This is definitely a valuable product. With nearly 300 pages of fiendish evil throughout its pages it serves as the most thorough exploration of the full nine Hells in Fifth edition. The adventure hooks are well-crafted and implemented in a way to drive the characters in the right direction, but give them lots of freedom along the way. As someone who was looking for an adventure like this, I absolutely love how well put together the whole thing is, and look forward to running my own version of it with some players in the future.
I felt the need to take it down to four stars for a few reasons I'll elaborate on, shortly, but I will say I highly reccommend this product to anyone who wants to run a deep dive into the Nine Hells.
Downsides/Weaknesses:
The art style of the archdevils. I'm just not really a fan of most of them. They look like rendered 3d models, and their textures seem off. They also look very little like previous official art for the characters, and do not feel as enticing as many are described as being. They also look a bit more like Sci-Fi aliens than fiends to me. It may be something that you like or doesn't bother you, so YMMV on the topic, and I'm just a sucker for different art styles than this one. The art for the monsters in Appendix B is much closer to what I would expect and would have preferred for the rest of the content. The difference in style of artists is just a significant mark for me.
Statblocks. Are mostly very good. I'll agree with another reviewer that some abilities, like all language proficiency should be more broadly applied to the archdevils, but overall they are well-crafted and should lead to really interesting encounters. I do think that all of them will see some level of adjustment in my own play, but this is commonly necessary for any high level campaign to do a little tweaking here and there. It's a little unfortunate that the campaign also requires multiple additional resources to provide the statblocks for all of the included encounters, so that's something that bugs me just a bit too, but it's entirely understandable. It is one of the benefits of being an officially licensed product that it's not restricted to using the SRD or unique content, but it does make this book a little more complicated to use. (Updated document fixed one of the mistakes in a statblock for the Hellcats mentioned in an earlier review.)
Partially Improved by recent update. Maps and artwork: Overall the scene-setting pieces and the cartography are interesting and useful. I would really like to see all of the planar maps, and really almost all of the images extracted for better VTT integration. The player handouts and other large spreads especially would be far easier to use at the table (virtually or in person) as images in addition to their place within the text. The whole adventure could also use some additional basic battlemaps for areas within the planes that are likely to arise. There are several thoroughly described areas (and several less thoroughly detailed ones) that involve potential combat encounters, and very few of them have anything close to resembling an appropriate battle map for them. This is something I would have truly liked to see, even if many of the encounters are flexible as to where they might occur. It would have been great to see possible lair/palace maps for the archfiends as well, but that's not entirely within the scope of the adventure. But even many adventure locations could have really benefitted from having a map to put them in. Those maps that do exist are decent, and it would have been nice to see more. Note: A recent update added a handful of images for battle maps as a seperate download. I would love to see this pack improved on with an inclusion of more of the artwork as individual files as well. It is a real boon to VTT play in particular, but also just generally. (Side note, if a FoundryVTT or Roll20 module for this ever gets created, I would absolutely snap it up, especially if it could be discounted for PDF owners and/or it contains additional maps and implemented artwork.)
Edit: They recently released additional battlemaps which really help fill things out a bit more on that side of things. I will still stand by my initial four-star rating for now, but if we get another update of similar scope and a touchup, then I can unreservedly bump that up to 5 stars.
Overall, these things were enough for me to knock it down from a 5 star product, but I absolutely love what they've created here and hope to see more items like this in the future.
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