Why Hell?

“Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw, Don Juan in Hell

I have a love/hate thing with fantasy. In theory, I adore it. In practice, I have a big problem with most fantasy settings. Fantasy is amazing because it gives you a chance to put up a big old funhouse mirror to reality without having to sweat the small stuff, but it's really easy to get lost on trying to make your world internally self-consistent and completely sabotage all the things that make fantasy so appealing. Novels and movies and games and so on are interesting because they're, on one level or another, about the person reading/watching/playing them and the world that person lives in. A fantasy setting that tries to be its own self-contained organism unrelated to the reality of the audience just ends up being unsatisfying escapism.

I love Hell because it manages to be closely tied to the fantastic and reality without feeling at all contrived. Hell's a place full of violence and magic and strange creatures and passion and all the things that make up an exciting fantasy setting, but it's also full of familiar real-world faces and is almost by definition a twisted nightmare reflection of reality.

Hell's appealing because every one of us carries our own private little hell with us at all times, buried away in the back-side of our subconscious. Anything's possible in Hell, but somehow it's all familiar anyway.

This is probably about as much as I'm going to say about what I'm trying to accomplish with the game on a non-gameplay level. It should all be gameplay talk from this point on.