Hell (is the future)

Hell is Hell. Everyone knows what Hell is - torture, heat, despair, inhabited by demons. It is where evil souls are punished after death. Everyone knows about this, and religious people believe it.

The reality is more complex. Hell is something total; easy to conceptualise but difficult to concretely realise. It was theorised by sadists and pedants, and the sadists and pedants who would eventually build it needed literally hundreds of thousands of years to design and properly implement their plans. Part of the difficulty is that abstract ideas of ultimate punishment are by nature inexact, and things have to be made workable. They completed it eventually. It is a perfected stasis, a universe of torture, and it waits for every soul in the far distant future.

The Bright Shiners are the ones responsible. Their natures are inscrutable. The are intelligences. Scholars who are aware of them (not many of these, often gnostics, intensely disliked by the church) sometimes call them stars, and refer to them collectively as a constellation. They hate, this much is obvious; they are hating machines. They work tirelessly to bring about their own instantiation. They send things back through the timeline, assassins and spree-killers mostly, in an attempt to ensure their own emergence. If, after everything, they exist, then so will Hell, in perfected perpetuity.

The gnostics call it The Material Hell, to differentiate it from the place in the popular myths. They will tell anyone who listens that the Material Hell is infinitely worse than the popular one. They will also say that it is the end state of matter, that the Material Hell is contained within our material world and is actually its perfected form. 

The process of travelling back through time is dangerous and traumatic. The minds that emerge are tangled and often incomplete. Their memories are washed-out, they are confused and aggressive, and generally they have only a vague sense of what they are here for. Most of them know that they need to kill someone specific, or destroy a specific family or community; sometimes a city, country, ocean, or species. They don't have bodies, so they need to colonise one in order to do anything. Bodies without souls work best (puppets, manikins, corpses), but they can also destroy the soul in a living body and inhabit what remains. These are what most people call demons; all demons are incomplete minds, scarred by travelling backwards from the perfected, eternal Hell system. Most demons basically follow the plot from Terminator.

No one knows what state the demons were in when they embarked from the future, but the things that arrive are rarely intelligent and never sane. They have a few things in common: they are invisible (though you can often feel their presence), make people physically sick when they are nearby, and can talk in screaming voices. Without a body they can talk to you and make you sick but that's all. This is actually enough to do quite a lot of damage in service of the Shiners (if you scream into someones ear for a few weeks it's not hard, depending on the person, to drive them into psychosis or suicide), but mostly what demons are sent to do is kill and ruin things, and they prefer to do this quickly and messily where possible. They hate with a hideous clarity and intensity; all of them have been imprinted by the Shiners, who are hating machines.

When they take ownership of a body they use it until it breaks. Enough has been written about what human muscles can do when all of the natural inhibitions removed; people fear demons for a good reason. Well-made puppet bodies are even better. A wooden doll can do some damage; an articulated iron mannikin might destroy half of a castle before it is finally torn to pieces. A strange side effect of the possession: pieces of the body slowly turn an instantly-recognisable wet crimson colour. Demons will generally attempt to hide this discolouration in a human host. 

You can destroy the bodies, which generally does nothing to permanently stop the demon, or you can manipulate the actual intelligence-being in various ways. If you know what you're doing you can imprison them, lobotomise them, dissolve and kill them, torture them. Because the demon is a bodiless intelligence, these things need to be done using language and ritual. Abstraction, contract, logic - these are your tools. There is generally nothing a demon loves more than pulling someone into screaming wet pieces after that person tried and failed to imprison it using logic. 

There are a few different things that demons do when they arrive: 

- They try to find whatever it is they were sent to kill, to further shore up the timeline for the Bright Shiners. 

- They build 'Mimic Hells'. Intelligent demons who are cut off from return to the future will often set about building lesser versions of the Material Hell in our time. This is often what demons do in their 'retirement', after they have successfully completed their various missions (or they believe that they have - because the demon minds are scrambled by the time travel, the missions are often poorly remembered and can even be contradictory or tautological). This can be as simple a cellar full of hooks and chains where they take people to torture to death, and as elaborate as a vast subterranean dungeon, built solely to trap and torment the people who enter it (like a Saw film). Mimic Hells are greatly feared by adventurers, and contain nothing but pain, terror, and often the demon itself, squatting in the middle of it all, screaming and laughing.

- Very, very few demons are sent with a more complex mission. They need to be capable of using magic (which is uncommon, but not unheard of. Demons are intelligence, intention, and voice - they have everything they need to use magic), and they need to arrive with enough of themselves intact that they remember the complicated rituals required to set up their return to the future. Being captured by a demon capable of return to the Material Hell is the single worst thing that can happen to a person or a soul. This fate is typically reserved for people that the Shiners believe have actively worked against their future emergence - if you discover (even read about) the Material Hell and the Bright Shiners, and try to take action against their instantiation, eventually your will be visited by returner demons eager to bring you to the future physically. The magic is time intensive and fiddly, but once completed you will never return. Your fate is better not to imagine. It is for this reason that learned gnostics sometimes (usually in secret) greet one another with 'Hail the Shiners!' - it is thought that outward displays of devotion will ward against the predations of returner demons.

- There are horrible rumours of Returning Engines, huge machines beneath the earth, built and maintained by ancient demon kings; vast gates and portals that can transport souls and people to the Material Hell en masse. No one has ever seen one.

Mag's Needle (preliminary notes)

Part 2, notes from actually running this location, here.

The Needle is the tower of a wizard, although not a wizard who knows magic - by dnd standards probably more of a sage: someone in possession of powerful artefacts, lots of esoteric knowledge, and a number of contracts with magical beings.

The wizard was King Mag, an eccentric, intelligent, and ambitious noble. Political sidebar - kings and queen in the current political structure are ranked beneath the Baroness, who is the actual sovereign ruling in the capital. Their actual titles are petty-king and petty-queen, but they generally don't effect these within their administered territories, and the Baroness doesn't care as long as they pay their taxes and don't try anything obviously seditious. 

Mag became aware of a secret invasion from another dimension, and set up the Needle to act as a testing site (vivisections) and prison for the extra-dimensional beings that he was able to capture. All of these beings were invisible. Things about the Needle:

- It is designed to imprison and study invisible beings. The entire building is constructed around the Lamp at the top, which emits a unique light that makes invisible things visible.

- It has two separate sections. One is above ground, and looks like a strange lighthouse. The other is below ground; a prison of iron cages, sunken into the earth, that mirror the structure of the tower. The prison can be flooded (this is a failsafe, for if the lamp fails and the invisible occupants try to escape), and will be half-flooded when the players discover it. The mechanisms of flooding are entirely mundane plumbing systems. 

- There is actually not much magic in the Needle. The obvious exception is the Lamp, and there are one or two magical artefacts scattered around as well, but by and large the functions of the various rooms and compartments are achieved via optics and fluid engineering. The tech base of the tower is higher than the world around it, and involves mechanisms, mirrors, and lenses.

- The light of the Lamp looks like very cold, white fluorescent light - it is utterly alien in a world that depends on candles and lanterns. It has various strange properties when refracted or concentrated, and reflects as you would expect light to. 

- Sections of the Needle are built from ironwork and tough sheets of absolutely transparent crystal, which means the the light of the Lamp falls through the entire room (nowhere for an invisible thing to hide), but the enormous expense of this construction technique meant that Mag had most of the core structure built from stone. These opaque stone rooms often have mirror reflectors built in that allow large beams of Lamp light to flow through them, but are not as absolutely covered as the transparent rooms.

- The construction is obviously paranoid. Mag was an intelligent man whose long term exposure to extremely dangerous invisible entities eroded his stability. His personal apartments and his laboratory are at the top of the tower, and are built from crystal.

- There is a central shaft that runs the entire length and depth of the Needle. The light from the Lamp shines down this shaft and can thus be redirected through opaque sections with mirrors.

- There are two dangers in the prison. The first are the weak, but vicious, Dimensional Vermin. Two of these are loose in the top section of the tower, and the other four are held securely below, in the iron prison. 12 more were drowned in their cells when they were flooded. The second is a single Dimensional Soldier, aka a Killing Machine. It is securely imprisoned in the bottom cell of the prison, which is currently flooded. Soldiers do not require air or food, so it has survived intact.

DIMENSIONAL VERMIN

Invisible humanoids, sent to our reality from the future as terror weapons. They are physically unimpressive and quite stupid, but the fact that you can't see them makes them extremely scary to fight against for most people. 

They kill things around them, it's all they do. Their bodies are human-like, and because they are invisible that's what most people assume that they are. They are actually bio-engineered by whoever is sending them back in time. They have no genitalia. They have been feeding on rotten meat from the dungeons, and small animals that have wondered into the tower. It the players get one into the light of the Lamp, they will see that they are bright red, slick, and shiny - obviously inhuman. They try to kill things by forcing their fingers into soft parts and orifices, and by strangling and beating people to death. Stats as commoners with permanent Greater Invisibility. 

DIMENSIONAL SOLDIER

Mag calls these the Killing Machines, and is obsessed with them. They are large, about the size of a horse, and are mechanical, not biological. They move on tank tracks, absolutely silently. They have a large pneumatic ram attached to them, which is what they use to kill things. It has enough force to slam through solid walls - human bodies that are hit simply come apart in a gory mess. 

Dimensional Soldiers are horrible paranoia machines. They move silently and are invisible, and generally the way that you realise that one is around is when someone next to you explodes. Once he discovered them, King Mag spent most of his life trying to figure out how to deal with the idea that one could be anywhere. They are mechanical, but also obviously magical in some obscure way. They seem to know who to kill, and they have a weird, slow, cunning intelligence. They can also fade out of existence when in darkness, which takes a few hours and means that they go back to where they came from (the future, but the players won't know this). They are always deployed into our timeline with a specific mission in mind, and will feel the presence of any specific people around them that their masters need eliminated.

They are horrible, but they follow a series of rules. They can't go up and down stairs (tracked vehicles). If they are in lit areas (even though they are invisible most of the time) then they can't fade out - this is how Mag originally imprisoned the one below, by immobilising it and keeping it lit at all times. It the players can see them then they are not really a threat, as the ram is a large and cumbersome weapon and you need to be in a specific danger zone for it to work. Under the light of the Lamp the Soldier is a black iron machine with weird controls and mechanisms covering its surface area. The ram on top is a block of polished steel. If you can see it, you will be revolted and creeped out by its silent movement, which is obviously, screamingly unnatural. You will also see small visual distortions around its 'body' as whatever makes it invisible tries and fails to do its thing beneath the light of the Lamp.