How I Intend to Pillage Descent into Avernus

It's only just been announced, so obviously I don't have a copy of D&D's next big adventure book to look through, but already there are a few reasons I'm excited for it.

First off: it's the first adventure to take place in the Outer Planes. Yes, it's theoretically linked to Baldur's Gate, but I suspect the time you actually spend in the city will be brief. Of the published adventures, barring brief forays into various demiplanes and such, the only one I think truly takes place not in the Forgotten Realms is Curse of Strahd, which is in the Demiplanes of Dread and thus the Shadowfell.

But while the Shadowfell and specifically the Ravneloft setting within it are super cool with their gothic horror vibe, taking things to the Outer Planes will give us a chance for truly surreal high fantasy - not to mention that the vibe they're going for appears to be very strongly the kind of over-the-top stuff you'd see in a Heavy Metal cartoon.

Furthermore, it looks like it will be a kind of D&D equivalent of an open world complete with Infernal Warmachines that are inspired primarily by the Mad Max movies (especially Fury Road, which - confession - is actually the only one I've seen...) Basically, imagine riding the War Rig while a bunch of demons and/or devils are chasing you down, plus it's all in Hell.

That's pretty metal, right?

So, what to take?

Well, there's a region of my homebrew world that is actually largely inspired by Mad Max as well. Essentially, the world is a post-apocalyptic one, but it's been 20,000 years since the calamity that ended the old, technologically advanced (think Star Trek levels but for magical reasons they were never able to go into space) civilization. Most of the world has managed to rebuild and recover, and it got to a standard medieval fantasy level, where it stayed until about 20 yeas ago, when people started discovering a lot of relics from this old civilization and now they're reverse engineering things and undergoing an incredibly rapid industrial revolution.

But this one region, called Parthalia (after the lost civilization) has been kept largely unsettled, despite the fact that, unlike the rest of the world, the vestiges of this lost civilization were not cleared away during the post-apocalyptic "Reign of Madness." The secret reason for this (spoiler alert for any of my players) is that there's a group of angels there who have kept people away since "Deluge." But a few scrappy people have managed to eke out a life there, seeking to make their fortunes plundering the ruins, but of course also having to deal with the anarchy that exists there.

Now, this isn't my Lawful Evil plane or anything. But I think that I'll be able to steal the vehicle system and just re-skin it. Instead of Infernal Warmachines, I can just make them vehicles built out of post-apocalyptic scrap. Instead of fueling it with Demon Blood, we could have some ancient substances traded around the region.

Avernus will also apparently have a number of warlords who are each vying for power while the Blood War rages around them. That might be good inspiration for the kinds of characters one would find in Parthalia.

I'm eager to see more about this. While I'd have liked to see a sourcebook in the vein of Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes or Xanathar's Guide to Everything announced, I'm really eager to see what we might get in this really crazy-looking adventure.