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Alright, /tg/. I wanna talk about something with you.

Hell.

More specifically, how do you portray Hell or any other demonic underworld for the sinners of society?
Do you prefer, maybe, Barlowe's vision of a highly surreal, militaristic, and grotesque Hell, using souls as the building block of it's society?

Or do you prefer a Hell-Raiser vision, full of monstrous tranhumans and a need for excess beyond insanity?

Or the corporate Hell, maybe. Is Hell mundane? Is Hell something more subtle; like endless boredom? Maybe Hell is other people for you. Or maybe it's all nipple-piercings and sadomasochist leather whips, you get the point.

How the hell do you "do" a hell, /tg/?

I'll bump with some Barlowe and Zdislaw Beksinksi or whatever I have.
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>>30026800

In Barlowe's Inferno, the city of Dis is endlessly built, only to be crushed under the "molars" of Hell and be rebuilt again. This picture shows Dis, and the foreground figure is a human soul.
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>>30026869

Here's a bunch of demons inspecting a human soul. I like how one of them looks like an Aztec figure, it kind of implies Hell is the product of people.
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>>30026927

Hannibal, as the filename says. Dictators and conquerors go to Hell and become warrior-servants to the lords of Hell.
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>>30026954

Last one of Barlowe's, 'cause I feel like I'm gypping him. But his book is hundreds of dollars...! Oh well. The picture shows a watch-tower, which, as the eyes show, is more literal than it is on Earth.
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>>30026927
>dem spindly little caliper arms

They're adorable.
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>>30026800
Am I the only one who still likes the old fashioned fire-and-brimstone Hell, with a classic red Satan ruling over the place?
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>>30027130

I like it too. It's kind of novel, just how unseen it is. But with how parodied it is, it's hard to seriously pull off.
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Barlowe is great, OP. This one is my favourite, a demon contemplating having once been an angel.

It's a good interpretation because it turns hell into a visitable location, without losing the "horror" of it. When hell is just a torture-fest, it's kind of limiting in terms of what you can do there: everyone is getting tortured all the time, the end. Barlowe's version makes hell into a place with cities and citizens that you could imagine visiting and walking around. It has resources it needs to collect, which it puts to use building an army, so that it can achieve concrete goals (taking the war back to heaven). So it has places to go and things to do, which is useful if you want PCs to visit there. But it's still very much hell.
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>>30027290
Diablo II did it well and still winds up pretty effective to this day. Great atmosphere.
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>>30028237

Yeah, but you posted a Tenacious D image. Which isn't exactly the most convincing portrayal of hell, unless it's bard hell.
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>>30026800
I like it to have nine layers. I need some variety in my hell.
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I actually came up with a kind of complex version of Hell myself, based vaguely on the Divine Comedy.

I'd need to go dig up what I had though.
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>>30028779
Please do...

Also, I love this show but this is my least favorite deception of hell. I mean it is basically a throw away gag: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWkkxgRi3fE
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>>30028658
I didn't post any image in this thread.
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>>30029307

Ah, my bad. Well there was a Tenacious D image
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>>30028711

And what do the nine layers... do? Are they like those in Dante's Inferno, or something else?

>>30028779

That'd be awesome. Please, if you can.
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>>30026800
We're already in Hell.

We are the angels who fell from the realm of pure concepts. Forever we will strive to return to that higher reality.
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>>30029612
They're more like a bean dip, I'd imagine.
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>>30029649
*tips fedora*
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>>30029649
Get out of here, fucking Cathar.
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Conscious non-existence.

What? That doesn't make sense to you? That seems like a contradiction? You can't understand how that works or happens?

That's the, literally, goddamned, torturous point of it.
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>>30029649
I thought we did for you Cathars back in the day?
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My favorite hell is Czarnosc.
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/15715013/
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>>30029752
I like this. You can't understand it. Understanding is for the living, those who still have hope of salvation.

Just unceasing torment that you are no longer capable of even knowing why you are experiencing it. It's not even actual torture with sticks and pokers and everything. God isn't actively *doing* anything to you for you to be able to rail at him for (if you were capable of that at all even) the injustice or whatever. It's torture because it is damnation and it is damnation because it just plain isn't where you should be, had you done things right.

That's chilling.
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I think Supernatural got it perfectly for me in that one episode where its revealed that Crowley turned hell into waiting in a queue. And when your number is finally called and you get to the head of said queue and the doors at the end of it, you open them to reveal the beginning of the queue.

It was just so beautiful in its mundanity. There are probably plenty of people who would go to Hell and derive sexual gratification from physical torture, but nobody fucking likes waiting in line.
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Hell is simply another plane of existence. Evil is a philosophical construct, after all. I model the Heaven/Reality/Hell distinction with entropy. Heaven is a frozen wasteland and Hell is a scorching desert.
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>>30029713
I wasn't aware that gnosticism fell under the fedora category now.
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>>30026800
At the moment? Like Disgaea.
Because I'm playing it
In a game? I guess I'd do it differently for each person.
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Hell should be about personal failure. Not any sort of divine decree that personally sent you there. It should be about how you, as a person, don't measure up to "goodness" no matter how you think you may. Because self-righteousness is just one more sin for the tally-board.

So no devils with pitchforks, because they failed too, they're being punish with you you know.

No lake of fire, that's too abstract.

Just being confronted, always and forever, with how much you suck.


(Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, with the possibility of getting yourself out if the person in hell were to simply accept that they were horrible and give up their pride and other sin? That might work, I think I've seen that in a couple things. No one ever asks the question of what would happen if Lucifer were to just say that he was sorry.)
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>>30030014
He probably did that because Gnosticism is what hipsters say they are when they want to be religious and still counter-culture.

Like how Zoroastrianism is the new hipster monotheism.

>"Yeah, I call Yahweh Ahura Mazda and Michael Mithra... You've probably never heard of them."
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>>30030113
Nah, Zoroastrianism is mostly big amongst Persian nationalists. Kinda like how Islam is a rallying cry for Arab nationalism, Zoroastrianism is a rallying cry for Persian nationalism.
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>>30029612
>>30029018

Well okay. I'm kinda going from memory though.

First, backstory: In the beginning the universe was positioned between two spiritual realms, Heaven above and Hell below. Both of them exert a sort of "gravity" that draws certain types of souls to it. Once a physical body is destroyed in our world, the law-abiding and orderly souls are drawn to Heaven, while the more imaginative, chaotic souls are drawn down to Hell. Heaven and Hell are made of material that warps and shifts based on emotions related to their affinities and a soul arriving will be given a new physical form based on their psychology and environment in which they land.


Hell is a very dark, overcast place consisting of a series of concentric circles, surrounded by a black sea of formless void. The outermost ridge is a rocky, lifeless beach upon which the Ring of Limbo Castle is built, encircling Hell. Limbo is run by the kinder and more orderly Demons, people who selflessly take in new souls and help them sort themselves out. See, the vast majority of new arrivals fall into the Wilds, a large area between Limbo and the inner realms. The Wilds are a mix of fields of freezing water and rain, nightmarish forests, and red-weeded fields. They're dotted by little shanty towns and settlements formed by new Demons, however the wandering bands of thieves or wild animals often force these groups to seek shelter in Limbo, depending on how close they are. A lot of the more powerful Demons prefer to have their own estates in the more bountiful and peaceful areas in the Wilds. Limbo City is run by self-loathing Demons who wish to destroy Hell one day through (hopefully) Peaceful revolution and reunite their souls with their counterparts in Heaven. This puts them at odds with the other factions.

(cont'd)
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>>30030431

As you cross the plains and mountains, you reach the Great City of Dis, a high-tech, walled metropolis-like ring city surrounded by fertile sulfur-fuelled farmland. Run by Demons as a relatively sane world, Dis is a disparate mix of Gothic architecture, South American Ziggurats, modern glass-structures, shanty towns, shady back-alleys, strangely beautiful parks and plenty of mass-transit rail systems. Due to the vast amount of varied and dangerous demons, Dis is a wild place, but Demons don't die very easily so violence is often seen as pointless. Dis was founded by the Goetic Elite, a moderate faction of Demons who want to keep Hell relatively peaceful and stable. Dis is probably the most "normal" place in Hell despite all the many-headed beastmen and jumbled collections of limbs wandering about.

Beyond Dis' inner wall is a massive, blazing Desert where brave and foolish Gladiators head out every day to battle in contests, drawing the attention of the cheering citizens of Dis. This endless burning sand is not natural as it's covered in the burning fire and waste produced by Dis every day in an attempt to keep it warm. If the fires were ever stopped the desert would freeze and things would get bad...

(cont'd)
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>>30030455

In the middle of Hell is a gigantic, deep hole known as the Malebolge. A baroque iron spiral full of enslaved workers and animated magical automata, Malebolge is run by the Fallen Faction, the most evil and selfish souls cast down to Hell from the Wars above. Here the Fallen work endlessly on weapons of war and terror in preparation for their ascendancy. This place is full of furnaces and metalworks, the heat of which barely keeps away the creeping chill of below. At the very bottom of the hole, in the deepest part of Hell, lies the frozen lake Cocytus, where the gigantic, ice-stuck form of Satan herself lies, slumbering for milennia. Satan is still stuck where she fell from the ancient War of the First Gods, the battle in which her former husband God and all his Angels lost their physical bodies and were split between Heaven and Hell.

The Limbo Demons wish to destroy Satan and demolish Hell, and Satan wishes to emerge and unite Hell under her heel, and the Goetics want to ensure an equilibrium between the two and maintain peace. The vast majority of Demons are either peaceful, melancholy people that try to enjoy what they can in their dark, sloppy existence, or are brainless thrillseekers broken over centuries of chaotic living. Some of the best artists and poets can be found in Hell, beautiful maidens who may be missing eyes or sport horns, but still good people. However if Satan ever got loose, things might get crazy. Nobody knows if She'd be able to leave Hell itself, but if anybody could, it's her.

Anyway, that's what I have IIRC. It's a bit mundane, but I like the idea of Hell being a place you could actually live in.
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>>30030481
>Malebolge
>Male Bulge.

i like it op but that was out of character
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>>30030481
I like the Idea of hell being "stable" i just dont like the iplication that the most uncomfortable thing about hell is body morphing
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>>30030515
>this guy doesn't know his Dante

Look at him. Look at him and laugh.
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>>30030579
I-Im sorry.
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>>30030574

The idea is that the longer you exist in Hell and the more frayed your mental capacities get, your mind eventually falls apart and you turn into one of the wandering monsters about the place, or your soul falls apart and you "die".

That's what I thought anyway. Death in Hell comes from centuries of endless torture or being broken through methods that destroy your psyche, like being forced to commit acts you'd never do, or having your brain altered by magic to fragment into a mess of uncontrollable reactions.

The physical body is just a representation of you. Even if you've transformed into some abstact flying brick monster you can still be of sound mental faculties and vice versa, I guess.
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>>30030661
>The idea is that the longer you exist in Hell and the more frayed your mental capacities get, your mind eventually falls apart and you turn into one of the wandering monsters about the place, or your soul falls apart and you "die".
oh ok that makes sense and I like it. I thought you meant that hell was nice people with horns
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>>30030692

Eh, more that most people there are conciously aware that they're knee-deep in the blackest, muckiest part of Existence and try their best to find some form of enjoyment so they don't cry themselves to sleep at night. That might come from being good and pleasant, or it might come from raping everything that moves and then setting fire to themselves.

Hell is a sad place. It's like you've been given eternal life but the only place you can live is at a lighthouse with a leaky roof in the middle of an endless rainstorm.
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>>30030481
>satan is female
Please keep the misogyny back in /r9k/, shitlord.
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>>30030804
"Ha'satan", Hebrew for "the Accuser", is a feminine noun.
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Hell is pure irony to the damned. Your failure and misdeeds in life will shape your fate in hell. If you spurned others in life in hell you will never be able to get directions, and will often fall and get stuck on the side of the road and nobody will help you. If you were a layabout and did nothing, wasting away, in hell the demons will drive you forward constantly, your feet will pound against the hard and sharp stone and you will be run beyond exhaustion every single day, with not a moment to rest. You will collapse, and then you will crawl.

It just goes on forever, it's pretty shit.

But you can get out. How? By breaking your behavior, accepting the truth about yourself and where you went wrong, and atoning it out with a long and painful quest. Everyone's quest is different. Some must go and find the souls of each person they wronged in life and apologize. Others must climb up the rocky walls of hell, if they fall they will break apart and will have to painfully heal until they can try again. And so on.

Of course, you could just be the soul of a wizard and get yourself the fuck out, or pass on to the 'real' afterlife if you weren't a shitty person. It's kinda hard to combine Unknown Armies's cosmology and traditional christian mythology, but I try.
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>>30029967

>the British
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>>30030848
sO ARE ALL THE OTHER ANGEL NAMES, RETARD.
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I like In Nomine's hell. It is split into a bunch of little kingdoms ruled by the various Demon Prince's. Some kingdoms are pretty horrible, the Prince of Death's domain is an empty plain where souls are left naked, every so often the Prince's harvesters range out and collect Forces off the damned souls, each time a soul loses a force it falls down the evolutionary ladder eventually degenerating into maggots desperately burrowing to avoid their final oblivion. Others like the City of Shal-Mari seem nice on the surface, even the damned can potentially achieve a modicum of comfort, though since demons are total cheats and dickwads it rarely happens.

"Below" all the prince's domains is the lower hells, the territory of Lucifer himself. Even Demon Princes fear being called below to speak to the Lightbringer. Sometimes the very walls of the lower levels attack visitor's minds and spirits reducing many to gibbering messes before they meet the Dark Lord. Others it is merely uncomfortably hot or cold.
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>>30031009
Micha'el, "one who is as God" is certainly not female. That "el" on the end is the give-away. And even if that wasn't true, the other angels being female wouldn't make it misogynistic to refer to satan as a female.

I don't even know what you're arguing here.
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>>30031130
>>30031009
>>30030848
>>30030804

I just have a fetish for demon girls, I meant nothing by it
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Interesting little perspective flip that people tend not to realize in the modern world.

Since the Tanach was composed in a desert, light is not always a good thing. "Those who live in the shelter of the Most High will find rest in the shadow of the Almighty."
—Psalm 91
So Lucifer being the Lightbringer isn't this stealth-gnostic demiurge thing whereby he's actually the good guy. It means he burns shit for kicks and giggles.
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>>30031165
Wait, you said God was her husband. I need more background info here. Is God the Godly God that our God is? What was before Heaven and Hell? All that good shit.
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>>30032363

Oh, okay.

Well it's like the Greek Mythology. There were the Olympian Gods and the Titans before them and so forth.

In this, "God" and Satan and the Angels were like ancient beings on Earth, very powerful, but with physical bodies. God and Satan were a pair, but their natures were different so they broke up and their respective armies joined them. The magical powers unleashed in their clash were so great that the physical bodies of both sides were annihilated and so each side drifted to Heaven and Hell, taking up residence there.

The few survivors of the disaster became the ancestors of humanity, orderly and chaotic both intermixed, to avoid the tragedy of their brethren.

Something like that?
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>R.E. Mann said, "I met a man who thought we had all been judged and are in Heaven."

>"Judged?" said Levine. "Why, yes, I imagine we are. We face eternity now. We have no universe left, no outside phenomena, no emotions, no passions. Nothing but ourselves and thought. We face an eternity of introspection, when all through history we have never known what to do with ourselves on a rainy Sunday."

>"You sound as though the situation bothers you."

>"It does more than that. The Dantean conceptions of Inferno were childish and unworthy of the Divine imagination: fire and torture. Boredom is much more subtle. The inner torture of a mind unable to escape itself in any way, condemned to fester in its own exuding mental pus for all time, is much more fitting. Oh, yes, my friend, we have been judged, and condemned, too, and this is not Heaven, but hell."

>And Levine rose with shoulders drooping dejectedly, and walked away.

>R.E. Mann gazed thoughtfully about and nodded his head. He was satisfied.

https://sites.google.com/site/principiascientifica/book/isaac-asimov/the-last-trump
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Isaac Aasimov wrote a short-story in which Hell (or 'eternal damnation') was simply for every single person who had ever died to wake up. No one could die again, no one got hungry, no one got angry and no one got horny. Slowly, all physical mass other than human beings just collapsed and blended in with the ground, until the Earth was nothing but billions upon billions of naked people just.. walking around. They couldn't get tired, but there was nothing to see. All humor was gone, and every single human was just.. apathetic.
I think that's the most horrifying description of Hell I've ever read. Please discuss.
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>>30032713
Holy shit, I didn't even see your post. I like you.
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>>30032957
Can we not. Ever? That's horrifying.
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>>30033000
>>30032713
This dude is quoting it. It's a really good piece, actually. But it does have the sort of 'flat' ending Aasimov's shorts tend to have.
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>>30033060
It's modern exploration into the idea of Sheol, the Old Testament realm of the dead where everyone, good and evil, go after death.
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I made hell into a general underworld with the different religions on a timeshare thing with tons of grey boring bureaucracy.
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>>30032957

Fuck man. I really cannot fathom such a thing happening or how I could deal with it. I go mad by just standing around doing nothing or waiting in line. If this is what hell would be like, I'd convert right now.

Ive read Dante and the Canonical versionof hell in the bible. I just started reading about Czarnosc (great shit). All of that is infinitely more preferable to standing around in the combined apathetic misery of every who has ever lived and died.

Fuck.
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>>30033800
There's a scene where R. E. Mann goes to a cemetery and finds a family sitting there, with the mother crying over a baby in her arms. The father tells Mann that it is the revived body of their son, who died shortly after birth. But it doesn't cry, it doesn't eat, and it will never grow.. so how is it really their son? It's just an immortal flesh-bag.
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>>30026800
A mix of Planescape's Lower Planes and Exalted's Malfeas, Wyld and Underworld.
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Hell has been an evolving idea over the past year or two as I've been preparing for my players to visit it.

I subscribe to the Lovecraft / 40K approach to Mortalkind vs. the Cosmos. That approach that says WE ARE NOT SPECIAL. That Hell was not made FOR US. It is just a horrendous dimension of fear and imprisonment which, for some reason, our bodiless souls are drawn to, and need help from benevolent powers to avoid.

Of course, it'd be hard for an adventuring party to get something out of that experience, so I'm still giving it a lot of thought. Trying to keep it mostly a mystery, even when they're in it.
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The way I like to portray hell differs on how the players end up there.

If they got there through force, such as opening a portal themselves or something similar, I go with a narrative of the grotesque, the chaotic, and the incomprehensible and horrifying, as soon as their presence is known however, the chaotic scene starts to swell before slowly growing quiet, like an orchestra tuning in the last seconds as the conductor taps the baton, and suddenly nothing. Then, from the nothing, trickling in a little at a time, forms start to take shape, familiar sights come into sight, human-like things show themselves and let themselves be known, as the intruders are led into what appears to be a marketplace, each stall hawking different wares or services, each one pandering to a weakness of human character, such as mirrors and makeup for the vain, or firecrackers and padded bats for wrath, and judging the focus of the intruders, hell itself discerns what purpose brings them to such a den of sin and gauges them roughly on their power. From there, a whim of a die roll and generally how hostile the players become or laid back, the denizens either ease up and cut back the hostility or they might start getting violent if there's something to be gained. So you may be ending up going to a fairly nice, upscale nightclub with some damn fine drinks, a wonderful performer or band of performers, and information for sale, as well as bar food and such, perhaps a massage parlor or even places that aren't of business, such as a park or on a lane of residences. Or you may be ending up in a dive bar where the brawl's getting violent, a massage parlor where the happy ending is on the house, or under the sticks of being beaten by an angry mob. Why the strange hellscape suddenly becoming much more familiar and like home? Well, if one were to perceive all of hell at once, they'd be driven mad, and an unpredictable mad person isn't much use or much fun in Hell.
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>>30035158
>"40K approach"
>"we are not special"
>births three out of four Chaos Gods possibly linked to events on Earth
>Emprah means that humans have center stage in fighting Chaos
>vast majority of Chaos' recruits are human
>destruction of humanity would also doom Chaos
u wot m8

Personally, my homebrew settings don't have Hell in them, unless they're D&D, in which case I try to hew to the descriptions in the sourcebooks.
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>>30035349
However, if they got there through a more established route, such as a gateway or a device known to send one there...

Fluffy clouds, cherubs, marble pillars, ivy, harp music and gently babbling brook water from water flowing from one cloud to the next, generally not what one would expect of Hell. As they press onwards, it becomes apparent that they're in the right place as messages written along the walls, sometimes hastily scrawled or in very fine letters, messages such as "We were promised," and "Better to rule in Hell," and upon closer inspection, the cherubs and angels are simply effigies, made of sand, metal, as well as hairs and leathers, of unknown origin. Eventually, visitors will discover the only door through and a large sign with brilliant letters in a language so base that it can be understood by any mortal who has the gift of language, "WELCOME TO HELL, ENJOY YOUR STAY, PARDON THE MESS." It appears at first to be a fairgrounds, with rides and sideshow games, but they won't let the players on any rides or play any games until they queue up in the line, ditto use of the lavatory. Queuing up is as simple as pulling a number and waiting for your number to be called. The good news, whenever you depart Hell, you return to only a few moments after you left, as the time flow is quite different. The bad news is, you may have to wait the equivalent of numerous life times for your number to be called, and it will feel like numerous lifetimes, even though you do not age. This is all a test, of course, to see how virtuous the entrants are, testing respect for the authority, honesty in not trying to switch numbers with another person in the queue, courage with the increasingly outlandish and repulsive fairgrounds food, benevolence when another person in line asks to go ahead of you when in actuality they're a plant there to test you, honor for holding a plant's place in a long line, and should you fail any of the virtues being tested...
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I run with one of three versions of hell, or I run them all simultaneously.
>Hell is other people.
When you go to hell (for one reason or another), it is a place where your soul is trapped to deal with either the worst people you can imagine, or the people you personally hate the most. And they are there. With you. Forever.
>Hell is nothingness.
Being put into hell means total spiritual deprivation - if the soul has senses. Imagine a great white expanse of NOTHING. Absolute. Total NOTHING.
Why is it not total darkness?
Because darkness lets you hope that eventually you'll find something.
If light fills a completely empty infinite space. What do you have?
The factual knowledge that it is empty. Forever. You are totally isolated and alone for eternity.
>Hell is repetition
Inspired by groundhog day. Imagine the worst day of your life. I mean -the- worst day of your life. The one where you're sure that even if you went back to do it again, you wouldn't be able to make it that much better.
Now imagine having to live through the worst day of your life. Over and over and over again. Forever.

Sometimes I mix the three.
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>>30035501
> The one where you're sure that even if you went back to do it again, you wouldn't be able to make it that much better.
How would that work? I mean, if you know you can't die and that the day will repeat itself indefinitely, you could do ANYTHING. Of course it would get tedious in a couple hundred years, but I can't imagine a day you couldn't make better by, say, violently murdering the person making you miserable or just.. well, raping everyone you feel the slightest attraction to. No consequences, right?
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>>30035158
Combining 40k's half assed combination of Judaeo-Christianity and Moorcock with HPL is totally inane.
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>>30035579
Hell as a place where you can infinitely live out the pleasure of torture, murder, and rape sounds pretty fitting. It would be a good subversion without making it unrecognizable.
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>>30035488
...one would find themselves plummet through a trap door, going down a well-worn metal slide, before being unceremoniously dumped where the souls of those being punished for similar failings are gathered, from other worlds, realities, and time periods waiting to be processed. They get the equivalent of a handicap sticker slapped on their forehead for being here with a living body, and go into the shorter line to deal with a broker taking on an appearance similar to the species of the person being audited for their reasons for being in Hell. If they're perceived to be a threat, they're regrouped with the others they came in with, put into a grounds of challenge, be it an arena for gladitorial combat, or a simple game of chess, or beating a devil at a fiddling contest, and should they lose, they're promptly ejected from Hell, back the way they came, and have to start the process over. Otherwise, they get to bargain for whatever it is they seek in Hell, and the bargaining chips can be as material as coins and dollar bills or as abstract as one's creativity or willpower. Souls surprisingly have little value, as they've no shortage of them in Hell, and there's only so many ways souls can be re-purposed to accommodate life in Hell. But, once an agreement is made, a contract is signed, both parties get what they came for, and the invader is guided back to the entrance.

Can it get a lot more violent than that? Absolutely. But why bother, when one has pokers in every fire? After all, apathy's a big thing as well, in Hell, all that bunk is mostly for show and to keep things orderly.
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>>30035600
And eventually.

Eventually you realize.

It's pointless. All that pleasure you're partaking in. All the joy you're getting out of breaking these taboos. Meaningless in the end - because like a lot of things, eventually you'll grow tired and weary of it.

Then what do you have?

Now, imagine someone being brought -back- from that hell, back into the real world.

Potential BBEG material? I know I'd be a little insane after the experience.
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>>30035656
At some point, wouldn't you just stop moving? Just sit down in the place you 'spawn' every morning, and keep sitting 'til you wake up? For thousands and thousands of years, just sitting there, watching the worst day in your life go by, steaming inside.
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>>30032957
Although I understand why Asimov didn't want to detail that sort of thing, honestly a lot of human sexuality is intellectual in nature. I took Prozac for awhile and though it almost totally killed my sex drive (fortunately I'm pretty determined), I'd still inflict 4-6 climaxes on my grill a session just by touching her.

I didn't really feel empathy or desire about it, just a way to assert dominance and experiment with someone else's body.

Besides intellectual reasons, social reasons, and dominance reasons, there's also general societal expectations, and of course the dance-like nature of courtship.
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>>30035656
Yeah, you'd have a hard time functioning socially afterwards.
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>>30035699
But if there is no societal expectations, no reason or need for any kind of dominance, and you already feel like you know all there is to know, why do it? I'm pretty sure he wrote in the story that the wish to learn had also disappeared.
>>
I like the Greek concept of the Underworld. It's not all fire and brimstone and daemons with pitchforks, most of it is Asphodel where the unremarkable spend their days wandering back and forth across a barren plain.

The fields of punishment fit better with more traditional ideals of hell, reserved for the folk who caused havoc on the earth and committed crimes against the Gods. And then you have Tartarus where people who have actually betrayed the Gods like Sisyphus and Tantalus end up.

And for the good and virtuous, there's always Elysium (Or the Elysian Fields) and the Isle of the Blessed for the folks who managed to live out three virtuous lives.
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>>30035733
They're still thinking beings, there will still be society.

Dominance games will exist over absolutely nothing. Indeed, social games will be the ONLY thing that exists in a world like that.

Not to mention knowing the answer to an experiment doesn't necessarily change the desirability of performing it.
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I had a dream I went to hell once. I spent what felt like an eternity in heaven, any mortal desire I could ever want laid out in front of me. I tried every food, smoked weed and drank, just pretty much did what I wanted.

Then I went to the next level. In this level there seemed to be an infinite number of women, all other souls trapped in hell, who wanted to bang. It was nice..till after an eternity I started banging dudes. And then she males. And then animals. Each time I got bored I had to continually seek out something to stimulate me. When I got bored of sex I went to the next level.

Thankfully after entering I woke up. But what I saw was enough to clue me into what the true nature of hell was. All around me people engaged in masochism and sadism, willingly engaging in violent sexual acts of near torture for the sake of stimulation. I don't want to know what's beyond that. Hell is nothing but your connection to God being severed. You can only engage in worldly pleasures so you continue to become more and more depraved until you join the ranks of demons. It's like reverse spiritual enlightenment.
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>>30035906
I should say: doesn't necessarily eliminate the desirability of performing it.

Do humans really fuck that often just for the need? You fuck to be spontaneous, to assert yourself, to express yourself, to cleanse your brain of bad thoughts. And to be playful.

Like there is seriously not much stuff to do in a world like that.

Its certainly as valid of an afterlife goal as sitting around waiting for indians.
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>>30035917
A dream? This is one of those "let me tell a story about my life" as a guise, no?

Anon, I love you and forgive you. You can come back home now.
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>>30035951
Well, you know, that's kind of moot if you can't feel sexual stimulation. Or get a boner. Or get wet.
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>>30036007
You might be able to experience physical arousal.

Men to get only more depraved when they can't into boner.
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>>30036002
Well it was a dream, I just thought it was relevant to the thread. It didn't change my life or anything
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Barlowe. Just Barlowe.

I mean, look at this. It's GRANDIOSE.

This is where fiends come from in my fantasy settings.
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Bump.
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Surely in this case, one would become too apathetic to even care about the boredom? You'd eventually just become a rock due to a lack of stimulation.

I like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac's view of hell; since everyone in Hell is an asshole, you have to spend forever living with assholes and dickheads. Crab mentality at its finest.
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I hereby seal this thread with my approval.

It shall be saved for posterity and the enjoyment of future /tg/ generations.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=hell
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>>30036964

I know 40k infests and taints everthing here, but everytime I´ve seen Barlowes work it fits (or forms?) my image of Daemonworlds.
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I do like a good Hell

I recall one that had a ring road as a major part of it, the Hadean Orbital, Route 666
It was a constant traffic jam, and everyone (though this was mainly demons) drove SUVs, minivans and vans. It always made you late for work too.
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>>30026800
Hmm... Eight legs?

How many vaginas does it have?
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>>30030985
Bloody right, it's a queue that never ends. Lovely!
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>>30029649
Just looked up Catharism, it's cool as fuck. IDK what these fools are getting buttmad about.
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As a lifelong Lutheran, I've been indoctrinated into the whole "eternal separation from God" deal, so Hell sucks for everyone involved, including demons. The scary red monster-things that the players fight come from another realm entirely.

In my stupid homebrew setting, the Hell that bad folks go to when they die is an endless desert of abrasive metal shavings, viz pic related. (It's actually a recolor of an image I made in Terragen, but that's beside the point.) The weather randomly shifts between blazing heat and freezing cold, which the metal conducts to the body with painful results. Shifting winds churn the desert into a chaotic hurricane of scouring metal; no dune is in the same place twice The sun never rises, producing an eternal grey darkness. Damned souls are forced to wander through--hungry, thirsty, burning/freezing, restless, uncovered, and alone--for all eternity. And with no God to help them, they have no hope.

This isn't even close to what the Bible says, but seeing as my setting is fantasy, this issue is insignificant. Besides, the players aren't supposed to see it directly. If they do, something has gone terribly wrong...
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>>30047039
>I've been indoctrinated into the whole "eternal separation from God" deal, so Hell sucks for everyone involved, including demons

I always took the separation from God to be relatively mild, at least from the perspective of people who were never really in touch with God in the first place. The notion of a place of eternal punishment doesn't really jive with my understanding of God as Eternal Love. Especially since we're talking about a figure that sacrificed his son/himself in order to create a loophole in the covenant to give people a second chance.
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>>30048855

It's less that God is an entity (he is) but he's more like, I guess, perfection?

By being separated you can never reach the perfect state.

It's kinda scary in a long-term sense.
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My personal hell would be being stuck on the third or fourth floor of a hotel. All the windows are milky and opaque, the doors don't open, and there are security cameras. The elevator dings every so often.
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>>30050298
Oh, well if we're talking personal hells, I'd say mine would be the beginning of the last hour of the night shift at my job. It's dark out, the store is dead and I can't leave the front, so I'm forced to stand there and watch time pass by. Which would be particularly hellish if it didn't.
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>>30050436

Mine would be a church of Scientology. The whole building smells vaguely of some kind of nasty spice, kinda like farts. The people are overbearing and pushy. The rug is really gross looking, and all the doors are made of this cheap, cheap, CHEAP particle board that is somehow LOUD when the door shuts. There's a Seven-Eleven next door, but I can never go. It's also too warm.

guess why this is my hell
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>>30050298
So which media company are you covering Sochi for?
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>>30050536
Because you're a lip-servicing Scientology cultist? I hear it can be really hard to get out of that shit.
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>>30050580

It wasn't hard to get out of for me.
For some people, though, it's impossible, cause their whole families; 90% of their friends; their whole lives are invested into that little religion.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bSZslEDUl0

Kinda like this.
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>>30030014
It was the first thing to fall under that category because it's hipster as fuck.
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>>30053703
Fucking makes you a hipster?


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