So your pistol-packing, kung-fu-fighting heroes took on something they couldn’t handle, and they bit the dust. Is that any reason for the adventure to stop?
In practice, your heroes may never find themselves in any actual form of Hell, and if they do, it should not be taken lightly. The descent into the Underworld is a classic stage of myth. Role-playing in such an environment should handled as such, with plenty of soul-searching as well as demonic butt-kicking.
The place these descriptions really come in handy is the flavor that goes with them. Next time you’re coming up with a Supernatural Creature to oppose the characters, you can just look into the list of possible punishments and build a demon to administer them. The Chinese version of Hell is very creative— where else are people tormented by perpetually imbibing nasty medicines or having their brain removed and replaced with a hedgehog? How will your players react to a demon wielding a trident in one arm and a stiff brush in the other, or who does a vicious “dutch rub” attack? Or a flock of ducks trying to nibble out the party’s livers? Just remember: if people are tormented in some way in the Underworld, there should be demons who can administer that torment, and the Lotus probably know how to summon those demons.
It can also be useful for visions of justified torments endured by those long-running villains that have finally been vanquished, and for diatribes by epically determined villains who escaped from their torments to get revenge on the PC’s.
A truly epic quest might involve retrieving lost Silver Dragons from a variety of afterlives to bring them back to the Secret War long enough to have a climactic battle. This is the sort of thing that any GM should be chary of, but if you’ve been reading Sandman and have a hankering to put a lot of myth in your action movie, go for it!
If anyone reading this page finds errors in my mythology or theology, please let me know. We’re making action movies here, so we can break any traditional rules we want if it makes better cinema, but we should always do so knowingly.
The classical Chinese underworld, situated beyond the Wu-chiao rock that marks the gate to the infernal regions, is subdivided into the Ten Courts of Purgatory ruled by the 10 Yama Kings collectively called the Shih Wang. (I found a reference to a Sutra of the Ten Kings that I have yet to track down. There was a metion of “shih wang ching” on an Amazon page and library entries on a related book, but I can’t find any further data. I’m still looking for a mythological source on “yama kings”.) They are described in the Yü Li Ch’ao Chuan, or the Divine Panorama. Those who lead virtuous lives from their youth onwards are escorted after death to the land of the immortals; those whose balance of good and evil is exact are reborn as humans; and those who have repaid their debts of gratitude and friendship and fulfilled their destiny, but still have a balance of evil deeds weighing against them, pass through the Courts of Purgatory before being reborn to live a new life and be judged again. (Apparently, being found wanting a second time is bad.) Those who are disloyal or unfilial, who commit murder or suicide, or refuse to believe in the action of karma, are in for it. Good works performed are certainly capable of offsetting one’s balance of evil deeds.
(In The Story of the Stone, the narrator says there are 135 lesser Hells and 10 principal ones, one for judgment by the god of Walls and Ditches, one for the Great Wheel of Transmigrations, and eight for the punishment of sinners. It looks like the first two correspond to the first and tenth hells of the Divine Panorama respectively. There is fine description of travel in the infernal city of Feng-tu in that novel, not to mention some delightful fuddling of demonic bureaucrats, somewhat more detailed than the scene in Journey to the West. I don’t know whether the Yin-Yang Gorge between the fifth and sixth hells, spanned by a swinging rope two inches wide, is Hughart’s invention or not. He also has it that the Ninth Court has no torments, which means no expiation, making it the most terrible hell of all, which seems to contradict the Divine Panorama.)
In the great Ocean, west below Wen-chiao rock, near the murky path that leads to the Yellow Springs, the First Court is ruled by His Infernal Majesty Ch’in Kuang, who is in charge of the register of life and death. He determines who needs punishment, and, if so, which other hells in which they need to spend time. All who die of old age to be reborn come through here; those with an equal balance of good and evil are sent to be reincarnated, changing sex and social status as appropriate. Those with a balance weighing toward evil are sent off to the right of the Court, to the Terrace of the Mirror of Sin, ten feet up and sporting a mirror fifty feet in circumferance. Spirits of the Threshold and of the Hearth shepherd sinners here, and all who look into the mirror see their own evil hearts and deeds.
This court has various sections such as the Hunger and Thirst Section, for suicides who did not perish for selfless reasons; the section for Completion of Prayer, where priests who made omissions in their liturgies have to complete every single one they skipped over in life by the light of a small wick. Black-faced, long-tusked devils are available to hang people up in chains if they get obstreperous.
One interesting belief is that the spirit of a murdered man can trade places with a person in the living world if they can secure the violent death of that person. This is a great way to bring back a favorite villain, as long as you don’t over do it...
In the great Ocean to the south of the Wu-chiao rock, His Infernal Majesty Ch’u Chiang reigns over the Second Court. This hell is many leagues in extent and subdivided into sixteen wards, containing:
Ways to wind up in the Second Court include leading children astray and then entering the priesthood to escape punishment; keeping something entrusted to you for yourself and pretending to have lost it; injuring a fellow-creature’s ear, eye, hand, or foot; practising quack medicine; and marrying under false pretenses. Horrid red-faced devils abound for inflicting punishments on sinners.
To the southeast, below the Wu-chiao rock, in the Hell of Black Ropes, His Infernal Majesty Sung Ti reigns. This hell is also many leagues in size, and has sixteen wards in which:
The ways to get into this hell generally sum up to shirking one’s duties to authority, including failing in one’s duties as a citizen, escaping from prison, and disobeying one’s superiors at work. Other ways are desecrating graves, promoting litigation, repudiating betrothals, forging deeds and other documents, refusing to return an IOU after it is redeemed, counterfeiting... and interfering with another man’s Feng Shui! How many player characters can avoid an appointment with the devils with big knives at the Third Court?
The Fourth Court, east below the Wen-chiao rock, is ruled by the Lord of the Five Senses, and sinners here are punished by:
Cheating customs, evading taxes, refusing to pay the rent, defrauding customers, petty thievery, going back on a promised loan, and refusing charity can get you time in the Fourth Court.
His Infernal Majesty Yen Lo (popularly known as the Chinese Pluto) runs this hell, to the northeast below the Wu-chiao rock. (The Encyclopedia Britannica reports under “Shih Wang” that this individual is Yen-lo Wang, a Chinese form of the Indian lord of death, Yama, and that he used to run the first court but was demoted for his leniency.) This hell has (you guessed it!) sixteen wards attended by bull-headed, horse-faced devils. In this case, they all get buried under wooden pillars, boudn with copper snakes, crushed by iron dogs, tied tightly hand and foot, ripped open and hearts torn out, minced up and given to snakes, and their entrails thrown to dogs. The divisions are by sinner as opposed to punishment:
This Terrace is curved in front like a bow, looking east, west, and south; it is eighty-one li from one extreme to the other. The back part is like the string of the bow, enclosed bya wall of sharp swords 490 feet high, with sides like knife-blades.
Due north of the Wu-chiao rock. The wards are by punishment, with sinners:
You earn time here by always complaining about the weather, littering near pagodas and temples, stealing gold from holy images, keeping blasphemous and obscene books without destroying them, destroying books that teach virtue, carving a yin-yang or the Sun and Moon and Seven Stars or the Royal Mother and the God of Longevity on common household objects, or buying grain and waiting until the price is exorbitantly high to sell it.
To the northwest of the Wu-chiao rock, ruled by His Infernal Majesty T’ai Shan. Here, sinners:
Raiding dead bodies for substances to use in medicine, separating people from their relatives, stifling illegitimate offspring, abusing authority, and disobeying elders are only some of the ways to earn time in the Seventh Court.
His Infernal Majesty Tu Shih reigns here, due east below the Wu-chiao rock. The sixteen wards punish sinners by:
Being unfilial by failing to nourish relatives while alive or bury them when dead, subjecting their parents to fright, sorrow, or anxiety, earns time in this hell if not offset by repentance. (Teenagers these days will probably consider the first ward to be an excellent form of extreme sports.) Sorcerers and magicians get dragged in here by bull-headed, horse-faced devils if they have not made proper vows of repentance.
His Infernal Majesty P’ing Teng reigns to the southwest below the Wu-chiao rock in the vast circular hell of A-pi, which is enclosed by an iron net. In its sixteen wards, sinners:
Committing one of the ten great crimes (?) wind up here after passage through the previous eight courts, as do arsonists, makers of stupefying drugs, ku poison, and stupefying drugs. In addition to the wards above, there is also punishment by being bound to a hollow copper pillar so their arms are wrapped around it, the pillar then being filled with fire; after that, knives are plunged into their lungs, they bite their own hearts, and it gets unspecifiedly worse from there.
(Ku poison is interesting. The prescription is as follows: “Take a quantity of insects of all kinds and throw them in a vessel of any kind; cover them up, and let a year pass away before you look at them again. The insects will have killed and eaten each other, until there is only one survivor— and this one is the Ku.”)
His Infernal Majesty Chuan Lun reigns in the Dark Land, due east, beow the Wu-chiao rock, just opposite the Wu-cho of this world. There are six bridges that all souls must cross, made of gold, silver, jade, stone, wood, and planks. Chuan Lun examines the shades and sends them on to their next incarnation and forwards a list of their names every month to the judge of the First Court for subsequent transmission to Feng-tu, the capital city of the underworld.
Of significance for transformed animals, there are apparently regulations that state that all animals (the list is “beasts, birds, fishes, and insects, whether biped, quadruped, or otherwise”) shall after death become chien— effectively, the ghost of a ghost (what you get when a Chinese ghost dies). Chien are reborn for alternating long and short lives, but those who have taken life have to pass through a revolution of the Wheel, have their sins examined, and be sent up to earth to receive proper retribution. Animals who take no lives during three existences have an opportunity to be reborn among humans. ???
Interestingly, scholars who study the I Ching, the Book of Changes, and priests who chant their liturgies don’t get tortured in the Ten Courts. They get their names and features jotted down in a book kept for these folk, then forwarded to one Mother Meng, who drives them onto the Terrace of Oblivion where she doses them with the draught of forgetfulness. The draught, a decoction of herbs (sweet, sour, bitter, acrid, and salt), makes them forget everything that has ever happened to them, leaving only a few reactions left like preferences and phobias. After that, they get reborn for a very short life (from a day to a year), and after that death, having forgotten holy words and other such matters, then they go through the whole Court system!
The Terrace of Oblivion is also used for anyone whose good and evil are balanced, or who has completed their punishment. Good spirits go back with sharpened senses and better health, while bad ones have duller senses and poorer health as a warning to pray and repent. The Terrace is situated in front of the Ten Courts, outside the six bridges; it is square, ten (Chinese) feet on a side, and surrounded by 108 small rooms containing cups of forgetfulness for the shades. (“Perverse” devils are there to force people who refuse to drink: sharp blades start up from the floor, a copper tube is forced down their throats, and the soul is forced to imbibe of the draught of forgetfulness.)
Once a soul has imbibed its draught, it is pushed on to the Bitter Bamboo floating bridge, which spans a rushing red torrent. Two devils named Short Life and They have their reward stand guard to beat back those who resist crossing the bridge. (Short Life has a black official hat and embroidered clothes, carries a pencil in one hand, a sharp sword over his shoulder, and instruments of torture at his waist. His comrade has a dirty face smeared with blood, an abacus in his hand, a rice sack over his shoulder, and a string of paper money around his neck. The former laughs a horrid laugh and glares out of his large round eyes; the latter furrows his brow hideously and utters long sighs.)
On the far side of the torrent, the Wheel of Fate goes around in a huge space enclosed by an iron palisade. Within are eighty-one subdivisions, each of which has its officers and magistrates; beyond the palisade is a labyrinth of 108,000 paths leading back to earth, on routes ranging from circuitous to direct. From the outside, the labyrinth is crystal clear, but within it is black as pitch.
In Japan, the names of the Ten Kings are Shinko-o, Shoko-o, Sotai-o, Gokan-o, Enma Daio (or Yama in Sanskrit), Henjo-o, Taizan-o, Byodo-o, Toshi-o, and Godo-tenrin-o. This ties in to Jigoku, below.
The six ways you can get reincarnated are in hell, the world of hungry ghosts, as a beast, as an asura (fury?), as a human, or in heaven.
The Japanese Buddhist Hell, across the river Sanzu, described in the Jigoku Zoshi (“Hell Scrolls” or “Hell Sketches”). (The Encyclopedia Mythica defined Jigoku as “one of the many hells, the lowest form of existence” in Japanese Buddhism. Tengoku is heaven.) (Found a mention of Sanzu no Kawa as translated as Styx or Acheron. Kawa is just “river” or “stream”. Supposedly you cross it and come before Enma, judge of the dead, who can send you to any of six worlds ranging from Hell to Paradise. One legend has it that when children die, they go to the banks of the Sanzu river, but as they play there, devils come to disturb them, and the bodhisattva Jizo comes to protect them. Sai-no-kawara is the name of the place on the shore where the dead must stop and wait to be allowed to cross, with both evildoers and children having to pile up stones as a penance until they are deemed fit to pass over the river.)
Yomi (“night-heart”) is also a name for a subterranean land of the dead, which is where Izanagi went after she died in Shinto myth. I’m not sure whether that fits in with Jigoku at all...
This page mentions there being Ten Realms (jikkai), of which six are non-enlightened and four are enlightened. The non-enlightened ones are those of demons (hell-beings), hungry ghosts, animals, asuras (evil spirits), humans, and devas (gods). The first three are the Three Evil Destinies and you get there by having evil karma. The river Sanzu has currents of fire (torturing the hell-beings), swords (torturing the hungry ghosts), and blood (as the animals reborn here devour each other). This make sense of another reference to "shozu-no-kawa" as the "river of three crossings", known as sanzu-no-kawa to the Buddhists. This page refers to some interesting children’s books using the mythology.
The Indian Buddhist Hell, inspired by pre-Buddhist classics such as the Mahabharata— literally translates to “devoid of happiness.”
The hot hells start with Samjiva (“reviving”), where sinners are killed with blades and revived when a wind blows on their remains. Kalasutra (“black string”) is where evildoers are placed on boards, lines drawn on them with black-inked string, and they are then dismembered along those lines. Samghata (“dashing together”) involves repeated slaughter and torture; it contains sixteen subdivisions where people guilty of various crimes endure tormenting visions in addition to physical pain. Raurava (“weeping”) inflicts so much pain the inmates weep and cry over their agony. Maharaurava (“great weeping”), the next one down, is that much worse. Tapana (“heating”) involves the torment of flames, and Pratapana (“greatly heating”) is the next step. Avici (“no release”) is at the very bottom.
In addition to terrible heat, these hells contain trees with leaves sharp as blades and a river named Vaitarani, whose surface looks like cool relief from the heat and thirst of the hells but whose cutting waves are like sharp razors. Sinners are stewed in iron cauldrons filled with their own blood, dismembered with saws, fastened to the huge thorny Salmali tree and pushed up and down, skinned and devoured by jackals and iron-beaked vultures and black and spotted wild dogs, yoked to cars of red-hot iron full of fuel and driven with goads and thongs, forced to walk over burning ground, crushed by rocks, beaten with clubs, impaled on pikes, have molten copper poured down their colon until it runs out their mouths, burned in fires, and forced to walk into rivers of molten iron.
Each hot hell has an entrance in each of its four sides, each entrance leading to four sub-hells (making sixteen extra areas in all): Kukula (“heated by burning chaff”), where sinners walk over hot ash; Kunapa (“corpses and dung”), where they wallow in a midden of corpses and dung and are devoured by maggots; Ksuramarga (“razor road”), where they walk along a road of upward-facing sword blades, in a forest of razor-edged leaves which fall when the wind blows, or a similar forest where they climb trees t obe impaled on leaves; and Nadi Vaitarani (“burning river”), where they’re thrown in the boiling river and have their limbs struck off with swords and spears if they try to climb out.
Arbuda (“abscess”) is so cold everyone gets eruptions like frostbite. Nirarbuda is cold enough they crack open. The next three, Atata, Hahava, and Huhuva, are references to the screams of the sinners within. Utpala (“blue lotus”), Padma (“red lotus”), and Mahapadma (“crimson lotus”) are so cold that the skin splits open so much that the inmate resembles a lotus of the appropriate color.
Literally “demon world”, this is another location in Japanese mythology. (Reikai is the spirit world, ningenkai the human world.) This is not actually a place of punishment, just a great place to go shopping for demons, so I’ve included it here. (I wonder whether it’s the Japanese name for the world of the asuras, but I haven’t turned up any corroborating data yet.)
Dante’s classic, from the Divine Comedy, subdivided into nine circles. The Freemasons have a nice page on how the appelation Lucifer became identified with Satan.
Not the most popular destination of late, but possibly gaining again with the spread of neo-paganism. Includes the Elysian Fields, a place for Heroes, and Tartarus, the lowest region, where the classic tortures of Sisyphus and Tantalus are repeated without end. Hades (aka Pluto) and his wife Persephone rule it. The path there is guarded by Cerberus, separated from the land of the living by five rivers, one of which is the Styx. Three judges, Minos, Rhadamanthus, and ??? choose who goes to Tartarus and the Elysian Fields. The Encyclopedia Mythica has Tartarus as a dank, gloomy pit surrounded by a wall of bronze, and beyond that a three-fold layer of night. I highly recommend checking out some of the original sources like the Aeneid and the Odyssey for more inspiration if you intend a trip down there.
The Semitic equivalent of Hades, possibly an interesting venue involving the Brotherhood of Hebrew Champions; the sort of gloomy, shadowy place where the vaporous souls of the dead wander unhappily. (This is much more vague than the detailed depictions seen in many other religions, but shares a lot with Babylonian Hell and Hades.) Encyclopedia Mythica has a description of it being divided into four sections for the martyrs, the non-martyred righteous, sinners who had lived prosperously, and sinners who had been to some degree punished; the fates there vary from extreme bliss to loss of all hope of resurrection (in the fourth). (Tophet is another name?) The Catholic Encyclopedia has an impressive description of the worst aspects of Sheol.
Alan Altany posted some interesting data: “Gehenna” comes from a valley near Jerusalem named Hinnom— in Hebrew, “ge-hinnom” is “valley of Hinnom”— where some kings of Judah engaged in forbidden religious practices, including human sacrifice by fire. The term “Gehenna” became identified with Sheol in about the 2nd century BCE.
Another that isn’t so popular but gaining as Nordic folks embrace their Asatru heritage, and well worth including because it gave us the word Hell. Niflheim is a land of ice, mists, darkness, and cold, which includes the territory of Helheim, ruled by Hel, daughter of Loki. Helheim is guarded by Garm, a monstrous four-eyed hound who dwells in Gnipa cave, and the giant Hraesvelg (“corpse eater”) oversees it and turns into an eagle to stir the wind with his wings.
Norse mythology has nine worlds (sometimes referred to in groups of three), the lot connected by Yggdrasil, the World Tree, a great ash tree with an eagle at the top, the dragon Niddhog gnawing at the roots, and the squirrel Ratatosk scampering up and down the trunk to carry insults back and forth between them. The first trio are Asgard, land of the Aesir; Vanaheim, land of the Vanir; and Alfheim or Ljossalfheim, land of the light-elves and their ruler Freyr or Frey. The middle trio is Midgard, middle earth or middle garden, our own land; Jotunheim, land of the frost and hill giants, ruled by the frost giant king Thrym, and Muspelheim, land of fire and the fire giants, ruled by Surt or Surtur. The bottom trio is Niflheim, land of ice and the dead; Svartalfheim, land of the dark elves; and Nidavellir, land of the dwarves (who are, confusingly enough, not distinct from the dark elves in Norse mythology).
Good Norse heroes are chosen from from the field of battle by the Valkyrior or Valkyries, to go to Odin’s feasting hall Valhalla in preparation for Ragnarok, the end of the world. (The Valkyrior are apparently named, including Brynhild, Gunn, Hild, Hrist, Mist, and Sigrun).
A trip through the Netherworld to the demon’s mouth is an option, but there are spots on Earth known for their connection as well (though you may have to find a Netherworld exit in the Mediterranean in 69 AD to use some of them). [Insert the ones on the Peloponnesus, on Sicily (Mt. Etna?), in Italy (Mt. Avernus?), the Irish island in The History of Hell, and anything else we can find. Which one did Dante use, anyway?]
It can also be done through visions— in Barry Hughart’s The Story of the Stone, the heroes enter Chinese Hell through powerful hallucinogenic mushrooms.
General:
A History of Hell, by Alice K. Turner, does a fine job of tracing the history and roots of Christian Hell. Celtic and Norse afterlives get a bit of attention, but it largely focuses on the ones that were major contributors— Hindu and Buddhist hells are just mentioned.
The Yellow Springs:
Taoist Tales, by Raymond Van Over, contains a translation of the Divine Panorama.
Encyclopedia Britannica entries under “hell”, “Shih Wang”
Jigoku:
Encyclopedia Britannica entry under “Jigoku”
Naraka:
Buddhist Cosmology, by Akira Sadakata
The Inferno:
The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
Sheol:
Hades:
The Odyssey, Homer
The Aeneid, Virgil
Niflheim:
The Adventures of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, by Barry Hughart, collecting the novels Bridge of Birds, The Story of the Stone, and Eight Skilled Gentlemen, is a wonderful trip through Chinese folklore and mythology; our heroes take a trip through the Yellow Springs in The Story of the Stone (chapters 16–20).
Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, narrates the journey of a science fiction writer through Dante’s Inferno. Much easier reading than the actual Dante.
Silverlock, by John Myers Myers, is a delightful romp through classical literature, including a descent into Hell.
Vanni Fucci is Alive and Well and Living in Hell, by Dan Simmons, collected in Prayers to Broken Stones, is a hilarious short story showing what happens when a fellow imprisoned in Dante’s Inferno makes a brief appearance on a televangelist’s morning talk show. While not actually related to the World of Darkness, it is a perfect example of how that world works.