The Cancermancers of Hungry Joe

I DM'ed more of the hellcrawl today, and I thought I'd flesh out Joetown a bit more.

Hungry Joe is the giant floating meat-man the size of a small mountain.

Joetown is the collection of hanging ships and trays beneath him, as well as the mucoid monasteries built atop him.

And Black Bottle is one of the neighborhoods.  It gets its names from the transparent black buboes near Joe's armpit, from which the wizards look out.  Black Bottle is unique--it in the only neighborhood that is inside of Hungry Joe.

by muk1

The Wizards of Black Bottle

They're actually cancermancers.  They tend to the functional side of Hungry Joe.  They're responsible for weaponizing his biology.  They create flesh grafts, harvest useful chemicals from the Joeflesh, and most importantly--create the Little Joes that compose the bulk of Joetown's Navy (the deterrent that keeps the paladins from sacking this little pustule of a town).

I've listed their spells (in the order that they would cast them if attacked), their laboratory, what they sell, and what they want.  New spells are listed at the end, in Appendix A.

Seskerset - space hooks, reverse gravity, wandering eye, neoplasma

He's a narrow man with telescopes for eyes.  He doesn't speak from his mouth, but instead a disembodied voice echoes out of his chest sometimes.  He is frantic, gruff, and is constantly forgetting things and then remembering them.  He can be taken advantage of, but only for about 10 seconds before he remembers.

He's also a modular man.  His head can sprout spider legs and wander away.  His torso can sprout wings and fly.  And his legs are fully capable of stalking around and kicking things.

You can probably guess his combat strategy: space hooks followed by reverse gravity to shred the people who were hoping to remain immobile.

His laboratory is guarded by a pair of flesh cubes.  His laboratory has a spiked ceiling.

Flesh Cube
HD 4  HP 8d8  AC none  Atk none
Move 12  Int 10  Mor 7

Since they're 7' tall cubes of flesh, they can't do much except slide around.  They build up a lot of momentum, though, and if they trample you (Dex check to avoid) you'll take 1d12 damage and be knocked prone.  If you have your back against a wall, you take double damage on a failed save and normal damage on a successful one.

Flesh Cubes are energetic servants that tend to over-focus on a single task.  They're naive but not unreasonable.  They shout "Cube!" before every sentence.  Sometimes they substitute the word 'cube' in the place of other nouns for no reason.  It's complicated.

He also manages the liquid zoo.  Troll arms swimminig around in tubes of blue liquid.  A swarm of bats, rendered down and stored as a chest full of 230 tiny ampules of black liquid.  There's a sealed urn filled with brown liquid catoblepas.  Breaking any of these things will cause them to coalesce back into the original animal, but without Seskerset's guidance, they'll slough apart in 1d6+1 rounds.

Goals
He wants to make a monster that is powerful enough to wipe out the paladins of Hell.  He will pay top dollar for monster parts.  He'll even shell out a bit of cash for rumors of monsters.  He'll also sell rumors of monsters (with the hopes that you'll bring him back the choice bits).  He knows where the Brinegod lays its eggs, and where Morfean (the dragon demon) sleeps.

With regards to the Little Joes, he's in charge of sales.  If you want to buy a Little Joe (a fleshcrafted submarine), he's the man to talk to.

For Sale
Venom Gland 500gp
Antivenom Gland 500gp
Grabby Tongue 500gp
Transbilicus 1000gp

Venom Gland - Your lymph nodes are taken out; you get -2 to save vs disease.  In their place, you get venom glands.  Your bite is venomous (3d6 damage on a failed Con check, 1d6 damage on a successful one) but since you're still biting with your tiny human mouth, you get -2 to attack with your bite.

Antivenom Gland - You get -2 to save vs disease, and +4 to save vs poison.  If you bite a poisonous creature (-2 to the attack roll), they take 3d8 damage on a failed Con check, 1d8 damage on a successful one.

Grabby Tongue - You talk with a lisp.  Your tongue can shoot out and grab things and pull them back into your mouth (Str 6).  You cannot grab anything larger than a sword, and your grabby tongue can't do anything except pull things into your mouth.  I guess you also spit things pretty far.

Transbilicus - If attached to two creature's belly buttons, the two creatures will switch minds.  This is a trivial surgery, but it is impossible to perform on an unwilling, unrestrained creature.  Unwilling creatures get a Cha save to resist.

Mormoi - hand of the hound, handspasm, gust of wind, neoplasma

She weighs 600 lbs and is carried by a living platform made from an enormous crab.  HD 4  AC leather  2xClaws 1d6+hold.  Held opponents are automatically damaged on subsequent turns, and their metal armor is damaged by 1d3 points.

In combat, she uses handspasm + gust of wind to disarm everyone, then blow all their weapons out the door while knocking them prone.

You must climb through a series of greasy bubbles to reach her laboratory.  She is accompanied by 2d6 servitors.  She doesn't have much furniture in her laboratory.  Except for a long workbench, everything is a servitor.  There's chair servitors to sit on.  Carafe servitors that will pour iced tea out of their faces.  Et cetera.

If combat breaks out, the crab will stand up to its (shocking) full height of 10', bringing Mormoi out of melee range.

She is currently manufacturing gas bombs for use against the giant parasites infesting Hungry Joe.  She's made three of them, and has supplies for 3 more.  Once the parasite problem has been dealt with, she'll return to her normal job of procuring shipyard wives for Hungry Joe, and helping Massantus with their installation.

Goals

She wants someone to bring her Seskerset, so that she can humiliate him, plant a bomb inside him, extract a tooth, and then control him.  (She needs his vote to override the other cancermancers.  She wants to unmoor Joe from the rocks below and float him somewhere safer.  This is not a terrible idea, but it will be the death of Joetown below.)

For Sale
Gas Bomb 300gp
Macrospike 300gp
Pomegranate Bomb 500gp
Bomb Implant 500gp

Gas Bomb - Explodes on impact.  Poison 1d4 on a save, 3d4 across 3 rounds on a failed save.  30' diameter cloud is as dense as normal fog.  Double damage to insects.

Macrospike - This looks like a short rod of bone, about nine inches long.  Both ends end in a sharp spike, like a tooth.  A red string is tied around its middle.  If the red string is removed, the macrospike suddenly extends to it's full length of 10' permanently, where it basically functions as a 10' pole.  If the macrospike is deployed as a weapon, it deals 1d10 damage on a thrust, or 2d10 if there is a wall behind you for the macrospike to push against.  It pushes as if it had Str 20.

Pomegranate Bomb - Not really a pomegranate.  3d6 damage, 20' radius.  Explodes on impact.  (50% chance of detonating when carrier takes fall damage, unless wrapped in bulky wrappings.)

Bomb Implant - Made from the skull of an infant stuffed with burnt scripture.  Placed inside a restrained creature.  3d6 damage to everything in 20'.  Detonated by crushing one of the restrained creature's teeth. (The simplest method is simply to pop it in your mouth and crush it between your molars; the process makes it softer than you'd think.)

Massantus - shrivel, monstrify, corpulate, fuse flesh, neoplasma

Has a glass sphere implanted in her belly, where she has imprisoned her last four pregnancies.  It's basically a fish tank where a quartet of children look out.  They have the size and proportion of fetuses, but it's obvious that they are much older.  Their faces look older, for starters.  They have hair and teeth.

The four children in her belly can, together, cast a single spell each turn as if they were a single wizard.  Their spells: chaos chain, magic missile, sleep.  Her belly has AC chain, HP 4.  If shattered, the four fetus-teenagers spill out and spend the next five minutes painfully dying.  (They will only live if put inside someone where they can connect to their circulatory system.  They could survive in Joe, but Joe's immune system might kill them.)

If combat breaks out, she'll turn some of her fleas into giant fleas, shrivel whoever is pissing her off the most, and then corpulates herself into a huge pile of hard-to-kill beef while her minions finish the party off.

She's in charge of managing the shipyard brides.

Each shipyard bride was once a woman who was married with Hungry Joe and fused with him.  (Similar to how anglerfish do it, except that it's the females who fuse with the male.)  Each of Joe's wives then becomes an organ inside him.  And while Joe is a floating corpus the size of a mountain, each of his wives is large enough to grow a whale inside, which is exactly what they do.

Each bride is about 99% womb.  A lot of that is just the vascularization required to feed the growing ship-fetuses.  In a way, it's almost like uterine russian nesting dolls.  The bride grows inside Joe using a placenta, and inside the bride is another placenta that holds the little Joe.

Tending the brides is a full time job.  It involves a lot of dive suits, long swims through the bride's uterus, and the many poisons required to keep joes rampant biology from reabsorbing his wife and child.  (Joe's body can generously be described as an overgrown garden.)

In a leaden chest, inside her bedworm's stomach, is the liver of the 13th Satan.  (This is the start of a long quest chain.  Putting the liver inside your body will let you regen 1 HP per turn and let you sense the location of the other pieces of the sundered Satan.  It's basically the rod of seven parts plus the hand of Vecna, except you assemble them by replacing all of your body parts and at the end you've basically turned into a balor and there is no scrap of the original character anymore, since the 13th Satan has paved over them entirely.)  Removing the liver from the leaden chest means that it can now be sensed by the other people searching for it (i.e. the other folks with Satan-parts inside them).

Goals
All she wants to do is her job.  Grow the Little Joes, sell the Little Joes, and profit.

She'll give you Joe-related quests, such as:

• One of her customer's is rumored to be abusing their Little Joe.  Go interview the flesh-submarine and find out if its true.  If it is, capture the Little Joe and bring it back here.  Caveat emptor.
• One of the shipyard brides is (understandably) depressed about her lot in life.  Find a way to cheer her up.  Will probably require you to ask her family what her hobbies were before she became a faceless organ inside a flying mountain of flesh.
• Sell a Little Joe to the King of Worms.  He's rich, and he definitely needs ships to finance his fight against The Sucking Hole.

For Sale
Gun Dog 300gp
Dog Gun 500gp
Scrapling 300gp
Servitor 500gp

Gun Dog - A dog with a cluster of cannons in place of its head.  Fires teeth.  HD 1.  AC leather.  Tooth-bullet 1d10.  Whenever the gun dog fires its head, it explodes on a fumble or near fumble (a 1 or a 2).  Exploding gun dogs deal 1d6 damage to everything in 10' (save for half).

Dog Gun - A weapon made from a dog.  Can limp around at 25% of human speed.  Has a magazine size of four.  Must eat a ration each day.  Regenerates 2 tooth-bullets each day.  Each tooth bullet does 1d12 damage.  Otherwise works like a crossbow.

Scrapling - A stylistic pile of flesh, animated by crude, but energetic, magics.  Whorls of teeth, carefully coiffed spirals of (useless) splayed muscle.  HD 1  AC leather  Flailing 1d6  Move 12  Int 4  Morale 8.  Scraplings will fight to protect you but will take no other action (except perhaps stealing food out of your bags when they're hungry).  Scraplings will stop whatever they're doing in order to craft a corpse into more scraplings.  Human corpses make 1 scrapling; horse corpses make 4 scraplings.  Scraplings hoard crafting materials (cloth, carpentry shit) in order to make the next batch of scraplings.  Whenever your scraplings make more scraplings, they have a X% chance to go feral, where X is equal to the new number of scraplings.  Feral scraplings have an equal chance of running away (50%) or attacking everyone indiscriminately (50%).  Scraplings like to break things, steal things, and draw on things.  If you cannot control your scraplings, you will not be welcome in town.

Servitor - This is basically a baby head fused onto the body of an enormous crab.  They're basically permanent, loyal hirelings, except that they're (a) ultimately loyal to the cancermancers, and (b) if they ever fail a save vs. fear, the crab part starts attacking the baby part. dealing 1d4 damage to itself each turn for the duration of the fear effect.  They don't engage in combat, but they are super adorable.

Lil' crabby cuties.

Festragon - wave of mutilation, hemoclasm, burrowing bolt, create homunculus, awaken homunculus with spell, toy homunculus, neoplasma

His arms are actually transplanted arms from a red-skinned giant.  He walks on them.  He former arms have been transplanted on to where her feet used to be.  He has another pair of smaller arms emerging from his belly that he uses to manipulate things.

His combat tactics: wave of mutilation, perhaps a bit of melee, and then finish them off with hemoclasm.

You'll probably find him among his diminutive menagerie, tormenting tiny homunculi versions of his enemies.  He likes to put them in his mouth, taste them, and then spit them back into their shoebox jail cells.

He's in charge of the Little Joe project, and the other three cancermancers obey him only when they cannot unanimously overrule him.  So, it's a loose tyranny.  His closest ally is Massantus.

Goals

He wants the party to bring him a live paladin.  He intends to put the paladin into his enormous hookah and smoke him, thereby gaining his knowledge.

He also wants to eat Hungry Joe.

This is not impossible, and it would involve him becoming the next Hungry Joe.  Except, he envisions himself as an avaricious, active, dominant mass of flying city-flesh, not the bovine piece of passive, drooling real estate that Hungry Joe has become.  The first step of this process requires the party retrieving one of the pancreators from inside Hungry Joe (the dungeon part).

He also has a back door in the Hungry Joe dungeon in his quarters somewhere, but he'll never mention it to the party until they've proven themselves loyal.

He also wants good food.  He's trying his best to savor things before he becomes Hungry Festragon.

For Sale
Friendly Tumor - 1000 gp
Infestation Gland - 1000 gp
Hyperpituitary - 1000 gp
Immortal Heart - 1000gp

Friendly Tumor - Your max HP is reduced by 3.  When you would next die from your HP dropping to 0, your cancer buddy dies instead..

Infestation gland - You can basically turn corpses into loyal zombies, except that the resultant creatures are not undead.

Hyperpituitary - You get -4 Con, but your HP total changes as if your Con were 4 points higher instead of lower.  You also grow a foot taller and about 20% beefier.

Immortal Heart: Your current and max HP becomes 50.  Your current HP can never be raised again, except by Festragon.  As far as you're concerned, he's the only source of healing in the universe.

by James Wintle

Appendix A: New Spells

Hahahaha blog posts with appendices.

I've written all the spells in GLOG format, but if you want to convert into something more compatible, just look at the spell, pick what spell level you want it to be, and consult the table below.

Level 1 Spells
[dice] = 1
[sum] = 1d6 per caster level (max 5d6)

Level 2 Spells
[dice] = 3
[sum] = 1d6 per caster level (max 7d6)

Level 3 Spells
[dice] = 5
[sum] = 1d6 per caster level (max 10d6)

Et cetera.

Burrowing Bolt
R: 50'  T. creature  D: permanent
This is basically just a rot grub that you fire out of your outstretched finger.  Have fun.

Chaos Chain
R: 50'  T: creature  D: 0
Target creature takes 1d6 damage of a random type (fire/ice/lightning/acid).  Then a random creature within 50' of it takes 2d6 damage.  Then a random creature within 50' of that creature takes 3d6 damage.  The chain ends whenever it would target the same creature twice (no one is ever hit more than once by this spell).  If all the damage dice show 6s, then the creature also gains a mutation.  Save for half (roll damage with d3s instead of d6s; yes, this makes mutation impossible).  Each die invested in this spell beyond the first causes +1 damage per damage die.

Corpulate
R: touch  T: creature  D: 10 minutes
Creature's current HP and maximum HP is multiplied by 5, up to a maximum of 5 * [sum].  Creature become an immense mountain of immobile, limbless meat.  Creature weighs 2000 lbs per [dice] and takes double fall damage.  Creature can still see and hear normally.  Speech is still possible (in rough gurgles) but spellcasting is impossible.  Alternatively, can be cast on a creature of HD [dice] or less; unwilling creatures get a save.

Handmaster
R: 50'  T: [dice] creatures  D: 1 minute
You control the target's arms.  Save negates.

Handspasm
R: 30' radius  T: creatures  D: 0
All target creatures within 30' of you must save or drop everything that they are holding.  Their arms are paralyzed for [dice] rounds.  Save negates.

Hand of the Hound
R. self  T: one or both hands  D: 10 minutes
Your hand falls off and grows into a monstrous version of itself: HD 3  HP [sum] * 2  AC chain  Atk 1d6+[dice]  Str 16.  You continue to control it, but if it dies, you don't have a hand anymore.  Alternatively, you can have this affect both hands, but then you're just standing there like a doof.

Hemoclasm
R: 50'  T: 20' radius  D: 0
All creatures take damage equal to their current damage, not exceeding [sum] * 2.  Save negates.  If the caster has a container within arms reach, they can collect about 1 liter of blood for every 3 damage this spell does.  E.g. A 20 HP ogre is down to 12 HP and fails its save against Hemoclasm.  It takes 8 damage.

Monstrify
R: touch  T: vermin  D: 1 minute
Target vermin (rat, scorpion, termite, etc) becomes huge and aggressive.  HD 3  AC leather  Atk 1d10.  You can cast this spell on [dice] vermin simultaneously.  Monstified vermin attack the nearest foe, and casters usually throw the vermin as they cast this spell.  Also works on halflings and goblins for some reason.

Neoplasma
R: touch  T: flesh  D: permanent
Creatures that fail their save get cancer.  They lose 1 Con immediately and another each month thereafter.

When cast against synthetic flesh creatures (basically anything that has 'flesh', 'blood', or 'meat' in its name), vatborn (including flab men and thin women), or Hungry Joe, it instead allows you to reshape their tissues (since these things are basically just functionalized cancers).

As a general rule, destroying or paralyzing tissues is simple, while adding new functionality requires a laboratory.  If one die is invested (equivalent to a level 1 spell), you can do things like seal their eyes, close their windpipe.  If three dice are invested (equivalent to a level 2 spell), you can fuse their bones together, reshape their bodies (similar to alter self).

Space Hooks
R: 50'  T: [dice] * 20' diameter  D: 1 minute
All objects in the area are pieced by immobile, invisible 'hooks' that are themselves anchored on the ethereal plane.  The hooks are tangible, and running creatures notice them settling in and can choose to stop running.  (Mindless undead will probably just walk through it, though.)  The hooks deal 1 damage for every foot walked through.  A living creature walking through a zone of space hooks will leave bloody a trail of bloody giblets suspended in the air behind them.

Toy Homunculus
R: touch  T: corpse  D: permanent
You touch a fresh corpse.  It's blood pools and coagulates and creates a tiny version of that creature.  The scaling is a bit wonky: humans end up being about 2" tall, while larger things are never larger than 4" in any dimension.

A toy homunculus is a magical construct, not a real creature.  It usually keeps all of the full monster's abilities, albeit in a tiny, adorable form.  (A toy gorgon cannot petrify anything bigger than a mouse, for example.  A toy dragon can light a pile of sticks on fire, but not much else.)  They retain no memories or spells, but they do retain language skills, basic knowledge, and personality.  This spell creates [dice] homunculus.

Shrivel
R. 50'  T: [dice] creature  D: 1d6 rounds
Save negates.  Target loses half of its current HP and deals damage as if their strength was 6 points lower.  After 1d6 rounds, the lost HP returns.

Wave of Mutilation
R: 30'  T: objects  D: 0
Everything in a 30' cone takes [sum] slashing damage.

Hungry Joe

So I had another session of my irregularly-scheduled hell game.  I might as well write about it.

It's a hellcrawl.  The party is running a pirate ship called the Adamantine Ogre, sailing across the burning seas of hell, trying to find repairs for their ship after it was bashed by giant swans in order to stop a ratman mutiny.

There's a quest for an egg, but who cares.  Hell pirates and hellish hives of scum and villainy.

This post is about Hungry Joe, one of the aforementioned hives.

But first, some context.

Dying in Hell

You can't die in hell.  If you would die, you instead lost 1d3 levels, become undead, and then must make a save against becoming some sort of fucked up NPC.  Regardless of your success, you lose memories.

The Abyss

There is a vast subterranean tapestry where all the souls of the dead trickle down to.  This is the Abyss, and it is full of demons (who only grow in power), the dead (who only dwindle), and the paladins, who successfully conquered hell, sundered Satan, and built the Circular Hells.

The Circular Hells

Basically just Dante's Inferno.  The concept is unimprovable.  There are three of them (East Hell, West Hell, and North Hell) and they are all run by the paladins, who collect and imprison the souls of sinners inside these machine-geographies.  They are packed with anguished people.

This is the hell part of hell.  Outside of the Circular Hells, life is laughably horrible, but inside, it's torture on a scale we can barely concieve.

The Paladins

They forced the demons to take the Oaths, creating the devils who wear the Shackles.  They ensure that sinners are punished forever, and that no one escapes the Circular Hells.  Someday, they will conquer all of the Abyss.

Hungry Joe

He is one of the very, very few people to escape from the third circle of hell (Gluttony).  That was a long time ago.

Hungry Joe has eaten armies and cities.  They're all still there inside him, still screaming, still dying, because there is no death in hell.

And he has grown huge.  Huge and strange--a self-loathing glutton trapped inside a levitating planet of unthinkable, impossible obesity.

Joetown Docks

Two rocks thrusting up from the burning oceans of hell.  They hold a barge suspended 50' above the surface of the flames, like a grain of rice held between two chopsticks.  One of the chopsticks has a shoulder filled with maimed boats and the sounds of lamentation.  This is Joetown.

The dock is crowded with moored ships, most of them no longer seaworthy.  The dock and the ships are built from non-flammable materials (because the sea is fire).  Things get dimmer the farther you move from the water's edge, because the ocean is the only light source.  There are many, many ships, most of them derelict and filled with crumbling, powerless undead.  You can only reach the dock by ramming other ships; otherwise you will have to tie up on someone else's ship and cross over their ship to reach the rock.

An unlit lamp post leans over the dock.  Atop it, a hookman named Jarrack watches for incoming ships, and charges them a small fee to dock.

Sample Ship: The Last Gamble.  Signs of violence.  Sails have been knotted and the anchor has been hung high upon the mast.  Mostly abandoned, except for the wailing coming from the hold, which contains six "mermaids" lamenting and arranging bones.  Melania has three bone fish hooks threaded through her cheek, each one a single use of summon fish if used as a conventional fish hook.  She and her five sisters are  looking for news of the living merfolk (up under the sunshine).  She will pay money for water (a rarity in hell).  They offer shelter but will attempt to kill and eat you if they think they can succeed.  Locked in a box they have a whaler that that they have been slowly eating over the last six months.  Every so often one will open the box and take a nibble.  They are saving his eyes for last.  (His living, terrified eyes.)

Another Sample Ship: Empty rooms.  More empty rooms.  In the boiling hot bilge is a mass of weeping flesh, half-submerged in its own suppurations.  (Stats as black pudding.)  Arranged carefully at the back of the bilge is a dolorite sculpture of a deformed uterus (worth 3000c) surrounded by sculptures of miscarriages, made from garbage and mucus.

At the end of the dock is a Joe Lump.

The Joe Lump is a blistered clump of skin and hair.  It wears a hat.  Up close, you can see the dozen eyes buried amid the fleshy folds.  Some are rolling madly and some are closed, but most are looking at you with calm regard.  Under the hat is a slobbering mouth.  At its base is a row of sphincters that constatly ooze black treacle.  It weighs about 400 lbs.  Joe can see through its eyes.

Dolorite

How much can you compress human suffering?  Into how small of a space can you compress it?

If you put a bunch of people in an oven, you have achieved a great deal of suffering, to be sure.

But if you cut off their arms and legs, and then piled them into the oven, you would surely have created a greater density of suffering.

But what of the superfluous material of the body, the bones and the skin and the digestive tract?  Why not excise that as well?  Why not peel a man down to the marrow and layer his anguished nerves across the oven floor, as compressed as possible?

This is the principle behind dolorite, except that it made with much more extreme efficiency than our example would seem to imply.  The details are best left unspoken.

Dolorite is fabulously expensive to create.  It is prized by demons, who manufacture it into daggers and dildos and other such blasphemies.

For most people, touching dolorite causes immediate and catastrophic depression, and a near-complete loss of the will to life.  (Mechanics: Upon touching dolorite, save or drop your HP to 0.  At the start of each of your turns, make a save.  If you succeed, you regain all of the HP you lost.)

From the Book of Creatures
The whole site if pretty awesome.

Joetown Shanties

Points of interest: a skinny man begging for food, smoke rising from a beached rowboat, a group of people amid four half-ships, and a path up the rock to the upper barge.

This close, it is possible to see the top of the rock through the haze.  The barge has something ascending from it, an irregular pillar, possibly made from thick smoke.

The starving man is running away from Hungry Joe.  He will follow the party if they seem to have food.  He is bruised around the face and temples, as if beaten recently.  He is (briefly) helpful if fed.  He will become aggressive in 10 minutes if not fed.  He is not hard to deceive, but he is desperate and willing to attempt anything.

The beached rowboat hides a trapdoor, leading to a man-burrow.  The first room holds  pair of blind, syphilitic "dogs"*.  The back room holds Jayak.  He will give free advice to anyone who does business with him.  He will sell cockatrice eggs.  He will buy drugs at a high price.  He will also pay beautiful ladies to reach into his chest and caress this small, shriveled heart, which does not beat, but merely trembles like a bird.

The four half-ships are exactly that.  Two ships that have been broken in half and assembled around a town square of sorts.  In this square a witch is attempting to commit suicide.  She has convinced her 10 friends to call upon Zulin, condemn her as a witch, shame her, beat her, and then burn her at the stake.  She hopes that this will consign her to oblivion, rather than an eternity of suffering.

One person is cursing the witch more than the oters.  She is Rendrada Fly-Heart, and she was the witch-hunter who killed the witch when they were both alive.  In death she is her deepest friend.

You can stop the ceremony.  No one will thank you if you do.

Gran Begina, the Witch:  HD 4, warp wood, steal voice, water to fire.  Her spellbook is written on the bottom of her shoes, and will be lost when she burns.

Rendrada Fly-Heart: HD 3, leather, broadsword.  Save +4 vs magic.  Enemies struck by her have a 50% chance of fumbling spells for 1 round.

Ascent

Up on the cliffs, you can see hookmen scrabbling up and down.  clickclick--clickclick--clickclick.  They wear baskets on their backs and seem to be collecting things.  (They are collecting giblets that missed the Buckets.)

If you climb the switchbacks up the cliffs, you will be accosted by 1d4-1 hookmen who demand that you pay 20c to ride the elevator.  This is not robbery, just a local rule that encourages hookmen to collect elevator fees from travelers.

At the top is the barge, perched precariously between two gripping crags.  Above it, the elevator writhes.  In the fire-damaged hold is meeting place that doubles as a shrine to Jubilex (one of the strongest elements of the demonic rebellion against the paladins).  In an open chest is a pile of meat hooks, for the hookmen's guests.

Whales are so fucking weird
and no one seems to notice.

The Elevator

There's a loop of enormous chain.  It is large enough that you could not pick up a single link.  It goes through a ring on the deck of the barge.  It loops up, getting lost in the smoke from the ocean.  450' higher, it loops through another hook in the ceiling of the landing lodge.

Wrapped around this enormous chain is one of Hungy Joe's intestines, sealed off in a closed loop.  The intestine still has directionality, however, and so it writhes around the chain with peristaltic contractions.  (Here's a video of what your stomach does everyday.)

It's a bit like a three-dimensional conveyor belt, where the chain is the floor and the skin of the intestine is the surface of the conveyor belt.  It moves about 1' for every 2 seconds (and so it takes 15 minutes to be conveyed from one end to the other).

Hookmen ride the elevator easily, since their hooks are perfectly suited to clamber onto the fleshy skin of the intestine.  Hookmen are friendly and helpful as long as you continually give them small amounts of money.  They ask for money a lot.

Non-hookmen can reach Hungry Joe by stabbing a meathook into the intestine and hanging on for dear life.

The elevator is fed by cutting it open and pouring in some half-digested chyme, harvested from Hungry Joe's intestines.  (The waste liquids are similarly drained beforehand.)  This is why the writhing flesh-elevator is covered in long, garish scars.

Hookmen

These are the descendants of the whalers that first befriended and colonized Hungry Joe.  They have drank Joe's bitter juices.  They have slept atop his troubled brow and let his dreams trouble theirs.  They have replaced their extremities with hooks.

They offer the same surgeries to the PCs.

Replace a hand (50c).  Your hand will forever do 1d8 damage, but it cannot ever hold anything every again (since you have no hand, just a hook).  If you replace both hands, you have a single natural attack that does 1d12 damage, but you can never hold anything ever again.

Replace a foot (30c).  You get a hook attached at your heel and another at the front of your foot, like a pincer.  For each foot replaced this way, you get -1 Movement and +2 to resist being moved or tripped.

For each hand/foot replaced in this way, you get +2 to climb.  If you replace all four extremities, you can permanently climb as spider climb.

Replace tongue (100c).  You can harpoon things and reel them in like a hookshot.  Your tongue has Strength 4.  If you have hook feet, you can use the bonus to resist being moved.

Hookman: HD 1, AC leather, Hooks 1d12.  Spider climb.  Harpoon tongue (as above).

They have no hair.  Every part of their body that was previously covered with hair is now covered with a soft cuticle, much like a flimsy fingernail.

The Buckets (Neighborhood)

About halfway up to the landing lodge are the Buckets.  These are hanging platforms.  They look more like stained metal trays than buckets.  The largest is 200' across.

They are used to catch Hungry Joe's drippings (from his many sores), giblets (from the meat harvests), and his feces (very little is produced--Hungry Joe's body is too gluttonous to allow much to escape).

A few hookmen eke out a shitty existence atop the buckets, growing strange crops to feed Hungry Joe.  Their shanties are made from from bones and spoorcobble.

The Dangles (Neighborhood)

About 90% of the way up to the landing lodge are the Dangles.  These are loops of Hungry Joe's intestines, knotted together and looped into paths and foundations.  They average about 5' wide.  The landing lodge is in the middle of this.  A normal-looking man will help you off the elevator, then ask for 20c.

Like all of Hungry Joe's buildings, they are attached by hooks.  Most of the buildings are converted (metal) ships or associated structures.  An old dock might double for a wide market road.  The harbormaster's office is inside an enormous diving bell.

The intestines are different colors and sizes.  Black, brown, yellow, red.  They all move slowly as they contract and pulse.  Remember that intestines are muscles.  The buildings sway.

The hookmen sometimes use the road.  Othertimes they jump from intestine to intestine.  They climb fastest sideways, like a vertical crab.  Climbing on the intestines is frowned upon, because it wastes blood, and sometimes Joe's meals spill out a little bit.  Most of this is caught by the Buckets, below, but it risks being wasteful.

Eating the half-digested chyme that spills from Hungry Joe's intestines is not tolerated.  That is food-theft, and is punished with death (as you are fed to Hungry Joe).

There are other places of interest up here.  The Nursery, where Flocculent Sneed with perform the operations that turn you into a young hookman.  The Tit, a tavern with an inaccurate name, where hookmen, pirates, scabromanders, and a battlesnake get drunk on blood.

Above the Dangles, you can barely make out the backside of Hungry Joe.  It is huge and sallow like a cancerous moon.  Occasionally a boil will pop, raining down toxins onto the Dangles.  Occasionally a hookman will spill one intentionally onto an invader.

Black Bottle (Neighborhood)

A neighborhood on the side of the Hungry Joe.  It is inside glassified blisters, which bulge out from Hungry Joe's side like bubble windows made from smoked glass.  Inside are the crab-hand wizards, who tend to the delicate chemistries of Hungry Joe's unruly livers and glands.

The crab-hand wizards replace each finger on their right hand with a crab claw. They do this to cast spells faster.  They have other alterations, but the crab-hand is the biggest and most consistent.

Most of the attention is spent grappling with the moods of Joe's humors, but they are mostly known for the Little Joes that they produce.

Little Joes are made by cutting off a large piece of Hungry Joe and growing it in a vat.  The resultant creature is often mistaken for a whale, until it lifts its head from the water and you can see the patches of hair and the blind, idiot eyes lolling amidst the waves.

Little Joes are used as boats.  Submarines, actually.  They compromise the bulk of Hungry Joe's ramshackle Navy.

The crab-hand wizards offer a variety of modifications to the basic Little Joe.  The jaw can be grown to large proportions, to the point where it subsumes the nose and forces the eyes to the side of the head, causing the Little Joe to have a face like a blunt-toothed shark.  Or the entire useless face and brain can be replaced with a cluster of cannons.

Each Little Joe comes with a magically locking hatch on the back and three interior rooms.

• Little Joe: 10,000c
• Chompers: +5,000c (powerful bite attack, precludes Cannon Cluster Face)
• Cannon Cluster Face: +5,000c (powerful and expensive ranged attack, precludes Chompers)
• Voluminous Uterus: +5,000c (huge cargo space, precludes blasphemy glands)
• Blasphemy Glands: +5,000c (blasphemes against gravity, allowing flight, precludes Voluminous Uterus)

Other items offered for sale: biomancy, potions.

• Crab Hand: +2 Initiative when casting spells.  100c.
• Sovereign Glue: 200c.  (max 3)
• Universal Solvent: 200c.  (max 3)
• Elemental Acid: 200c.  (max 3)
• Yoshi Tongue: 300c.
• Nulligan Nodes: Immune to poison.  Whenever you would be poisoned, you rage instead. 500c.

From the Contemporary Chester

Yellowbelly (Neighborhood)

Strains of tumors evolve and fight slow wars across Hungry Joe's tortured belly.  This is where the priesthood lives, alongside the butcherboys.

The priesthood are the actual leadership aboard Hungry Joe.  They maintain his body and his mind.  They control the Navy and the butcherboys.  (They also control access to the dungeon inside Hungry Joe.)

The butcherboys are specialized hookmen.  Their job is to keep Hungry Joe fed.  Hungry Joe's diet includes "fish", relatively mundane vegetables from the gardens, intruders, and pieces of Hungry Joe himself.

While institutionalized autocannibalism may seem self-defeating, it works better than one might suspect because of the sheer efficiency of Hungry Joe's digestive system, due in part to his many miles of digestive tract.  And autocannibalism is necessary, because it is important that Hungry Joe is eating constantly.

Very bad things happen if Hungry Joe ever stops eating.

Pirates of Hell

So I have some players who ran through the Pleasure Dome, and instead of choosing to escape the fleeing orcs, they choose to leave with the mistress of the Dome and her genie paramour, and rode a giant lotus all the way down to Hell.

So then I had to write some Hell stuff.

What is Hell

Hell is the big trickle-down.  Everything that dies ends up here, unless a god cares enough about you to sweep you off to their appropriate heaven.  (Or to accurately, unless someone cares enough about you to sweep you off to the appropriate whatever.)

Digression: although the organized heavens tend to be much more powerful than anything in hell, there have been cases where pissed-off demons have assassinated psychopomps and dragged a soul to hell despite their good deeds.  This is why you must always be sure that your god loves you more than Hell hates you, and wise people do not blaspheme against devils nor gods.

And it isn't just death that brings something to Hell, it's ending.  Whole cultures, lost ships, burnt paintings.  It's all here in Hell somewhere.  Hell isn't infinite, but is large enough to accommodate everything that has ever passed away in Centerra; perhaps that's what determines the size of Hell.  It's certainly much bigger than the Church's Heaven.

Some say that nothing lasts forever.  Heavens will eventually crumble, even gods will die, and we'll all end up down here.

Dying in Hell

You can't really die in Hell, you can only transform into a lesser form.  Die, and you'll return as a shambling undead.  Die again, and you'll become a crawling thing.  Die again, and you'll become a soul-maggot, good for nothing except consumption and too weak to even turn a doorknob.  But even that is not the end.

And with each death, you lose a little bit more of yourself.  Memories fade and your sense of purpose numbs.

Why Hell Sucks

The surface world is organized for us (or rather, we are organized for it).  We have food and sunlight and water sources.  The temperatures, oxygen levels are all suited for our biology.  And the world is stable--we know where to find our family and friends, and we know where we fit in the context of this continent and this culture.

Hell is too big, too weird, and too shifting.

• The environment is too indifferent.  Usually it is too hot, but it may be too cold, or the air  may be toxic.  Food and water are extremely hard to come by.
• Everyone is dead (except for people who bodily enter Hell).  Being dead is depressing.  First, because you are trapped in a foreign body that is rotting around you.  Second, the animal pleasures no longer give any joy.  Most of the dead are vaguely hungry, sleepy, horny, etc.  But although many of them try, there is no satisfaction anywhere.
• You don't know where you fit in.  While you grew up in a home surrounded by relatives who introduced you to your cultural context, hell is a hot pit full of strangers.  They are cruel because they don't know you.  They are full of the bigotry of bygone eras.
• There is no way out, not even through death.  All of your future is known to you, and it is all exactly as terrible as this.

And of course there are demons.  They very wildly, but they tend to be selfish and cruel.  (Or at least, the selfish and cruel ones are most prevalent.  That's not to say that there aren't any demons who have showed kindness in the past, but demons with scruples tend to be eaten by those without.)

Altruism comes from social altruism, and there are no societies in Hell.

Devils are simply demons that have signed the Covenant with the Church's paladins.  They are recognizable by the shackles that they wear on their necks, wrists, and ankles.  While demons are numberless and infinitely mutable, devils have been numbered and regimented.  

Their duty, as appointed by the Church's agents, is to torture the inhabitants of Hell. The cities of Hell are not surrounded by farmland, but by fire pits and torture factories, where the souls of sinners suffer eternally.

And if you've ended up in Hell, you are by definition a sinner.  Unless you're a paladin.

The Paladins of Hell

If hell has a ruler, it is the paladins.  They conquered it generations ago, toppling Asmodeus and his legions of demons.  Not only do they plan and execute the myriad sufferings that damned souls must suffer, they sometimes send devils to the surface as spies and tempters, in order to better learn who is a sinner.  Because after all, they must find all the sinners, even those who have never sinned, but would sin if they were given the opportunity.

It's a religious-military dictatorship, and there are an awful lot of them.  And while they can be kind and sympathetic to other paladins, everything else in Hell is treated cruelly, with attitudes that range from hatred, to contempt, to resigned indifference.

The King of Hell is Holy Mormoth, the Underpope.  He dwells in the holy city of Excoriation, amid his attendant princes and bound devils (such as Lolth and Pazuzu).  Rumor has it that Jubilex, the Lord of Slime is being transported back to Excoriation where he can finally be destroyed (if he refuses to take the Oaths).

The Sea of Fire

It's an ocean of fire on par with the Great Lakes, and nearly all of the places of interest are on it, or near it.

It's also the only light source, which means (a) everything is backlit into silhouettes and little else, since the light is always coming from near the horizon line, and (b) things get very, very dark as soon as you move away from the sea.

The Sea of Fire is made of eternally burning oil.  If you remove some of the oil from the sea, it is just normal burning oil without any supernatural longevity.  It gradually loses it's potency over the next 24 hours until it is just filthy, mildly-poisonous water.

Ashen Shores

A cross between jagged lava rock and hard-packed ashes.  If examined closely, the ground will be discovered to be countless layers of burnt human remains, packed on top of each other like accreted layers of sediment.  And of course, they are still alive, although you will have to pack the ashes and shards into a jar and watch them for a while to have any clue.  (On a long enough timeline, even the ashes will assemble and crawl towards the light of the distant shore.  This is what an ashling is.)

Encounter: A crawling hand, caked black with ashes, with a crude map carved into its back.  It wears a crawling bracelet, which allows you to detach your hand and walk it around without any harm.  It doesn't allow you to see through the hand.

The map on the hand leads to the Widening Gyre, a dungeon where a prisoner managed to send the hand out for help.  (My party just killed the crawling hand and took the bracelet.)

Encounter: Maggot-takers.  A wide line of humanoid figures armed with shovels and lanterns, sweeping the landscape like a search party combs the woods for a lost child.  In front of them, an enormous pig-thing sniffs the ground.  Behind them, some sort of flesh-and-metal arachnid shambles along, with pale limbs reaching out from it's cage-like abdomen.

(The Pig-Thing is a black pudding wearing the skin of a dire boar.  Use the stats of a dire boar until the skin takes enough damage to fall apart.  The arachnid is a modified bebelith, with an enlarged abdomen-prison and a placid personality.)

Every once in a while, the pig-thing will snuffle and paw at the dirt.  The searchers will dig until their shovels come up bloody, and then extract a screaming "maggot" from the ground, which is then fed to the arachnid.  ("Maggots" are generally considered the least of the useful forms of souls.  They resemble hairless, gelatinous child-selves of the person they once were.  They've died so many times that they only remember 1d6 facts of their original life.  They are the most common prey of demons.)

The Iron Docks

Three tongues of metal, jutting out into the Sea of Fire.  They have been savaged, torn apart, and rejoined with rivets.  They are blackened with soot, but they are not rusted.  Metal buildings squat on the long pier.

The air above them shimmers with heat.  Bare feet will blister and burn almost instantly, and metal boots will likewise fare poorly.  (This is also true aboard ships, since most are metal.)

The First Shack

The first small building has a sign in front: three fish eating the same object.  Inside, the floor is coated with thick leathers.  There are three mirrors and a table covered with broken glass.  In the mirrors, you can see the occupants of the room: three mermaids.  You cannot interact with them in any other way.

The mermaids will caress the hair of your mirror-self and communicate by reading your lips.  If the mirror is broken, the shards will bleed profusely and one of the mermaids will die.  The surviving sisters will attack with phantasmal killer spells.

Each sundered mirror has a 2-in-6 chance of yielded a crystal ball shard.  (This is a single-use item.  When broken under your teeth, you act normally for six seconds and then rewind time back to the moment when you broke the shard.)

But they are merchants, not murderers.  They sell only one thing: short term wishes.  Anything that they grant will be undone by the next day, although the indirect effects remain.  Wishfood that was eaten will still have nourished you, and a wish-ship that vanishes will still have carried you to your destination.

They are not interested in money.  Instead, they are interested in things like:

• Courage.  (Permanent -4 to save vs fear.)
• Peace.  (Gain an insanity.)
• Kindness.  (You can no longer commit altruistic acts.  You cannot even aid another PC, unless your life depends on it.)
• Anything else the PCs can suggest.

The Second Shack

The sign outside depicts a bottle.  Inside, the shack appears to be full of metal garbage: iron looms, torn armor, gnawed wheelbarrows, snarls of wire, defaced marble busts.  It stinks of hot vomit.

Clinging to the ceiling is a huge creature, something like a scaly gorilla with an ox skull for a head.  This is Samael, who suffers the nightmares of creatures too insane to cogitate them.  He is enraged by excessive stimulus (lights, loud noises, surprises, loud people), but is otherwise a decent fellow.

If you give him a bottle, he will vomit out one of the nightmares and give it to you.  This process takes 10 minutes, and then he will drop a bottle imp to the floor.  He also desires alcohol.

The Third Shack

There is no sign outside this shack, but there is a stained hook, large enough to impale a horse.  This is the lair of Mogrel, who runs a fetching service.

The room descends a leaden staircase, below the burning surface of the ocean.  The heat here is tremendous (1 damage every minute of exposure). 

The room at the bottom of the stairs is an office.  A huge fishtank holds five things that look like obese, wriggling eels with the faces of horses.  A bell hangs from the ceiling, and a tapestry on the wall depicts sailors being devoured by a deformed whale.  (This is a depiction of Gurlungangus, a local whale demon.  The tapestry is worth 200g.)  These is a steel door at the back.

If the bell is rung, Mogrel will emerge.  He resembles an elongated walrus with an oversized head.  Instead of eyes, a cluster of small, eyeless narwhal heads emerges from his brow.  He has the stats of an HD 5 ogre, and is capable of attacking everyone in melee range at once.  If he deals max damage, the target is impaled.  If he is killed, his meat will rot into nothingness over the next 24 hours and he will self-resurrect.

In exchange for fresh souls (usually 'maggots'), he will offer to let you use one of his bat eels.  If a hunk of flesh is placed into the tank, an eel will eat it.  If an eel is removed from the tank, it will quickly grow to its full size (stats as a dire bat) gaining 1 HD per round.  If the eel ate a hunk of flesh, it will then be compelled to fly off, locate the person from whom the flesh originated, and carry their corpse back here, where it will impale it on the hook.  Eels that haven't eaten hunks of flesh will just try to escape, and then attack people on the docks.

There is a final room, and this is where Mogrel watches the undersea through a small porthole.  He is in love with a mass of mangled intestines that sometimes swims past the porthole.  Also in the room are a bed of nails and a small steel chest.  The speak with locks spell is written on the bottom of the bed of nails.  The steel chest contains a fat leech (attacks as a viper, spits demon blood into you that reduces all healing by 10, but this penalty decreases by 1 each day), a wavy dagger, a telescope, and the beating heart of Mogrel, who will permanently die if the heart is destroyed.