Act: Act 2 — After Hell
Sessions: 29/10/2020 to 12/11/2020
Main Locations: The road from Elturel, Baldur’s Gate, Waterdeep, Giovanni’s Magnificent Mansion
Main Threads: Returning from Avernus, cult ambushes, Baldur’s Gate under cult influence, Giovanni’s family, Costa’s transformation crisis, Mordenkainen’s back door into the mansion
After Elturel is returned to the Material Plane, the party begins the long road back toward Baldur’s Gate.
At first, the road is too quiet.
That silence feels wrong. No one is heading east. The party spends the night in Giovanni’s Magnificent Mansion, and refugees from Elturel gather outside, hoping to follow them for protection. The people are frightened by the empty road too.
Costa and Giovanni tell them to leave.
Three hours later, someone walks straight toward the party, tossing a small fireball in his hand.
“Well, well, well. Looks like I’m gonna have to take everything you own.”
It is an ambush.
Then comes the command:
“Kill the angel.”
Costa’s transformation is already following him. The sword, the wings, the holy presence, and the party’s victory in Avernus have made him visible in a dangerous way. He is not simply Costa anymore. To enemies, strangers, and desperate people, he is now something else: a symbol, a target, or a prize.
The attackers are tied to cults the party had angered before Avernus. The party kills them and loots the bodies, finding money and a spellbook filled with powerful magic: command, protection from evil, thunderous smite, branding smite, find steed, blinding smite, dispel magic, aura of purity, banishment, death ward, locate creature, staggering smite, banishing smite, circle of power, destructive wave, dispel evil and good, and geas.
After the fight, Zaleron’s lingering blue condition is removed.
The party continues toward Baldur’s Gate.
A peasant sees them on the road and hides in the bushes.
That is the kind of fame the party has now. Some people may call them heroes. Others see them coming and hide.
Closer to Baldur’s Gate, the party is ambushed again, this time by ghasts and several women connected to the priests of a death god. The narrator is banished during the fight.
When the party reaches Baldur’s Gate, they find a city that feels terrified.
Giovanni disguises himself as Kristoph, Costa’s brother. The city is seedy and tense. The inner gates are locked. Giovanni calls over a woman, but she is terrified even to speak.
She tells them Baldur’s Gate has been closed for a while.
About a year.
Then the party learns the worse truth.
They were in Hell for two years.
The world did not pause while they were in Avernus. Families aged. Cities changed. Cults grew. People died. The party saved Elturel, but they lost time they did not know they were losing.
At the gates, the party is not allowed into the inner city. Costa reveals his angelic form, but even that does not get them inside.
The city has changed since Elturel fell. Different cults rose in the chaos, and some of them banded together to take over Baldur’s Gate. Cultists walk openly in the city now. Guards take the party’s names and descriptions. Giovanni acts unstable. Rendar draws a lot of attention.
Then the party goes to Giovanni’s family home.
It is rough.
His family is still there, but one of his sisters is dead. His mother has only recently been told, even though the death happened months earlier.
The family situation is broken before the party even understands the shape of it.
Giovanni wants to get his father, sister, and brother out and teleport them to Waterdeep.
That becomes the immediate plan, but it is not simple.
Giovanni knows someone in Baldur’s Gate with a teleportation circle, but she hates him and wants him dead, so that option is not safe. Instead, the party waits for Giovanni’s father and younger brother to come home from work at the docks.
The wait gives the family wound time to breathe.
When Giovanni became a performer, he distanced himself from his family because he did not want to be seen as poor. Now he is back after two years in Hell, famous and powerful, and his family has been living through a nightmare without him.
When his father and brother finally return, the reunion is emotional but strained. His father does not want to leave until his daughter’s killer is found.
Then things fall apart.
As the spell is being prepared, Giovanni’s sister runs off. Zaleron and Costa chase after her. Guards are knocked out. The party forces the situation forward and teleports the family to Waterdeep.
They arrive in the middle of the market through a teleportation circle.
Guards come to investigate, but Giovanni handles it.
His father is still furious and storms off.
Inside the Magnificent Mansion, the party watches for the strange phenomenon they noticed before: footsteps, changing doors, and the sense that something else can access the mansion.
The narrator changes his Third Eye to see invisibility and waits.
For the first few hours, nothing happens.
Then the door opens.
Detect magic reveals conjuration.
Beyond the door is not the normal room. It is an ethereal-looking road lined with other doors.
Someone is standing there.
Another wizard.
Mordenkainen.
He sees that the narrator can see him and shuts the door.
Then he opens it again and returns holding a golden key.
Mordenkainen has a back door into all Magnificent Mansions.
He says the narrator caught his eye and that he is impressed. He will be watching and will return with a proposal. He was not ready to be seen yet.
Then he leaves.
The party rests.
The next morning, the consequences of Costa’s transformation become impossible to ignore.
Costa has tried to hang himself.
He is alive, but only because his wings keep flapping.
Rendar tries to pound on his chest and breaks a rib.
Costa’s uniform is neatly folded on the bed. There is a note addressed to Rendar.
Costa does not like the wings. He does not like the way people look at him. He is overwhelmed by what the sword has made him.
This is one of the first major emotional costs of Avernus.
Costa accepted the Sword of Zariel and became powerful enough to help save Elturel, but the victory did not end when they left Hell. His body has changed. His identity has changed. Everyone sees him differently. The world treats him like an angel or a sign, and he does not know how to live inside that.
Afterward, Giovanni properly introduces the party to his family.
When they leave the mansion, there is no sign of Giovanni’s father. The city itself does not seem to have changed much in the time they have been inside, but the family has not stabilized.
The party casts locate object on Giovanni’s father’s shirt and gets a direction: the Wandering Portal.
Zaleron, Rendar, and the narrator go to find him while the others go shopping. The shopping group buys Costa full plate and gets Giovanni’s little brother a job. The dragon slayer longsword is traded for the armor.
Giovanni’s father is found sitting alone at a corner table.
The narrator convinces him to get up and rejoin the others.
The group meets back together and goes to a real estate agent named Payoric, looking for a home.
Then comes more family drama.
Giovanni goes off to take time for himself at the Maiden’s Tears tavern. Costa has a serious life conversation. Someone watches them from nearby, and Costa’s truesight reveals the watcher is a drow, who leaves once noticed.
The road back from Hell has become exactly what it should be: not relief, but aftermath.
The party saved Elturel.
Now they have to live in the world that kept moving without them.
The exact identity of the drow watching Costa and the narrator is not yet explained in this section.
The notes do not give the full contents of Costa’s letter to Rendar, only that it exists and that Costa’s uniform was folded nearby.
The details of Giovanni’s sister’s death are not yet known at this point in the notes, only that she is dead and the family is broken by it.
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2020-sessions