Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Inferno

A group of denizens (broadly speaking) of the Golden City decide that actually, Hell is hell, and they'd like to get out. But the lower realms weren't designed to be left easily...

Hells

The Golden City

The hell of aesthetics. The domain of beauty above all - above comfort, above justice, above compassion, above life. Its pristine boulevards are lined with endless salons, museums, gardens and galleries, and behind them the garrets of those who slave for endless days and nights to keep them clean and beautiful. Its lords and ladies in their mansions sponsor great artists to buttress their reputations, and great critics to destroy those of their opponents. Here the fall of an artist into madness and atrocity in search of inspiration is not only an expected part of the creative process - it is itself a beautiful and desired element of the tragedy of her life.

Bavaria Megaragusa's travel guide suggests the following distinctive sights:

• Caged singers.
• Animation sweatshops.
• Public criticism session - very exciting!
• Human sculpture.
• Gladiatorial dance.

Besides the usual precations for infernal travel, Bavaria Megaragusa suggests:

• Having a spare set of expensive clothes.
• Buying an up-to-date style guide immediately on arrival. It'll cost, and won't actually impress anyone, but it will keep the critical police off your back for short stays.
• If caught off guard by a critic or socialite, deflect with a confident reference to something obscure, or preferably made-up entirely. It'll buy you time to get away while they're on the defensive.

Districts

• Platinum Eidos is the vision of the future. A sleek and sterile district of gleaming silver towers, overdesigned UI, and no pockets. Seductive to too many Etherites, not to mention Syndicate associates. It is the district most tolerant to innovation and new media, and most new ideas make their home here whether or not they like the paradigm. Its Patron, who calls herself 'the Vicar', is a rising star in the politics of the city.
  • The Vicar [1] was formerly an anticathari demon, who taught that the world of matter is wholly profane in contrast to the pure world of spirit - and that the world of matter is to be preferred in this comparison. The rise of science and death of theology led to her casting off most of her old theological trappings and swearing allegiance to the Golden City, in which she established a realm of the new material god.
• The Amber Districts are the antithesis of Platinum Eidos. These ossified domains clustered in the centre of the city know what is beautiful and expect it to be studied and adopted by all, rather than for the sublime to be torn down in the name of empty 'innovation'. Each district freezes a past aesthetic in time according to the tastes of its Patron. To a man (they are all male) the Amber Patrons seek to end the ascendancy of Platinum Eidos, but internal squabbles and the Golden Lord's finger on the scales have left them so far ineffective. Their very name and group identity, much to their chagrin, was given them by the Vicar, but the districts now tend to a yellow colour scheme nonetheless.
• The Pavilions of Autosculpture are concerned with the development of the self as the highest artistic canvas. Here one can go - or be sent - to become more beautiful in mind and body. The architecture and furniture of the schools and clinics here tend to be masterworks of living or once-living materials - wood, hair, bone and flesh. This approach engenders frequent fires, but impermanence has a beauty of its own.
• Lower Bohemia contains the city's rabble. The minor artists and performers and hacks who struggle desperately with themselves and one another to find some way they can justify themselves to the authorities. It stretches as an abyssal pit in one edge of the city, crammed full of tiny garrets and byzantine alleys stuffed with salons and schools ravenous for patrons.
• The Undercity is not a district proper but runs among all the districts. It is the vast backstage of the Golden City, a hidden and silenced realm of slaves where the work of upkeeping the gleaming beauty of the facade goes on.

Locations

• The Oubliette is a foreboding brutalist structure which reflects no light. Inside, those who are too ugly to be seen in public slave in absolute darkness.
• The House of Reflection concerns itself not with the production of art but its study and criticism. Within its mirrored halls are found immense libraries of impenetrable criticism one is expected to have read, educational and corrective facilities to improve those who have not, and the domains of the city's most feared and dangerous critics.
• The Iridescence is an underground independent and alternative venue. It takes the form of a burrowing insect carapaced in jewels and precious metals, which emerges from the undercity to nest in next season's hottest location. When whatever its new trend is is in danger of hitting the mainstream, it sloughs off its carapace to leave a building shell and vanishes, to emerge elsewhere with a new angle and design.
• The Golden Coliseum showcases competitive physical arts, most notably martial arts, but also spectacles of dance or acrobatics, often lethal. Competitors in the arena are graded not on strength, but on style, a distinction that has doomed many a cocksure guest.
• The Ivory Tower is the highest-security prison and treasury (in the Golden City, where people are objects, these concepts are not firmly distinguished) of the Lord of the City. Thoughts, feelings and things not for the masses are interred here.

The Wasteland

A Hell adjacent to the Golden City. A blasted desert of bone dust pockmarked with the wreckage of civilisations. Domain of roving marauder bands who sometimes ride out on their mad vehicles to attempt to pillage the City.

Marauder Bands

• The Calamity are the mightiest of the Wasteland, a leather-bound legion led by the fearsome demon queen of the same name. She has sacked the Golden City three times, and both she and the Lord of the City have spent time the unwilling (save by certain rumours) guest of the other. Recently she has been campaigning in the frigid deserts nearer Kakuri, but fleeing traders report she will soon return with new warslaves.
• The Skulls of Negation are a group of black-clad skeletons and mummies, who raid with their withered steeds and six-shooters to steal corpses and press them into service. A recent destructive clash with Cataclysm's Army has left the group diminished and headless.
• Cataclysm's Army is a breakaway group from the Calamity, mad and self-destructive even for Wasteland marauders, based around vehicles driven by flame. Their uncompromising ideology drew a swathe of glass across the Wasteland until it ended in catastrophic clash with the Skulls of Negation.
• The Band of Beauty in Desolation is a new band formed around a mysterious red-robed figure. They are particular about the appearances of their clothes and gear, and are notorious for stealing the any beautiful things left in the Wasteland, and breaking them in such a way that they yet remain beautiful, to serve.

Locations

• The Cathedral Ruins are said to have once been an outpost of law and peace, centred around a miraculous machine that could remake wreckage into the tools of civilisation. But unknown villains tore the community apart, and now the ruins lie deserted, and the machine broken and silent.
• The Corpsefields are a great lake of corpses mummified by the dry desert, often fished in by the Skulls of Negation.

Xoria

Xoria, the Nightmare of Flesh, is an atrocious ouroborous of fleshy caves where the gluttonous are sent to be forever digested. The mere environment can be lethal to the unprepared as it assails them with acid pools, intolerable stench and an unnatural hunger, but even travellers who defeat these must defend themselves against the ravenous inhabitants.

Hazards include:

• Acid Elementals, like the water elementals familiar to hermetics, with bonus acid damage and an insatiable hunger.
• Deep Tapeworms found passively attached to Xoria's walls, which smell incredibly appetising despite their foul appearance, with meat that looks like sweet jelly. But any who eat it will find themselves slowly consumed from within.
• Antibodies, slumbering monsters that awaken when a source of indigestion disturbs Xoria's hunger. They can take the form of giant lamprey-worms, enormous leukocytes, swarms of bloodsucking teeth, or many other forms, all nauseating, and will hunt down and consume things which impede digestion.
• Organmen, half-digested damned given a new lease on life by some agency. These bands of cannibals scour the caves of Xoria for anything they can use or eat, and take a particular interest in any hapless travellers or new arrivals with relatively soft, fresh flesh.

The Chained City

The hell of toil. To be condemned to the chained city is to be condemned to a constant battle to keep your head above water, above the constantly rising sludge that seeps up around the jagged iron architecture. Every soul is chained to the depths and must forever beg, bargain and toil for new links to extend their leash before the deep swallows them. Uncountable links are manufactured every day in the city, but most are simply shuttled up the chains to Lord Kizna atop the city, who disburses to loyal slaves and directs the constant new construction that keeps the upper city clear of the mire.

Mechanics

Hell isn't quite like IRL.

• Coincidentality varies and usually depends on following the rules of the hell in question. For example, in the Golden City, creating ugly things is vulgar.
• Pattern spheres work on materialised spirits according to their nature, but conjunctional Spirit is more permanent.
• Non-conjunctional spirit alone is limited in its ability to work as a pattern sphere, so that it's not godsphere.

Virgil is a narcotic made from the sense organs of damned souls. Taking a dose gives you heightened senses for 1 hour (+2 dice on sense rolls) at the cost of also heightening your pain response (+1 wound penalty). Long-term abuse by mortals alters the user's aesthetic perceptions to be in line with the Golden City - they see the beauty in suffering and tragedy and the shallowness of mere animal happiness. The drug is extremely addictive, provoking a depression and a craving for sensation if denied after a dependency has formed. Versions of the drug exist that can be imbibed through any sense organ.

Mirbeau is a narcotic precipitated from exquisite but awful dreams. It produces beautiful but agonising visions elaborated from the past of those who take it. It can be in liquid or even gaseous form.

Red Chrome is used by the warsouls of the Wasteland, a heady mixture of blood and fire. It produces frenzy.

Chargen

• XP-based chargen, 100 bonus xp
• Use whatever book or edition works best for what you're trying to do, I'll nerf it if it's too busted in the context of the character.
• Demonic Investments (book of madness) can be bought like Enhancements if you have some reason to have them. They cost the same as other backgrounds but require one point of flaws per investment point. Flaws should be flaws in the context of a Hell game rather than things like 'you seem a bit demonic'. The normal limit is 5 dots. You can probably borrow in stuff from Enhancements as well.

• The most broadly relevant Investments are Attributes, Armour and Countermagic all at 1 point per dot.

• Don't be too fragile

Hikers

Who are you, how did you get here, and why do you want to leave?

Ooyama Shinki (大山 神鬼)

• Renegade Akashaic who is partner of a powerful devil, the blue oni Kikansetsu-maru (鬼神説丸). They do not share a relationship as master or slave, but as kyodaibun (blood brothers, despite them both being girls) and have sworn to take on the world's greatest challenges together. In fact, they are complimentary halves of the same soul: Shinki and Kikansetsu-maru being the red and blue oni of a pair respectively. By temporarily merging their souls through voluntary possession, they can become a third form- the deadly kuroki (黒鬼).
• Banished to Jigoku (Hell) for 108 years or until the end of the kalpa after being defeated by a team of daring Akashaic disciples who sought to curtail her heretical explorations of the profane Shih demon hunter society's chi cultivation techniques and her partnership with a demon.
• Wishes to leave Hell because she is not an infernalist and she wishes to test her mettle against the wills of city men (the Technocracy) once more. The fact everyone here is kind of a dick and she missed out on Free! Eternal Summer has nothing to do with her present desires.
• Shinki means "creativity".
  • The kanji for her name are "great" "mountain" and "god" "oni".
• Kikansetsu-maru's name roughly translates to "circle of intrigue".
  • The kanji for Kikansetsu-maru's name are "oni" "god" "theory" "circle".

Melihellenia (Melody) Trenvile

• Demonic Singer, rebel artist and performer in the Golden City's hippest night spots. As the daughter of Bird of Paradise, Royal Singer to Cal, and a mortal prince, Melody (her stage name) is constantly a locus of the most in rebellion and scandal, and is currently the leading voice in the "Angel Punk" movement, which appropriates Angelic and moral iconography and aesthetics. Her power comes from her voice, which is known to be either angelic or demonic as she wishes. She denies all rumours that she stole it from an angel she seduced (while spreading them on Hello).
• Long Term friend to many in the city, throws a lot of good parties.
• Angel Punk is starting to become mainstream, and Melody's cool hunting has lead her to the conclusion that she'll soon need to move onto a new rebellion. For this reason she's decided to run away to the mortal world, and possibly betray the city in the process. Hopefully this will make quite a splash.

Gloria Stark

• Daughter of Cal and an Hermetic Infernalist
• Mom got gigulled and Gloria sent to Hermetic Hogwarts to learn her trade
• At 16 she got kidnapped and dragged to the city to take her place as one of his princess.
• A year later she still trying to escape, each attempt succeeding at every step of the way, only to have the effort foiled at the last second as part of Cal's living art exhibition of "Absolute Despair in Light of False Hope"

Startia Firenza

• Second generation "immigrant" to the Golden City.
• Former coliseum fighter who was beaten down and is now Melody's backup dancer.