Nessus Pre-Release Blurb
This one was daunting but I finally have something I feel comfortable running at my table for a party of veteran game designers.
I have little idea how other folks from 1st edition interpret the Arch Fiend but, in order to save you some time, I’ll lay out my journey. That way, if you see things differently, you can avoid wasting your money.
First off, I wanted to touch on real lore related to Asmodeus. If you do this dive yourself, you quickly find out that he’s the Lord of Carnal Lust and that his first “love” was Lilith—who’s now, according to D&D lore, with Moloch. Greenwood calls out Asmodeus’ fey castle, which led me to also pull in threads from Irish/Scottish lore regarding the Unseelie Court, the fey and the teind. I sprinkled this with drow and added a perilous connection between the Faerie Queen and Lolth. Lord of Carnal Lust and Faerie King are both titles that could go south quickly in the eyes of many AD&D adherents. I wanted to use them to add some unexpected facets to Asmodeus without letting them color his whole persona.
I wanted Asmodeus to be scary.
Like really, really, scary.
He’s not Oberon. Naming the gulfs around Asmodeus’ palace “Trisitia” as a subtle shadow of Titania is the only nod I give to Shakespeare before quickly moving on.
Asmodeus is scary but he’s not a monster you face. He is, in his own words, a parameter. I broke the 4th wall in Avernus with the dialog between Astaroth and Asmodeus. In that book, the Arch Fiend was a bit on his heels. Caught off guard. But in his home realm of Nessus, he is King. I thought it fitting to knock on the 4th wall again in this book.
Here is a spread from “ITP: ix Nessus” that showcases what I mean:
p90-91 of ITP: ix Nessus
So, there you get a little of the intro to the second adventure and an idea of what makes Asmodeus’ prison different from any other prison in the multiverse. I’ve maintained the fiction established in Castle of the Silver Prince, that Asmodeus is the father of alchemy and this plays somewhat heavily in how the prison adventure works. A dose of Frankenstein, if you will.
I’ve done my best to portray Asmodeus as a terrible, frightening tyrant who materializes from the shadows of his palace to terrorize the denizens. And although I avoid graphic reference, he is depicted as abusive to Bensozia, lustful, self-indulgent, and meticulously cruel. He suffers no breach. All who misstep are punished brutally or destroyed. The very nature of his prison displays a penchant for irony, catch-22 problems, self-aggrandizement, and infernal ingenuity.
He is unmatched in all of devildom, which is why he holds his place at the bottom of the pit.
While building Asmodeus up into the great dark horror that he should be, I also wanted to capitalize on a seed I planted in Avernus, regarding Tiamat’s demonic heritage and her designs on the Arch Fiend. And I wanted to pull in Greenwood’s spare mention of fabled Beherit and Batna. To these, I’ve added more lore concerning Armaros, Glasya and the forlarren (FF39)—Asmodeus’ unacknowledged progeny that creep through Nessus’ crags and forests. With all these factions fomenting, it is an opportune time for revolution and revolt!
Other Powers in play are Lilith, and possibly Baalzebul and Lolth, along with token help from a wide array of Demon Princes. The Queen of the Fey treads a dangerous line at the Unseelie Court. And then, perhaps, the threat of Beherit and Batna’s return is real. Such an assemblage of foes is a problem worthy of the King of Hell.
Supporting all this intrigue is the infernal hex crawl and the hooks proffered by random (or cherry-picked) encounters. Nessus is haunted by evil faeries, ghosts, vampyrs, and much stranger things. And it is brimming with plots and threads and magical items that beg for story capitalization.
Yeah, I like to spell vampire that way, and I’m going to do it again before this post is over.
I’ve included, in the bundle, a second PDF (22 pages in length) that details the Fiald Afleiyect, which is a lute, crafted by Asmodeus during his seduction of Lilith. The instrument contains its own demi-plane and a former-bard-vampyr has it, and is willing to sell…
Nessus weighs in at over 170 pages. And I’m bundling it with the Fiald Afleiyect, plus high res Player and DM maps for your table plus additional art you can print out plus the bunch of handouts.
Because of the size of this product and the extras I’m going to list it for $1,000,000 uh, I mean $24.
You get two adventures in the main PDF, both designed for characters of 13th level or higher. The first is Worrisome Cave, where Tiamat has gotten a secret foothold in Nessus.
The second is the prisons of Pulchra Mönstrum, which I’ve already touched on. Now, shifting gears a little.
As some of you may know, life has taken me on a dirt road over the past couple years. There have been periods where I’ve either sat in a beanbag staring out a window night after night, or mindlessly played a video game over and over, not for the enjoyment, but to make everything else go away.
Nessus was a stub back when all this started. And Maladomini (though I’m still proud of it) was kind of cut short.
There were many months were Nessus sat untouched and no writing was done. I didn’t worry about it. I knew I couldn’t write unless I had to write.
But then, suddenly, about a month ago, the angst of my life needed expression and I started writing again—ferociously.
The subject matter is fraught. On the one hand, Hell is the perfect lens through which to express myself. I know all about Hell. And yet…
Hell also felt like the wrong place to express other things I was feeling. Suffice to say, Nessus has been tough to write. Working through the Hells has been thought-provoking at this particular point in my life.
Although I won’t be explicit about it anywhere else, I have included a magic item in Nessus for Nikki, whom I have long called “Blue Frog”. This is because when I lived in Korea, I learned that the term for “rebel” is blue frog because, for whatever reason, they say that blue frogs always swim upstream. It’s a difficult homage, one that I shared with her, and that shares the spirit of Gygax’s tribute to Tom Keogh.
Nikki is currently on hospice.
Pain makes for good art though, and I hope that’s the case here. Not just art, but playable-from-the-box material that holds true to the venerable, cranky, idiosyncratic system I have chosen to run. I have finished Nessus at the precise moment that Ben (who saved thebluebard from oblivion by hand-stitching the site back together) stretched forth his master thief’s hand and took the Emerald Tablet from the black, flower-covered tomb in the 5th Heaven of the Castle of the Silver Prince campaign. If you own that product, you know what it means. Somehow, the timing was perfect.
So this stuff is not for readsies. It’s for play. Locations you’ll see in Nessus include the Burning Woods of Estuans Interius, the horrible canyon of Antenora, Lake Cocytus, the Lethe, Asmodeus’ Mirage Mines, and Mulmun Henge (aka the Unseelie Court) where players can run the risk of drinking Purple Tea. There’s also an adventuring company, the Company of Sin: six characters of 13th level. They will certainly test your party’s mettle. (that’s a little rhyme)
The store page for Nessus is already created at Gumroad, but not yet published. I’m letting the material sit for a while, now that copy editing is done. I want to try and ensure this release is cleaner and more polished than Maladomini. I’m thinking October? Maybe Halloween?
I’ll post here again when the stars are right.
Until then, I will recharge, I will sleep, and I poke and peck at the stub of Dis, second of the Nine Hells.
But before I go, I thought I might post this excerpt, which was well-received on the Night Wolf Inn Discord. It’s from the Infernal Appendix in Nessus and is meant as an intro to some extrapolation of rules put forth in Avernus. Basically it’s another sample of what you get in the Nessus bundle, even though it’s just exposition and not playable.
Hope you enjoy:
On the Minting of Devils
In the Abyss, demons condense from trillions of damned souls who are then combined and, through words of power, transmogrified endlessly into lesser or greater forms.
Not so in Hell.
The royals claim their spirits are very old and that they have always been divine. They don't dispute their fallen state, but claim it is an inevitable consequence of the quest for value and meaning.
"You need to try it. You need to try everything," the Iron Duke told me. "If you don't try it how can you know?"
That was the night. A singular, harrowing, dark night, in a flickering study, in a certain high mansion perched in the Ghalla Peaks, in the City-State of Sandren.
I had been initiated into an esoteric order on the off chance of an opportunity, because I knew some of the names. You wouldn't believe me if I told you. And that night, out of nowhere, it just landed in my lap.
I took the carriage down Windlymn Street, past the Chiming Library, onto Litten. The wind was ferocious. Lanterns swinging. I made it inside just before the first real crack of thunder.
All the guests wear masks to these things. I played along, carrying mine on a stick, pressing it to my face for interactions. I thought it was funny at the time.
I half-expected to be the butt of some prank. Shown into a parlor, you know? Some paid thespian behind a screen. A bit of smoke and theatre. Seance-type charlatanry.
So I was skeptical.
But I also thought...well, what if? So I wasn't afraid going in. But I was on guard. I had my wits about me.
I remember rose-colored sconces flanked an undisguised expression of Mr. Sto...or, I should say, the Mansion owner's Stygian tastes
It was a massive painting, perhaps ten by four, a landscape with the infernal city looming above a puddled floodplain, made even darker by the study's gloomy gas lamps.
I was leaning into the piece, squinting at a plaque, which titled the work, The Walls of Dis, when a man's voice, so close I nearly spilled my drink, sounded in my ear.
"Our lies are important," the voice said. I don't know if I jumped, but when I whirled around, the man—if I can call him that—wasn't so close as I expected. "Only through lies do you learn the exquisite value of truth," he was saying as he eased back into leather upholstery, pulling deeply on a cigar of grandiose, almost theatrical size. I hadn't seen him when I entered the room.
But I wasn't about to let some make up and paste horns fool me. His left foot though. That was dedication. A hoof. The hair on the fetlock. All of it really. It was real. I cracked a little right then because either he'd cut off the hind leg of a goat and built a prosthesis or...
Anyway, I asked him what the truth was, in a pandering way, trying to project clearly that I was playing along but looking desperately for signs this was all a farce. He said, to the effect, "The truth is we're all selfish, and the rest is accountancy." Something like that.
And then he talked about the point of enterprise. How its purpose is to make existence easier for the entrepreneur, yet through the pursuit of an easier existence we have to work harder, etcetera, etcetera. He was playing professor, or guildmaster. I don't know.
He said we all become obsessed with progress. That consciousness begets wants. Wants beget pain. So we damn ourselves, don't we? I remember him saying it just like that. "Consciousness itself may be Hell," he said. "Which is why Hell is endlessly creative."
Hell is endlessly creative. I thought about that because I was a scholar. This was my field. I had written extensively about the Hells and the lore was what had brought me there. I wasn't an occultist or a devotee or a wishful thinker hoping for some kind of dark blessing. It was, for me, purely academic. Could all this history, this lore, be true? From the many mysterious relics made by Armaros in the wastes of Avernus, to the ceaseless factories of Maladomini, to the intricate nine-dimensional machinations of the Arch Fiend—Hell was indeed creative, by all accounts, or at least the accounts were creative. And I had been deeply familiar with them since my time at Desdae.
"Creativity brings nuance, and nuance brings complexity," my one-hoofed companion was saying. "Complexity brings dilemmas that require contemplation, discussion...assistance." I thought he said "assistance." I think now he said "assistants."
"In order to navigate," he was saying.
I interrupted him at that point and chuckled, which I blamed on the whiskey, while pointing at his hoof with the finger on the hand that was holding my glass. "You forgot one of your shoes," I said. And then I started laughing. Because I'd had two, you see? And it was preposterous. Meeting an imp? Some slithering lemure? Or being shown a box with an infernal larva squirming inside? That was how I imagined being inducted into the circle. If the great history of Hell was real, that was how I imagined passing through the veil behind which dwelt irrefutable proof.
"Yes..."
That was his answer. And then he just puffed for a while. The gray cloud that billowed in front of his face in that moment made for a breathtaking transition as I saw his eyes glow like red coals through the smoke.
"Have you heard of the Greater Plan?" he asked.
I was speechless by that point because an impenetrable dark horror had settled over me. I was falling for it, you could say. Those glowing eyes had been a sight too much. Yes, of course I knew about the Greater Plan. It was esoteric, barely mentioned in grimoires at Desdae, but I was a scholar. Only I couldn't say so because my throat had gone dry and there was less than a teaspoon of meltwater and weak booze left in my glass.
"I don't think there's a solution," he said very slowly. "How do you escape a broken system when everything is tied to it? We are what we are. It's not that we deserve our fate. We ARE that fate. Our progress is the progress of flames consuming a house. That is our collective force, our...trajectory. Our 'progress' is just combustion continuing from one fuel source to the next. It ends suddenly when there is nothing left to burn. We cannot decide to be different—unless we cease, entirely, to be what we are."
"I didn't imagine the Iron Duke would be philosophical."
He fixed me with his scarlet, searing eyes and said, "This is not philosophy. These are shop proofs. One must understand one's patron. And one's employee. If you understand the thing you know where it belongs, and in what capacity it best serves."
His paw-like hands performed a tumbling repetitive motion. "There are cycles we are part of that we cannot yet imagine but for which we wait."
"You mean escaping Hell and returning to divinity?" My question was clumsy and faltering, painful. But it felt good, like first steps after a terrible accident, learning to walk again.
"Returning?" He puffed on that enormous cigar. "No. If you have ever been a thing, you do not stop being that thing. You do not need to return to it. The experience is in you forever. For example, have you ever murdered someone?"
"No."
"Ah. You feel good about that. I can tell by the disdain. Your disdain is what you are now. And you feel it. After you murder someone you'll feel other things. You'll know what it's like to feel that exultant power. Like...squeezing your fingers through a fresh block of clay. You are the first to do this thing that the clay was waiting for, that it was MADE for, that was always possible. You destroyed something or perhaps just changed it. And it felt good. And anyway, there are other blocks of clay. Guilt, depression, feeling misunderstood, feeling superior, smarter, more enlightened, more powerful, evil, transcendent, hated, revered, chosen, mislabeled...forgiven. You may feel those things. And when they put you to death for what they call your crime, you will feel the fear or the peace or the anger or resentment or the numbness or the closest thing to nothingness that you can imagine being. And after all of that, you will still know what it was like to NOT be a murderer. Because you were once that too.
"When you are mortal," he said, "You are focused on your identity but there are many identities inside of you once you break through..."
"The wall?" I asked, glancing at the enormous painting of the infernal city.
"You were listening...with your heart." His scarlet eyes flared. The cigar was almost done. "Yes. The wall." At this point I noticed a glass of garnet wine on a far side table and a trace of warm resin in the air. Was there someone else in the room?
I took a seat across from him, quite close, and there was, under the smoke and spice and leather and alcohol, the faint barnyard odor of goat. This gagged me momentarily but quickly passed for other strange smells were growing stronger. That tang of hot, sweet resin. "Plenty of people never commit murder," I said. "I don't think they are missing out. What you described sounds like common megalomania. It's mental illness. I think walls are important. There are other ways of learning that smashing through them isn't the best route forward."
"Oh?" His goatish ears lowered and his face crinkled into a terrifying grin. This was not theatre makeup. "You mean there are examples of why you shouldn't? You mean that you've learned not to do it because someone else did it? Or that many people did it. Not once but many times. That's how you know the pattern. That's where you're drawing your wisdom from. You're pointing at the tears. The Horror. Lost potential. Emptiness. Despair. Regret. Every time you leap off a mountain you fall. You know this because others have done it for you. Be grateful to them. Be grateful that you are one of the few that CAN learn from other people's lessons." His face relaxed into a menacing stare. "Because there are others, many, many others," his face became so blank and empty that it felt like a confessional, "that can't. They must learn firsthand, from doing it, from suffering. And while you sit here, judging them for their stupidity, they are the ones that provided you with the lesson you are telling me now."
It was at this point, my head clouded with drink and smells and the preposterous reality of what I was sitting next to that I realized I had lost track of the thread. It felt like I was in a maze.
"You wanted to know where devils come from," he said as if reading my mind from before the party. "You can't know where unless you know why. I'm trying to get there, but you keep disagreeing."
"I'm not disagreeing. I'm trying to understand."
"You don't understand because you disagree."
The faint sound of chains stirring in the room's darker recesses made me turn my head before I could formulate a rebuttal, "That has nothing to do..."
"YES!" he bellowed. His rage exploded in a cloud of shouted smoke and spittle and deafening sound. His eyes were boreholes in the side of a forge. I stiffened. The heat and foulness of his breath, those deformed, but powerful fingers twitching, decorated in gold and jewels, eager to do violence. His goatish teeth bared. I was afraid. He was screaming three inches from my face, "YES IT HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH IT! Your logic and your academics have no power here. I am the only power here—and you will know it."
I remember feeling a split second of internal mirth at his lack of control. A split second where I knew him pathetic, wrong about everything. Just another tyrant. In that split second I decided I'd seen enough. I was ending this interview.
But then his hand, like a twisted root and just as unyielding, thrust across the gap between us and into my belly and I saw him, like some impossible magic trick, pull out my intestines, which he lifted up before my eyes and all his rage turned suddenly to laughing.
I will never forget that laugh. It was braying, like a whickering goat-scream. And the strangest part was that I felt no pain. Not then. It felt more like I'd swallowed something alive and it was moving around inside me, squirming. It felt alien and very wrong and very serious. But there wasn't any pain.
With my guts in his knotted paw, the arch devil stared into my eyes. He had never stopped staring into them. He tugged as if testing our connection and I jerked forward as if on a rope. He moved one cupped paw below my insides to collect the dribbling blood, then lifted it to his mouth and sipped, laughing like a monstrous child.
I was transfixed. Afraid to move for what it meant to my insides, which he had only partially pulled from my body.
"This is where devils come from," he whispered to me, lips wet and dripping with my blood. "It is dawning on you that you were not prepared for this interview. You imagined a set of parameters. Like the addict who thinks they will be able to control themselves with the bottle sitting in front of them on the table. Only now do you know that you were wrong. This was the lesson you couldn't learn from someone else's experience. You had to walk this road yourself."
I could not speak.
"Painful, I know," he said, nodding as if acknowledging something grave and sad. "But!" he turned optimistic. "Some people," he spoke as if speaking to an imbecile, "in your position," he licked more of my blood from his lips, "would vow never again to be on the wrong side of power. They would have an epiphany, right now, like you might be having. They might just decide to break through that wall."
I could feel my body. Very cold. And now my stomach hurt. I was thirsty and regretted both that I could not ask for water and that there was no one to bring it.
"Let us finally answer your question." As he spoke I saw, or thought I saw, materializing from the spreading darkness in the room, a woman.
Unlike my tormentor—who was pale and deformed—the woman was scarlet and gleaming, skin so red, lips even redder, and full like glistening cherries. Her yellow eyes threw warm light like freshly-minted gold. Decorative scarlet sleeves covered most of her tall black horns, and all the rest of her sparkled and flashed with jewels and hoops and mysteries and beads.
She drew close to the fiend still clenching my guts and draped herself lovingly around his rather slender shoulders. Her lips and then her teeth nibbled playfully at his pink, goatish ear.
"When two great devils, who are simply angels living other lives, love each other very, very much, they sometimes get together..." The woman swung herself around him and straddled his lap. Her fingers laced across the back of his hairless head and she laughed a light musical laugh when he said, "very, very much."
Lilis. That was her name. I came to know later. And her laugh caused him to pause and give the sound space. He seemed to enjoy its echo, sharpened in that room of glazed cabinetry and carefully organized books. Only when the laugh died did he continue, "Sometimes they get together and make a new devil." Both of them were looking at me.
I was afraid. The room was slipping away along with everything else. My life. My dog, Argos. My terrible accommodations near the Aerie off Gullet Street. It wasn't really much to lose, but I was afraid of losing it anyway and of becoming nothing.
So I said yes.
The hands that strike the bargain later claim surprise at the terms...
What Dispater and Lilis did then was certainly sexual, or at least sensual, but also ugly and brutal and filled with exultant joy. Not joy in the sense you probably imagine, but joy at pure freedom, of sovereignty and of acts unpunished. Of power, I suppose. Of access to pure, unrestricted power.
That was my birthday.
"What should we name him?" I heard Lilis ask.
My flesh became infernal flesh. My soul became infernal spirit. I was taken to that infernal city of Dis and engulfed in Agony. I retained my memories but lost their meaning. Hell kept the keys.
—Dysander, Dispater's newest scribe
whom the arch devil calls "Wallborn"
I suppose that about sums it up.
I hope this fall and winter are good to you and that you spend it with the people you love, doing things you love to do. Time is short.
You’ll hear from me again in October.
peace,
and happy gaming.
