Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus A retrospective and review of a completed campaign. Part 1/?. An introduction.
‘Baldurs gate: Descent into Avernus’ (BG:DIA) is a module for Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, produced by Wizards of the Coast, with Adam Lee as it’s lead. It has a number of interesting ideas within it, and a very cool setting. That’s probably the most praise it’s going to get in this series of posts, however, and a significant portion of that is simply from it’s association with D&D 5e, a very robust and fun RPG, and the high budget for art and design WOTC obviously gives its designers.
The module professes to take players from levels 1 to 13 over the course of its 256 pages, yet one wonders why they bothered, when it’s clear only the last 8 really mattered to the designers. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me explain why I’m writing this screed.
In early October, 2019, I started a new BG:DIA campaign as the DM, aiming to conclude the campaign in a satisfactory manner within a year, after experiencing too many other campaigns, either run by myself or others, that had never been able to finish satisfactorily. Playing as a Student and with Students often means those you play with and your own priorities change year on year, and there’s always a risk of your table hemorrhaging players, never to return, once post-exams celebrations finish. I succeeded and was able to finish the campaign in early July, 2020, largely thanks to the UK lockdown freeing up me and my players schedules significantly.
I feel the manner in which I approached this module is also worth mentioning. Apart from the self-imposed time limitations, I also was studying for my Medical degree and attending placements in various hospitals, running a Dragon AGE RPG campaign and organizing a fortnightly independent Adventurers League event. I was relying on the module to, well, actually give me a campaign, rather than a nonsensical mess that I had to crudely stitch into a facsimile of a coherent story-line.
As should not be a surprise to anyone with much experience of all but a few of the 5e modules, BG:DIA is a mess, unfriendly to new and busy DM’s alike. It’s plotlines are meandering, the villain seems to change multiple times, it’s themes are discordant and the first 5 levels of the adventure seem simply to be an excuse to get players to level up fast enough to get to the ‘meat’ of the adventure. Even when they get there, however the ‘meat’ of the adventure isn’t exactly a prime-cut, either, filled with meaningless choices, fetch quests, and opportunities for players to miss vital story beats and details for no explicable reason.
Please don’t get me wrong, despite my frustrations with the module, me and my players managed to have a lot of fun. I do feel, however, that this was despite the module more than it was because of it.
As it was, the campaign that I ran was saved by three main virtues:
1: My players, a group of creative and confident storytellers unafraid to tell the stories of their characters collaboratively with me.
2: My willingness to go off the rails and use 3rd party supplements to enhance the adventure, to compensate for my lack of time to customize the adventure personally. (I will be linking to and shouting out all of these supplements in future posts, but I primarily used the products of Eventyr games)
3: Many of the themes, and the central plot-line, do have a seed of something compelling and awesome. Zariel’s fall and redemption, the Mad-max theme of Avernus and the moral quandaries of the blood war, and I was able to nurture these seeds enough to give them a life of their own in the adventure.
During this series of posts, that are inaugural to my blog, I will be discussing what I disliked about this module in more precise terms, in chronological order, covering each ‘chapter’ of the adventure one after another, as it is meant to be played. I will also be discussing how many d&d adventures have fallen into the same traps BG:DIA has fallen into and how amazing it is that the designers have failed to learn a single lesson from past 5 years of 5e modules and combine every single mistake made in the past, into one module. I’ll also be highlighting what I did to improve upon what I see as the modules mistakes, what the module got right, what I wish I’d done better and what those running adventures set in the outer planes can do to ensure their campaigns are fun and thematic right off the bat.
I hope you enjoy this series, and hang around for more in the future, as I’ll be talking about a lot more than just Baldurs Gate! I have a lot of opinions about a lot of thing’s in RPG’s, and you can be assured, they’ll all get posted here.
