Just in time for the Hell's Rebels and Hell's Vengeance Adventure Paths, Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Hell Unleashed hits later this month. For this entry into the Unleashed series, Jerome Virnich and I broadened the book's focus to encompass more than just dragons, just undead, or just any one creature type. Instead, we investigate a spectrum of Hell's servants, be they immortal fiends, damned mortals, or more terrible things in-between. Also expect a few other nasty tricks you've never seen in an Unleashed book before.
So you're as prepared as you can be for the coming blasphemy, here are 10 infernal topics in Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Hell Unleashed that your party paladin doesn't want you to read.
- Roads to Hell: Before you can face the horrors of Hell you have to get there. Learn more about gates, spells, ferrymen, and talismans that provide direct routes to Hell—or that bring it to you!
- Manifestations: Learn how to conjure forth manifestations, new haunt-like dangers that allow divinities—both fair and foul—to exert their wills upon the mortal plane. Along with these new rules you'll find examples of foul miracles for all of Hell's archdevils, and more.
- The Book of the Damned: Learn more than ever before about Golarion's most infamous tome, The Book of the Damned, including its history, its lingering masters, how to conduct research within the book, and the god-like being that guards its secrets.
- The Cult of Lies: Hell has many allies in the mortal world. In once such case, a cult of Asmodeus on the cusp of breaching the border between the mortal world and Hell. This elaborate encounter features customizations to make it a threat for a wide range of play, making it an appropriate climax to either an adventure or an entire campaign.
- Exorcism: Fiends sometimes wear the fairest of faces, and their disguises aren't always illusions. Can you defeat a zebub devil? What if that disgusting devil is firmly rooted inside the body of a 12-year-old?
- Everything has its Price: Whether you're striking a deal with a contract devil or your trading artifacts in the legendary Market of Breaths, everything has a price. Yet Hell rarely accepts currency as mundane as gold. What would you trade for power, immortality, or a chapter from the Chronicle of the Righteous? Once you've decided you're buying, it's just a matter of finding who's selling.
- Living Blasphemies: Not all of Hell's denizens are devils. Asuras, immortal beings with grudges against the gods, also strike from Hell's depths against pious mortals. The Flowering Jasmine Monastery has fallen to one such living-heresy. Can you, and your faith, survive what that holy place has become?
- Test of the Hellknights: Before any armiger can call herself a Hellknight, she must survive a lethal test: defeat a devil in single combat. Learn more about the Hellknights' most infamous rite of passage, with details on its strictures, testing grounds, and devils to confront would-be Hellknights of all levels.
- The Gate to Dis: The passage between Hell's first layer, the wasteland of Avernus, and its second, the metropolis of Dis, is one of the most traveled routes in all the planes. The Forked Pyre guards that passage, twin spires flanking an endless volcanic cascade. Infernal Duke Furcas oversees the orderly passage of the damned through his realm to the torments beyond. Learn more about one of Hell's most notorious warlords, his eon-old fortress, traits for all infernal dukes, and details on their infernal demesnes.
- Visions of Hell: Glimpse the face of Hell with one of Pathfinder's most METAL covers ever, by Remko Troost. Inside, you'll also see more of Dis, depictions of infernal personalities, and maps for every diabolical locale.
Illustrations by Eric Belisle and Roberto Pitturru
Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Hell Unleashed debuts at the end of this month. Pick it up, and put the fear of Hell back into your players.
F. Wesley Schneider
Editor-in-Chief & Author
