Putting characters through hell
I recently sent the player characters of my game to hell. Literally. Specifically, a twisted realm of the dead called the Hell of Burning Scrolls, which was made to torment academics, scholars, and other thinkers. Appropriately enough, the party ventured into hell in search of knowledge.
Now, I figure that in any game, a realm referred to as hell is a terrible place. It’s not supposed to be a walk in the park, it is supposed to be suffering — but only for the characters, not the players. I worked very hard to walk the line on that, and my group really enjoyed their trip to hell — though their characters obviously didn’t.
So how did I literally torture the characters without torturing my players?
Hell is a dangerous place, so it would be easy to have high-level demons just slap the characters around, rain fire on their heads and push them right up to the brink of a total party wipe — or over it. But how much fun is it to get beat up like that? For the players, not much.
Instead, I use mood and setting to push my PCs to the edge of comfort (but not over), to that place on the edge of their seat where they’re on high alert, taking chances and covering their asses at the same time, and shuddering each time something new happens. A carefully-crafted description and a little focused pressure establishes a mood, gets my players to engage, and to buy into the horribleness. Before long, they creep themselves out worrying about what’s around the next bend in the tunnel so that I don’t have to actually do all that much to their characters.
Let me tell you about the Hell of Burning Scrolls, and what it did to my players and their characters. The hell is a blazing plane of cracked and tortured earth. Stones burst out of the crust or stand stacked in tottering towers, all on the edge of falling — without ever tipping. Canals are gouged deep into the land, running with sullen red magma and flowing in twisted patterns that spell out unfathomable obscenities. The red sky is choked with black clouds, and sparks kindle as the air itself catches fire now and then.
So… it’s hot. Pretty standard for hell, right? Sure. So I gave the Hell of Burning Scrolls a twist — the landscape is covered in written words in thousands of languages, etched and scorched into the very stone and ash and baked earth. And then the characters caught sight of the first souls trapped in this hell — ragged forms crawling along the ground, reading the writing. The lucky ones have a few scraps of blackened paper on which to take notes, but most are forced to carve their findings into their own flesh with sharp stones or jagged bits of metal.
Why? Because the lord of the Hell of Burning Scrolls is a demonic scholar. He demands that the secrets inscribed on the rock be brought to him, and those that learn enough to pass the exams gain admittance to his library — a twisted tower palace powered by a demon furnace. Those who pass the tests enter and get promoted up the tower.
Those that fail the tests are demoted down the tower, and those that get demoted all the way down to the basement are fed to the furnace. What remains of these poor souls who didn’t study hard enough become Shushers — charred skeletons robed in smoke that can hush other souls like creepy librarians, literally smothering their voices and even magical mental communication.
As the PCs stood there, taking all this in, I narrated something on the tip of their tongue that they couldn’t get out, something that they forgot that they couldn’t quite remember. And as they looked down at the broken and burnt ground, they watched new words being etched into the land at their feet — their own knowledge sucked out of them and inscribed on the surface of the hell. All those souls out there, trying to scrape together enough secrets or wisdom to earn a place in hell just a little less awful, were cutting notes into their flesh even as the hell stole away their own memories and skills.
The PCs did have to run from an actual rain of fire because, well, this is hell. They finally made it to the dubious shelter of some caves where it was a little cooler, but also where rebel souls had holed up inside, preying on those who sought what little solace the caves could provide.
That’s what my group had to deal with. But what did I actually do to their characters? Not that much, really. First, the oppressive heat gave them all a universal penalty as the hell parched them and hit each character with low-grade heat exhaustion before they had gone two steps. It stung, but wasn’t a big deal.
Second, the Hell of Burning Scrolls was hungry for knowledge and began eating away at their memories. Everyone got a roll to resist the drain, and only one PC failed. He lost a tiny bit from one skill, his choice of which. And I explained how the hell would eat every bit of every skill until it began to gnaw on their intelligence. It would be a long process to fail that many rolls — no one was actually in danger of losing that much — but every single player shuddered.
Then the rain of fire did some actual damage to them, which is pretty standard fare. A few of the party got moderately hurt, but nothing they couldn’t heal — also nothing that they could afford to keep healing if it happened too many times, though. But still, they were on top of things.
The party found some shelter and began trying to discuss next steps. They had to find the secret knowledge that they came here for, and they needed to get away from the hell’s power eating their own knowledge. Could they risk taking notes like all of the wretched souls out there? Gambling that they could find what they needed or reclaim what skills might be leached away before they lost even more?
And while they were discussing this, a Shusher floated by and silenced them. They had to stop talking while I narrated a ghastly thing with a blackened finger held up to lipless, scorched teeth, the wind prying ashy flakes from its body. The characters could have killed it easily — Shushers don’t even fight — but would that alert others? Would it do any good? So they huddled and waited until the Shusher left, hoping the whole time that it would leave before the hell ate anyone else’s skills.
And then they made it to the caves to fight against some desperate souls who were looking for a way to die.
That was it. All told, the characters suffered a minor penalty, and one of them lost a little off of his least-favorite skill. They took some damage that they healed, and fought a combat that they handled competently.
That doesn’t sound like much. No one was tormented, no one died, and I didn’t even beat anyone half to death. The characters didn’t actually suffer very much. But wow, were the players ever creeped out. They wanted to leave so badly! Every little thing that I described just made them curse this place. No one for a second doubted that they were in hell. Being there for a short time was awful, and every time I made them imagine being imprisoned there for eternity — using the wretched souls there as models — it just intensified their already terrible opinion.
But… my players had a great time. Hell was creepy but cool, they succeeded in their crises, and they have almost found what they’re looking for. (As of this writing, they’re still in the middle of this adventure.) They were engaged with the story that took them to hell, and with the hell’s theme and dangers. I didn’t have to club them over the head with giant monsters or do a lot of hit point damage to make them fear and loathe the place.
Over the course of most game campaigns, player characters go to dangerous places. That’s where villains live and scheme — so that’s where the hero’s journey leads them. But even in the nadir, the dragon’s cave or literal hell, this is a game and it should be fun.
