Go to hell!

A /tg/ homebrew, first conceived as some sort of Pokeymans for adults and then evolved into a game of its own. Developed primarily by an anon with Tourette's with some general input from the board. Players take the role of characters that have a "demon in a box" (ie. a Pokeyman from hell) which they use for nasty shit.

Rules

Go To Hell

A Storytelling Game of Bad Decisions

"Vicious Circle the RPG" - Anonymous Forward

One day on 4chan's /tg/ I posted a thread suggesting a world not so different from our own, where, since 2002, maladjusted people had begun using special occult boxes to summon tortured souls from Hell and have them battle each other. It's sarcastic cruelty and adult satire of a popular children's game was applauded and I was given many good ideas that would provide the kernel of trying to flesh it out into a full, playable roleplaying game.

This is not that game.

While struggling with how to represent the complexity of soul dueling while keeping it both fun and dark, and trying to integrate an advancement mechanic that dealt with not how many battles you fought or enemies you defeated but with unlocking memories of your enslaved soul's past life, I started to have some other ideas. Some ideas more my speed, more my style.

And that's how Go To Hell was born.

Maybe someday I will go back to that first game (in my mind it's "Luxuria Rule"), but speaking as its core concepts were taken from both copyrighted sources and other people, I doubt it.

Go To Hell is a creation of my own, but I made it with the kind of players that show up on 4chan in mind.

So, with that said, let's Go To Hell...

To play Go To Hell you need at Narrator and at least one Player. Besides that all you need is a sheet of paper and a pencil to keep track of a few things. For the record, the game goes best when you have multiple Players, so while one is getting royally fucked over by the Narrator the others can point and laugh until it's their turn to get reamed.

Players will take on the role of Holders: social outcasts, psychos, freaks, punks, and other assholes who have summoned a real, damned Demon. How this happened isn't really important (occult bullshit is for pussies). What is important are three things. Which of the 9 Circles of Hell does the Demon come from? What powers does it have? And is it a Lesser Demon or a Greater Demon?

There are, as I said, 9 Circles of Hell, one for each of the sins which can land you there. Every Demon is defined by the Circle they occupy, and that Circle also affects it's Holder. The Circles are: Heresy, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Pride, and Betrayal.

After you choose a Circle, you should define what your Demon can do when it's kicking ass and taking names for you. Does it possess people? Does it take physical form and rip their heads off? Does it cause feces to rain from the sky? All of this is up to you, any demon-y powers will do. The shared factor among Demons is that whenever you summon them to solve a problem, they usually end up causing more than you already had.

That leads me to the third question: What type of Demon do you have? Lesser Demons have no free will. Their obedient slaves, so they'll do exactly as your brain-dead Holder says. However since they're so weak, they require 2 Points of Luxuria (more on that later) to materialize for the duration of the scene. You spend the power, your Demon it appears, it does what you say during that scene, and by the next scene of the game it's disappeared and if you want it again you'll have to spend more power and re-summon it next time you have a problem you can't handle yourself.

Greater Demons are strong enough where they only require 1 Luxuria Point to materialize for the duration of the scene. However their also free-willed and only loosely bound to their Contract with you, the Holder. They can't directly harm you and they have to follow what you say, but they're free to cause you as much grief as possible in the process, and generally will.

For example, Randy's Demon is Shithead, a Lesser Demon. It's Randy's slave. When Randy's being chased by the cops he spends two Luxuria Points to summon Shithead. He tells it to use it's powers (as his player scribbled down gleefully at the beginning of the game) to possess the cop driving the cruiser and cause it to crash. Shithead obeys and now the police car is a fiery wreck. Unfortunately that fiery wreck is blocking the only way out of the alley.

On the other hand, Bill's Demon is Soulfucker, a Greater Demon. When his fiance has locked herself in the bathroom after he tried to stick it in her pooper while she was asleep, Bill get's worried that she may call the cops, or worst, her father. So he spends 1 Luxuria Point and Soulfucker materializes. After verbally abusing Bill for while he finally gets the command "make sure she can't call anyone". Hearing this, Soulfucker breaks down the door and rapes Bill's fiance to death, ensuring that she will never call anyone again; while Bill looks on in horror.

To materialize your Demon for the rest of the scene (the scene changes like in a TV show or movie, in between events and locations) you have to spend Luxuria Points. 2 for Lesser Demons, 1 for Greater Demons. Luxuria Points are gained by sinning. However these sins cannot be things your Demon did for you or that you did because of your Contract Limit (more on that later). Only unforgivable sins will do, so it helps if your victims are old ladies, churchgoers, kittens, or loved ones. An active sin (assault, theft, public shitting) against strangers will generate a Luxuria Point. A passive sin (emotional betrayal, like sleeping with your fiance's underage sister) against someone close to you will generate a Luxuria Point. Only sins with a victim who knows it will gain Luxuria; if you write hatespeech on a wall it doesn't count until someone sees it.

Contract Limits are the price Hell puts on having a Demon at your disposal. Simply put, by the agreement of a Holder's contract with it's Demon, it shares the same Circle as it's Demon. Bill is normally a nice guy, but Soulfucker comes from the Circle of Lust. That means whenever a tantalizing opportunity to do something horrible in the name of Lust appears, it's a Contract Limit for Bill. He has no choice but to either obey it and perform that action (without gaining any Luxuria for it) or to spend a Sanity Point to avoid it. Each time you avoid a Contract Limit the price doubles. By interrupting the chain of avoidances by following a Contract Limit you can break the cycle, so that next time you avoid one it will only cost 1 Sanity Point again. You have to obey two Contract Limits in a row to restore all your Sanity Points. As you lose Sanity Points, the Narrator gets to describe alterations to your behavior as listed in the Sanity Meter below

Sanity

10: Composed

9: Anxious

8: Stressed Out

7: Neurotic

6: Desperate

5: Panicked

4: Disgruntled

3: Incoherent

2: Insane

1: Immobilized

0: Complete Breakdown

The inherent conflict in Go To Hell comes from consequences. When a Holder does something bad, it instigates a Reality Check. You kill someone the cops will be after you, you do drugs and your family will try to put you in rehab, you rant about having a demon and people will come to take you to the funny farm. You can't roleplay your way out of a Reality Check unless you've either spent Karma Points or summoned your Demon. However this doesn't solve your problem, it just lets you avoid it for a while, and causes the problem to get bigger and bigger as your poor desperate choices only make things worst for you. You spend a Karma Point, shoot a cop and run away. Now the manhunt is huge. You summon your Demon, it throws the car off a bridge on the way to your intervention, and you crawl out of it, only to see your uncle who was driving is now dead. Sooner or later the Reality Check will be back. The first Reality Check costs 1 Karma Point, the next one costs 2, and so on like that throughout the session until your out. Each point of Luxuria you gain also takes away a Karma Point. Needless to say, Holders are people who rely on their Demons to bail them out when their Karma runs dry.

When your all out of Karma and Luxuria Points and the Reality Check comes for you again, you can choose to either Surrender or Run. Either way the Narrator gets to decide your fate, but depending on which you choose the outcome might be different.

In some cases a Holder whose finally been caught by his Reality Check is out of the game, dead or in prison usually. Other times this simply sets up a whole new scenario. Once in prison and bereft of Luxuria Points, the Holder can start sinning to get Luxuria and then summon his Demon to get out of there. That works well in single-player games when neither player nor Narrator have had enough yet.

In multiplayer games having one of the Holders caught can either provide a hook for the other Holders, or they'll say "fuck that guy, we have our own shit to do". In that case the game has taken on a competitive edge and it will now be about who stays alive/out of prison/etc. the longest. In this case the Narrator should feel free to deputize players whose Holders are out of the game to help him as co-Narrators.

Each session of Go To Hell should start with each Holder having 10 Karma Points, 10 Sanity Points, and 0 Luxuria Points. Character sheets should just be pieces of paper with the Holder's name on it, their Demon (it's name, powers, Circle, whether it's Greater or Lesser), and a running tally of their Points.

And that my friends is how you play Go To Hell.

The Official Supplement to Go to Hell

Last Man Standing: In group play of Go to Hell, a Reality Check can be settled (rather than just avoided) by selling out someone else. At least until the next stupid thing you do. But the point is this will allow you to stop "running" and allow you to basically take a new direction at your leisure without the Narrator steamrolling you with the cops on your ass. This way you can choose what kind of evil activity you want to go do next, or try to be a decent human being (and watch how the Narrator tempts you/drives you insane with Contract Limits, like having your Lust Contract Limit come up when your at church with your extended family and a bunch of young nuns walk in).

Royal Rumble: Things like betraying fellow Holders will likely make someone ask the question "what happens when Demons fight?". This is a very good question, since there's no real limit placed on the effectiveness of Demons, just the general rule that it's never going to permanently solve your problems. However everyone's Demon does have their own flavor (your supposed to right down the way your Demon uses it's narrative omnipotence at the beginning of the game, such as "feces magic" or "possession" and so on. A list of three or so broad but themed powers is usually a good setup). However this still doesn't decide which Demon is stronger, it just gives them different styles of power use. Now you might say "My Greater Demon should kick his Lesser Demon's ass". However, Lesser Demons are pumped with 2 Luxuria Points for every 1 that a Greater gets because they need the extra power to materialize. That should put them on even footing with their more free-willed counterparts. So then how DO you decide the outcome of Demons fighting? When two Holders get in a Demon fight, they can both choose how much Luxuria to spend on the fight, which translates into retries. Since they both have their Demons materialized out in the scene already they both are assumed to have one re-try each. You can spend all the Luxuria you have on retries, but you have to decide it before the contest begins

The contest is rock, paper, scissors. When one person is victorious and the loser has no retries left, it's settled. The winner then gets to describe how his Demon rapes the other Demon. However, there's a rule in the books of Hell that while Holders can get their Demons to kill, rape, maim and otherwise fuck over, to death even, the general populace, one Holder's Demon can't kill another Holder. That doesn't mean your Demon can't rape or otherwise humiliate the Holder you just defeated, and you get the chance to describe that if you want after you describe it killing his Demon, but it can never be fatal. Because if your Demon could kill other Holders, it would be able to kill you as well; that's the way the rules of Hell work.

For those lily faggots who lose such a duel and find their Demon killed by another, they're in a predicament. To get their Demon back they'll have to make a new Contract with Hell, giving them a new Contract Limit while keeping the old one. That means if your Lust Demon gets killed and you summon a Sloth Demon, you now have both Lust and Sloth Contract Limits. Have fun with that.

Recovering Karma: Helping good people avoid their own Reality Checks (which usually makes it your Reality Check too when you get involved) or causing bad people to get Checked when they otherwise wouldn't have gives you the opportunity to regain Karma Points. So does patching up things with people you sinned against (be it to get Luxuria, just while being a bastard, or as part of a Contract Limit). If you can go from 4 or below Karma back up to 10, you gain an extra point of sanity on your gauge to help you avoid Contract Limits (and thus TRY to be a good person... faggot). This means having your scale changed from 10 to 11 or 11 to 12, etc.