It's not Avernyou, it's AvernUS

I got over excited and agreed to host TWO D&D 5E games of Descent in to Avernus as a newbie DM, so I'm going to blog my work here. She/they Art blog - @betbie_m

[its-avernus]

GET THAT AVERNUSSY

A blog documenting my foolish decision to run two Descent in to Avernus 5e games, concurrently! And the mistakes and wins along the way.

This blog will include spoilers for -

D&D 5E adventure - Balders Gate : Descent in to Avernus

Balders Gate 3

D&D homebrew campaign Fall of Elturel

໒(⊙ᴗ⊙)७✎▤—---—---—---—---—---—---—---—

I've always had a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew; getting overexcited, overestimating myself, working myself to burn out, and then either barely scraping through or crashing out completely. Would you believe it turned out I had ADHD? It's taken a lot of personal growth to pace myself when it comes to creative projects, to try and practice a bit of self control and not punish myself so harshly for failure. Only time will tell if this intro is foreshadowing.

I got in to D&D just before lockdown, as a lifetime looser nerd it's shocking it didn't happen sooner, and I've been playing with a group consistintly for a few years now. I myself have only run two one shot sessions of D&D/D&D adjacent games for my friends. My usual group, the Nat 1s (it's based on our group chat name), currently have an ongoing pathfinder game and season 2 of a homebrew 5E campaign on the horizon. It's a lot of fun and two games is more than enough really, but I had a hankering for more. A yearning. A NEED for some meaty, lore packed, Faerun based, canon complaint Dungeons and Dragons. I love making up fantasy worlds but I also love playing with pre-existing story and lore. I'm a fandom child at heart, raised on fanfic, and I've been farming plenty of dopamine from Balders Gate 3 recently. I floated the idea of running a good ol' Forgotten Realms game with a group of artist friends, who I'll call the Goblins (named after our art collective), but was clear that I didn't want to DM. I really wanted to be a player and I had some characters I was excited to play. That idea hung in the air for a bit, and I was pleased knowing I had put things in motion.

Then, one fateful day, I was scrolling through dndbeyond giddily looking for some good Fey'ri homebrew. I decided to check out the Adventures tab and the first one on the list was Balders Gate : Descent in to Avernus and the stars aligned! It was based where I wanted, full of meaty lore, AND is a sort of prequel to BG3! I got way too excited and almost imedietly posed the idea to the Nat 1s, I figured that if I was going to chose the campaign I really needed to be the Dungeon Master too. I was ready to buy the book and set it up to run at my house, we've finally painted the dining room so me and my partner have been looking to host things here. All but one were up for it (the one who couldn't was due to time constraints) which made four players. My mind was already whirling with ideas - I was going to put a monitor on the table to show art and backgrounds on for the mood, I was going to build some cool set pieces, it was going to be amazing! Then I remembered, I'd also talked to the Goblins about having a game, and I'd been really excited about it. After much soul searching and pacing, I decided that if I was going to be doing so much work for one campaign would it be that much morr work to run two campaigns? Right? It made fiscal sense if I was going to spend money on the book and DM material I should run it at least twice. I was not biting off more than I can chew at all, this was a smart well reasoned decision.

Four of the Goblins were in, and they've been really excited to start. With the Nat 1s one of them asked if their partner can come along, and she's really nice and I know she's been wanting to play D&D, so I said yes. I also invited my brother because we'd discussed playing together before but it had never happened. So I now had one group of four and another group of six.

As of starting this blog I have a session 0 (which will possibly roll in to session 1) with the Goblins next week. I'm not going to document everything happening in the sessions here, mostly the things I write and create for the campaigns.

⋆͛*͛ ͙͛ ⁑͛⋆͛*͛ ͙͛ ଘ(੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ✩‧₊˚⋆͛*͛ ͙͛ ⁑͛⋆͛*͛ ͙͛—---—---—---—---

The groups -

The Goblins - session 0

Alex

B (instagram)

Slowedmountains (tumblr)

Kaiser (instagram)

Purapea (instagram)

The Nat 1s - (TBA)

Adam

Alex (different Alex)

Andy

Dan (my partner)

James

Lois

[its-avernus]

I haven’t posted here in a while, and that’s not from lack of things to post. Both campaigns are still in full swing and everyone is having a whale of a time (or at least they said they have). I’ve also been busy with other projects, but they aren’t D&D related. I have time at the moment to work on some more minis for the next stage of the campaign, and one that I should have done to begin with but better late than never.

We have Hellrider Reya Mantlemourn, and then Captain Zodge of the Flaming Fist and his personal squad. I’ve decided to do the back of the minis as well, because it was confusing for players who couldn’t see the fronts of the previous minis.

As I used the alternative first chapter, Fall of Elturel, it actually recommends skipping the opening with Captain Zodge at the start of the official module. I have decided to include the scene with some amendments. I’ve also put together an alternative route for my players to choose so I might not even end up using it 😅 It’s already mostly prepared by the module so I don’t feel too bothered by putting the extra work in.

[its-avernus]

I watch lots of D&D YouTubers, and while I've been prepping for my campaign I've been devouring DnD horror stories videos, so it's been drilled in to me to have a session zero (thanks Crispy's Tavern). I have been part of games where a lack of a session zero has been a problem, I wouldn't call them horror stories but I know from experience why they're important. I've spoken before about wanting to make sure the player's characters are embeded in the world and really part of the story. I also wanted to make sure I had clear notes for both groups game preferences because I'm fairly confident that the two groups will be pretty different. So I made myself a worksheet!

I have space at the top to record basic details about characters (names, pronouns, class, species). Then my house rules, which is the same for both parties. After that some basic party boundaries I wanted to make sure I covered. Then I made a table for hard and soft limits, which was a really good tip I got from the 2024 DM guide. Basically - hard limits are topics that people do not want in the game at all, whereas soft limits are topics which can be explored in the campaign but with some caveats.

For example:

A player may ask that self harm/suicide not be a used as a plot point or be something the party has to confront directly, but it can happen in the background as part of the story. This is a Soft Limit.

It's not unusual for a party to ask that no rape or sexual assault be included or mentioned in the campaign at all. This is a Hard Limit.

Finally is a list of 20 (such a fortuitous number!) character prompts. I made these to help players hash out their characters with a fun activity. The plan was a player would roll a D20, choosing a prompt, then each player would answer for their character. Then the next player would roll, etc. etc.

I have now run a session 0 and session 1 with the Goblins (I'll probably make posts about this later), and I'm really glad I had this form on hand. It was useful to make sure I got all the information I needed. I wont be sharing the sheets for the specific parties (but I may bring some of the info up later). I didn't get a chance to try out my roleplay prompts due to time constraints, I wasn't too worried because their characters were mostly fleshed out, but I think they would be handy for me to get to know the characters better. I think I might start asking for one person to roll the dice and pick a prompt at the begining of sessions as a little roleplay warm up.

I finally have a date for the Nat 1 session 0. I already knew that the Nat 1 games would be a lot more infrequent than the Goblin's sessions. Me and the Goblins currently have every two weeks on a monday evening booked in for the forseable future. The Nat 1 group is booked a weekend day at a time, but the weekend sessions will be a lot longer. So the two groups might end up progressing at about the same speed. I am really curious to see how the two groups session 0s divert. I'll probably go in to the differences a bit once I have all the data.

[its-avernus]

A DM conundrum- Monster Minis

I spent a long time going back and forth on how to represent enemies and other NPCs on the battle maps. Alex, of the Nat 1s, uses little pieces of whiteboard plastic on stands he can write/draw on to indicate what it represents on the table. I also considered just using different coloured generic game pieces, but I think that could get confusing with a lot of mobs in play. I have friends with 3D printers, my own digital 3D modelling is...still a work in progress, but I know there’s plenty of resources available but finding and printing all the ones I need for every session will take up a lot of time. I do plan on making 3D figures for some major characters and for the infernal engines, that are coming up later in the campaign, traditionally. I love sculpting with recycled materials, and I've already been fiendishly hot gluing bits of cardboard and other packaging to make some fun backdrops. If you're looking for cheap materials for making table top miniatures etc. then you're going to need to get down to the charity shop and rummage through the toys section, there’s also sometimes good stuff on the shelves of general knick knacks. I remember the fun of hunting through the bins and boxes a child, so I tried not to take anything too cool and picked up stuff that wasn't in good knick. I will share more of my toy haul in a later post because I did get some good stuff. I've also started modelling some things out of air dry clay and wire, but it's too time consuming to do it for every mini I’m going to need.

I was checking out recommendations for cheaper options on Reddit when I came across this user - Printable Heroes. They have a tonne of free to use miniatures you can print off on their website https://printableheroes.com. I know nothing more about them than this, and I'm not using them, but I thought I'd recommend them for other DMs and players because the art is awesome and it's really cool of the artist to have these up for people. Why am I not using them? Because I saw them and remembered that I'm an artist and I could make my own!

I have a session 0 next week with the goblins, I'm not sure how long that's going to take so I said we could at least start session 1 if we have time. Following more recommendations from Reddit I'm using the alternative session 1: Fall of Elturel which you can find on Dungeon Masters Guild. It starts your adventure in Elturel with a focus on giving players a connection to the city before the disaster. It also lets you skip straight to the first dungeon in Balders Gate once you get there. I'm making a few changes to this module, which I might talk about later, but I'm otherwise following it pretty closely. So I've drawn up all the minis I'm going to need for session 1. My art doesn't have the same broad appeal as the ones I've shared above, but I like them, and they're helping me practice drawing faster. I'm curious to see how much my art will change throughout the campaign. Maybe it will get worse?? Only time will tell.

I had alot of fun with the designs. I know Owlbears tend to have the tufted feathers that look like ears (I don’t know what they're called) but I thought that using a flat faced owl as inspiration would make something more unnerving. This Owlbear is based on a Tawny Owl, and I think it works. In the module the Runty Wolf is meant to be small and timid, and the players have an opportunity to adopt it. Being able to draw it myself is going to make it easier to signal to my players that they should feel sorry for it, and hopefully they’ll be less likely to kill it. I know for a fact that if it dies in my partners game, and he finds out later he could have had it as a pet, he will be distraught! I also found some concept art for the cult of the dragon outfits and they were really cool but a bitch to draw.

I also drew Grace stuck in a tree for the wolf fight. Trying to draw the tree to match the style, tiny, and fast was a challenge but I'm pleased with it. I haven’t drawn her donkey to save time.

Kaiser, one of the goblin players, was showing me the handouts they'd put together for a ttrpg oneshot they were running.I don't remember the system but they'd made a load of little handouts for different droids with stats, names, and a little bio. it was such a fun idea I stole it. Near the beginning of the module the players get horses, they're fairly inconsequential except for the wolf fight technically being mounted combat (I'm going to have to read up on that). So to make it more interesting I'm gonna print out the below and let my players pick one at random. The printouts do include pictures of actual horses I found on google, cos I thought actual pictures would be funnier than art. I've blocked out the pictures here because they're photos of peoples pets that I found online, it felt weird. Without the images I should add Boris is a donkey and a good boy. This gives the players some fun RP opportunities and I might have the mounts stats and temperaments effect the game depending on how much time we have and how hard the players are finding the encounters. If they’re having a tough fight it would be a bit cruel to go “Copper Star gets spooked, roll animal handling to not get thrown off and kicked in the head”.

I did try and find a bunch of little toy horses on my charity shop run because I thought that giving my players a little horse, even if they're too big for the board, would be novel and fun. Alas I only found three little unicorns, I'll think of something to do with them.

I still have some work to do before I'm ready for the first session but I'm excited, and a bit nervous. I'll update with how it goes!

[its-avernus]

I should have seen this coming...

The full two times I've run campaigns in the past I've kept them pretty silly. It's hard to run something short and serious because your players need to emotionally invest in characters and setting in a short amount of time. It's so much easier to run something silly. Descent in to Avernus is looong, when I told a friend I was running it he said (with an amount of concern in his voice) "you did pick a long one". Pushing aside the concern of running something of such longness, I was much more worried that the adventure required a level of serious engagement from the players that I'd never expected of them before. It would also take away from the storytelling, at least for myself, if the characters didn't believeably fit in the setting. So I gave all my players a rule -

"You can choose whatever race or class you want, within reason, but you have to convince me that they make sense in the story."

I did plan to have a fairly meaty session 0 as well to really embed the characters in the adventure. I wanted their backgrounds and goals to weave in to the story, and the world around to naturally influence their actions and decisions. I already know it's not going to be easy with a fairly linear story, Descent in to Avernus has multiple ending written in but it's not an open world - they all gotta go to hell whether they like it or not. I felt bad at first trying to restrict my players, but I really wanted this to work and getting them from A to B doesn't leave a lot of room for hijinks. I need minimal shenanigans. Oh how naive of me! I should have know at least one of my players would take this as a challenge.

I was invited to a birthday night out for a friend seven years younger than me, which means that we were meeting up for pre-drinks at their flat and pre-drinks were serious business. (We started playing ring of fire, which thankfully peetered out before anything got mixed in the jug.) This did mean that I was quite drunk at about 8pm, with two of the players from the Nat 1s having a heated discussion about D&D races while everyone else played beer pong. I explained to them, in no uncertain terms, that they would have to give me a very convincing argument for the more exotic races on why they would be on the Sword Coast. It was then I looked to my friend Andy, and he had a look in his eye, a look that said he was about to test me.

"I'm going to be a Tortle." he said with a simple matter-of-fact-ness.

"How the hell is that going to work?"

"He hatched on the beach at Balders Gate and he's returning to see his birth place."

"But they're not native to the area, turtles lay eggs in specific places not just anywhere!"

"Who says?"

"Err...I dunno, the wiki!"

"You said I could be whatever I want as long as I could make it make sense."

"Yeah well, I'm looking forward to hearing your argument for it during session 0!"

While this could read as combative, I promise it was all in good humour. I was playfully annoyed, while Andy seemed smug about his choice. As I was mulling over my drink, my brain was whirring. One of the things I love about using an already existing world, especially one so in depth, is making stories work in them becomes like a puzzle. You can twist the cannon as much as you want really, and I will be making changes for the sake of my games, but I like having the restrictions to keep things cohesive. As I was thinking away I remembered that the city of Balders Gate, before the time of Balderan, was an infamous pirate and smugglers town.

"Andy I've got it! Pirates stole him as an egg to sell, but he hatched and they kept him. So he was raised on the high seas by pirates!"

"Pirate turtle?"

"Pirate turtle!"

The other player there, Alex, chimed in - "you could make him an artificer and give him back cannons like blastoise." He came out with the idea so quickly and succinctly it was honestly impressive. Andy was already on etsy looking for custom minis and showed me an excellent pirate tortle, with cannons on his back and a parrot on his shoulder.

It came together so perfectly that, when I look back on it days later, I think I might have been had and Andy had already found the miniature before even bringing up Tortles. I can't be mad though, bring on pirate turtle!

[its-avernus]

I have received pictures of the Tortle Pirate!

You can tell a lot of my friends are in to 40k, they know how to paint minis.

[its-avernus]

I should have seen this coming...

The full two times I've run campaigns in the past I've kept them pretty silly. It's hard to run something short and serious because your players need to emotionally invest in characters and setting in a short amount of time. It's so much easier to run something silly. Descent in to Avernus is looong, when I told a friend I was running it he said (with an amount of concern in his voice) "you did pick a long one". Pushing aside the concern of running something of such longness, I was much more worried that the adventure required a level of serious engagement from the players that I'd never expected of them before. It would also take away from the storytelling, at least for myself, if the characters didn't believeably fit in the setting. So I gave all my players a rule -

"You can choose whatever race or class you want, within reason, but you have to convince me that they make sense in the story."

I did plan to have a fairly meaty session 0 as well to really embed the characters in the adventure. I wanted their backgrounds and goals to weave in to the story, and the world around to naturally influence their actions and decisions. I already know it's not going to be easy with a fairly linear story, Descent in to Avernus has multiple ending written in but it's not an open world - they all gotta go to hell whether they like it or not. I felt bad at first trying to restrict my players, but I really wanted this to work and getting them from A to B doesn't leave a lot of room for hijinks. I need minimal shenanigans. Oh how naive of me! I should have know at least one of my players would take this as a challenge.

I was invited to a birthday night out for a friend seven years younger than me, which means that we were meeting up for pre-drinks at their flat and pre-drinks were serious business. (We started playing ring of fire, which thankfully peetered out before anything got mixed in the jug.) This did mean that I was quite drunk at about 8pm, with two of the players from the Nat 1s having a heated discussion about D&D races while everyone else played beer pong. I explained to them, in no uncertain terms, that they would have to give me a very convincing argument for the more exotic races on why they would be on the Sword Coast. It was then I looked to my friend Andy, and he had a look in his eye, a look that said he was about to test me.

"I'm going to be a Tortle." he said with a simple matter-of-fact-ness.

"How the hell is that going to work?"

"He hatched on the beach at Balders Gate and he's returning to see his birth place."

"But they're not native to the area, turtles lay eggs in specific places not just anywhere!"

"Who says?"

"Err...I dunno, the wiki!"

"You said I could be whatever I want as long as I could make it make sense."

"Yeah well, I'm looking forward to hearing your argument for it during session 0!"

While this could read as combative, I promise it was all in good humour. I was playfully annoyed, while Andy seemed smug about his choice. As I was mulling over my drink, my brain was whirring. One of the things I love about using an already existing world, especially one so in depth, is making stories work in them becomes like a puzzle. You can twist the cannon as much as you want really, and I will be making changes for the sake of my games, but I like having the restrictions to keep things cohesive. As I was thinking away I remembered that the city of Balders Gate, before the time of Balderan, was an infamous pirate and smugglers town.

"Andy I've got it! Pirates stole him as an egg to sell, but he hatched and they kept him. So he was raised on the high seas by pirates!"

"Pirate turtle?"

"Pirate turtle!"

The other player there, Alex, chimed in - "you could make him an artificer and give him back cannons like blastoise." He came out with the idea so quickly and succinctly it was honestly impressive. Andy was already on etsy looking for custom minis and showed me an excellent pirate tortle, with cannons on his back and a parrot on his shoulder.

It came together so perfectly that, when I look back on it days later, I think I might have been had and Andy had already found the miniature before even bringing up Tortles. I can't be mad though, bring on pirate turtle!