, what amazes me is that the war machine stuff is all contained on just a few pages, but you can get many sessions of fun out of it. If you don’t like the war machine concept, you can easily discard the whole idea and you still have an entire adventure’s worth of material to use.
It’s something that makes this adventure very unique. That said, I can see why some people might not like it. These are literally cars in D&D. It’s a bit much, and a pretty blatant Mad Max reference.
On top of that, it seems to me that if you’re going to rip off Mad Max, then this stuff should be in Dark Sun, not the first layer of Hell, which already has tons of content from older editions to be expanded upon.
All told, I personally like the war machines. Like the dinosaur races in Tomb of Annihilation, this concept makes the adventure stand out and it’s just plain fun, which really is what D&D is all about, right?
Soul Coins: When I was writing Emirikol’s Guide to Devils, one thing I couldn’t figure out was how exactly souls were used as currency in Hell. Some books said that soul larvae were used.
Soul larvae are foot-long worms with faces of people! Hags would collect them into herds in the Gray Wastes! I was a bit baffled how somebody could carry this “currency” around in bulk.
Check out page 225. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that they gave soul coins their own magic item entry! Now we have all the details we need.
- Non-evil creatures suffer when carrying them.
- You can commune with the soul inside.
- You can expend the soul for temporary hit points.
- Rules on how to free the soul.
- Where soul coins are “minted”.
Blood War: I’m also really happy that they dug into the Blood War to a degree in this book, and that they didn’t make it yugoloth-centric. The use of yugoloths in 2e in particular just made things too complicated for me. It really felt like yugoloths were the stars of everything for a period there, way back when. I think the prime focus of the Blood War should obviously be on demons vs. devils.
It does feel a little odd to me that demon lords are just running around on the first layer of Hell. Kostchchie just showed up? And he ended up in chains? I would think that the arrival of a single demon lord on the first layer of the Nine Hells should be a bigger deal. Wouldn’t Asmodeus take an interest in this?
Flying Fortresses: I love the idea of the flying fortresses, I love how they look, and I love what they do. Check out the image of the docked fortress pulling souls out of the River Styx on page 123. That’s just awesome.
Hellfire: Another thing I struggled with in Emirikol’s Guide to Devils was hellfire. Hellfire is this special kind of flame discovered by Mephistopheles. In older editions, if you were hit by a spell or item that used hellfire, it bypassed fire resistance. In Pathfinder, I believe, hellfire does both fire and necrotic damage.
I really struggled with how to make hellfire feel special without being overpowered, or to use it in a way that violated the 5e simple-but-effective design sense.
Check out what the hellfire weapon does on page 223: “Any humanoid killed by an attack made with this weapon has its soul funneled into the River Styx, where it’s reborn instantly as a lemure devil (described in the Monster Manual).”
Oh! OK. Holy crap. They took a hard left turn with it, but they made it scary in an interesting - terrifying - way. I love this so much. The players can and should be terrified of bad guys wielding these things.
The Bad
Now we’ll go over the stuff I didn’t like. Please remember this is just one dude’s opinion, and that my opinion is likely to change over time.
Baldur’s Gate: I don’t want Baldur’s Gate mixed in with my Hell stuff. I just want the Hell stuff. The first 44 pages of this book are in a fantasy city on a mortal world, when the players have been promised devil shenanigans.
My big fear is that groups will sit down to play this adventure, and will have quit/fizzled out before they even get to Hell. A lot of groups take a while to play through these adventures, and just getting their characters to level 5 can take months of real life gaming.
I have worked out an alternate beginning to this adventure that avoids Baldur’s Gate entirely. I’ll write it up at some point soon.
The previous published adventures - Dragon Heist and Dungeon of the Mad Mage, are set in a Forgotten Realms city. This scenario just feels too similar to the last two. You’re in a city, here’s a location/dungeon to hack through. I think that more variety is needed.
Too Much/Too Little: In the past, I have written about how the most important thing in an adventure for me is good ideas. Ideas that inspire me and get me excited to actually run the adventure. I can’t handle walls of text and/or pages of description on the minutiae of how a trap or room works.
This adventure most definitely avoids this pitfall, but goes too far in the opposite direction. The entire Avernus section is full of bite-sized chunks of encounters that, in my opinion, aren’t fleshed out enough.
Remember the Thay chapter in Rise of Tiamat? It was about two pages long, and consisted of a weird dream that the heroes would have while hanging out with the Red Wizards.
In some cases here in Descent Into Avernus, we get scenarios hampered by brevity. Check out page 97 - The Tower of Urm. It is Mordenkainen’s tower in Hell! A tower that can shift between the planes! Home to one of D&D's most famous NPCs. The description of it consists of one column of text.
What’s in it? I don’t know. This is a cool place and it deserved to be fully expanded upon! I’m glad it is in the book, but it comes off as boring. I’ve been given a homework assignment - design the tower. The main reason that I buy adventures is so that I don’t have to do that kind of work.
The Denizens of Avernus: I really don’t like the use of non-devils in the Nine Hells. When I think about an adventure on Avernus, I think of devils! Legion Devils, Hell Knights, all sorts of really cool devils that finally get their chance to shine.
In fact, when I think of Avernus, I immediately think of that one Monte Cook adventure in Well of Worlds where the group has to escape Avernus while being chased by a horde of fiends!
Yet I open the book and see wereboars. Wereboars. In my Nine Hells! Why inject something comparatively mundane into such a cool place? Why water it down? Why waste the space?
The players finally get out of the mundane city and actually get to the Hell stuff, and they are greeted by kenku, redcaps, and wereboars. Not a fan.
That said, I was very much expecting to hate and junk Mahadi’s Emporium for the same reasons, but it is actually very cool.
Joke Names: I run very goofy D&D games. I come up with stupid NPC names all the time. Essie has a zombie named “Teat Chillmango” on Hell’s Rebels. The group in my Acq Inc game just met a dwarf pirate with peg arms and peg legs named “Peggy Stickbeard”.
It takes a lot to make me say, “OK, that’s a bit much”, but it happened right here in Descent into Avernus. Let me give you some examples:
- Slobberchops: The villain’s pet winged cat in Baldur’s Gate. This by itself is fine. But, when taken in totality with all of the others, it’s too much for me. One struggle in D&D is to avoid having your big bad guy become a joke to the group.
- Chukka & Clonk: Again, fine on its own. But when it is one of many, it starts to feel like we’re playing a silly cartoon romp rather than tearing through Hell, carving a path through demons and devils.
- Lucille the Pit Fiend: This one in particular gets me. The general… THE GENERAL! ...of Yeenoghu’s demon army, a badass-looking white-scaled pit fiend with a cool-looking helmet and battle-standard, is named “Lucille."
- Mickey the Flesh Golem: This is a flesh golem made from demon parts. It has awesome art and everything!
- Burney the Barber: Oh, a barber! Hi Burney, how’s it going? Can you just take a little off the sides? What’s that? You're a bronze dragon? You’re an agent of Bahamut, the god of good dragons that opposes Tiamat?! OK.. yes, Burney's his real name is Balarystul. But you know the group is going to call him Burney and will start doing Bernie Sanders impressions every time he shows up.
- Smiler the Defiler: This one just doesn’t do it for me. It rhymes. His name is “Smiler”. It’s like a Shadowrun NPC from 1993 discussing biotech on the Shadowland BBS system that you have accessed with the aid of your 2600 baud dial-up modem.
Each area has more or less pointless busywork which feels quite a bit like “filler” or a way to work in more encounters before the group gets to where they need to go.
Long ago, I ran Golden Voyages, an Al Qadim boxed set adventure for my group when we were little. I love that adventure. Your group has a ship and they race against other ships, all searching a handful of islands for hidden treasure.
One section of Golden Voyages involves meeting genies on the plane of fire to get something you need. Those genies tell you that first, you must go to the plane of earth. The earth genies tell the you to go to the plane of water. Water says go to wind.
My group got so turned off by this that their interest in the entire setting dropped. Eyes glazed over, and soon after, half of the players dropped out.
I think these paths should have been organized differently so that it is not so obvious that these encounters on the paths (many of which are very cool, by the way) are speedbumps.
Double Page Spreads: I really like that they put some big art in this book. The problem, for me, is that when the big pieces are spread out over two pages, the seam mars the art pretty badly. Another issue is that I feel like either the subject matter or the composition isn’t worthy of two pages.
Pages 48-49 The Infernal Puzzle Box: The seam doesn’t ruin this one. My beef here is very slight - the tiefling looks too “real” in comparison to the rest of the image. Do you remember those old dragon magazine covers that looked like photos of people in costumes? Where it looked like the artist used their friends as reference? I get that vibe from this. This looks a bit too much like someone doing a tiefling cosplay as opposed to a tiefling.
I say that, yet when I look at the image online as opposed to the book, it actually looks really cool.
Pages 88-89 War Machines: The seam obliterates this one. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here. So much of the piece depicts an explosion. If anything, the explosion should have been in the center of the image so that the seam devours it and we can still make out the war machines. Instead, the fire takes up most of the right-hand page.
Pages 157-158 The Blood War: My beef with this one is more that most of the art depicts fire. It is very cool to see the relative size of a goristro compared to medium-sized creatures, but this feels like a missed opportunity to me. The artist is awesome, I just would have preferred to see more devils vs. demons and less fire.
Pages 168-169 Battle in Baldur’s Gate: This one actually works pretty well. It’s weird that the central character is caught in the seam, but there are scenes on each page that are clearly visible.
I’d have liked to see different scenes get the two-page treatment. Maybe Zariel vs. Kostchchie, or two war machines side by side, with adventurers jumping from one to the other, that kind of thing.
Overall
So. Is this a good adventure? I’d say yes. One of my favorites! No 5e adventure has, in my opinion, come close to the greatness of certain adventures in past editions.
These 5th edition adventures are “tool kits”, semi-sourcebooks wrapped in adventures. This book has a huge, in-depth guide to Baldur’s Gate in the back of the book. The Avernus section is as much a sourcebook as it is an adventure.
By splitting the focus and making this a book that has “something for everyone”, I think it becomes a product that doesn’t fully achieve any of its goals. It is not a sourcebook that is easy to navigate. It is not an adventure with deep, dramatic moments laid out for you. It offers endless options, most of which are described in no more than a single paragraph. It offers suggestions rather than details!
The thing is, as I’ve mentioned in the past, what they are doing is working. From what I understand, these adventures sell well. They are well-received. So just because it doesn’t fit my needs doesn’t mean they should in any way stop what they’re doing. It just means that I might need to look elsewhere to find adventures that I am excited about running.
Ranking the 5e Adventures
Where does this one rank among the 5e adventures? Right now, I’d say the three best adventures are:
Curse of Strahd: This is a good adventure, but I like certain sections more than others. The fact that it is essentially a re-make/update of an adventure that’s been re-done many times before hurts it a bit, too.
Once you've decided to run Curse of Strahd, you have to spend a lot of time identifying the parts you want to use and then cobble together your version of the adventure, but the component parts are cool enough that it is worth doing.
Tomb of Annihilation: I really liked this adventure, but man, that jungle section is such a huge campaign killer. Newer DMs might find their group growing extremely bored and restless as they wander the jungle seemingly forever.
The tomb itself is absolutely fantastic. Definitely, IMO, one of the best dungeons of all time. What’s even more impressive is that the tomb is huge and yet almost every room is worth running. White Plume Mountain is probably my favorite dungeon ever, but that one is something like 16 pages long!
Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus: Is this adventure better than Tomb? I’m not sure. I sort of want to say yes. The thing that gives me pause is the fact that I don’t want to run the Baldur’s Gate section OR the Elturel stuff.
I just feel like by the time the group gets to Hell, they’re going to be let down again by having to explore another mortal city (Elturel), even if it is chained to Hell. For me, it’s a “when are we going to get to the fireworks factory” kind of thing.
I guess I can say that this adventure is one of the best 5e adventures out so far. The sheer volume of good ideas in the Avernus section easily outweighs the more dreary elements in the opening chapters.