Jordan Peacock

Jim comes prepared, but will match your energy. If you have players that are willing to step up and really engage, he is more than willing to respond in kind. My experience with him at the helm of Legend of the Five Rings 5th edition has been wonderful. Recommended, particularly for lore-rich settings.

I have been running this module for the last ten months in my home game. It's incredibly evocative in tone, but the details are quite the mess, and extremely hostile to unwary GMs. That said, I've been running it successfully, largely by doing several things: 1. Replaced key NPCs with player characters. I gave several archetypes to the players and encouraged but did not require they be selected. As a result we have a firbolg Hellrider PC who replaces Reya Mantlemorn, and we have a Hollyphant PC who replaces Lulu. 2a. Worked with the players to create motivations: multiple times in the book the GM is encouraged to coerce, sometimes forcibly, sometimes at threat of PC death, to get PCs to "follow the story". I'm sorry, but that's bulls---. Simply having a conversation about *why* a character might care about the fate of X does wonders for smoothing out how to move things along. 2b. Related to above, but this is just a more general GM tip: you don't need the entire party to share identical goals! Just non-contradictory ones, or ones that aren't contradictory quite yet (if you're encouraging PvP). 3. Take your time in Baldur's Gate: I know GMs who literally skip everything in the early chapters and start in Avernus, and that's fine, but we took our time in Baldur's Gate and it really paid off. 4. Supplement and fix: I can't recommend Justin Alexander's "Remixing Avernus" blog series highly enough; it's essentially an entire book fixing the campaign as it was published. You don't need to take everything (or anything) that Alexander provides, but you almost certainly need to respond to the concerns he's addressing. He also links to multiple other third party sources to flesh out different parts of the campaign if you want to focus more or less on them. 5. This is probably the most idiosyncratic to me, but I've been running this using the new Daggerheart system instead of D&D, and while that has added a little work to me in the way of stat block conversions and the like, overall it's been a great decision and I have no regrets on that.

DeAngelo made room for the emergent story, even when that ended up shortcutting several planned scenes. Very much enjoyed learning Marvel Multiverse RPG with him.