Inferno judges guild pdf download

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Seer Delight. Realms of Shadow. Oasis of Koessa. Journey through Malebolge Book Two. Customers Who Bought this Title also Purchased. Reviews 1. Please log in to add or reply to comments. Gunther B. I have an original hard copy of [ See All Ratings and Reviews. Narrow Results. Pay What You Want. See all titles. Publisher Website. Follow Your Favorites! Sign in to get custom notifications of new products! Recent History. Product Information. Copy Link Tweet This. Paul Elkmann , Geoffrey O.

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Here is a sample of a page from a watermarked title:. File Last Updated:. Publisher Average Rating. They certainly work a lot better than solars, planetars, et al.

It may not withstand rigorous logical scrutiny, but then a milieu with intelligent, flying, fire-breathing reptiles seldom does. If I had to speculate on why this is, I'd say a wargame-derived engine is far better suited to external conflict resolution i. To leap to a related topic: it's similar to why the space opera genre is a colossal mismatch for a prequel trilogy addressing the theme of moral corruption. Daniel: I can't agree with your analogy Ravenloft is to Vampires what Hell is to Christianity , and your subsequent comment is an unnecessarily antagonistic hand-waving of exactly what I'm interested in hearing about.

Why is a Hell modeled after its description in the Inferno a "hot mess"? Or, if you like, at what point would a setting that depicted a cataclysmic war between supernatural entities become "plain stupid" unless you inserted Loki and Odin, and what do you mean by that? Can you have giants fighting gods without Odin? Actually The Divine Comedy is not just a religious work and this is particularly true of Hell which features a pronounced absence of God [although not of God's various agents].

It's also a political commentary and a comedy in the classical sense in that it will be all right at the end. To properly capture the inferno in an RPG requires that it be just as reflective of the character's lives as Dante's hell was of his. So they should see their friends who they failed and their enemies on their journey.

Of course player-characters probably won't have the divine mandate that Virgil and Dante had on their journey to ease their way. And the guardians of that place the demons and devils should be concerned with putting the characters back in their proper place and given that most PCs have shed enough blood to fill multiple Phlegethon rivers this is an easy location to dump them.

I loved the Inferno supplement when it came out but then, as a kid, my reading of The Divine Comedy was incredibly superficial Wow, cool stuff!!! I'm not sure that it falls apart without Christianity but I think, any of the deeper meaning and context is lost in any medium without taking into account the political criticism that Dante was engaging in.

Without the backdrop of Vatican and secular Italian politics one could argue that we're essentially left with only the "Cool stuff" whether a Christian ontology is included or not.

Reverance Pavane was posting as I was writing my post so I yeah Insert any stodgy, lawful good, civilized, and political society in place of Christianity and you are all good. Most campaigns have that. Inferno would not be a proper hell for Asian or African style settings, but for most places based on any European flavor it will work just fine. Based on a comment to the post by Jeff Reints, I hooked myself up with a not so legal pdf of it naughty naughty. I was karmically punished though.

I printed it at the office, but the smaller printer didn't like it and shunted it to the mail room copier, where several people saw it. There was some 'splainin to do, Lucy! I said it was from a website I was working on. For a game which explicitly links itself to Christianity, along with several other religions, and is up front about it see In Nomine. Touchy, touchy! I didn't mean to offend virgin ears eyes? In any case, it does seem silly on the face of it: God's absence from the Inferno is not incidental - it is critical.

At least in Dungeonland, the marriage of two unrelated metathemes was served up as a mash-up. Whether it was successful or not is debatable, but it certainly would have been less interesting if it had been "based on" Wonderland but exhibited none of its disjointed lunacy. Not having ever picked up Inferno, I can only go by James' description, but based on it, it sounds very much less fun than one that relied on the richer source themes or at least a mash-up attempt.

Handwaving, incidentally, is a good thing. It is how I so effectively cast "persuade lesser mortals The horror of inferno is not "there's so many of these things and they have so many damn hitpoints!

Also, inferno is quite the exposition-heavy railroad, with Virgil as DM, walking Dante along saying "look at this" and "this is all because. I assume that when you write "and yet does so without reference to the single most important source of this imagination: Christianity" you are referring to Catholicism rather than Christianity.

My only point is that, devoid of its Christian underpinnings, Inferno becomes little more than a catalog of grotesque punishments. That's rather missing the point of both what Hell is and what Inferno is. I'd say devils work in a non-Christian context. Devils do, sure. Hell might even work when it's presented as just some evil extra-dimensional place. That's not my issue.

My issue is specifically with a vision of Hell based explicitly on Dante. I don't think that makes much sense outside a Christian context. Indeed, which is why I prefer my fantasy Hells to deviate more from what's presented in Inferno.

In the western medieval context, that distinction is largely meaningless. I appreciate the retrospective. We re-released the original Inferno about a year ago with updated art and organization, so it is again available to everyone. I've found over the years that surprisingly few gamers have read Dante, they have nothing to compare the module against. I recall one email from an English professor who wrote to say he only became interested in classic literature after his high school gaming group was run through Inferno.

Readers should remember that in when Inferno was written there were NO published settings for Hell, by anyone. Inferno was the first product of its kind.

It was an obvious addition to the game, and Bob Bledsaw readily agreed. And if you are going to write the first published Hell, the obvious place to start was Dante. I spent a lot of time in thinking about the Christianity aspect of Inferno. Inferno is written the way it is because a strongly monotheistic Hell wasn't commercially viable; it was the rare DM in who ran a monotheistic campaign I didn't know any. Nothing prevented such a campaign from existing but the existant rules didn't encourage it.

It was a delicate balancing act to be true to Dante's text while creating something DM's could run. It was impossible to write Inferno without liberties because Dante-as-written isn't always good adventuring locations.

Tiamat's lair was put on the First Circle simply because the poem didn't provide any suitable high-level challenges in that area she moves outside Inferno in the completed version, but is still in Gehenna. Even without any devils the landscape is lethal. That will come across even more strongly in the complete Inferno and the forthcoming Gazatteer of Hell. Dante's descriptions are very linear, so the module emphasizes inward movement through the artifical device of impassible ridges; this restriction is lifted in the complete Inferno, allowing full circular movement over something like one hundred thousand square miles.

There is a great deal of weirdness and the fantastic there. Both of these are mentioned in the completed Inferno but together only get two or three pages. Geoff Spellbook Games. I can't help but wonder why an Inferno without Christianity is any different from Elves without Norse cosmology, Medusa without Athena and Poseidon, or Tiamat without Marduk.

That was part of its charm. It also seems to assume that a place of eternal torment is somehow a uniquely Christian concept. As a teacher and scholar of religions I can assure you it isn't. Nor are the sins in Dante only limited to Christianity. There are various Hells in all sorts of paradigms, and things like pride, wrath, envy, etc are moral taboos in places all over the world.

Well said D, and thanks to Geoff for the extra insight about your fascinating old school artifact! I originally got into reading Dante long ago after reading Larry Niven's Inferno in my teens. I was not a huge Niven reader, but I had heard of Dantes Inferno and found the idea of an atheist going there his sci fi writer character from that book very interesting maybe being raised by European Catholics helped with that - a real fear of hell being hammered in at an early age.

So when your Inferno appeared at my local gameshop, I snatched it right up. At that time it for sure had a lot of bang for it's buck. I plan to use it in the not too distant future as a bit of a playground for some higher level characters from my games. Not a full exploration, but some higher being or power sticking them there for some purpose or another to be determined. For me, it's not a question an Inferno so much as the Inferno.

That is, I can easily see many different interpretations of Hell that work just fine without Christianity but Dante's vision of Hell is a very specific one that, in my opinion, feels odd when presented outside its original context. Geoff, Firstly, thanks for stopping by and providing some insight into the creation of this old module. I really appreciate that. Of this I have no doubt. Even now, monotheism is practically verboten in published fantasy RPGs, so I'm not at all surprised that it was no different in Still, I can't help but wonder if a book like Inferno mightn't benefit from some discussion of monotheism and what it means for a campaign.

Did the removing of these symbols later change the basic of what a good cleric from a large western was all about? Can't one simply say "OK, this is the hell for these guys? FWIW, I did run a series of sessions putting the party through the first three circles before they all were bludgeoned to death. This was almost 30 years ago, and I was quite a bit younger then, so all I can recall are the endless series of battles and that the players seemed pleased with the experience.

None of us were visibly offended by the fact that, as DM, I inserted plenty of references to Christianity.