There's cocks on every surface

i personally prefer it to be a barren wasteland, but your players may want a more traditional description of hell.

one advantage that a wastes version of hell has is that it gives the player more of a safety net to explore. if there's devils and fire and shit all over the place they might just want to get the fuck outta there as quick as possible.

Those are all fine cliches but how about going for a different one?

For instance, take Equestria and make that your Hell. All sunshine and ponies and baked goods forever. An eternity stuck amongst the perky, chipper and childish.

Do a combination of the two? Like, hell is humanity, but only its darkest parts. Hell is the worst parts of humanity magnified.

>>18117307
>>18117310
>cocks on every surface
>barren wasteland

Impotent cocks, then.

I like it to look like Earth, only everything is wrong. The sky is eternally a horrible thunderstorm. The plants are all sickly yellow and poisonous. The animals are misshapen, slathering caricatures of their earthbound counterparts.

And the people are either damned souls or horrible demons. If you can tell the difference.

I think each of your characters should have a personalized hell.

The Paladin should be sent to a place of evil with no way to correct it.
The Ranger should be forced to slaughter animals senselessly all day, every day.
The Mage should be in an infinite wasteland, alone with his thoughts and unable to cast magic.
Et cetera.

Do what I do.
Hell is personal. There is no universal symbol for it as everyone's hell is different for that person.
It changes depending on the person, so if you were to travel to it, everyone would see something different. If they couldn't see it, they'd feel it. Other than that, if you could perceive hell without actually being IN it, somehow, you'd see satan sitting in the middle of a blank white room, who would probably instantly banish you.

Anyway, what is this for?

It really depends on what kind of Hell you're going for, and on the themes of your game. Whether it's theological, or humanistic, or... what.

>>18117348
>>18117342
Delayed hive mind?

>>18117351
Yeah. Honestly, If you're going traditonal style, you can Always use the divine comedy.

if you watch Supernatural there's a few alternate timeline episodes where Satan takes over the world. instead of transforming it into a hellhole he turns it into a lush paradise with flowering trees and forests, but humans are reduced to violent, mindless creatures. i personally loved that interpretation of hell incarnate.

>>18117365
Creepily enough, yes.

What games are you DMing ?

In my DnD games I illustrate it as the 9 layer of hell each one is different from one another. I'd recommend reading The Fiendish Codex 2. But be sure, your player's better be prepare...

>>18117351
It's for a heavily customized setting of dnd. The story is supposed to be heavily based on philosophy and the quest for knowledge and the nature of the universe. The real problem is, I don't want to have to many things objectively stated, yet via the nature of hell it seems as though you should be able to gather a lot about the nature of the universe. Easy solution: keep hell out of the story, but I don't really want to do that.

>>18117421
No one knows much about hell for those who attempt to go there and come back seldom do, and those WHO do are so scared or pacted so as to be utterly useless when it comes to information. Only those truely pious or under the protection of gods can go there and document it's inner workings. No one has yet to truly do this.

There you go.

Hell should be different for each character.

Isolate them from the things they love and surround them by the things they hate.

You don't even have to separate the party. Just make everything they see either in their head or only able to interact with who it's meant for.

>>18117457
All well and good, but I plan on having my players have a short expedition there so I was wondering how to describe it to them.

Hell is other people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Trjxuc6Q2c


Here. I like this.

It is a place where spoken language is rendered bable, where writing or any other marking intended to convey meaning is instantly erased, and where the unprotected find their memory fogged. Learning can not happen there, trust can not long survive there, Hope swiftly withers there.

Time flowing can not be tracked by any kind of natural cycle, there are no seasons, no day and night, not even clouds or weather. Only a world rendered bleak and lifeless by the inability to communicate. No moral code can be established, no laws enacted, so it is anarchy in its worst form.

This would be a depiction of hell that they are likely not prepared for.

>>18117569
No, no, no, no good sir.

Reverse that completely.

Make hell the place where everyone knows exactly what everyone else wants, loves, hates, needs, desires, despises and adores, at all times.

Where there is no deception at all, and twist it. Because that sounds very nice, but there are tons of little lies and deceptions we tell each other each and every day that allows us to live with one another.

"If everyone knew what everyone else really thought, no one would like anyone."

Make hell the place where you know exactly what everyone thinks of you, and they know exactly what you think of them.


That is the realm of unending war and suffering of all against all. And they will do it to themselves.

That is hell.

Hell, huh?
I would make it a surreal nightmare. A place of pure existential dissonance. I would make it hyper-emotional, to the point where being there too long just causes people to revert to babbling idiots.

Have every-day require a sanity check of some sort, and possibly status effects based on the area.

Perhaps it is an alternate dimension with everything that the real world has in it, but everything evokes paranoia. A soda isn't a soda in hell, It is acidic and saccharine at once and advertised with insane graphics.

Everything is pessimistically grey and disgusting. Like jhonen vasquez's mind.

>>18117730

A completely empty wasteland. No other life, no crying screaming hordes. No plantlife, no water, no sun, no heat. Just emptiness. To signify that Hell is, quite literally, nothing. Your punishment (in that world) is an eternity of absolutely nothing but your own mind.

Maybe the deeper you go, the more its' shaped by its' inhabitants. I.e the first few layers are barren and dead, but as you descend deeper, there's more of the classic fire and brimstone, then skin and bone structures, getting to the point where there's just a blackness so infinite, your players can barely glance in the openings direction without being terrified of what lies below.

Completely silent, of course.

>>18117421
Hell is the place where everything is true. All of the ideas you believed, even the ones you knew false, are completely true.

>>18117612
I like this, it would be like, if suddenly you were in a place where the knowledge that everyone you call your "friends" really just hung out with you so that they would have something to make fun of when you were gone. Whether or not it was actually true.


That would be torment, to find out that all of your life was lies and deceit.

>>18117745
I actually like Jhonen Vasquez's idea of hell, it's the exact same as Earth, but with none of the nice and helpful people to balance out the assholes.

>>18117421
If hell is supposed to be the mad reflection of the universe, you could go mega-surreal and have hell make perfect sense. Absolutely, totally, mundanely sane and sensical.

Force your players to come to terms with, if sanity is the mad reflection of the world they know, their "normal" world is what is actually fucked up. But they like the fucked up more than the sanity.

Like, totally kinda-off topic here, in one of the Ravenor books, Ravenor gets the barest glimpse of what this daemon-prince's true form is, and all he says is "It was so pure, so horribly, despicably pure."

The setting of 1984.

Well if you're going for the traditional, Biblical Hell, then it would be a place completely absent of the presence of God. A place totally devoid of all that is good, merciful, or just. All of the bad you see in the world would be infinitely multiplied with no respite, no peace, nothing to redeem it.

In a more vivid, hyperbolic sense it would be as if someone stabbed the universe in the heart and let all that was good or beautiful or worthwhile in it bleed out into nothingness. Then that profound emptiness would be filled up with pain, evil, and pointless, unending suffering.

Have it appear slightly, subtley different based on their personalities. Or, a blank hallway with only doors with their names. Opening the doors reveals personalized tortures and nightmares based on the character.

Hell shouldn't be hot, with pits of fire and brimstone and immediate, intense pain.

Hell should be cold. Mercilessly, inescapably cold, with howling winds and fog and freezing rain. Cold so terrible it gnaws on your very bones, makes the blood sluggish in your veins. It doesn't bring numbness and slumber like in the real world, it just drives relentlessly on, keeping you awake and aware of every slow, agonising moment.

The old Norse had it right.

anybody ever see "What Dreams May Come"?

though I must admit my favorate hell is the fuck awesome one from heinlins "Job: a comedy of justice"
being bro with satan, having sex with a fallen nun for a week straight, looking at the beautiful veiw of the lake of fire from your balcony, knowing that the actually bad people who get sent here DO get punished, so good.