BG: DIA. A rationale for bizarre choices in the first chaprer.
Descent into Avernus is a thoroughly confused module. Throughout the first chapter we’re meant to unravel the mystery of what happened to Elturel, but the players have no reason to care about Elturel, and until the very end of the chapter, no indication that devilish forces are responsible, or even at work in Baldur’s Gate. Furthermore, at the end of the chapter the players seem to be expected to leap into hell voluntarily to save Elturel, but are given no indication on how that could possibly be achieved, or why they are the one’s being sent to do the ‘saving’. The PC’s, by the end of the first chapter, will have effectively saved Baldur’s Gate by killing Thalmara Vanthampur or disrupting her plans, job done.
This is a mad, jumbled plot, and near-impossible to work with without massive adjustments. So why was it written this way? Well, some of the blame can be put at the feet of sheer incompetence. There are issues with how the plot of this adventure that no amount of mitigating factors can explain, especially with a project of this size and budget, with dozens of people working on it. These sort of issues are now infamous, and plague many WOTC official adventure modules, forcing DM’s to warp the plotlines to their own ends, and frustrating any attempt to run a campaign ‘straight out of the book’.
Too many cooks spoiled this broth
Some of the blame can also be put on the sheer size of the project. Not in the sense of the size of the book, though that is large, but in terms of the size of the team that worked on it. There are eleven so called ‘story creators’ (an unhelpful title), two story consultants, 15 writers (what separates these from the ‘story creators’ is unclear) and four developers listed in the books ‘credits’. Some of those listed have multiple roles. This could be a classic case of ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’- there are less than 10 pages of actual adventure content per writer. What were they doing? Why were so many needed, when three or four would really suffice?
Its obvious that this bloated team of creatives did not help the adventures structure, and they obviously failed to communicate and create a cohesive story-line together. But the same goes for other D&D modules, which while generally unclear, few were as tonally deaf as the first chapter of this one.
A video-game tie-in, sort of?
The issue, is, of course, Baldur’s gate. As I reflected in my previous post, the module is not about Baldur’s gate, it is about Elturel. And yet the game takes on that name, insists on the players being from there, starting there, levelling up there. Why?
Well, simply put: Marketing. For a video game called Baldur’s gate 3 which set in the forgotten realms setting, using the d&d 5e rules (adapted to a video game format) and is being promoted by Wizards of the Coast, the producers of D&D. It looks like it’s going to be a decent game, and I’m moderately excited about it. But it looks like someone at WOTC, or even Hasbro, saw this as an opportunity to use an official d&d module to market, or try to ‘tie-in’ to this new video game.
Instead of building a new module from the ground up to fit into the game, which seems to feature mind-flayers and planar travel quite prominently (and rather few fiends for that matter), that would complement the new video games themes and setting, they instead have hamfistedly crammed baldurs gate into what seems to be a module they had developed with a different vision in mind.
In addition, it seems the designers, as illustrated in the ‘dungeon of the dead three’ were far too eager to throw in references to previous video games set in Baldur’s gate. Now I love references to obscure pieces of D&D lore, but not if they detract from the main plots and themes of a story.
A tale of two cities, but not really
One of the writers and ‘story creators’, the much loved Chris Perkins, had this to say about the module, in an interview with Inverse:
“I like to think of it as A Tale of Two Cities. One city has fallen under the sway of hell, the other is in danger of suffering the same fate unless you step in and do something about it.“
Given this quote, I’m pretty sure Chris Perkins either has not read ‘A tale of two cities’, as it is quite clear that the adventure does not tell a tale of two cities, it tells two tales, that happen to be set in different cities, or only accidentally referenced it.
The fact is that Baldur’s gate is under no such danger of suffering the fate of Elturel by the end of the first chapter, and the two cities indeed have no other connection, or indeed any connection to each other other than physical proximity. Indeed, the design lead Adam Lee admits as much in an interview:
Todd Kendrick: “How does that bring us to Elturel”
Adam Lee: “So Elturel is connected to Baldur’s gate by the river [chionthar], probably a couple hundred miles up the river is the city of Elturel and Elturel, uh, you hear about it through a courier or through people who are reporting, who say ‘oh my gosh, Elturel has just, been taken, it has disappeared and just become a smoking crater’, and something terrible has happened there.”
That’s it. That’s the connection. Someone comes and tells the PC’s while they’re in Baldur’s gate that Elturel is missing, and they’re, for some reason, meant to care about it. And do something about it. While the rest of the universe, it seems, sits on the palms of their hands, and does nothing.
Conclusion
The fact is that Baldur’s gate inclusion is awkward, clumsy, and unnecessary, and the designers put in the minimum possible effort to make it fit. This is compounded by the bloated size of the design team likely contributing to nobody in the team actually knowing what the overall plot was, or should be. The module seems to have been primarily written with the city of Elturel in mind as the primary hub for the players, and that connection seems to have been scrapped, almost at the last minute, leaving the adventure completely adrift, and condemning it to be even worse than the usual mediocrity produced by WOTC these days.
The tie-in isn’t even that worthwhile, in the end, Baldurs Gate 3 has suffered repeated delays and has only just opened up a public alpha. Fucking morons.
In my next post in this series, I’ll actually be constructive, and I’ll be discussing how the adventure could be better, and what I would do differently if I were running it again. I actually like a lot of the adventure’s themes, and I think that with just a little effort, it could be a brilliant experience, to run and to play.
