Infernum Book of the Damned

Infernum Book of the Damned, Podreczniki RPG, Infernum

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Contents
Gareth Hanrahan
Credits
Contents
Editor
Richard Ford
A Passage Into Hell
2
Introduction
14
Cover Art
Tony Parker
Part I: Into the Infernum
The Basics
18
Races of the Infernum
24
Logo & Cover Design
Anne Stokes
Demon Breeds
33
The Houses
44
Interior Illustrations
Eric Bergeron, Chamonou, Ryan Horvath, Kythera,
Tony Parker, Chad Sergesketter, Christophe Swal,
Simon Taylor
Mortals
60
Fallen Angels
67
Part II: To Live & Die in the Pit
Skills
72
Studio Manager
Ian Barstow
Feats
98
Combat
113
Survival in the Infernum
141
Production Director
Alexander Fennell
Miscellaneous Rules
147
Equipment
164
Proofreading
Ron Bedison, Mark Lewin
Part III: Lore of the Nine Circles
Demonic Mutations
188
Playtesters
Tanya Bergen, Mark Billanie, Andre Chabot, Mark
Gedak, Robert Hall, Daniel Haslam, Mark Howe,
Trevor Kerslake, Patrick Kossmann, Kent Little,
Alan Marson, Alan Moore, Murray Perry, Mark
Sizer, Daniel Scothorne, Sam Vail, Michael J Young
The Downward Spiral
219
Sorcery
231
Character Sheet
250
Index
252
License
256
Open Game Content & Copyright Information
Infernum – Book of the Damned ©2005 Mongoose Publishing. All rights reserved. Reproduction of non-Open
Game Content of this work by any means without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden.
Infernum – Book of the Damned is presented under the Open Game Licence. See page 256 for the text of the Open
Game Licence. All text paragraphs and tables containing game mechanics and statistics derivative of Open Game
Content are considered to be Open Game Content. All other signifi cant characters, names, places, items, art and
text herein are copyrighted by Mongoose Publishing. All rights reserved. Printed in China.
1
A Passage Into Hell
A PASSAGE
INTO HELL
PROLOGUE
Wherein our narrator awakes to fi nd himself in Hell,
and meets a guide who shall bring him through the
Nine Circles; also, the nature of the clouds of Hell.
never recover. You’ll see those wretches as we travel.
Your memories may return – mine did.’ He smiled at
some unknown pleasure.
I THE EMPTY CIRCLE
The narrator and De Rais cross the First Circle of
Hell on a riding spawn; there, they meet three demons
who are bypassed by De Rais, who then explains the
terrible purpose of the agonies of the damned.
I awoke on a plain of hot dust. My mouth was full
of bitter ash, my tongue was swollen and parched. I
rolled onto my back and looked at the tortured clouds
far overhead. A contrail of purplish vapour spiralled
down from the lowest cloudbank to my prostrate form
and I surmised I had fallen from some great height.
He pulled my body to the side of a strange lizard-
like creature and strapped me to its fl ank. ‘This is
a riding spawn,’ he explained, ‘a mindless beast of
burden akin to a demon.’ The creature appeared to be
in some discomfort – its legs had been stretched out
as if by a rack until they were three times their natural
length, to increase the riding beast’s stride. De Rais
slipped his transparent heels into the stirrups, prodded
it with wicked goads and the beast began to lumber
across the dusty plain.
I lay there a while, broken in body and mind. I could
not remember who or what I was; but I knew this was
damnation.
The wind sounded like a scream.
A shadow fell across my face, cast by a pale man in
dusty clothes. By his slight translucence I surmised
he was dead. Curiously, his beard was slightly blue
in colour. ‘You have fallen, sir,’ he said, ‘and cannot
get up.’
I acknowledged that this seemed to be the case.
‘I shall assist you,’ he offered.
I observed that I had not expected such charity in
Hell, to which he replied that he would most likely
trade me to some avaricious demon anyway, but
that accepting him as guide and captor was a better
option than waiting for some desperate stalker to
come upon my shattered form. I acquiesced, and
he reached down and picked me up with some
diffi culty.
‘My name is De Rais,’ he said.
‘I cannot remember my name,’ I replied,
apologetically.
‘That is because of the Lethe Clouds,’ he said,
pointing to the curious yellow-purple cumuli above.
‘The waters of the River Lethe are vaporised by great
factories and pumped into the air above the First
Circle. All those who fall into the Infernum are
stripped of their memories for a time; indeed, many
2
A Passage Into Hell
From my raised perspective, I could see that this
great plain extended to the horizon, but was dotted
with massive buildings outlined against the seething
sky. Some were great chimneys, belching out clouds.
Others resembled fortresses piled up on fortresses,
all towers and walls and bastions defending some
anonymous stretch of dust. The tallest structures
were brass pillars that reached up beyond the clouds
and were wreathed in crackling lightning.
De Rais rode up, careful to keep me on the far side
of the riding beast from the demons so they could not
see me. I heard him hail them, and they replied in
guttural voices.
‘What are you doing on that spawn?’ challenged one,
‘you should be down here! This pathetic scrap of
plasm won’t feed all of us! How would you like to
have the hairs of that little blue beard used to tie your
organs together, so that when we shake you, they’re
all torn apart?’
‘This is the First Circle of the Pit,’ said De Rais gaily,
as if he were showing me around some charming
city or fl oral garden. ‘The Empty Circle. Not the
most imaginative of names, but who’d waste poetry
on such a barren place? Still, you get a lot of souls
landing here, so it’s worth the demons’ while building
fortresses.’ He gestured at one particularly impressive
barbican. ‘That belongs to Savar of the Sturrach.
Charming fellow. He’s up here as a punishment for
eating too many of his troops.’
‘Touch me,’ said De Rais quickly, ‘and you risk the
wrath of my lord and master.’ I saw him reach down
and draw back his shirt, revealing a brand on his
chest. The demons recoiled. He spurred the spawn
and it began to scuttle on, chittering little gasps of
pain with each step.
Once we had left the demons in our wake, I ventured
to enquire what the demons were doing with the
unfortunate soul. ‘Torturing it, of course,’ replied De
Rais, ‘the very meat and coin of this whole empire
is torment. Bleed a soul, force it into paroxysms of
agony, and it gives up a piece of itself. Demons need
that to survive. Every soul in torment is food and fuel
for the demon-kin. If a demon does not eat, it starves
and that is not a pleasant sight. They live to torture
and they torture to live.’
‘So Hell is as the poet Dante saw it?’ I asked.
De Rais shook his head. ‘Of course not. He was
Italian, and therefore misguided. He got the shape of
the Pit right, but the Pit is not Hell.’ I asked him to
expand on this, and he did (De Rais quite loved the
sound of his own voice). ‘The Infernum is the empire
shared and quarrelled over by the Nine Great Houses
of the demon-kin. The Pit is a vast chasm divided
into nine circles, which makes up the majority of the
territory claimed by the Infernum. And Hell… Hell
is the Pit and all points beyond, for ever and ever,
amen.’
‘But you are a dead soul, De Rais,’ I observed, ‘why
are you too not being tormented?’
‘The demons permit certain choice servants a
measure of… freedom,’ he said, and would elaborate
no further.
‘What made the Pit?’
‘The same force that raised those brass pillars,’ he said
cryptically. ‘Now hush – some demons are about.’ I
looked, and saw three fi gures hunched over a fourth.
One was the size of a man, but its limbs were those
of an insect, its hide was rugose and scaly, and its
head resembled that of a bird. The second was on
fi re, and looked like a burning stick fi gure beneath
the fl ames. The third measured nearly ten feet tall
while hunched over and was covered with plates of
black iron clumsily bolted to its grey skin. They were
gathered around a vaguely humanoid fi gure composed
of whitish spirit-stuff. It resembled De Rais’ form to
a degree, but where he was shaped as he must have
been in life, this soul was sexless and anonymous.
It could have been anyone. The demons had pinned
the soul down with stakes and the second demon was
pushing its burning fi ngers into the soul’s stomach.
After some hours of travel, we came to the brink of
the Pit, and I looked down into Hell.
II THE TEMPEST CIRCLE
The pair enter the Second Circle, a land of howling
winds, towering mountains, and sharp rocks. De Rais
describes the Nine Great Houses of the Infernum, their
different natures and current dispositions; also, the
infamous Free Cities and the current trials besetting
demon-kind are discussed.
The vertigo of staring down into the Pit was almost
enough to kill.
The memory of standing on a high mountain and seeing
all the kingdoms of the world fl ashed into my mind.
All the kingdoms of Hell were spread out beneath
me. Mile upon mile of black industrial wasteland,
3
A Passage Into Hell
of blasted heath, of tortured fi eld and burning land
– the terrain was infi nitely varied, but there was no
pleasure or comfort to be found anywhere that did not
come from the suffering of another. Standing there
on the brink of the Pit, I was deafened by the chorus
of screams and buffeted by waves of rising heat from
the raging inferno beneath.
‘There are nine Great Houses and innumerable lesser
ones orbiting them. We’re technically in Haimon
territory at the moment, but they take little interest
in their holdings here in the Second Circle. The big
Haimon estates are in the next circle, with all the dead.
Haimon’s power comes from their legions of damned
souls. They put the dead to work for them.
I do not know how long I was transfi xed there. In the
uttermost dark I saw a light – a gout of fl ame which
rose towards me. I watched as a great rolling ball
of fl ame slowly rose up through all the circles until
it passed by me. The heat of its passage seared my
face, and I felt the fl ank of the riding spawn quiver
and singe.
‘House Astyanath and House Riethii have equally
few holdings this far up in the Pit. They don’t like to
travel too far from the entertainments of the capital,
Pandemonium. Astyanath likes pain and Riethii
prefers pleasure, but they share enough common
interests to work together much of the time.
‘Glabretch, on the other hand, are permitted only a
handful of fortresses below the Fifth Circle. They’re
plague-makers and disease-mongers, not to mention
fl esh-crafters. They’d pay well for a slave like you,
actually; they need lots of raw materials and test
subjects.
‘Ninth dawn,’ said De Rais in a hushed tone. ‘Each
morning, the Morningstar rises from the palace at the
heart of the city of Pandemonium. It rises through the
Nine Circles, bringing light to each in turn.’
The border between the fi rst and second Circles was
marked by a line of castles and fortifi cations. As we
passed them, I saw that the pre-eminent feature of
these buildings were all the dungeons, prison yards
and forges turning out links of chain. We passed
through this region slowly, waiting in line behind
huddled masses of captive souls and their demon
keepers. Beyond the gates of the fortress, we came
upon a rocky landscape, lashed by winds and storms.
De Rais’ path wound its way through twisted stone
outcrops and over deep ravines.
‘Carthenay could pay the most, of course. There’s
no banker like a demon banker and the Carthenay
coffers are bottomless. They own most of the Seventh
Circle, which makes them almost as popular as the
Glabretch.’
‘This is the Second Circle, Tempest. The
storms here are eternal.’
I inquired as to the nature of the brand
that De Rais bore. He evaded the
question, but it did cause him to
launch into a lengthy discourse
on Infernal politics.
‘The Houses are the real powers
in the Infernum. They’re not
quite the same as mortal dynasties,
but all the demons in a
House share some common
heritage. It is said that the
House founders were
once commanders in the
old legion, but you don’t
want to go repeating that in
polite company. The nobility
doesn’t like any implication that they
weren’t around since the start.
4
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