Sessions: 23/04/2020 to 11/06/2020
Main Locations: Elturel, High Hall, Grand Cemetery
Main Threads: Surviving the fallen city, finding Ravengard, restoring Lulu’s memories, leaving Elturel for Avernus
The campaign’s surviving notes begin with the party already in Elturel, now trapped in Avernus.
There is no calm introduction. A woman and her children are running through the streets, screaming, chased by monsters. Giovanni is still being introduced as Jason. Lulu, the hollyphant, is with the party, though her full importance is not yet clear.
The party tries to cross a bridge and kills the spined and bearded devils blocking their path. They are not yet saving the city in any organized way. They are just trying to understand where they are, what has happened, and how to survive long enough to do something useful.
Soon after, a small boy from their previous ship comes rushing toward them, pursued by two devils. The party saves him.
For a while, at least.
As they continue through the ruined city, the party hears banging and pounding from behind a blocked door. When they remove the fallen wood, zombies spill out. In the middle of the fight, a well-armed woman in fine clothes and studded leather steps in to help them, saying it looks like they need assistance. Her family is dead, but she is from Elturel and believes survivors may have gone to High Hall.
The party heads that way.
Elturel is already devastated. One side of the city is destroyed worse than the other. They find a charred body clutching a silver sword, and when the sword is taken, the corpse erupts. High Hall itself is badly damaged, with parts crumbled or blackened, though the central cathedral still stands.
Hellhounds guard the entrance, so the party rests before going in.
A familiar scouts the interior and finds bodies, blood, more hellhounds, and a strange creature with a mask-like face. The notes describe it as the souls of fallen soldiers brought back by devils to serve as bodyguards.
Lulu rushes out as bait and gets incinerated, though she survives.
The party uses Leomund’s Tiny Hut, which quickly becomes one of their signature survival tools. It lets them control danger from a safer position, but it also leads into one of the first truly ugly Anti-Heroes moments.
The small boy they saved earlier is sent in to draw attention.
Then long, spindly arms reach out, grab him, and pull him inside.
That moment matters.
It shows early that this is not a clean heroic campaign. The party saved a child, then used him as bait, and Hell took him back.
During a rest, the party sees people trying to reach High Hall, only for all of them to be killed. When the party enters the building, the holy imagery is already corrupted. Images of Torm have been twisted to look like a female devil. Strange crab-like creatures move through the place. Bodies lie everywhere.
When one of the bodies is searched, it speaks.
“You’re trying to rob me, a dead man?”
The corpse is not a corpse at all. He is a druid, hiding among the dead because it was safer than standing up. He tells the party there are more people downstairs hiding in the crypts.
The party encounters cultists and a demonic lizard-like creature near the altar. They fight from inside the hut until the area is clear, then find a lever at the altar leading down into the lower levels.
Below, the horror continues.
A creepy baby mask watches from behind a curtain. A woman’s body lies below, strangely undecayed, with a greatsword beside her. Two terrified people are hiding nearby. The peasants believe the dead woman is the reincarnation of Torm and hope she might wake up and save them.
Costa wrestles with the sword and comes out changed in some way.
The hellhounds catch up with the party, along with the creepy baby-faced creature. After more fighting and another short rest, the party keeps moving through High Hall. They hear women screaming and men shouting somewhere down the hall. In the Hall of Scholars, shelves are filled with bones, and red amethysts are found hidden among them. In another room, insane men harass commoners before a spined devil joins the scene.
Eventually, the party finds a worried priestess named Farah.
Farah believes Costa may be Torm returned to them. She also explains that devils will not enter the resting place of the Unknown Hero, and that holy water from the area can hurt fiends and undead. She tells the party that Grand Duke Ulder Ravengard went west to the Grand Cemetery searching for the Helm of Torm’s Sight.
The party collects holy water and leaves High Hall.
On the way to the cemetery, they see an imp trying to convince a halfling to make a deal to escape Hell. The party recognizes it as a bad deal. The moment reinforces one of the rules of Avernus: desperation is always being sold back to the desperate.
The Grand Cemetery is horrific.
Body parts are stuck to the fence, and some of them are still writhing. Skeletons and zombies wander the grounds. The party sneaks through the undead, using names carved on pillars that still radiate holy power when spoken aloud. Shadows and specters emerge from the pillars, burning in the radiant energy.
The party hides in the dome and tries to lure enemies into manageable positions. Some of them are calm enough to share a charcuterie board while a fight goes on outside, which says a lot about the tone of the campaign by this point.
Then the cemetery situation turns strange and dangerous.
A man comes running out. He seems to have some control over the minotaurs. He is also a vampire-like figure named Giddeon, the former keeper of the cemetery. Giddeon asks if the party is with the demons. His entire purpose now seems to be killing as many demons as possible.
Around this time, Sena reveals herself as a succubus. Giovanni gives away his real voice in the heat of the moment, and Sena charms him after promising to save him if he submits.
The notes around this fight are messy. They make it clear that Zaleron and Costa end up knocked out inside the building, Giovanni is compromised, and the vampire asks whether another party member will submit to him. The exact blow-by-blow is unclear, but the result is obvious: the cemetery nearly breaks the party.
The party survives the encounter and moves deeper below the cemetery.
They find more minotaur skeletons, trashed embalming rooms, religious symbols of Torm, Tyr, Lathander, and another figure, and eventually an armored man writhing on the ground with a shield, clutching a golden helmet.
This is Ravengard.
He is speaking in Celestial and Abyssal, caught in a psychic struggle between Torm and Baphomet. The party finds scrolls, including tongues and mass healing word, then gets pulled into a brutal boss fight.
The fight almost becomes a total party kill.
Cloudkill devastates the group. Only Giovanni and Costa are left standing by the end. The immediate plan afterward is practical and grim: rest, get invisibility, grab the cleric from the temple, and loot “Count Chocula.”
The next session picks up with the aftermath. They loot Giddeon, and Costa has some kind of glow-up. The boy, somehow, brings two fallen companions back to life. The notes do not fully explain how, but the moment is important because it makes the boy even stranger than he first appeared.
The party returns to High Hall. On the way, they hear fighting and find ghouls battling Rendar. Back at High Hall, Farah believes the knight they saved is possessed and wants to perform an exorcism at the altar of Torm.
The altar has been desecrated. The party splashes holy water on it, and it begins to purify itself.
During the ritual, will-o’-wisps emerge from Ravengard. When the exorcism succeeds, Ravengard wakes.
Ravengard has seen visions, and Lulu was in them.
He saw a massive demon. He saw a woman with a sword, which she plunged into the ground. He saw a palace rise around the sword. He saw Lulu flying away. He saw two bird-like humanoids beside a strange vehicle.
The vision reveals that Ravengard had been trapped between Torm and Baphomet. It also begins to unlock Lulu’s memory.
Lulu flies off, then returns with the words that change the whole direction of the campaign:
“I remember.”
She remembers bird folk named Chuka and Clunk. They were kenku. They took her to Fort Knucklebone. She remembers Zariel’s sword and knows she helped hide it, but she does not remember where. The kenku may know more.
The fortress is not in Elturel.
It is in Avernus.
Before leaving, the party searches the crypts and finds a deceased High Priest of Torm. They loot the body with permission, finding a gold locket, bracers of defense, a yellow diamond, and an earth elemental gem. One corpse is a mummy.
The plan becomes clear: climb down the chains from Elturel into Avernus and find Fort Knucklebone.
Before they leave, the party sees four cloaked figures moving strangely through the city. They seem to be looting, but they do not walk like humans. They have very long tongues. The party hears screams after the figures enter a building.
They ignore it.
That is another important Anti-Heroes moment. Maybe they had bigger problems. Maybe there was no time. Maybe they simply chose not to deal with it.
Either way, someone screamed, and the party moved on.
They grab arrows from a ransacked store, return near the cemetery, desecrate Giddeon’s body, and prepare to leave. Giovanni, still known as Jason to some, finally reveals his true self.
Then they go to the edge of Elturel.
Below them, the Blood War is visible: demons and devils fighting across the ground of Avernus. The chains themselves make the party nauseous. As they climb down, a devil comes after Giovanni. He catches it with hideous laughter, and it falls into the war below, where demons beat it.
The party reaches the ground.
Elturel is behind them.
Avernus is ahead.
Some combat transitions in the Grand Cemetery are unclear, especially the exact order of events involving Giddeon, Sena, Zaleron, Costa, and Giovanni. The notes preserve the major outcomes but not a full blow-by-blow.
The boy’s ability to bring fallen companions back is also not fully explained in the notes. It should be preserved as a strange and important event rather than over-explained.