RPG Product Review: Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus Dice and Miscellany
With every new D&D adventure nowadays comes with a new dice set. This new one, for Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, is the best set yet, and should be a staple of your collection.
To begin with, the box is stunning. The cardboard is thick and sturdy. It’s a dark red, with the face of Bhaal on the cover, encircled by a metallic, holographic gold. Along the edges are multiple symbols and writing in the infernal script.
Once you open it up, you’ll find the inside is even better. There is a nice, black velvet lining on both the top and bottom of the box, creating two dice boxes for you to roll in. With the weight of the cardboard, they won’t move around on the table when you’re throwing dice into them. This is the most useful box they’ve put out so far for this reason alone.
The dice inside are a nice marbled red with gold inking. The numbers are serifed, and I love that they included two D20’s, four D6’s, along with a percentile and D10, D12, D8, and D4. Having the two D20’s is a no-brainer, so it was nice to see them include them here.
Also included is a fold-out map of Avernus, the same you’ll find in the Descent into Avernus book, but on a much smaller scale. This will work well to hand over to your players to use in their adventures into Hell.
On the opposite side is a demon and devil identifying a multitude of the combatants of the Blood War. Up top, the demons are all Yeenoghu’s minions, so they all have lupine hyena heads. It’s really cool to see how demons can be customized to match the demon lord they serve. Below, is the legion of devils, alongside a human for scale. It does a great job of showing you how large these hosts are.
The rest of the box is full of various cards. An intro from Volo to Hell, along with the infernal script is useful, because you can hand over the font card so players can translate texts during adventures. There are two further cards covering strange encounters and trinkets you may find.
The rest of the cards present the demons and devils from the identification page I spoke of above. Each card has the creature on one side, and a description by Volo on the back. This is great, because it doesn’t have the stats, so it’s very flavorful. One player could have these cards they were given by Volo himself to prepare them for the journey into Avernus, allowing them to be the one to explain what creatures the PCs are encountering.
This whole set is very useful, even if you don’t use any of the cards inside. The dice and fantastic box/dice tray are worth the price alone.
Wizards of the Coast sent a copy of the Dice and Miscellany to Dice Monkey for review.