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What are some features you would describe to players to really hit the mark in describing Hell (1st plane Avernus)??
- Stygian smell
- Sulfurous smell
- Broken arrows and shields on ground
- Demon/Devil blood coating the ground
- Random fireballs falling from sky
- Troops of devils 2d6 marching
- River Styx with lemures
- Cracked ground, dry, blood-red sky
What other descriptions can make the feel of gameplay in hell awesome?
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Opressive and relentless.
There is never any relief. Misery is a constant, and any illusion of relief is just another torment in disguise. Those damned taking shelter from the cold near steam vents trade the chill for a caustic, burning mist that coats their blasted skin. It soaks them so thoroughly that going back out into the cold is that much worse. Plains of broken obsidian and glass give way to smooth salt flats.
The damned are the most common resource of Hell. They are ever present and eternal. And there are many uses for them. Many are crushed and compacted into hardened bricks and cobblestones, with which the great cities of devils are built and the roads of Hell are paved. They are ever aware, seeping blood and tears when a glimmer of what they once were is remembered. Some of these "stones" feature a blinking, helpless eye or two, the only outward hint that it was once a person.
The natural landscape of Hell is packed with those souls of damned and devils alike that have been absorbed directly into the plane, either through their own "true" deaths or through the gradual loss of a sense of self. Hints of faces constantly press outward from the broken stone, charred trees, and corrosive waters. All memory and thought is absent, there is only pain and the need to give it a voice when they have none.
Many engineering wonders can be found throughout this hellscape, but all of them are built upon suffering. Operating even the simplest of devices, such as a drawbridge pulled upwards by ropes of tendons and muscle, requires the suffering of the damned that are a part of it. Devils hosting guests to the plane will often invite them to operate such machinery themselves. After all, the damned deserve their fate, and surely any infliction visited upon them would not stain one's own soul. Or so goes the assurance of devils.
There is always the sensation of being watched. The damned are ever aware of unseen eyes looking over them. They know they will be caught making a mistake. They know they will be punished.
There is always the sensation of being followed. The presense is never seen or heard, but it's something one feels is always just out of sight. No matter how far one goes, one never manages to lose it. No matter how long waits, it never arrives. But somehow it constantly approaches.
Stiff, sharp grass, each blade grooved with bleed lines, nourish earth soaked with the ever-replenishing blood of damned.
The brightly blazing souls of witch burners hang from posts lining the main roads leading to some of the more devout cities.
Nothing is free. Wild trees bearing fruit that doesn't scream or weep always have a hook hidden somewhere. Anything one takes from Hell, Hell takes back with interest.
Note to self:
Never mess with Mikaze...
What other descriptions can make the feel of gameplay in hell awesome?
Think about it for a moment.
Eternal war,so endless participants.
The landscape itself is made up of dying (eternally, as they are immortals) soldiers, and poor souls conscripted into the wars under threat of the lash.
You could get a spade and dig your way through all the crippled, screaming damned... dig forever, and you'll only find more bodies. It could be a hundred miles deep, and as far as you could possibly travel in any direction. So many, suffocating, crushed, mangled and unable to escape the horrid reality. Used and discarded...
A picture is worth a thousands words, and if you leave it sitting on the table, it keeps talking while you do other things:)
If you have access to a color printer, scan the internet for pictures of hell, print one or two out, and leave them on the table while you play. That will keep them from forgetting where they are.
Any ideas for a memorable encounter?
Chain devils.
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A picture is worth a thousands words, and if you leave it sitting on the table, it keeps talking while you do other things:)
Really recommend Google Image searching Hieronymous Bosch and Wayne Barlowe.
Bosch for a sort of fever dream-like view of Hell, possibly as seen by people on the Material Plane trying to make sense of it. Garden of Earthly Delights is the one everyone knows. That medieval painting was also animated in the Buckethead music video for "Spokes on the Wheel of Torment"(possibly NSFW).
Barlowe for some truly terrifying and alien hellscapes. He did a lot of art for this in the Inferno artbook and I believe some color plates for his novel, God's Demon.
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"Hell is a boot, stepping on a person's face for eternity."
Hell is every oppressive dystopia to ever and never exist.
Here and there one can find colossal beings, monstrous in form and nature, mutilated and bound with immense chains and layers upon layers of bindings both mundane and magical. Some are well guarded and tormented further by legions of devils. Some are left alone in their misery, monuments to suffering. Some of these beings are the remains of great and terrible beasts on the scale of the Tarrasque. Some are actually the very souls of nations and empires.
Everything is ritualized. Like all great decievers, devils are especially adept at lying to themselves. They wrap themselves up with illusions of righteous behavior and proper conduct. Those visiting Hell would do well to learn as many of the convoluted and paradoxical codes of conduct devilkind adhere to and force upon the damned. It is even more important to realize that while it is possible to play these rules in their favor, it is impossible to adhere to all of them, riddled as they are with Catch-22's and loopholes.
Lightning has a tendency to arc upwards in Avernus, as if it were trying to escape this plane. The souls of fallen angels who lamented too late and whose physical forms have been destroyed, they reach upwards for an absolution beyond their grasp. Sometimes their grief drives them to strike downwards, towards those that most remind them of their lost glory and innocense.
Enormous monoliths dot the plane, both speaking of the terrible majesty of their builders and inscribed with terrible truths weaponized to crush the will and spirit of the reader. These great stones, some resembling black marble, obsidian, or gigantic petrified scabs of Hell's very blood, seem to be driven into land like spikes meant to inflict as much pain upon it as possible. The land itself may shudder from time to time, but the monoliths hold the "flesh" of the plane tight.
Hell's worst torments are those it manages to get you to inflict upon yourself. Eventually, the damned always start doing the devils' work for them.
The players will be sailing the River Styx. Any recommendations for encounters there.
Do not play ANYTHING by Styx unless your party is into very goofy hell references...;)
Encounters on Styx should be with Charon's boatmen, or souls in the river being drained of all memories, or if you're feeling creul, put a very powerful upper planar good creature being held down by the Deamons that can exist in Styx without losing memories and watching parts of it being pulled off by these critters.
There is a wonderful idea from In Nomine I recommend you steal.
Outside the entrance to Hell there are two particularly powerful angels. Their mission: to ensure no mortal soul enters Hell that does not deserve damnation (living beings visiting do not count). Very, very occasionally they will pick out a soul who achieved redemption in some way before death from the throngs of souls flooding into Hell.
However, their presence also means that all the damned souls have one last glimpse of divinity and grace...
I'm not extremely familiar with the Pathfinder setting, if that's what you're using, but traditionally the water of the river Styx does not take memories. That's the river Lethe. The five rivers are Styx, Lethe, Phlegethon, Acheron, and Cocytus. Styx is the river of hate, and of binding oaths. Obviously if you're playing in a setting that flavours it differently go for it.
Styx encounters:
- Paying the price for being ferried along or across the river. What might a boatman ask? What are the characters willing to pay?
- Perhaps a boatman seeks to pass his oar to a passenger, forcing them to remain ferrying souls on the river for eternity in his place?
- Perhaps the characters must be very careful what they say while on the Styx, as the river is standing witness to any oaths made, rendering them unbreakable.
- Some of the drowned souls who tried to pass without paying the boatman swarm the boat, attempting to drag the characters to share their fate.
- A soul that was not buried without proper rites begs the characters' intercession to have those rites said for them on the Material Plane, to give them a small measure of peace and let them cross the river safely.
- (Again taken from In Nomine) They find an angel who comes begging for their help in finding her prey, a devil who caused carnage on the Material and who she followed to Hell. Alas, the angel was so consumed with rage and hate for the devil that she fell and is still unaware of her Fallen state.
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The players will be sailing the River Styx. Any recommendations for encounters there.
The river itself is not made of water, it is made of stolen memories and the souls of those who have been dissolved within it. Looking into it, one's reflection is distorted, of oneself at a younger age, or in the grip of some remembered situation (generally a traumatic one), as it doesn't reflect you, it reflects your memories (and not always true ones, but nightmarish perversions of past events that seem just close enough to what you remember to make you question whether or not you are seeing a repressed true memory, that you've blocked out...).
Below the surface, figures can be seen, some flowing along with the current, horribly stretched and distorted like taffy pulled thin and taut, their souls fluid and yet obviously wracked with pain by the process. Some seem oblivious to the presence of your skiff on the surface, others are reaching out, as if you could rescue them from the depths of the river, seemingly only just below the surface of the water.
Instead of the burbling of a brook, the sound of indecipherable muttering comes from the water, faint, as if from a great distance, and when the water is cut with an oar or barge-pole, the sound increases somewhat, so that individual words and phrases, plucked randomly from the memories of those interred in the river, as if a doorway between the source of the wailing and your position has been momentarily opened, ever-so-slightly.
The river lacks much other traffic, but another skiff, this one barely large enough to hold it's passenger, poles past, with a slender bedraggled hag of emaciated and distorted appearance it's only inhabitant. She is seated, and looks like a bundle of rags, until she moves, her white eyes seeming blind, and her features vacant. One scrawny arm holds a pole, and the other has long grasping nails, which she uses to reach into the waters, as if attempting to seize a fish. What she plucks forth is a squirming serpent-like tendril of oily water, black and silver in hue, that she sniffs at, tastes, and either throws back into the water, or places into one of a dozen flasks hanging from cords around her neck. She is a memory harvester, who snatches up traces of interesting memories that have been stolen by the river, and sells them to various individuals. Some are memories of power, such as knowledge of a spell, others are knowledge of sins, which can be used to blackmail or torment someone, others might be happy memories, or love or joy, which fetch high coin, either from their original owner, or from a fiend who can know such things in no other way. The hag herself keeps her memories scribbled down in a ledger, chained to her side and her most prized possession, for constant exposure to the Styx has left her with vast gaps in her own memory...
[This sort of memory-selling Stygian Hag would be a good source of retraining options, as she could sell memories of knowing a particular feat or skill or spell, at the cost of using Styx water to erase a different feat or skill or spell, to 'make room' for the new memory. There may be dozens of story reasons why such a hag would be sought out, as well, if, for instance, an NPC ally or mentor died, and one desperately needed to know the command word to an item he left behind, or the location of the royal signet, or whether or not he had an heir. Some hags might even game the system, and arrange for certain individuals in the mortal world to live luxurious lives of opulence and decadence, so that, when they reach the river, those memories of debauch and splendor become prized items for sale. Experience the life of Duke Carmody, whose sixteen exotic lovers were each more beautiful and voracious than the last! Learn the arcane secrets of the Fiend-Sorceress Neberkhamun, third apprentice to Nex himself!]
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On every layer of Hell, there are damned souls certain that things must be better elsewhere. And most of these souls turn these hopes "upwards". Sometimes these damned climb upon each other, piling high like ants in their attempts to traverse that impossible distance between the layers of Hell. The higher they go, the more hope takes them and drives them to frantically press on, crushing each other as they go. Most of these mountains of lost souls topple or collapse into themselves, rendering the surrounding landscape into a field of broken, twitching bodies. But very rarely...miraculously...they succeed. They do not find deliverence. The souls making this journey have held onto and been pressed into each other for so long that they are fused together into a titanic ladder or stairway of flesh. They become the road that they sought to take to a better place, but their efforts do not go to waste. Devils often use these "backroads" to cross between layers. Even others among the damned and rare planar travellers might use them, though these travellers might be at risk from the jealous souls they are climbing attempting to pull them in to share their fate.
Courier XCVII-Zeth spent part of a lifetime betraying the trust of others to place politically damaging and life-ruining messages and information in the hands of her employers. She has spent countless lifetimes limping across the wastelands of Avernus to deliver messages from one devilsh city to another. The scrollcase that ensures the security of its contents also marks her as one of the Damned that is to be left untouched save by her handlers and keeps her body capable of healing just enough to carry out her duties, always securely stabbed into her grey, scarred flesh. Every time she makes her rounds, she asks when she will be allowed to return home. The devils always truthfully promise "after this next delivery", for she is already home.
The accountants of Erebus use abacuses of the most exquisite craftsmanship. Only the heads of the wealthiest merchants of flesh are worthy of serving as skewered "counting stones" in these masterpieces.
It is a sad truth that many souls find themselves in Hell unjustly. Whether due to diabolic sacrifice or trickery, even the purest of heart might find themselves eternally damned. But for some of them, those particularly blessed, there is hope. In Stygia there sits a monastery dedicated to purging infernal taint and sin from souls that have been stolen and defiled by Hell. The wise masters, all beautiful and pure angels, of this order teach that these souls can attain purity once more and ascend to their proper place in the afterlife. But this purging requires pain and punishment. And it is not enough to purge oneself. One must purge the evil one sees in their brethren. This is not sin. This is just. The masters assure that this is so.
There is a valley in Malebolge where time seems to bend upon itself. Villages filled with the souls of those who commited genocide in the name of safety for their own in life. Like clockwork, a village will mobilize and attack another. Every man and woman in the attacked village is cut down and apart. Unable to die, they are mangled beyond any capability of causing future harm to their attackers. Even then further atrocities are visited against them, to warn others of the fate awaiting any who would act against the victors. And for a time there is peace, until they are attacked by another village despite their efforts. And every cruelty they visited upon their victims is returned to them in kind. These villagers rarely notice that those they share the same faces with both their victims and tormentors.
A man hides in a cave, far from the eyes of devils and other damned. He huddles in the darkness, fearful of the faintest of sounds the wind makes outside. He peers out from time to time, seeing an empty landscape but absolutely certain that there is a hint of something moving on the horizon. Rarely, he ventures out a few steps as the gnawing loneliness grants him a moment's courage. He always flees back into the darkness before the fourth step forward.
He has lived this way for eons.
Be unpleasant.
Be casual about the evil.
If you know players have buttons and strong reactions to something, push them. (Not to the point of making them leave the game, be careful) -- but Hell should be an ugly, horrible, painful place.
Read Dante.
Read the Screwtape Letters.
Perhaps have someone being punished for the sorts of activities the PCs have been engaging in.
