Act: Act 1 — Descent into Avernus
Sessions: 10/09/2020 to 01/10/2020
Main Locations: Avernus, the Bleeding Citadel, Idyllglen
Main Threads: Restoring Lulu, reaching the Bleeding Citadel, surviving the scab, entering Lulu’s memory, learning Zariel’s history, claiming the Sword of Zariel
After freeing Kostchtchie and escaping the Arches of Ulloch, the portal closes and collapses behind the party.
The group makes its way back to Olanthius in the Crypt of the Hellriders. The road to the Sword of Zariel is finally open, but before they can follow it, Lulu has to be restored.
Giovanni restores Lulu from petrification.
When she returns, she says she remembers everything.
She changes back into the massive celestial elephant-like form she once had, no longer only the small strange hollyphant who has been stumbling through half-memories and broken instincts. Lulu is still Lulu, but now she feels much more like the creature she was always supposed to be.
In the middle of all this cosmic weight, Giovanni has an artsy nude drawn of Olanthius.
Olanthius likes it.
That is part of the campaign too: ancient guilt, celestial memory, death knights, demon lords, and then someone decides to make nude art of the tragic undead knight.
After a long rest, the party heads for the Bleeding Citadel.
They fuel the war machine with the soul coin of a serial killer.
That detail matters. The party is on a quest for a holy sword that might redeem a fallen angel, and the vehicle carrying them there is running on the damned soul of a murderer.
That is Avernus. That is also the Anti-Heroes.
The Bleeding Citadel appears ahead of them like something beautiful trapped inside something obscene. From a distance, it looks like a gorgeous celestial temple, but the ground around it is scabbed over with blood and pulsing like living flesh. Chains lead toward it. Holes split the top.
Lulu flies the party up.
Inside, the ground is soft and awful. It squishes under their feet, and blood pools where they step.
Lulu senses Crokek’toeck nearby and says it is deadly.
The party sees a stained-glass window of Zariel, clean and strangely untouched by the gore around it. When Costa touches it, he gains temporary protection, but only because he is good-aligned.
The party sends an imp familiar ahead to scout.
To reach the citadel, they have to crawl through bloody tunnels.
Something ahead sounds like feral pigs chewing.
The familiar finds humanoids with pig-like faces gnawing through the fleshy tunnels. The creatures are accompanied by a demon shouting at them in Abyssal.
The party kills them.
Then Crokek’toeck appears.
The notes call it “the alligator fucker,” which feels accurate enough for the moment. It arrives like a nightmare and vomits out more enemies: barlguras, gnolls, a vrock, and wretches. The scene becomes immediate chaos, a tunnel full of demons, blood, bodies, and too many things coming from too many directions.
The party banishes Crokek’toeck and keeps fighting everything it left behind.
The next stretch is barely orderly enough to describe.
Giovanni gives inspiration. The party fights off the remaining dretches while concentration holds. A nalfeshnee demon waits farther down and wants to work together to get through the door. His name is Trantolox.
Giovanni performs for a vrock.
The notes admit what the scene feels like: there is so much going on.
Gnolls, bulezau, dretches, demons, and other horrors are all tangled together in the living scab around the citadel. The party is not walking through a dungeon so much as crawling through a wound while Yeenoghu’s forces chew their way toward something holy.
Eventually, the party reaches brass doors marked with inlaid runes.
The doors only open for the good-aligned.
Lulu opens them quietly.
Then she lets Costa think he did it.
Radiant light spills from the open doors and burns the blood and filth away from the party.
For the first time in a long while, the place feels clean.
Inside, the room itself acts like a long rest. The party is restored by the holy power of the citadel. After the crawling blood tunnels, demon vomit, and scabbed flesh, the sudden peace almost feels unreal.
At the dais, words are carved in Celestial:
The hero who becomes one with the blade exists no longer.
The Sword of Zariel is here.
Rendar approaches it first.
A translucent image of a woman appears and says:
“I remember.”
Then the party is gone.
They are pulled into Idyllglen.
At first, it is not completely clear whether they have traveled through time, entered a vision, or stepped inside someone else’s memory. The answer becomes clearer as the horror unfolds: this is Lulu’s memory.
They arrive in a town under attack.
Screams fill the air. People run from gnolls and demons. Dretches attack civilians. A giant hyena prowls the chaos. A hezrou is trying to break into a church.
Lulu is not with them.
The party fights inside the memory anyway.
Giovanni and another party member dimension door toward the hezrou. Banishment becomes the narrator’s favorite answer to impossible monsters. Then Garoknul appears: a six-armed demon horror.
The party kills the first wave of enemies.
Then a voice in their heads says something like:
“Nice work. Take a break. The really bad stuff begins in an hour.”
That is not comforting.
The party takes a short rest. Beyond the town, everything is white fog. This confirms they are not in a normal place. They are trapped inside the boundaries of Lulu’s memory.
The narrator sends the imp into the mist.
The imp dies.
The narrator takes psychic damage.
Then the next wave comes.
More demons appear. More gnolls. More dretches. More barlguras.
Then Yeenoghu himself arrives.
The fight becomes far beyond ordinary survival. This is no longer just the party against monsters. This is the memory of why Zariel mattered, why she went to war, and why the road to Hell began in the first place.
Then Zariel appears.
She arrives as an archangel, with a more powerful version of Lulu beside her, and steals the kill.
The notes call her a dirty kill stealer.
But the moment is still massive.
This is Zariel before the fall: radiant, powerful, certain, and terrifying. She is not yet the ruler of Avernus. She is the angel who believed she could take the fight to evil itself and win.
The Hellriders charge through after her.
Then they all ride into Hell.
It is heroic.
It is also the beginning of the disaster.
A bright flash brings the party back to the dais, where Lulu and the ghost of Yael are waiting.
Now the truth is clearer.
Lulu gave up her memories and her magic. Yael gave up her life. Together, they protected the Sword of Zariel in the hope that it could one day give Zariel a chance at redemption.
But claiming the sword has a cost.
Whoever takes the sword must give up their life.
Not necessarily by dying, but by being changed so completely that the person they were before no longer exists in the same way.
Rendar tries to take it.
The sword does not want him.
Costa picks it up.
The sword accepts him.
He chooses to attune to it, knowing it will permanently transform him.
The change is immediate and enormous. Costa gains truesight. He learns Celestial. He gains resistance to necrotic and radiant damage. His Charisma becomes almost supernaturally powerful. Wings grow from his body. His personality begins to change with the sword’s influence.
It is a victory.
It is also a wound that will matter later.
Costa does not just gain a weapon. He becomes visibly holy. He becomes the kind of person strangers point at, worship, fear, misunderstand, or expect things from. The party has found the sword that might save Elturel, but Costa has paid for it with the ordinary life he had left.
The party levels up and rests in the cathedral.
Giovanni now has Magnificent Mansion, and it is fully decked out.
When Costa walks out of the cathedral, the Bleeding Citadel crumbles behind them.
The sword has been claimed.
Lulu remembers.
Yael’s work is finished.
The road now leads back to Elturel.
The exact mechanics of the Bleeding Citadel fights are chaotic in the notes. The recap preserves the major threats and outcomes but does not try to reconstruct every combat round.
The notes do not fully describe how Lulu was petrified before Giovanni restores her, only that he restores her and she remembers everything.
anti-heroes
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