So I'm running a game based off Wraith: The Oblivion, where the PCs have been plunged into hell. They have to make a long, long trek across the combined nightmares of humanity, and avoid falling prey to whatever terrors lurk within.
How do I describe that, Veeky Forums? I'm thinking of the art of that one murdered Polish artist. What kind of weird shit could they see?
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Check out 'What Dreams May Come' for a start I guess.
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>They have to make a long, long trek across the combined nightmares of humanity, and avoid falling prey to whatever terrors lurk within.
So like browsing /b/?
A great and spacious building.
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Huh, a constantly overdosing cat of bulged eyes and with needles instead of legs.
A hill made of cancerous tissue, gas gangrene and fat worms, tattooed with vapid slogans.
A naked and emaciated man full of holes filled by lit cigars of every kind and shape.
A field of human-faced apple trees being chewed by a harvester tractor. Each of the apples has a baby face. The tractor's blades are swastika-shaped.
The animated parts of The Wall movie.
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I hope it helps.
>You'll wear dogskin clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick wagging tails that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding puppy fruit, laying stripes of fragrant meat on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.
Fields of irregularly pointed tree like structures, with each limb holding an impaled, still "alive" soul.
Any structure is made from the living tissue of souls. Stretched, maybe even separated from them, but the workings of Hell are fickle and ever ready to accommodate further torture.
Roads are paved with the backs of mostly buried souls.
Souls found wandering are often preyed upon by winged creatures of various and ever changing looks. They often attack the eyes, aiming to take them for themselves. Other favourites are too take ears, fingers or even whole arms. Of course you can't kill a soul in hell, this is just more torture.
The air itself is always oppressive, but not always the same way. Sometimes hot and biting, other times a chill will blow, biting to the bones. Other times a stench will come from somewhere, of blood or feces or sulphur.
Light does not go far in Hell, the place hates it. There is always an ambient light, that is just enough you wish for more, originating from nowhere specific. If you were to somehow light a fire in hell, or by some demonic magic create one, its light would be ruddy and red, never white, and it would be swallowed up far sooner than its brightness would seem
A swathe of fetid swamp, where sinners are compelled to crawl, on all fours, toward some goal far in the distance, whatever drives them forward is obviously even worse than the swamp itself. Insects and other creatures constantly bite, gnaw on, and flit about these sinners, never giving them a spare moment.
A great machine trundles across the landscape, belching acrid smoke and hot coals, behind it are chained rank upon rank of sinners. It appears the only reason for this machine is to drag the sinners into exhaustion and if they should collapse, continue pulling them relentlessly. A great silent demon sits atop the machine, and if he hears a single cry of pain or complaint the sinner's chain is dragged into the machine.
>Dogs
>Hell
No
You nailed it with using Beksiński as a starting point.
It's very crude, but David Flirth's works have always stuck with me as what a truly terrifying hell is: anachronistic and nonsensical
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Roaming groups of demons mounted on amorphous beasts hunt wandering sinners. Their tactics are similar to fox hunting, having smaller beasts chase the sinners until exhaustion before riding up for the "killing blow" which mostly just leaves the sinners horribly maimed and in great pain, but of course, not dead, you can't die in hell.
A landscape of irregular huge boulders strewn haphazardly, but spaced apart, plenty of room to walk between them. Under a few there is a demonic equivalent of a trapdoor spider
A small group of sinners drags a massive crate of small stones what looks like hundreds of tons. They have clearly tread the same path for years, a vague circle is carved deep into the otherwise unremarkable landscape. If you watch them long enough they will come to their starting point, and a small bird will deposit a single pebble, and they will begin to make the circle again.
A field of small, evenly spaced twigs. Upon close inspection the twigs are more like straws, you can hear breathing through them. Each straw, among hundreds, is attached to a sinner, buried deep underneath.
A group of demons plays a game with sinners, where they tie dozens of them together, so close they're barely inches apart, and can hardly move, then have them chased by some great beast. The group to be consumed last is deemed the winner.
All demons have the strange ability to manipulate the flesh of sinners to their liking. Many sinners wander Hell with strange deformities. Huge arms, misshapen heads, parts stretched or crumpled like poorly made clay dolls. There is no way to fix these deformities except another demon, who will likely leave you worse off than when you came.
What does Hell serve in the cafeteria?
people
>tfw Hell cafeteria is shutdown by the health inspector
close enough to the real world you might not realize right away that you're dead, if everything wasn't so horribly off.
like a calculator with a wrong bit, it's so tiny but every step it just gets more and more broken. everyone fat and ugly rolling on wheelchairs, speaking english but nothing they say means anything. tv is nothing but infomercials for products that don't make sense. the stores are dirty, shelves empty. it's like the world ended in 1994 and everyone's just pretending it's still going. everything feels held up by duct tape, a constant sense of dread like everything's about to explode
>hell is the goddamn stupid faggoty bullshit made by tim and eric
jesus christ how horrifying
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my dumbass brain immediately started coming up with captions in there regarding the shittiest trampoline in the universe
Hellscapes? How about The Colonials from All Tomorrows:
"So they were made into disembodied cultures of skin and muscle, connected by a
skimpy network of the most basic nerves. They were employed as living filtering devices,
subsisting on the waste products of Qu civilization like mats of cancer cells. And just to
witness and suffer their wretched fate, their eyes, together with their consciousness,
were retained."
Imagine a field made up of these. Probably a punishment for faith by rote or some other crime of being thoughtless.
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Imagine a place where every part of every part of the landscape in existence is bent, malformed, deformed, broken, defective, derelict, discarded, discontinued decommissioned and flawed.
Here's an interesting thought; One of the terrors they encounter are roving packs of brutal hell beings, the catch; they only target evildoers. Hell beings are armed with sawtooth, salted, blood dripping, puss dripping, shredding, spikey, thorny, brutal, savage, red hot weaponry, so hot that smoke emits from their hands as they hold the weaponry and they scream in pain regularly and over and over, belching up sandstorms and farting out blizzards, wailing in psychotic agony from the scalding weapons and armor they must at all times and places wield.
Extremes of temperature wildly fluctuate between scalding hot and freezing cold, the ground spews blood and fluid bodies, it rains gristle and bone meal, lightning strikes the ground regularly, and some areas are divided off from the other areas by giant torturous walls, or seas of either; magma, rotting corpses, vinegar, tears, boiling salt water, or mercury.
Fog banks heavier than lead move about regularly, and cracks in the ground ooze tears, puss, vinegar, and shadows.
Hell should suck absolute ass in every way possible, yet not be so extreme that the players can't really do anything there.
I look very forward to Agony. It seems to really have a haunting, disturbing, very strong image of hell. It seems to nail the "organic walls" sort of thing; landscapes that look familiar or cave-like, with furniture of bones, doorways lined with teeth as if they were mouths.
There's a very thin line with this kind of setting where you can really make it just formless (In a bad way) and a little too far, but this seems to handle it very, very well. Watch some gameplay for inspiration.
This was made for a D&D game, but you can use it if you wish, I'm sure you could make it work for what you have in mind. I went for a sort of Buddhist reincarnations not-actually-eternal feel for these.
Ashralak, the worst hell imaginable and the ultimate hell evildoers visit.
The floors of Ashralak are made of bodies so heavy with evil that they have putrefied & petrified, scalding hot & spewing flames & magma suddenly & regularly. The west wall is made of scalding inward-pointing blades, the north wall is made of red hot salt masses, the south wall is made of salted red-hot glass powder piles, & the east wall is made of salted white-hot slag. Darkness there scalds the body like acid, light scalds the body like fire, simply existing burns the skin off steadily. The lifespan of an inmate is no longer than 4 breaths before death comes swiftly, inmates spend every waking moment screaming in pain & begging for nonexistence, darkness is heavier than lead, scalding vapors of burning putrescent bodies leak from the ground so thickly that sight is useless, & there is so much sound that hearing leaves the inmate only a few seconds after arrival, such heat assails the inmate that the body becomes dripping masses of jelly which simply drop to the floor, every weapon used in an evil deed rains from above, every rejected flawed or broken weapon rains from above, all diseased vomit & dung pours in from above, fires so hot they make inmates who happen to be near them vomit fire & explode, burn continuously, scalding salt hailstones assail the inmate, and spews of ice-slurry blast up from the floor with no warning.
Seriously, look up anything and everything by Zdzisław Beksiński if you haven't already. I don't even want to imagine what his dreams were like, but he creates a very beautiful, haunting hell.
Gehrax, a less bad but still really bad place you really, really don't want to go.
The floor of Gehrax is made of rust-powder & crushed bones, the east wall is made of freezing tombstones, the west wall is made of blade fragments frozen in sleet, the north wall is made of icy tears frozen-solid, & the south wall is made of frozen bodies & hailstones. Pain & Hunger are the constant companions of those villains who inmate there, the fluids of every decomposing corpse pouring in upon them as they suffer open leprosy wounds, plagues, blisters, gout, dysentery, gangrene, frostbite, syphilis, ebola, scarlet fever, as well as dry mouth so intense their tongues split. Giant brass wolves who breathe fire savagely rend tear & attack inmates while demons with scalding sawtooth salted blood dripping weaponry brutally chop inmates to pieces to make rations. There is nothing to eat or drink in Gehrax except the bodies of slain inmates, inmates spend the entire sentence without ever knowing where they are or what they were sentenced for, & any time an inmate stops moving, for even a moment, brass wolves & torturing sawtooth demons appear instantly from nothing to rip the inmate apart in a bloody, cruel, excruciating death. Sentences in Gehrax are long, but they aren't billions of lifetimes like Ashralak, only millions of lifetimes, yet it is perhaps the worst of the lower realms, because since it's inmates do not know why they are experiencing a life there, they may easily reoffend (in later lives) if they are insincere in prayer or deed.
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And finally, the least bad place an evil-doer can go, twin regions co-equal in all measurements, sharing the same planar area, Tanoryx and Batnor.
Tanoryx and Batnor, where every foul hideous vile bestial demon resides, and where every cruel tricky misleading beautiful demon resides. The ground there is made of black ash on one side and red stone on the other, the west wall is a wall of flames, the east wall is a wall of inward pointing blunt and sharp edges, the north wall is a giant ocean of lava, and the south wall is a boiling ocean of vinegar. Every object broken by violent force rains from above, the spent venom of every poisonous creature rains from above, and the spent breath of every dragon rains from above, demons spend all day and all night engaged in torments of inmates, fashioning whatever they need from the raining junk. Inmates spend their sentences being stoned, fried, baked, boiled, tenderized, salted, shredded, mauled, maimed, crushed, amputated, vivisected, eviscerated, impaled, sawed, bisected, torn apart, diced, eaten, drowned, deboned, broken, quartered, squeezed (as between two large stones), stabbed, shot through with arrows, javelin'd, burned, frozen, scalded, grilled, sliced, minced, and starved, enduring the double pain of being reborn from their own gore, or the triple-pain of being reborn from the dung of demons.
A video clip similating what being "reborn" is like. People in Tanoryx, Batnor, and Gehrax do this each time they are killed, and if being reborn from the dung of a demon, it must go from shit to mutilated shattered body parts, then from body parts to a body, so it's twice as long and twice as painful.
Fair warning, rather graphic.
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That Needles, he's a fun guy, if you're into that sort of thing. Just don't accidentally call him pinhead, your gesfinktagezoink will never get over it.
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First there is the long fall, first through total darkness, then through miasma of burning bodies, then through red hot fire, and finally out unto the broken unpleasantly hot land, arid, dead, rocky, big rock 'waves' where it was once magma fluid flowing, curls and drips and dips, black, bleak land, cracks in it oozing scalding mercury and boiling vinegar, swathes of flames, so hot they are blue, combust in flash fires lasting no longer than a moment, yet the people who are near them are scalded with such great heat that they melt down into puddles that evaporate and recombine back into people again. Death comes for you the first time when what you thought must surely be a large lone raincloud dropped a torrential flood of white hot axe heads, shredding everyone under it, the axe heads so hot that after they hit the ground they melt into lakes of fluid metal, the numberless people who roam aimlessly screaming in agony, your own screams of agony with them as your body forms up again from being sliced burned and melted, the agony is beyond sanity, but you are alive again, Savage beasts simply appear out of thin air for absolutely no reason, their armor and weapons so hot that bloody fogs of vapor issue from their scalding bleeding hands and bodies, each one wielding absolutely barbaric, razor sharp sawtooth swords, the sword blades so hot they are visibly on fire, the beings raving on in their own language as they scream in the relentless pain of being what they are, slicing, chopping, tearing, biting, weeping a continuous flow of rancid blood from their eyes, the hideous, barbaric beings screams are screams of pure ptsd anguish, pain, and sorrow. Suddenly another wailing ptsd anguish demon appears for no reason, holding a scalding mountain top in both its giant hands, the creature hundreds of feet tall, wailing & thrashing in agony, weeping ceaselessly, the gigantic being slams the mountain top down on top of everyone, even the other demons, except you.
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As much as it pains me to say it, the furry webcomic Jack portrayed a decent rendition of traditional hell. Don't get me wrong, I only got into it because a fucking dog shoots up a school but it was a wild ride while it lasted.
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Your second, third, and fourth death came very suddenly and in quick succession, for when you turned to flee the scalding hot mountain, less than 2 steps later a swath of instant fire caught you dead-center, your body burning so hotly that your organs burst, split, and fumed, bones cracked and fragmented, blood burst open it's veins and flew out as reddish smoke, and you vomited a tongue of fire six feet long, your eyes blowing out seconds before that to fire off their own tongues of fire, theirs only 3 feet long, before your body exploded like a shrapnel bomb. When you had reformed a head, a face, eyes, and a significant portion of a torso, the first thing you saw was a giant demon foot that crushed you all over again less than 10 seconds after your eyes formed. When you finally reformed yet again from all that, before you could do much of anything, your fifth death struck, a wailing psycho ptsd hell being stabbing you with a burning acid sweating salt covered spear, your body experiencing a death by leprosy, but melting all the way down to death only 3 breaths later, so experiencing it at an extremely rapid, painful pace, before you managed to finally stay alive for longer than a few moments, having a sanity-break and running around screaming, asking people if there is a way out, running for seven entire days and by a miracle, living seven entire dies, before a pack of wailing psycho ptsd hell beings armed with warhammers that sweat fluid lead appear out of absolutely no where and hammer you into scalding hot evaporating paste, before instantly vanishing for no reason, dying your sixth and seventh death in quick succession, your seventh death coming when another "rain" cloud rained burning swords on you while you were reforming, and your eighth and final death coming when you tried to use a mostly intact sword as a weapon, a calm, centered hell being popping into existence above you and pouring a limitlessly flowing urn of scalding acid on you.
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Would a wraith who is experiencing a hell existence have any different abilities or capabilities than a more normal wraith?
One intriguing possibility I thought of at one point was that Demons or other severely evil evil-doers sometimes 'jail-break' wraiths from a hell existence to be their servants / assistants / pawns / etc.
Isn't it odd how there are more depictions of hell than heaven?
Not really. Hell is supposed to be eminently understandable. Classically, it's depicted as comprehensible torture, neverending. Heaven is supposed to be incomprehensible to the unenlightened mind. Dante ran into this when he was writing the Comedia. His depictions of Heaven are incredibly vague and far more otherworldly than his depictions of Hell.
Hell is also more visceral, and lends itself to storytelling. Bliss doesn't.
Big props to anyone who can name the album this artwork was used for without reverse image searching.
It's a great album, too.
Go play video game The Void