• Pandesmos, the top layer, resembles the above description more closely than the rest of the plane. It contains the source of the river Styx, a daemon-infested river that burns away the minds of anyone that touches it spanning all the lower planes. Unless you your way across, your best bet to travel on it is to wait for none other than Charon (or one of several demon servants) and pay bus fare. Aside from various demons and assorted exiles, Loki keeps a hideout here while a couple of Finnish gods maintain their pantheon’s afterlife, the Babylonian God of darkness sulks in his palace, and the God of bugbears holds court in a wind tunnel covered in severed body parts nailed to the floor.
  
• Cocytus emphasizes the windy part of Pandemonium; its tunnels are smaller, the winds are loud enough hearing them drives you temporarily insane as well as deaf, and if you’re dumb enough to listen you can faintly hear people crying and screaming. Unlike the natural walls in the rest of the plane, this place looks like someone carved it out, though not even the Great Powers know who.
  
• Phlegethon emphasizes the dark part of Pandemonium. While you can light up the rest of the plane if you can protect the light source from the wind, non-magical sources can’t penetrate the darkness here (all spells have their illumination effects halved). Without you won’t be able to see anything. Unlike in the rest of the plane, water flows through the whole level, bringing with it the appropriate rock formations.
  
• Agathion is a giant stretch of featureless rock except for the occasional rock sphere. Half those spheres contain barriers that, if broken, shoot bystanders away with the force of a contained windstorm; the others contain nothing, unless they house ancient, powerful creatures the gods shoved in them because they couldn’t kill them. There might be other layers, but no one’s ever reached them.
  

Counter: 32.5

• If the mods are to be believed the scare MIGHT be over, so this may all just fizzle out
  
• if it doesn’t, we might want to consider shifting the thread over to a preestablished forum elsewhere not directly affiliated with SA, somewhere the thread’s format and ethos can survive. I dunno, maybe RPG.net? I don’t know much about forums, SA (specifically this thread) is the only one I visit now.
  
• Wherever we go, we might want to keep this and that thread running concurrently, crossposting as necessary. If S for A collapses, we pick up where we left off; if it stays intact, we can just let it to spin off and make Inklesspen’s job harder.
  
• I just cracked Glitter Hearts from the Twitch bundle open out of curiosity and found the most elegant “what is an RPG” section I’ve ever seen. I want to both review that and finish this review first, so I’m not stopping now. Whether the forum lives or dies, let’s party like the Wari, motherfuckers
  

• Orthrys is the highest level of Tartarus and the part where the Titans still hold the most sway. Or rather, some Titans; the less assholish ones peaceably wander the upper planes. Kronos holds court on a pair of spheres whose tallest mountains touch tips, the bottom of Mount Olympus used to extend here until the Olympians broke it to seal the Titans, Kronos can’t muster enough force to attack another plane but still plots, etc. Going to try to keep my promise not to go too deep as much as possible. You also have a pair of Finnish gods ruling swamp planets here, though their area of control spreads out from the first layer into the rest of the nested spheres. Planets are about 100 miles away from each other, making travel relatively easy (with the right equipment).
  
• Cathrys’s worlds are smaller and sit maybe 500 miles away from their neighbors. They have a lot more life than the rest of the plane – lots of jungles and grasslands – but all the plants here secrete acid that rapidly eats away metal and less rapidly eats away everything else. Dangerous place to be unless you can your way around environmental hazards.
  
• Minethys is characterized by the massive, dusty windstorms that rage across the 5000 miles between worlds. Each planetary surface has long since been stripped of life, since the dust is so poisonous it’s like the entire plane is under a permanent cloudkill spell (). Also every 10 days or so a tornado sweeps across any given planet and tosses everyone there either to another planet or another level entirely.
  
• Colothys’s planets sit 500,000 miles apart, twice the distance between the Earth and the moon. They are rocky, irregularly shaped, and so wildly mountainous portals down to the next level can be hundreds of miles from the tallest peaks. For some reason an unusually high number of demons and daemons carve bases into the cliffs here, and one sphere houses the God of hill giants, a raging rear end in a top hat that controls the rest of his sphere’s levels through brute force and fear. Since you can theoretically fight or climb your way down without wizard help, I’ll give it half a
  
• Porphatys brings back the . The plane is filled with clouds of acidic snow, though the acid is much milder than in Cathrys; however, it melts into equally acidic water that sits a few feet deep on most surfaces and submerges every level barrier to the next. Also, traveling to another sphere involves flying through cloud after cloud of snow over millions of miles.
  
• Agathys, the lowest known plane of Tartarus (there might be more but no one knows for sure) is pretty much the Himalayas: the planet, every planet. The air is thin, the environment is cold, and there’s very little reason to go here except bragging rights. It may as well be a series of separate, tiny levels, since the adjacent spheres are so far away reaching them might as well be impossible.
  

Counter: 38

Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Jun 26, 2020

MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Jun 26, 2020

• Oinos, the top layer and home of Anthraxus, is a mess of dead vegetation and sickness; spending time on the level gives you a one in 10 chance of catching a major disease (when do you roll this? The book doesn’t say, Grubb nodded off while writing that part). Oinos is crawling with daemons constantly fight brush wars over power, only uniting when the some force invades the plane; Anthraxus usually sticks around in his tower (called Khin-Oin, where the level gets its name) and squabbles with neighbors until he takes control any time Oinos comes under attack. You can also find the Babylonian death god, the god of Druergar, and the orcish god of death in their own, smaller sub levels.
  
• Niflheim contains Yggdrasil’s roots, making it a natural location for Hel to set up shop. Though she’s long since lost most of her personality to the plane, she remains loyal to the Norse Pantheon and rules out of a feasting hall in clear sight of the only known gate between Niflheim and Oinos. The environment is a bit more pleasant here – the vegetation is a bit thicker, no gradual disease – but the soul-consuming effects of the plane are still in full effect.
  
• Pluton is the layer controlled by Hades himself, just assigned his Roman name to set it apart from the rest of Hades. Like Hel, Hades is both grimly emotionless and loyal, a good thing since Mount Olympus’s base can be found in this layer and theoretically scaled. He rules out of a gigantic fortress built around that base with its gates just across from the only portal between Pluton and Niflheim, both guarded by Cerberus. As for the terrain, think Oinos except without disease and with Mediterranean vegetation.
  

• Khalas’s light levels are low outside of areas illuminated by lava, and the air is perfectly breathable but hot enough to deal 1d6 damage per turn without protection - I'd say the is enough of a borderline case for half-credit. You get a lot of water flowing down the mountainside, not just the Styx but waterfalls that just push the edge of the boiling point. Most of the exiles that inhabit the plane live here, though the only god in the area is a Chinese demi-Power.
  
• Chamada is substantially more volcanic than the first layer; you get entire volcanoes sticking out of the mountainside and lava waterfalls everywhere. The resulting volcanic gases hit unprotected visitors like the stinking cloud spell and can permanently damage their lungs. In other words, roll out your .
  
• Mungoth mixes a great deal of snow and ice with much reduced but still present volcanism. No heat damage here, though you do have to look out for avalanches whenever something erupts under the ice and sends a mixture of snow, lava, and flash-boiling water down the mountainside. You might also run into the Finnish goddess of pain, who you should probably avoid (the book describes her realm as “not a nice place to visit”). Aside from that the level is about as habitable as Gehenna can get; once you get away from the cold underground, you might as well be in the sort of cave system you might find in a Prime Material (even hostile creatures tend not to make it this far in the plane).
  
• Krangath is both volcanically inactive and nearly uninhabited. It’s completely dark and -level cold, and the only real inhabitants are Shargaas, Orcish god of darkness, and his various spirit followers and undead hanging out deep under the surface.
  

Counter: 41.5

mellonbread fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Jun 28, 2020

• Athletics is modified by STR
  
• Charm is CHA
  
• Contacts is CHA
  
• Driving is DEX
  
• Forensics is WIS
  
• Medicine is INT
  
• Perception is WIS
  
• Stealth is DEX
  
• Technology is INT
  
• Translation is INT
  
• Vandalism is STR

• Social class
  
• Relationship with the player character on your left
  
• First contact with the occult
  
• Tragic flaw
  
• Criminal record
  
• How an occultist learned magic
  
• Forms taken by holy symbols
  
• Why a variant human spook is so weird
  
• Dreams that spawned a fairy spook
  
• Favored weapons
  
• What killed a undead spook
  
• Why a mundane character is involved with the occult

• Athletics is STR so starts at 1
  
• Charm is CHA so starts at 2
  
• Contacts is CHA so starts at 2
  
• Driving is DEX so starts at 0
  
• Forensics is WIS so starts at 3
  
• Medicine is INT so starts at 3
  
• Perception is WIS so starts at 3
  
• Stealth is DEX so starts at 0
  
• Technology is INT so starts at 3
  
• Translation is INT so starts at 3
  
• Vandalism is STR so starts at 1

• Machete (D8 damage, Light)
  
• Leather Armor (12 AC, Light)
  
• Flashlight (Light)
  
• Gas Mask
  
• The Grimoire Galdrabók by Natan Lindqvis (gives us access to the life saving spell Cure Wounds, plus Neutralise Poison and Cure Disease)
  
• A Ritual Mask (light, gives us bonuses to saves when casting spells beyond our level)
  
• A Safe House from the social advantages table