Act: Act 1 — Descent into Avernus
Sessions: 30/07/2020 to 03/09/2020
Main Locations: Avernus, Mordenkainen’s Tower, the Obelisk, the Mirror of Mephistar, the River Styx, the Crypt of the Hellriders, the Arches of Ulloch
Main Threads: Searching for the Bleeding Citadel, bargaining with Mephistopheles, finding the Crypt of the Hellriders, learning Olanthius’s history, freeing Kostchtchie
The road through Avernus continues with the party still chasing the mystery of the Sword of Zariel.
Lulu is trying to lead them, but her memories are still damaged. The group comes upon a dark iron tower rising from an island in a lake of boiling blood. It looks important. It looks dangerous. It looks exactly like the kind of place that might contain an answer.
Then Lulu realizes this is not the right place.
The tower door opens anyway.
A wizard appears: bald, goateed, light brown skin, surrounded by devils who all look up at him when he emerges. The party recognizes him as Mordenkainen.
They try to get his help.
He is not especially helpful.
Mordenkainen says he is there for important work and does not want to help them. He has not heard of the citadel they are looking for, but he suggests there may be a lesser mage somewhere else who can help. When the party asks whether he knows how to leave Avernus, the tower simply disappears.
The devils nearby mention that Mordenkainen comes to Avernus often looking for people to fill his “Circle of Eight.”
That is all the help they get.
Two nycaloths watch the party from a distance. The party approaches them, but the creatures are mostly curious and do not become the next problem.
The group drives in the direction Mordenkainen pointed.
Six hours later, they reach a tall obelisk surrounded by stones. A strange man is there, shouting at the wind. He claims the place is a magical puzzle. He believes each stone is tied to one of the eight schools of magic, and that the obelisk in the center will grant a boon to the mages who solve it.
The party starts assigning people to schools.
Giovanni is conjuration. Zaleron is transmutation. Lulu is evocation. Rendar is enchantment. The narrator is divination. Costa is illusion. Reginald is necromancy. Charles, the bearded devil, is abjuration.
But the “wizard” cannot remember his own name.
That is suspicious enough.
They make him cast a spell to prove he is actually a wizard, then counterspell him. The party bullies him until he breaks down and admits the truth: he is not a wizard, and he is trapped here. He says Bel, the former ruler of Avernus, trapped him for disobedience.
Detect Thoughts reveals even more.
He is not human either.
He is a barlgura disguised as a man.
He stole the wizard book from the last wizard who came through here, whom he ate.
Somehow, this still leaves him useful.
The barlgura knows the sword is in the Bleeding Citadel, or at least knows how to reach someone who can guide them toward it. He thinks a spell in the stolen book might free him, but the narrator knows it would backfire horribly.
With no better plan, the party touches the stones.
The barlgura begins chanting in Abyssal.
Then everyone gets zapped.
A monodrone appears beside Giovanni. The narrator gains truesight for an hour. Lulu is blasted by magic missile. Rendar resists a confusion effect. Costa has pigeons circling over his head. Reginald is hit by blight and dies. Charles feels great. Zaleron turns blue.
The barlgura remains trapped.
He tells them Mephistopheles may be able to help.
With truesight active, the narrator spots a burning ball of fire in the sky with a rider watching them from about 120 feet away. The two nycaloths are still out in the distance. Two invisible imps are flying overhead too, apparently connected to Mad Maggie.
The barlgura tells them about the Mirror of Mephistar, where they may be able to contact Mephistopheles.
So they leave.
As they travel, the rider and the nycaloths follow them for a while. Eventually truesight fades, and the party rests. Zaleron gives the narrator 200 gold for spells and says, “When it comes time, remember this.”
The longer they stay in Hell, the more the place affects them. The notes suggest the effect is not permanent if they leave or use magic, but the warning hangs over the journey anyway.
In the morning, the party reaches the Mirror.
The Mirror of Mephistar is a slab of ice connected to something far colder than Avernus. When the party looks into it, they see old, haggard versions of themselves trapped in the ice. Every one of them is stunned for a short time, staring into the reflection.
Then they see the tower beyond the mirror.
A figure appears behind the ice: Rigaroth, an emissary of Mephistopheles. He holds a kettle of steaming water and pours it over his face.
The party asks where the Bleeding Citadel is.
Rigaroth offers rare knowledge in exchange for assistance. He wants the party to dam the flow of the River Styx where it spills into a slime-filled chasm. If they do not do it, nothing terrible happens immediately. They simply do not get the knowledge.
That is enough.
At least for Giovanni.
The bargain appears carved into the ice on their side of the mirror. To make the deal, they must chisel out the words, melt them down, and drink them.
Giovanni drinks.
Costa pretends to.
And with that, the party has made another infernal bargain.
An imp from Mephistar named Frosty arrives with shattersticks, which are basically dynamite. The party disguises some rocks as themselves to act as bait for the things following them, then heads to the River Styx.
At the river, they find a green creature being repeatedly dunked into the water by a torture device. It is an ultroloth, and it begs for help.
Spined devils surround the party and attack, killing Frosty in the fight.
As the party places the shattersticks, voices begin to sound around them. Something in the slime speaks of revenge and Bel.
The damming succeeds.
The explosion collapses the crane holding the ultroloth, and he falls into the slime. The slime itself seems alive. The notes describe it as breathing.
Back in the car, the ultroloth explains that something in the slime has been talking about revenge on Bel. The party uses the war machine’s grappling claw to pull him free, and Zaleron unlocks his dimensional shackles.
The ultroloth gives them a scroll of Create Homunculus.
They return to the Mirror.
Rigaroth appears again and tells them how to free the barlgura: he must swear fealty to Mephistopheles. The narrator places a hand on the mirror and receives a gift, choosing a permanent increase to Wisdom.
The party drives five hours back to the obelisk.
They tell the barlgura he must swear fealty to Mephistopheles for freedom.
He does.
With that, he can finally lead them to the next step: the Crypt of the Hellriders.
The party reaches the crypt and rests outside during a sandstorm. Costa has a dream of a war between good and evil.
The doors to the crypt are locked.
Giovanni admits to being a coward.
The party tries to get the password through Zena in exchange for a contract, but the situation goes badly. They attack her, and she disappears.
The party retreats into the hut to rest.
Then smoke appears in the distance.
A sleigh pulled by bulls approaches.
A death knight arrives.
When he sees the dome, he asks, “What is this? Who put this here?”
Giovanni tries to reason with him, but the death knight is not in the mood. The party fights him and eventually gets him unconscious inside the hut.
His name is Olanthius.
The party spends the long rest with Team Elf taking turns knocking him out every time he wakes up.
They bully him for a while.
Eventually, they hide and let Olanthius enter the crypt while a familiar spies on him.
The password is “For glory.”
The party kills Olanthius and enters the crypt.
Inside are ghosts, burial urns, mummies, secret rooms, and the bound dead of the Hellriders. In one hidden room, they find names written in blood on parchment. The warriors’ souls are bound to the place.
Giovanni sets the names on fire.
Later, the party finds massive stone tablets covered in hundreds of names. These stones bind the souls to the crypt, while the parchments made the stones invulnerable. Because the party destroyed the papers first, the stones can now be damaged.
They scratch away the names.
Hundreds of souls are released from the urns.
The party then finds Olanthius’s journals in a hidden room.
The journals reveal the truth of him. Olanthius was shattered by Zariel’s fall from grace. He blamed himself for not stopping it. Rather than live with the failure, he took his own life, only to rise again as an undead servant of the same tragedy.
The journals also point toward General Yael, who knows where the Sword of Zariel is.
Then Olanthius returns.
He is not angry this time.
He is happy they freed the other spirits.
Olanthius knows the location of the sword and is willing to tell them, but only if they help him free Zariel from herself. To stand a chance against Zariel, he says they will need the aid of a demon lord: Kostchtchie.
Zariel stole Kostchtchie’s hammer and left him powerless, locked away in Avernus. If the party frees him, he will go after Zariel and weaken her.
To reach him, they must use the Arches of Ulloch.
The party drives for an hour to the arches. They are huge, two hundred feet tall. The party drives the war machine through them and appears in front of a massive chasm.
They have ten minutes before the portal closes.
From the bottom of the chasm comes screaming.
It is Kostchtchie, yelling for his hammer and his freedom.
The party starts climbing down, and things immediately go wrong. A hellhound appears. A chain devil attacks from below. Polymorph is used to turn into a giant eagle and carry Rendar and Zaleron downward. Costa, Zaleron, and Rendar all fall to the bottom.
The party kills the chain devil and frees the demon lord.
Then they escape back through the portal before it closes.
The episode ends with the party having done something horrifying but useful: they have released a demon lord because a death knight told them it might help save a fallen angel.
That is the Avernus logic of the Anti-Heroes.
In Hell, the road to redemption apparently runs through blackmail, torture devices, infernal contracts, undead knights, and freeing something that absolutely should have stayed chained.
The exact identity and role of Zena/Xena around the crypt password is unclear in the notes. The recap preserves the fact that the party sought the password through her, attacked her, and she disappeared.
The full mechanics of the obelisk puzzle are also unclear from the campaign notes, though the consequences of touching the stones are preserved.
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