Chapter 3: Avernus - Path of Demons - Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus

Chapter 3: Avernus - Path of Demons. Spawning Trees Diagram 3.2: Path of Demons Demons beget demons. Where their filth lands, they spawn ever more corruption. -The Cartographer When the characters arrive here, read or paraphrase the following boxed text to the players: Treelike growths cluster along the shoreline of a lake of bubbling, black goo. Each growth is formed from the same ichor as the lake and has writhing, membranous sacs budding from its limbs. Five bearded fiends heap coals around the trunk of one of the trees. As they hurl more coals onto the pyre, four of their number cruelly poke and tease the fifth member of their group. Lakes of demonic ichor appear where demons are slaughtered in great numbers. Malformed trees grow on their shorelines, their branches laden with fleshy sacs. These eventually flop to the ground and wetly break open, each one releasing a fully grown abyssal chicken. Abyssal chickens are carnivorous, temperamental, tasty bottom-feeders native to the Abyss. They beat their leathery wings to scare predators and to help them run faster, and they taste like fatty chicken. With your permission, a character who casts the find familiar spell can henceforth choose to conjure an abyssal chicken instead of a raven. Devilish Work Crew Zariel dispatched infernal cleanup crews to scour the lake shores for the trees and destroy them before they become thickets. When the characters arrive, they encounter a work crew of five Bearded Devil in the process of raising a pyre around a tree to incinerate it. Four of the devils tease the fifth, whose name is Krikendolt. A vrock savaged Krikendolt's skull during one of the many battles of the Blood War, leaving him with terrible scars and a brain injury that has turned his alignment to chaotic good. Krikendolt's comrades learned that he pities the abyssal chickens, and they are now goading him into slaughtering the chickens on pain of death. Secretly, Krikendolt keeps an abyssal chicken named Earwax in hi...