There’s a tradition among Dungeons & Dragons players—and honestly, RPGs at large—that if you get to a high enough level, you’re gonna kill a god. Unless, of course, you’re running a campaign for a table of obstinate players who want to kill the devil instead.
This officially-sanctioned D&D book from Arcanum Worlds lets you do just that. The book, which you can buy right now on the DM’s guild, arrived yesterday—and I’m kinda shocked that there’s not been much fanfare behind this thing considering the chops on display.
First off, they got in Arcanum Worlds’ James Olhen, a game designer with an absurd resume. Olhen was the Senior Creative Director at Bioware for 22 whole years, and worked on games like Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age: Origins, Neverwinter Nights, and Mass Effect. Adrian Tchaikovsky, who wrote the Hugo Award-winning Children of Time series, has joined forces with him to send you straight to hell.
It’s also for a good cause. All proceeds from the book will go to Extra Life, a fundraising program from the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals which focuses on providing hospitals with life-saving care and treatments.
The book itself is a meaty 286 pages long, providing an adventure for characters level 11-20 and a journey into the depths of the Nine Hells. If you send high-level players anywhere, you have to start assigning HP values, because they are going to try and fight the biggest bad you put in front of them. And you know what that means—stat blocks, stat blocks galore.
This means that Asmodeus, Lord of the Hells, finally has a numerical value. We can now theorycraft how to dunk on D&D’s very own Lucifer. It also comes packed with over 50 high-level monsters to fight and over 20 magical items, so it might be worth buying even if you aren’t going to throw your party into the hells wholesale.
I’m very much looking forward to diving into the book myself. I’ve never ran a high-level adventure, but the prospect of sending a group of adventurers on a Doom-style rampage through hell, knockin’ over the Archdukes like bowling pins on the way to kill fantasy Satan? Sign me up.