# Dramatis Personae — Descent into Avernus *A chronicler's index of the souls met between Elturel's fall and the long descent that follows.* > [!quote] Volothamp Geddarm — Chronicler in Residence > A young chronicle, this one. The ink is still wet on the first chapter, and already the cast has begun to outpace my notebook. > > What follows is my best accounting of the people the heroes have met — friends made, enemies earned, and a great many whose true measure has not yet shown itself. The conspiracy at the heart of this tale is one I do not yet fully understand. I am told that is the *point* of a conspiracy, and so I will not apologise for the gaps. They will close, in time, with blood. > > The holy city of [[Elturel]] is in [[Avernus]]. There is a clock counting down. And five heroes — plus one rather small celestial elephant — are the only ones I trust to read it. > > — *V.G.* --- ## The Heroes > [!info] How They Came Together > An unlikely company assembled in the war room of the [[High Hall]] on the morning [[Elturel]] fell, sent into the [[Woods of Sharp Teeth]] to rescue a druid's stolen circle. They saved a family of pie-bakers and put down a would-be Death Knight. They rode home to find no home left to ride to. They have been catching up ever since. - **[[Cassian]]** — Bard and noble of the [[Lords' Alliance]], with [[Waterdeep]] polish and a smile he can pitch to any room. Carries an inconvenient connection to the [[Vanthampur]] family that even *he* did not remember until the moment it mattered. - **[[Char]]** — Rogue and scholar; a former bounty hunter with a quietly catalogued mind. The party's strategist. Unseen Servants do half his thieving and *Tasha's Hideous Laughter* has saved his life twice. - **[[Docktor]]** — Cleric of [[Selûne]], sworn to the [[Hellriders]]' codes. Cynical about his own oath until the [[Elfsong Tavern]]'s ghost sang it back to him. The vision he saw afterward changed something in him that has not yet finished changing. - **[[Rick]]** — Barbarian and native son of [[Baldur's Gate]]. Heir, after a fashion, to the finest bakery in the [[Lower City]]. Executed Sir [[Tarquin Belmont]] with his own hands. Has not been the same since [[Jorik Thornwick]] died on his watch. - **[[Rowan]]** — Goliath of the [[Emerald Enclave]]. Befriends animals, drinks more than is strictly wise, and has been knocked unconscious in defence of his friends with what I am told is becoming a habit. ### Inner Circle - **[[Lulu]]** — A hollyphant. A small, flying, golden elephant whose trumpet banishes devils and whose celestial nature has, in the space of a few tenday, made her a folk hero in the worst neighbourhoods of [[Baldur's Gate]]. She has lost most of her memories. She is recovering them in pieces — and the pieces are bad. [[Docktor]] saw her in his vision, pulling him through a portal out of [[Avernus]]. [[Lulu]] herself does not remember doing it. - **[[Reya Mantlemorn]]** — A [[Hellriders|Hellrider]] of barely eighteen winters, raised in [[Hilde Kaas|Hilde Kaas']] shadow, sworn to the [[Creed Resolute]] on the day she could first hold a sword. She watched [[Elturel]] fall from outside its walls. The heroes saw her break, on her knees, on the road. She has been the steady spine of the refugee camp at [[The Tumbledown]] ever since. Whether the Church she swore to still deserves her oath is a question she has not yet asked out loud. --- ## The Refugees of Elturel > [!info] Forty Thousand Souls > They came down the [[Chionthar]] road in a slow grey tide — those who were outside the city when it fell, those who arrived too late, those whose families have been swallowed whole. [[Baldur's Gate]] did not welcome them. The heroes have been their shield since [[Anga Vled]]. - **[[Mira Thornwick]]** — A widow twice over now. Her husband [[Corwin Thornwick|Corwin]] was a [[Hellriders|Hellrider]] in [[Elturel]] when it fell. Her son [[Jorik Thornwick|Jorik]] was murdered on the road. She trusts [[Lulu]] more than she trusts any mortal alive, and she still believes [[Corwin]] can be saved. - **The [[Stoutfoot]] family** — [[Dorbin Stoutfoot|Dorbin]], [[Merrilee Stoutfoot|Merrilee]], [[Pip Stoutfoot|Pip]], [[Daisy Stoutfoot|Daisy]], and [[Bobbin Stoutfoot|Bobbin]]. Saved from a [[Bane]]-cultist's altar in the [[Woods of Sharp Teeth]] in the heroes' first hour together. They owe the party more pies than the [[Lower City]] can hold. [[Daisy Stoutfoot|Daisy]], the chronicler is told quietly, sees things she should not. - **[[Naeris Talandar]]** — Elf druid, sole survivor of the Circle of Deep Roots, massacred by [[Dead Three]] cultists in the [[Woods of Sharp Teeth]]. Travels with the refugee column now — quiet, broken, the last green thing left of his family. - **[[Marcus Fairholm]]** — A grizzled [[Hellriders|Hellrider]] sergeant who held the refugee column together on the long road south. Murdered in [[Insight Park]]. His killers cut [[Dead Three]] sigils into his skin. He was not the first. --- ## Elturel — The City That Fell > [!info] What We Know > The [[Companion]] flickered. The earth opened. Chains thick as ancient trees pulled the holy city through a wound in reality, and the wound closed, and there was a crater where forty thousand souls had been. The party has since had reason to suspect that none of this was accidental. The [[Cult of Zariel]] had been inside the [[Hellriders]] for years. The High Observer was not in his city the morning his city died. *The day that was promised has arrived,* read the orders that fell from a dead knight's pocket. That is the thread the heroes have been pulling at ever since. - **[[Thavius Kreeg]]** — High Observer of [[Elturel]], priest of [[Torm]], and conspicuously absent the morning the [[Companion]] failed. He took the oath of every [[Hellriders|Hellrider]] he ever blessed — including [[Reya Mantlemorn]]'s — with eyes that lingered on the blood. The chronicler does not yet know where he went. He has his suspicions. - **Sir [[Aetan Morrow]]** — The hand that wrote the orders. The name that came out of [[Tarquin Belmont]]'s pocket. Sent his man to kill descendants of the [[Creed Resolute]] on the morning of the fall, knowing exactly what was coming. Still walking free, last anyone heard, somewhere in [[Baldur's Gate]] or beyond. - **[[Hilde Kaas]]** — Senior [[Hellriders|Hellrider]] who sent the heroes into the [[Woods of Sharp Teeth]] in the first place. She was in the [[High Hall]] when the chains came. The party has not heard whether she lives. The chronicler chooses to hope. - **[[Pherria Jynks]]** — An aide to [[Thavius Kreeg|Kreeg]] who covered for his absence on the morning of the fall. Was she in on it or merely fidgeting at her duty? The chronicler has not yet decided which is more damning. - **[[Jace Farrow]]** — A priest of the [[Order of the Companion]], and the only one of them who saw something coming. He sent [[Char]] and [[Rick]] a [[Paper Bird]] before dawn — *the summit is not what it seems* — and then fled with his family toward [[Baldur's Gate]]. He has not been seen since. ### The Legend of the Hellriders - **[[Olanthius]]**, **[[Yael]]**, and **the devil prince [[Nothius]]** — Names from the song every [[Elturel|Elturian]] child knows. The High Rider, his beloved, and the fiend they pursued into [[Nine Hells]] itself. The story goes that [[Olanthius]] and [[Yael]] sacrificed themselves so the riders could escape, and that holy water sprang where they fell. The chronicler has been a chronicler long enough to know that *the story goes* is rarely the same thing as *the story is.* --- ## The Cult of Zariel > [!warning] What the Heroes Have Confirmed > The [[Cult of Zariel]] is inside the [[Hellriders]]. They wear the [[Creed Resolute]] like a borrowed coat. When their soldiers die, they do not go to whatever heaven their families pray for — they go to [[Avernus]], to be remade as devils in the Archduchess's legions. [[Tarquin Belmont]] burned with infernal flame on the road. *I'll see you again,* he promised, and the chronicler is inclined to believe him. - **Sir [[Tarquin Belmont]]** — A [[Hellriders|Hellrider]] of thirty years' service, broken by demons at Millhaven in his youth and reforged in something colder. Hunted the descendants of the [[Creed Resolute]] on [[Aetan Morrow]]'s orders. Murdered [[Jorik Thornwick]]. Killed by [[Rick]]'s fists. Is, at the time of this writing, a devil in the legions of [[Zariel]] — and he wants [[Rick]] to know it. - **The unnamed priestess** — Travelled with [[Tarquin Belmont|Tarquin]]. Cast Spirit Guardians that were not spirits at all but tiny chittering infernals. The mask of the holy cleric, slipped. The chronicler regrets that she died before he could put a name to her. - **The six knights** — [[Gareth]], [[Willem]], [[Matthias]], and three others whose names did not survive the firelight. Tarquin's men. None of them did either. ### The Powers Behind Them - **[[Zariel]]** — Archduchess of [[Avernus]]. Fallen angel. Architect, it seems, of [[Elturel]]'s fate. The chronicler has it on what he chooses to call good authority that she was *not always* what she has become — a hollyphant remembers her as a friend, a knight named [[Corwin Thornwick|Corwin]] died at her blade in [[Docktor]]'s vision, and the grief in her voice as she watched the [[Hellriders]] flee back through the portal sounded, the chronicler is told, like nothing a devil should be able to feel. That is a thread someone is going to need to pull. --- ## Baldur's Gate — Friends in a Faithless City > [!info] The Compromised City > A city of one hundred and twenty-five thousand, ruled by four dukes and the [[Flaming Fist]] and the [[Guild]] in roughly that order, depending on the week. Its Grand Duke is in [[Avernus]]. Its remaining Council is half-rotten and half-asleep. The refugees from [[Elturel]] are not welcome at any of its gates. There are still good people in it. There are not many. - **Duke [[Dillard Portyr]]** — The one honest man on the [[Council of Four]]. Cautious, conflict-averse, and the only Duke the chronicler has yet seen made genuinely angry by what [[Thalamra Vanthampur|Thalamra]] is doing. Has thrown his quiet weight behind the heroes — and behind a coalition called the **Baldurian Benevolent Business Association**, run through his man **[[Oswin]]** and [[The Lucky Lumpkin]]'s bakers, to keep the refugees fed. - **[[Ludo Vance]]** — Card sharp at the [[Elfsong Tavern]] and [[The Guild]]'s discreet voice in Duke [[Dillard Portyr|Portyr]]'s ear. Not an ally. Not an enemy. He and [[Nine-Fingers Keene]]'s people would also prefer that [[Thalamra Vanthampur]] not consolidate the [[Flaming Fist]] under her thumb, and shared interest is its own currency. ### The Lucky Lumpkin - **Paul and Robin** — [[Rick]]'s parents. Bakers. Conspiracy theorists, after their fashion. They read the [[Baldur's Mouth]] and form opinions accordingly, but Robin makes the finest lumpkin in three districts and Paul was, against his own politics, charmed by Duke [[Dillard Portyr|Portyr]]. The kitchen at the [[Lucky Lumpkin]] is now a quiet front of the war. ### The Elfsong Tavern - **Alan Alyth** — Bartender. Polishes glasses, hears everything, believes none of it. His ghost sang to [[Docktor]] and now he watches [[Docktor]] the way a man watches weather. - **Klank and Skoona** — An animated suit of armour and a half-ogre, respectively, who keep the door at the [[Elfsong Tavern]]. Skoona is reasonably certain she has beaten [[Rick]] at arm-wrestling. She has. - **The Singing Ghost** — A translucent elven woman who has haunted the [[Elfsong Tavern]] for longer than any patron's memory. Until the night she fixed her eyes on [[Docktor]] and sang to him the [[Creed Resolute]] itself, she had never sung to anyone in particular. The regulars are still discussing it. - **The [[Cheese Rat]]** — A giant rat. Speaks Common and Elvish. Buys cheese for two or three gold pieces a piece. The chronicler will not pretend to explain this. He will simply note that the [[Cheese Rat]] is now part of the story, and that [[Rick]] is, at the time of writing, planning an empire. ### Other Faces in the Lower City - **[[Eldeth Copperkettle]]** — Bartender at [[The Blushing Mermaid]]. Was not charmed by [[Cassian]]. Was eventually moved by coin. Believes [[Joram Torvun]] is the sort of man whose acquaintances end up dead. - **[[Senna]]** — A flower-seller, [[Rick]]'s childhood friend. Made to crawl on [[Nysene Eomane]]'s ballroom floor in front of nobles, and answered humiliating questions under the bite of a [[Zone of Truth]]. Has since given testimony to the [[Baldur's Mouth]] naming [[Cassian]] as a tormentor. The truth and the printed truth are not the same thing here, and someone made sure they would not be. --- ## The Vanthampur Conspiracy > [!info] What the Heroes Have Pieced Together > [[Thalamra Vanthampur]] sent the heroes into a [[Succubus|succubus]]-laid trap on their first night in her city. Her tailors were fiends. Her household has assassins on retainer. Her newspaper savages refugees and her quieter newspaper says nothing at all. She is moving to absorb the [[Flaming Fist]] in [[Ulder Ravengard]]'s absence and become, if the chronicler reads the wind right, the next Grand Duke of [[Baldur's Gate]]. What she *serves* beneath that ambition is something the heroes do not yet have written down on paper. The chronicler suggests they obtain such paper soon. - **Duke [[Thalamra Vanthampur]]** — Barrel-chested, sixty, and built from the bottom up by decades of clever cruelty. Born poor, climbed the city's sewers (literally) into power, and now sits on the [[Council of Four]] with hands in every dark thing the chronicler can name. Tried to have the heroes killed at [[Eomane House]]. Will try again. - **[[Amrik Vanthampur]]** — Her favoured son. Charming in the way devils are charming. Runs a moneylending operation out of the [[Low Lantern]] in the harbour, squeezing desperate people with an expression he has practised in a mirror. The heroes have not yet met him face to face. They are coming. - **[[Fendrick Gray]]** — The Vanthampur butler. Decrepit. Watches doors with the patience of a man who has seen worse than the people on the other side. - **[[Hector Briggs]]** — Former [[Flaming Fist]], now Vanthampur muscle. Escorted the refugees to [[The Tumbledown]]. His Duke's hand on the throat of every soul there. ### The Paltara Shop - **[[Veldan Paltara|Veldan]] and [[Viresse Paltara|Viresse Paltara]]** — The most beautiful tailors in the [[Upper City]] until they were not tailors at all. [[Succubus|Succubi]] in [[Thalamra Vanthampur]]'s service, running blackmail through their fittings. [[Lulu]] chased [[Veldan Paltara|Veldan]] across the rooftops and banished him with bottles and chairs and a tavern full of believers. [[Viresse Paltara|Viresse]] escaped a bathhouse corridor at the last possible moment and is, the chronicler regrets to report, still extant. - **The unnamed imp** — Last seen wearing a hat and minding the abandoned shop on someone else's behalf. The chronicler hopes someone has thought to ask whose. ### The Eomane Court - **[[Nysene Eomane]]** — Patriar of the [[Upper City]], hostess of monstrous parties, and now in possession of a debt the heroes owe her. She kept commoners on leashes for an evening's entertainment and was annoyed chiefly at the inconvenience when the heroes did not die on her marble. *The little elephant is clever,* she said of [[Lulu]]. *Perhaps she should be the leader.* The chronicler advises everyone keep careful note of when she comes to collect. --- ## The Dead Three Beneath the Bathhouse > [!warning] What the Heroes Found in the Dark > Beneath the [[Frolicking Nymph]] bathhouse, in flooded limestone tunnels that should not exist beneath any respectable establishment, the heroes found three doors carved with the symbols of [[Bane]], [[Bhaal]], and [[Myrkul]]. The cult of the [[Dead Three]] has been hunting [[Hellriders|Hellrider]] descendants for [[Thalamra Vanthampur]] — body by body, dumped in [[Insight Park]] — and they answer, somewhere up the chain, to an unnamed *Agent* and an unnamed *Emissary*. The chronicler has names for some of them now. He suspects he will have names for the rest before this is done. - **[[Vaaz]]** — Death's Head of [[Bhaal]]. Signs his letters with the title of a man who has earned it. The chronicler has not seen him. The chronicler knows he is somewhere beneath the bathhouse, or above it, and that he wants the bodies *spread.* - **[[Remigio]]** — Master of Souls in service to [[Bhaal]]. Runs the murder operation out of the beached pirate ship called the [[Poisoned Poseidon]], converted into a tannery. The smell, the chronicler is told, is part of the disguise. *Every death, an offering. Every fear, a prayer.* - **[[Joram Torvun]]** — [[Remigio]]'s street eye. Took coin to identify [[Hellriders|Hellrider]] descendants among the refugees. Saw [[Char]] mark a chalk sign at the docks badly enough that the whole trap turned around. Still alive, last anyone knew, and still afraid of his Master. - **[[Tam]]** — A boy the heroes turned, briefly, into a witness. Took [[Joram Torvun|Joram]]'s coin for a job he did not understand. Released into the refugee tide with his life and a warning he had better keep. - **[[Flennis]]** — Master of Souls in service to [[Myrkul]]. Ran a necromancer's morgue beneath the bathhouse and a swarm of skeletal rats around her boots. Died there, on a slab she had used for other people's work, before she could throw the [[Fireball]] that would have ended the heroes and most of the dungeon. - **[[Yignath]]** — Iron Consul of [[Bane]]. Carved infernal text into a prisoner's skin in the name of [[Zariel]]. Died sloppily in flooded water, which is no way for a Consul to go. - **[[Kazzira]]** — Fist of [[Bane]]. Died beside her Consul. ### Embarrassments - **[[Harren Coldwell]]** — Dwarf merchant lord of the [[Upper City]]. Discovered, mid-bath, that [[Char]] knew a thing about his son which [[Char]] should not have known. Now finds himself owing apologies to [[Thalamra Vanthampur]] that he had not planned to offer. The chronicler is uncertain whether this counts as victory or as the kind of debt you collect on later. --- ## The Powers Above the Page > [!info] Whose Hand Moves the Board > The chronicler is unwilling to pretend he understands the shape of the conspiracy in full. He understands fragments. He understands that [[Zariel]] sits at the centre of one map, that [[Bhaal]] and [[Bane]] and [[Myrkul]] are bleeding the city for reasons of their own, and that something older than any of them may yet show its hand. He will say this much: the prophecy [[Lulu]] read on a wax tablet beneath a [[Bhaal]] altar named [[Elturel]] conquered, the Sun blackened, conflict coming to [[Waterdeep]] and [[Athkatla]] and [[Iriaebor]], and four souls with four fates. Four. He does not yet know whose. - **[[Zariel]]** — Archduchess of [[Avernus]]. Pulled a city through the floor of reality. Remembers [[Corwin Thornwick|Corwin]]. Remembers, perhaps, [[Lulu]]. Holds the souls of the [[Creed Resolute]]'s oath-takers in her hand. - **[[Bhaal]]** — Lord of Murder. His prayer is the one [[Remigio]] dismisses his men with. - **[[Bane]]** — Lord of Tyranny. Whose Iron Consul tried to raise a Death Knight in the [[Woods of Sharp Teeth]] in the heroes' first hour. - **[[Myrkul]]** — Lord of Bones. Whose Master of Souls kept a morgue beneath a bathhouse and called the bodies *work.* - **[[Yeenoghu]]** — Demon Lord of gnolls. [[Lulu]] saw him in a vision on the road, leading demons across a burning battlefield. The chronicler suspects this was a memory, not a warning. He may be wrong. --- ## In Memoriam - **[[Jorik Thornwick]]** — Sixteen years old. Wanted to be a [[Hellriders|Hellrider]] like his father. Throat slit on the road by [[Tarquin Belmont]] and his murder staged as a gnoll's. His killer is in [[Avernus]] now. His mother is still on the road. - **[[Corwin Thornwick]]** — [[Hellriders|Hellrider]]. [[Mira Thornwick|Mira]]'s husband. Cut down by [[Zariel]]'s blade in the vision [[Docktor]] could not look away from. Whether his soul has any chance of release, the chronicler cannot say. - **[[Marcus Fairholm]]** — Sergeant of the [[Hellriders]]. Held the column together. Killed in [[Insight Park]] and carved with [[Dead Three]] sigils. Was not the first. - **[[Rimple Badgerburrow]]** — Gnome militiaman of [[Anga Vled]]. Killed by an arrow mid-conversation with [[Rick]] on the night the bandits came. The chronicler is told he had been making his point with some indignation. - **[[Naja Bellandi]]** — Long dead. The High Watcher whose final prayer fifty years ago birthed the [[Companion]] and saved [[Elturel]] from a vampire's court. The chronicler raises his glass to her memory, and notes — only in passing — that the [[Companion]] she summoned is the thing that pulled her city into Hell. Prayers, the chronicler has come to think, should be read carefully before they are spoken. --- > [!quote] V.G. > Eleven sessions. A holy city in chains. A duke with a knife in every pocket. Two of the [[Dead Three]]'s captains in the ground and a third still writing letters from somewhere I have not found. > > This list will grow. Some of it will grow shorter. > > Pour me a drink. I'll keep writing.