A Franchise Split Between Two Mediums
In September 2019, Wizards of the Coast released Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, a tabletop adventure promising to take Dungeons & Dragons players into the first layer of the Nine Hells. Just three months later, Larian Studios announced Baldur’s Gate 3 at The Game Awards, a video game sharing the same city and overlapping thematic territory. The coincidence was not entirely accidental. Both products emerged from Wizards of the Coast’s broader strategy to revitalize the Baldur’s Gate brand. However, the near-simultaneous development of a major video game and a tabletop campaign sharing critical setting elements created tensions that threatened to derail the tabletop adventure before it reached gaming tables.
The Narrative Collision Course
Descent into Avernus begins in the city of Baldur’s Gate, which is being overrun by refugees from the nearby city of Elturel. As The Alexandrian’s review notes, the adventure has very little to do with Baldur’s Gate itself, despite bearing its name. The city serves primarily as a launching point before players descend into Avernus to rescue Elturel from the devil Zariel.
This structural weakness became more acute when Baldur’s Gate 3 entered development. Larian’s game positioned Baldur’s Gate as itscentral hub and narrative focal point, promising players a deeply immersive experience in the city. For Dungeon Masters running Descent into Avernus, the comparison was brutal. The tabletop adventure rushed players out of the city and into hellish combat encounters, while the video game would let players truly inhabit the city’s streets and politics.
As DMDavid’s analysis observed, the adventure’s core hook, that your heroes get to adventure in Hell, required creative work to fix the weak connections between the Baldur’s Gate prologue and the Avernus campaign. Those weak connections became glaring gaps when a competing product promised to explore the city in far greater depth.
The Overshadowing Problem
Baldur’s Gate 3 entered early access in October 2020, just over a year after Descent into Avernus launched. The video game immediately attracted massive attention, drawing players into the Forgotten Realms setting through Larian’s cinematic storytelling. The tabletop adventure, by contrast, struggled with mixed community reception.
On Reddit’s Descent into Avernus community, players praised the infernal machine combat as a fun way to handle random encounters once the party acquires their own vehicle. However, the same discussions repeatedly highlighted structural problems: a rushed first chapter, disjointed narrative transitions, and a lack of meaningful player agency in key plot moments.
The video game’s success amplified these criticisms. When Baldur’s Gate 3 offered players expansive choice and consequence, the linear design of the tabletop adventure felt increasingly dated. Dungeon Masters reported spending significant time incorporating player backstories and reworking the campaign’s opening to match the narrative depth players expected after experiencing Larian’s approach.
The Canonical Timing Trap
The chronological relationship between the two products created additional complications. Descent into Avernus is set in 1494 DR, while Baldur’s Gate 3 takes place in 1492 DR by most estimates, placing the video game’s events before the tabletop adventure. This meant that players experiencing Baldur’s Gate 3 first would encounter a city that, in the tabletop timeline, is about to be thrown into chaos by the events of Descent into Avernus.
For Dungeon Masters, this created a continuity headache. Players familiar with the video game expected certain factions and power structures to exist in the tabletop adventure, but Descent into Avernus barely engaged with the city’s internal politics. The consequences of player actions in Chapter 1, such as potentially destroying multiple homes and killing innocent people by spawning a pyramid in central Baldur’s Gate, felt disconnected from the lived-in world Larian was constructing.
Salvaging the Avernus Campaign
Faced with these challenges, the D&D community took matters into its own hands. Dungeon Masters began extensive rewrites of the adventure’s early chapters, expanding the Baldur’s Gate section to give the city the weight it deserved. Some started their campaigns near Elturel, letting players witness the Companion go black and the city’s destruction firsthand, as described in community discussions about incorporating backstories.
Others leaned into the Avernus setting itself, using the infernal war machine mechanics as the campaign’s primary selling point. The vehicular combat system, which allows parties to customize and pilot hellish machines across the wasteland of Avernus, offers a gameplay experience that Baldur’s Gate 3 cannot replicate. This mechanical distinction became the tabletop adventure’s strongest defense against obsolescence.
When total party kills occur, creative Dungeon Masters have even used the setting’s infernal logic to continue the story. As one GiantITP forum discussion detailed, devils can kick defeated parties back to Baldur’s Gate with new obligations, turning failure into narrative fuel rather than a campaign ending.
Two Hells, Different Audiences
The near-derailment of Descent into Avernus ultimately reveals a broader challenge for cross-media franchises. When two products share a setting but differ dramatically in scope, budget, and medium, the weaker product risks absorption into the stronger one’s shadow. Descent into Avernus survived because its core premise, a vehicular hell-ride through the first layer of the Nine Hells, offers something Baldur’s Gate 3 does not. The tabletop adventure found its footing not by competing with Larian’s vision of Baldur’s Gate, but by abandoning the city entirely and descending into the chaos that only a Dungeon Master can conjure at a table surrounded by friends.
