How to represent such holes? "If you fail this test, you go in the hole and die" is not great

How to represent such holes? "If you fail this test, you go in the hole and die" is not great.

Treat the story as a metaphor for dungeon crawling.

>and die
if only this were true

I was able to do something like that through metagaming. Make the players think the thing is important out of game, the players will flock to it in game.

The first edition of Delta Green had a 'spell' - some scientists notes on Mi-Go mathematics - that did nothing but cost an exponentially increasing amount of sanity each time it was studied.

Every game I've used the notes a player offs themselves because "if it cost sanity must be powerful spell rite"

What manga is that from?

Boku no Amigara Fault.

The Enigma of Amigara Fault. It's like under 20 pages long. Just google it and don't sleep for a week.

If you're doing the Enigma as written, you don't have players enter the holes unless you want to do a painstakingly awful description of being compelled to force yourself down miles of you shaped rock that gradually twists and narrows and mutilates your mind and body. The players are investigators trying to figure out why the fuck these holes are irresistably attracting people and why they were just fucking there underground for no real reason. It doesn't make any possible sense. The world somehow contains random holes that perfectly match random people who lose all rationality and just climb in. The world is clearly somehow wrong, but why? And then as they are realizing how fucked reality is, DRR DRR DRR finally happens as the other shoe

It's going to take a bunch of work teams with strong will power or carfully matched up by outside authority of strong will power to holes that at not theirs. Then it is going to take a lot of concrete if we want to fill them in or less if we want to just slap some 20 tonne slabs over them.

Or some sticks of TNT and patience.

Either way once it becomes evident what these holes do to people the party will not be stopping their crusade against the rock.