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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 616306" data-attributes="member: 4937">Taloras: You open up a deeper question regarding the mythological context of the word 'Hell' itself.Everyone's hell is rooted in some mythological context.  Even if you believe in Hell, very little is known about 'Hell', and what you probably believe isn't based on scripture but on some mythological tradiation that has grown up about hell.  The hell I described in the post above is my take on one Mythological tradiation (the one that arises from and inspired Dante and to a large extent the imagery used by TSR for the Nine Hells).  The tradition you cite is a very modernistic one, and while you are perfectly free to have whatever view of hell you want, that view of hell really doesn't have alot to do with the mythological context of the Nine Hells in D&D.   The mythological context of the personal hell within each ones mind is very much not the hell of the Nine Hells.  For one thing, being personal and subjective, it is uniquely Chaotic in nature.  The Nine Hells are the embodiment of very non-chaotic principles.  Things are subjective there.  Things are absolute.  Likewise, the hell of the Nine Hells is not the hell of Christianity.  The hell of Christianity is a place where noone who is there wants to be, not even the ruler(s) thereof and which exists to punish, store, or maybe even dispose of souls who have become damaged and refuse to be repaired.  Not so the hell of the Nine Hells, because the petitioners there arrived there by the conscious choice that Hell was the right place to be.  The inhabitants of Hell may rue thier decision now that the suffer, but they all came there beleiving that suffering was for the greater 'good'.  The Lords of the Nine don't punish the petitioners for being Evil, they reward them with a refined and refining horror that serves purposes of law and evil.  First, they wish to weed out the weak.  Second, they wish to acustom the strong to hardship, to pain, and to horror in order to harden there hearts and make them 'stronger'.  Thirdly, they wish to create an impenetratable barrier of pain, hardship, and horror which none not so accustumed could endure for the purposes of defending thier power against invasion by other incarnated ideological principles.So, while it is possible to have in your campaign, for example a romantised Hell like Neil Gaimen's Hell were are only found the people who believe that they should be punished (which oddly seems to me to be the very ones which don't need punishing) such a mythological tradiation won't meld well with any of the writings about the Nine Hells of D&D.</blockquote>

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