Hell

The underworld, or 'Hell' is, unsurprisingly, a nasty place.

A giant bowl-shaped structure that lies beneath Pthfnder, Earth and the Forbidden world, it is the ultimate destination of all the souls of the dead.

Though many lands have their own underworlds, upon souls vanishing there, whether due to the death of the outsider they have become or otherwise, they all eventually fall down here, to this pit full of clay and the rubble of ages, their souls reborn of the clay and stone, their new bodies hacked out of the earth by the shovels of the diggers - spirits who have taken up the task of endlessly harvesting dead souls.

In the center of this land is a great ruined city, where great watch-fires have burned for eons uncounted. It is the city of rubble and ruin. Every building destroyed, ever road torn up, every marbled courtyard crumbled and tower burnt, it all ends up down here, the echoes of dead cities recreating themselves endlessly.

Beyond lies tangled roots, mist and mire. The sucking clay at every step, the shapes of scarred stone idols and cracked pillars. The land of the dead is an ever-changing map. No sooner does something crumble than does another echo take its place, and the echoes stretch on, seemingly forever.

The dead cannot die. When they lose fingers, limbs, heads, the lost pieces still live. They grow. They feed. The land of the dead is full of monsters such as these. When the dead crumble to dust beneath the weight of time, they still exist. A  handful of thoughts in the dust of endless centuries. A mind turned in on itself, moving what particles remain of its body in fitful slumber.

The dead who do not feed upon the dead are lost.

Cannibal banquets are held in the hallowed halls of the city of the dead. The newly dead feast upon the crumbling bodies of the old, and the old feast upon the bodies of the new, even as they themselves crumble. The feast delays entropy. Holds off the crumbling, holds things together for who knows how long. Months? Years? Centuries? The great dead cannot tell you how long they've been down here. The great dead have long lost their original selves, forgotten their own names. Bloated bodies the size of cities comb the wastes for victims. Tangles of limbs and heads stretching on for miles in the water and the silt, a thousand tongues muttering everything, anything they can remember.

When the great devourer came, one would not be surprised if the dead went willingly.

The creature that was once known as Gerold came into being one day. Scars of clay, teeth of stone, mouth full of ashes, dug out of the muck amidst the secrets of sages. There's no telling whom he devoured first. What is certain is that he eventually devoured them all.

The greatest of the dead. One who was ready to feed from the first moment he was free.

One who feeds upon the dead absorbs them. Their bodies become one with their devourer, but it is an imperfect process, much like merging lumps of clay. Gerold would have grown massive by the end. A single body, stretching on for miles uncountable. Limbs the size of mountain ranges, teeth the size of cities. Billions and billions of lesser dead within. Singing, shrieking, screaming in one allmighty cacophony.

At the end of the world, that is what was called to make the choice. An almighty demon god, large enough to swallow worlds. Large enough to be one.

The question at the end of the world was simple. Choose the Book, or choose the Overdeities?

But the question afterwards should have been:

Where is he now?

### Setting Notes:

Hell is fairly hellish, unsurprisingly. There's several things to consider if you want to run it.

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- Everyone is made of clay. The dead arise from clay pits, and clay forms their bodies. It might take years for them to rise to the surface and claw their way out (Or be dug up, if they're lucky enough to appear in the Riser's Pits).

Fortunately, the dead don't think much when they're still part of the earth, so they usually awaken rested, rather than insane.

- The dead have no physical needs. Their clay bodies may be perfect replicas of their living bodies, but they do not have the same needs. No drinking, no sleeping, no breathing - they don't need to eat to survive, either, but hunger is the something they *can* feel. More on that in a moment.

- The dead can never really die. So long as one single particle of their body remains, the dead remain conscious. So in other words, the very earth is sentient down in Hell, but it's a bunch of insane clay blobs that don't have enough body to actually act.

- The dead feast upon each other. All the dead can feel hunger, and all the dead are drawn to consume each other. If the dead eat one another, the hunger abates, and the eater grows saner and stronger, replacing flesh they have lost to other causes with the flesh of those they have eaten.

Those of the dead who eat enough start to become larger and stronger, eventually becoming titanic in size, with extra limbs and faces, an insectoid shell, antennae, a tail, giant jaws, or similar. This aberrancy usually occurs when they're growing back a piece they've lost - a lost arm might grow back as the limb of a preying mantis.

(The dead tend to follow a theme with regards to what they become: they draw from a mixture of humanoid, insectoid, and reptilian features as they grow larger. So one of the dead might have their lower body turn into a giant worm, or their head might become that of a crocodile, but they will not grow jackrabbit ears or a wolf's head.)

- The dead are all pretty crazy. This is not a healthy environment to be in, and the dead have no choice but to exist here. Most of the dead within the City of the Dead are sane enough to be around other people, but they're still oddball. The further you go from the center of Hell, the crazier the dead get, and the larger they grow.

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- Magic *does* work just fine in Hell, even as one of the dead. The main problem one faces is that the really good spells, like *Plane Shift,* require material components and spell books to use, which is a big problem. The most useful spells, after all, come from Pthfnder, as it's a magic-heavy world. The problem is, unlike the other worlds, Pthfnder doesn't connect *directly* to Hell, as it has it's own set of planes that compose the afterlife, and things only get to Hell once they're slain on one of *those* planes. And furthermore, the Pthfnder afterlife is more stringent about 'taking it with you' than Hell is. The Pthfnder planes usually turn you into some sort of spirit being as you get shunted to your afterlife, meaning you'd need to hold onto a spellbook or your memory of spells not only through that, but for who knows how long until you're finally slain and shunted down here.

It's not very fair, is it?

- You CAN take it with you. The happy clause of Hell is that if you happen to die while a bunch of things are being destroyed at roughly the same time and place, it all comes with you. Therefore, if you happen to be in an area of Pthfnder that doesn't shunt you into another set of planes, you can pull off a plan like Gerold did when he was sent down here: make sure you die at the same time that a bunch of really good spell books are burning around you. Most inanimate objects at least stay legible when reconstituted in Hell, so take careful note of this.