Ever make a campaign set exclusively in hell? If not how would you do it?
>>46720398
Requiem Chevalier Vampire.
>>46720398
Roll for whatever
*Everyone rolls d-anythings*
You all continue to burn forever.
REEEAAAL fun.
>>46720398
Why do you think they describe the planes of Hell etc. in the D&D Planar Handbook type books? It's for exactly this kind of purpose.
A GM should have no problem contriving an excuse for the players go actually travel to the Lower Planes. Getting them some kind of permit of safe passage is another story but also not too difficult, particularly for higher-level characters.
Collecting some rare plant, retrieving a lost item, heck even thwarting some nefarious plan are all good reasons for the PCs to go to Hell and not necessarily be opposed by every single creature they meet. There ARE cities in the lower planes, and with the right passes they can be about as accommodating as Drow cities in the Underdark.
>>46720398
Three people who chose damnation for something higher. One was a paladin, who in his deathbed told the world 'I'm cot done yet.' The second a ranger looking for her husband, who had made a deal in exchange for ten years of true love and happiness. And last was a thief, looking to steal what could not be stolen: redemption. The greatest dungeon crawl I ever ran, my favorite group.
Well, unfortunately,
>depends on the setting
Hell is a bit of a tricky subject, because Christianity itself can't really agree on what it is. Sometimes it doesn't exist, sometimes it's simply the absence of God and/or his Light, or it's a fiery lake of endless torture. Haven't even looked into Islamic Hell. Judaism doesn't have Hell, it has, or had, Sheol, where everyone went regardless.
Then you have fantasy interpretations, like D&D, or you have shit like Doom 3 that said Hell wasn't human Hell, it was Martian Hell with Martian demons, because humans are descended from Martians and the demons may have ruled Earth at some point and want it back. Hell was some other dimension, but also supernatural and Infernal, yet the demons had a very real physicality to them to the point of being dissected and studied.
>>46721139
Dang it now I want to hear more hell stories from other peoples campaign
>>46720398
Ran a Wild Wild West Mouseguard game where the players were stuck on a train that was heading to Hell. That was fun.
I played in a game that wasn't in Hell, but we were pretty high level so one thing we enjoyed doing was travelling to the triple realm and partying like fiends.
I probably wouldn't tell the players that they're in hell. Let them figure it out on their own.
>>46721244
I ran a campaign over 2.5 years that--about 70% through-- saw the party going to Hell to pursue the fiancée of the Party Face/Leader, who had been kidnapped and taken there by her mother... In the middle of the wedding. Party was ~level 18 (FantasyCraft was the system) at the time, so rather than experiencing a drawn-out, danger-filled trek predicated on suffering and fear, it was truncated to something closer to a puzzle-driven, fast-paced dungeon crawl (speedrun, even). They went through 5 layers of hell (the river Styx/antechamber, then 4 layers each representing 2 deadly sins), culminating in a final showdown between the Face and the fiancée's mother; the Usurper-Queen of Hell ('Eve' was her name, for further convoluted symbolism). He had to challenge her alone, while his allies escaped the war between demons and angels raging on the fourth layer, returning home with the aide/noble sacrifice of the fiancée's father.
The Face was way outclassed, being a squishy talky character with a goofy Western accent and having none of his friends/allies/army to assist him in the climactic confrontation; but he had incredible conviction, a magic hat, a fiery sword, and an unshakeable love for his kidnapped fiancée.She killed him with a single word. He didn't stand a chance.
>>46721228
>Haven't even looked into Islamic Hell.
It's the "fiery lake of endless torture" plus being forced to eat fruit made out of pain and nightmares and then being forced to wash that down with water that is so hot it would skip boiling and go straight to plasma if the pressures weren't supernaturally heavy, plus you don't just burn but you actually feel every cell in your body burning away and being regenerated over and over and over. And this is all just the top layer, reserved for the minor sinners. Below that it's so horrible that even the ideas of it would burn your brain out of your head just thinking about it.
But then, there's also a legend that on judgment day, the sinners will just be shown this Hell so that they would know what God could do to them if he wanted to to make sure they were REALLY REALLY SORRY for not worshiping him, then everyone gets let into Heaven anyway, just some people get a nicer heaven than others.
There was actually a guy on our party who went permanently blind for trying to cast "detect evil" in one of the seven hells.
What a dumbass.
>>46722027
I like to imagine there would be like one guy in there who was good and he couldn't detect him.
Wayne Barlowe shit is great for this kind of setting.
>>46721244
The paladin was an undead dead with multiple levels in paladin, but counted as fallen at the beginning. He got to be a couple level highers than the others to make up for the sheer lack of abilities, but not too much because undead status. Wanted his story arc to be rediscovering his faith. Eventually he realized that his deity had never left him, he had left it.Got his class levels back, and it went about as well as one might expect with a paladin trapped in hell.
Ranger tracked down her husband across hell and cleared house for an arch devil in order to find out who had her husband's soul. Found out it was the dude who she busted ass for, made a deal to change spots with him. Arch devil agreed and let her husband go. For her selfless sacrifice, she got to ascend up there with him.
Rogue was the last to get any sort of closure. After finding relics to return to the world, freeing those who had never found faith before death, and cheating the arch devil of all hell, the thief realized that you couldn't take redemption, you earn it. And by doing all that, the thief had.
I ran a campaign where the players and a country invaded hell.
>>46721139
In Asia Minor or in Alexandria,in the second century of our faith (when
Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation
engineered by defective angels),Nils Runeberg might have directed,with a
singular intellectual passion,one of the Gnostic conventicles.Dante would have
destined him,perhaps,for a fiery sepulcher;his name might have augmented the
catalogues of heresiarchs,between Satornibus and Carpocrates;some fragment of
his preaching,embellished with invective,might have been preserved in the
apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses or might have perished when the firing
of a monastic library consumed the last example of the Syntagma.Instead,God
assigned him to the twentieth century,and to the university city of Lund.There,in 1904,he published the first edition of Kristus och Judas;there, in
1909,his masterpiece Dem hemlige Frälsaren appeared.(Of this last mentioned
work there exists a German version,called Der heimliche Heiland,executed in
1912 by Emil Schering.)
Before undertaking an examination of the foregoing works,it is necessary to
repeat that Nils Runeberg,a member of the National Evangelical Union, was
deeply religious.In some salon in Paris,or even in Buenos Aires,a literary
person might well rediscover Runeberg's theses; but these arguments, presented
in such a setting,would seem like frivolous and idle exercises in irrelevance
or blasphemy.To Runeberg they were the key with which to decipher a central
mystery of theology; they were a matter of meditation and analysis, of historic
and philologic controversy, of loftiness, of jubilation, and of terror. They
justified, and destroyed, his life. Whoever peruses this essay should know that
it states only Runeberg's conclusions, not his dialectic or his proof. Someone
may observe that no doubt the conclusion preceded the "proofs". For who gives
himself up to looking for proofs of something he does not believe in or the
predication of which he does not care about?
>>46722692
The first edition of Kristus och Judas bears the following categorical epigraph,
whose meaning, some years later, Nils Runeberg himself would monstrously dilate:
Not one thing, but everything tradition attributes to Judas Iscariot is false.
(De Quincey, 1857.) Preceded in his speculation by some German thinker, De
Quincey opined that Judas had betrayed Jesus Christ in order to force him to
declare his divinity and thus set off a vast rebellion against the yoke of Rome;
Runeberg offers a metaphysical vindication. Skillfully, he begins by pointing
out how superfluous was the act of Judas. He observes (as did Robertson) that in
order to identify a master who daily preached in the synagogue and who performed
miracles before gatherings of thousands, the treachery of an apostle is not
necessary. This, nevertheless, occurred. To suppose an error in Scripture is
intolerable; no less intolerable is it to admit that there was a single
haphazard act in the most precious drama in the history of the world. Ergo, the
treachery of Judas was not accidental; it was a predestined deed which has its
mysterious place in the economy of the Redemption. Runeberg continues: The Word,
when It was made flesh, passed from ubiquity into space, from eternity into
history, from blessedness without limit to mutation and death; in order to
correspond to such a sacrifice it was necessary that a man, as representative of
all men, make a suitable sacrifice.
>>46722718
Judas Iscariot was that man. Judas, alone
among the apostles, intuited the secret divinity and the terrible purpose of
Jesus. The Word had lowered Himself to be mortal; Judas, the disciple of the
Word, could lower himself to the role of informer (the worst transgression
dishonor abides), and welcome the fire which can not be extinguished. The lower
order is a mirror of the superior order, the forms of the earth correspond to
the forms of the heavens; the stains on the skin are a map of the incorruptible
constellations; Judas in some way reflects Jesus. Thus the thirty pieces of
silver and the kiss; thus deliberate self-destruction, in order to deserve
damnation all the more. In this manner did Nils Runeberg elucidate the enigma of
Judas.
The theologians of all the confessions refuted him. Lars Peter Engström accused
him of ignoring, or of confining to the past, the hypostatic union of the Divine
Trinity; Axel Borelius charged him with renewing the heresy of the Docetists,
who denied the humanity of Jesus; the sharpedged bishop of Lund denounced him
for contradicting the third verse of chapter twenty-two of the Gospel of St.
Luke.
These various anathemas influenced Runeberg, who partially rewrote the
disapproved book and modified his doctrine. He abandoned the terrain of theology
to his adversaries and postulated oblique arguments of a moral order. He
admitted that Jesus, "who could count on the considerable resources which
Omnipotence offers," did not need to make use of a man to redeem all men. Later,
he refuted those who affirm that we know nothing of the inexplicable traitor; we
know, he said, that he was one of the apostles, one of those chosen to announce
the Kingdom of Heaven, to cure the sick, to cleanse the leprous, to resurrect
the dead, and to cast out demons (Matthew 10:7-8; Luke 9:1).
>>46722731
A man whom the
Redeemer has thus distinguished deserves from us the best interpretations of his
deeds. To impute his crime to cupidity (as some have done, citing John 12:6) is
to resign oneself to the most torpid motive force. Nils Runeberg proposes an
opposite moving force: an extravagant and even limitless asceticism. The
ascetic, for the greater glory of God, degrades and mortifies the flesh; Judas
did the same with the spirit. He renounced honor, good, peace, the Kingdom of
Heaven, as others, less heroically, renounced pleasure.<1> With a terrible
lucidity he premeditated his offense.
In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage;
in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendor. Judas elected those
offenses unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence (John 12 :6) and
informing. He labored with gigantic humility; he thought himself unworthy to be
good. Paul has written: Whoever glorifieth himself, let him glorify himself in
God (I Corinthians 1:31); Judas sought Hell because the felicity of the Lord
sufficed him. He thought that happiness, like good, is a divine attribute and
not to be usurped by men.<2>
>>46722749
Many have discovered post factum that in the justifiable beginnings of Runeberg
lies his extravagant end and that Dem hemlige Frälsaren is a mere perversion or
exacerbation of Kristus och Judas. Toward the end of 1907, Runeberg finished and
revised the manuscript text; almost two years passed without his handing it to
the printer. In October of 1909, the book appeared with a prologue (tepid to the
point of being enigmatic) by the Danish Hebraist Erik Erfjord and bearing this
perfidious epigraph: In the world he was, and the world was made by him, and the
world knew him not (John 1:10). The general argument is not complex, even if the
conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, lowered himself to be a man
for the redemption of the human race; it is reasonable to assume that the
sacrifice offered by him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by any
omission. To limit all that happened to the agony of one afternoon on the cross
is blasphemous.<3> To affirm that he was a man and that he was incapable of sin
contains a contradiction; the attributes of impeccabilitas and of humanitas are
not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold,
confusion, hunger and thirst; it is reasonable to admit that he could also sin
and be damned.
>>46722769
The famous text "He will sprout like a root in a dry soil; there
is not good mien to him, nor beauty; despised of men and the least of them; a
man of sorrow, and experienced in heartbreaks" (Isaiah 53:2-3) is for many people
a forecast of the Crucified in the hour of his death; for some (as for instance,
Hans Lassen Martensen), it is a refutation of the beauty which the vulgar
consensus attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, it is a precise prophecy, not of
one moment, but of all the atrocious future, in time and eternity, of the Word
made flesh. God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to
the point of being reprehensible - all the way to the abyss. In order to save
us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain
web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus;
He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas.
In vain did the bookstores of Stockholm and Lund offer this revelation. The
incredulous considered it, a priori, an insipid and laborious theological game;
the theologians disdained it. Runeberg intuited from this universal indifference
an almost miraculous confirmation. God had commanded this indifference; God did
not wish His terrible secret propagated in the world. Runeberg understood that
the hour had not yet come. He sensed ancient and divine curses converging upon
him, he remembered Elijah and Moses, who covered their faces on the mountain top
so as not to see God; he remembered Isaiah, who prostrated himself when his eyes
saw That One whose glory fills the earth; Saul who was blinded on the road to
Damascus; the rabbi Simon ben Azai, who saw Paradise and died; the famous
soothsayer John of Viterbo, who went mad when he was able to see the Trinity;
the Midrashim, abominating the impious who pronounce the Shem Hamephorash, the
secret name of God.
>>46722785
Wasn't he, perchance, guilty of this dark crime? Might not
this be the blasphemy against the Spirit, the sin which will not be pardoned
(Matthew 12:3)? Valerius Soranus died for having revealed the occult name of
Rome; what infinite punishment would be his for having discovered and divulged
the terrible name of God?
Intoxicated with insomnia and with vertiginous dialectic, Nils Runeberg wandered
through the streets of Malmö, praying aloud that he be given the grace to share
Hell with the Redeemer.
He died of the rupture of an aneurysm, the first day of March 1912. The writers
on heresy, the heresiologists, will no doubt remember him; he added to the
concept of the Son, which seemed exhausted, the complexities of calamity and
evil.
>>46722800
Borges is such good inspiration for off the wall setting building.
If you wanna play demons, thete's infernum. A Dante-esque hell set bit on more modern age, on 3.5-derivative system that is not really that balanced. But it is rather flavourful and I had fun playing it.
I had part of a campaign set in hell, but not the whole thing. The players started the game as clerical errors, souls who had done no major wrong in life but ended up in hell as a result of a spell cast on them by the BBEG.
They met, formed a party and found a way out of hell, a way through limbo between heaven and hell, and then chose to return to life and finish their business in the world by avenging their murders and bringing down the BBEG.
It was my attempt to get around the "you meet in a tavern" and it was viewed favorably by the players even though it followed the same damn pattern other than the spirit templates I had all of them using rather than their real stats/etc (which took effect once they were topside once again)
>>46720398
Anyone ever heard of infernum? It was really fun setting wise.
I have also had a two PC game in my main settings cosmic version of hell.
>>46720444
I came here to post this.
>>46720398
Ever play doom? That is how I'd run it.
Is the Codex Infernus for Savage Worlds any good? I figure that is exactly the sort of thing that would work for this.
[screams intensify]
>>46730126
I really want to play that, but I have no idea if my potato laptop can even run it.
>>46730219
What is it?
>>46730268
Devil Daggers, fast paced arena FPS where you destroy increasingly difficult swarms of bizarre, hellish creatures. The catch is you have infinite ammo die, but in one hit. Very very simple game, looks like a ton of fun.
>>46730219
I mean, the game's page on steam recommends a minimum of a single GB of memory. I imagine even a potato could run this thing.
>>46730219
it can, unless you are playing on a typewriter
Due to a complex legal kerfluffel during a minion exchange deal, a team of Baatezu fall out of the normal hierarchy and become some of the few free agents in Baator. With no higher-ups to answer to but still bound by the deal to each other, this rare alliance of equals must navigate the soul economy on their own behalf for the first time.
The PCs start as Rank 8 devils in line with Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells, which means the races available are Erinyes, Harvester Devil and Pain Devil. They can serve as mercenary agents for other devils, or seek power through lost artifacts in Baator's hidden reaches. They advance as monsters, and could potentially grow powerful enough to spontaneously promote themselves to greater forms of devil. They can gather minions, trade souls, and seek personal greatness in the grim politics of Baator.
>>46728235
So did I.
>>46721319
Please, more details. The whole premise is pretty interesting already
