Running The Great Hunt Without Losing Your Mind
The Great Hunt is a published D&D 5e adventure by Wizards of the Coast that drops your party onto the first layer of the Nine Hells, Avernus, with a simple prompt: kill the devil and take his skull. It sounds straightforward. It is not. I ran this as my first ever homebrew-assisted Avernus module and learned two things quickly. One, Avernus does not care about your character sheets. Two, the adventure text assumes a level of player ruthlessness that most table groups do not naturally possess.
Understanding The Great Hunt Before You Run It
At its core, the adventure asks players to navigate the blood war between devils and demons on Avernus while dealing with Malice, a bone knight serving a greater devildriver. The party is drawn into the conflict through a patron or circumstance that the DM fills in. The mechanical heart of the adventure is built around social encounters with devilish NPCs, combat skirmishes with low-to-mid tier fiends, and a final boss fight against Malice himself, who has a lair action table and summons that escalate based on remaining hit points. What most people miss is how heavily the adventure leans on improvisation. The printed content covers roughly six to eight hours of play. Most tables who follow it strictly finish in three. You need to pad it without making it feel padded, and that is where the actual work begins.
What You Need to Download or Acquire
The official release is available as a digital PDF through D&D Beyond or the Wizards website. If you are running this as a homebrew-style expansion, you may also want the Volo's Guide to Monsters for additional bestiary options and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes for Avernus-specific monster stats. The adventure itself references some homebrew elements that are not in the core books, so having those supplements on hand matters more than usual. For physical copies, it was originally released as part of the Stranger Things crossover material but has since been reprinted. Expect to pay between fifteen and twenty-five dollars depending on format.
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The Actual Method of Running It
Start by establishing why your players are on Avernus before the first session. The adventure gives you hooks, but they are thin. I found that tying it to a single NPC backstory was enough. One player's patron owed a debt to a devil. That was sufficient motivation to walk into hell and not question the logistics. If you spend more than twenty minutes explaining the cosmology, you have already lost them. During the social encounters, play the devils as genuinely charming. The adventure text sometimes makes them read like standard villains. They are not. They are bureaucrats with horns. A devil offering a favor in exchange for a future obligation is far more dangerous than one demanding it outright. This matters especially during the negotiation with the local devildriver, because the players will almost certainly try to bargain their way out of the main quest. Let them try. Record every promise they extract. Those promises will come due later in the adventure whether you intended them to or not. Combat encounters should feel oppressive but fair. Avernus terrain is difficult. The ground is cracked earth and exposed bone. Movement is halved in combat unless a character has a flying speed or a similar advantage. This changes engagement ranges dramatically. Ranged characters dominate. Melee characters suffer. I adjusted my encounter layouts to account for this by placing cover and elevation advantages for the enemy side, which made the fights feel appropriately brutal.
Common Pitfalls I Hit Running The Great Hunt
The biggest problem I encountered involved the encounter balancing for a party of four level 11 characters. The published encounter guidelines assumed a slightly smaller party and did not scale well when the party included a high-damage wizard or a multiclass paladin. My first playtest run ended with the party clearing the first major skirmish in two rounds with negligible damage taken. I had to rescale three separate encounters on the fly by adding extra elites or reducing the number of minions. Another issue is the moral ambiguity of the adventure's central conflict. Players who approach the adventure with a lawful good framework will struggle because there is no clean solution. Every faction on Avernus is corrupt. The adventure forces this point repeatedly, which works narratively but can cause tables to stall or demand rules lawyering sessions. I learned to preempt this by making it clear in session zero that Avernus does not reward virtue. It rewards survival and cleverness. There is also a pacing problem in the middle section where the adventure sends the party to track down information from multiple NPCs scattered across Avernus. The transition between locations can drag. I solved this by converting one of the information-gathering stops into a combat encounter with a pursuing devil patrol. It kept momentum moving and gave the players a reason to hurry without explicitly telling them to hurry.
The Final Boss and What Happens After
Malice is a bone knight with lair actions that trigger at the start of each round. His statistics are solid but not particularly innovative. The real challenge here is managing the battlefield, because Malice summons reinforcements that appear at the edges of the encounter map each round until a certain threshold of his hit points is reached. I recommend using a visible countdown tracker so players understand the escalating threat. If they do not know the fight gets harder as it goes on, they will burn their most powerful abilities too early and then face a full-strength boss with depleted resources. After Malice falls, the adventure branches based on what the players do with his skull. This is the moment where the session can either land or collapse depending on how much investment the players have in their characters' motivations at this point. If you have been tracking their personal hooks since session one, this ending will work. If you have not, you will have a group that feels like the adventure skipped the payoff.
When This Adventure Fails Completely
The Great Hunt does not work for parties that are below level 9. The encounter difficulty assumes a certain baseline of survivability, and dropping underleveled characters into Avernus will result in a TPK within the first three encounters. It also does not work for tables that prefer purely social or investigative play, because the adventure is combat-forward with social elements layered on top rather than the other way around. If your group wants to negotiate their way through every encounter, they will find very few doors that stay open. A viable alternative for those tables is to run Ghosts of Saltmarsh or Waterdeep Dragon Heist instead. Both provide stronger social frameworks and lower combat intensity while still being substantial adventures. The adventure itself runs about twenty pages of dense text with scattered encounter maps. It is concise to the point of being sparse, which means the DM has to do more preparation work than the adventure would suggest. Budget an extra two hours of prep time beyond what the book implies, and you will be fine.
