BrainStream: Hell is a Seedy Motel

[bkdelong]

It's been a while since I've written about my dalliances in the Dungeons & Dragons Planescape campaign. I'm still doing with with the City of Doors (CODI) project and we have some excellent stuff in the pipeline. I'm still playing my role of Organization Czar, Master of Canon and Chief Annoyance....but this time I've also jumped into story development. I've been spending a bunch of time in the Outer Planes - specifically the Abyss, Baator, and Mount Celestia.

Primarily I've been concentrating on the devils, (also known as Baatezu), trying to dig into their psyche by reading books like "Faces of Evil: The Fiends" and "Hellbound: The BloodWar". I've tackled newer books like "Book of Vile Darkness" and the "Planar Handbook" but it doesn't have the same volume of information as the 2nd Edition tomes.

I mention all this because my work resulted in the weirdest dream last night. I got a phone call from a woman claiming to be the personal assistant to an up and coming fiend who was interested in my services. So here I am, walking around my house with a cell phone, my family all about....trying to have a phone call with some evil being - or at least, one of their servants.

I don't remember much of the other side of the call but I do remember trying to figure out how to ask if the evilness in question was a Devil or Demon aka Lawful or Chaotic - "Is your...uh...boss a 'by the book' kind of person or are they 'spontaneous' ?", was the best I could come up with.

The next scene was be nervously dragging a friend out of a dive bar into a creepy series of alleys to show him the contract. The "boss" was definitely a Baatezu and I remember the phrase "Kocrachon Torturers". The Kocrachon are a beetle-type of devil with acute senses and arms with tiny claws quite adept at wielding scalpels. In addition to performing the duties of torture within the Baatorian ranks, they also perform "upgrades" to their fellow fiends and oft perform surgery to heal them as well.

I don't remember signing the contract but I do remember looking at a pamphlet detailing planar travel. It has a silhouette of the US with gold arches starting at one city and going to another - like airplane routes. I gathered that these were the various portals to the Outer Planes. I felt myself concentrating and then all of the sudden being yanked into a blur of nothingness as I travelled to ...well, somewhere.

The next thing I knew, I was in the lobby of said seedy motel. There was a desk off to my left with a nondescript owner handing out keys from behind the counter and an elevator off to my right. A crowd of about 5 humans mulled around. I noticed two rooms with their doors open...actually, I don't know if they even had doors. I just remembered scarves of varying colors draped over them.

I was approached from my right by a woman who appeared to be the person I spoke with on the phone. She was fairly nondescript. Attractive with shoulder-length sandy blonde hair, wearing loose khakis and a shirt. She explained who she was and escorted me to one of the rooms in front of me.

There was a semi-enclosed front entryway that allowed me to see into the other room. However it was explained that I had to be searched for drugs before going in because, you know - there were policies. I looked at the table to the right and saw what looked to be a bunch of cardboard doughnut boxes containing the contents of other folks pockets - pills of varying colors, loose change. I searched through my pockets and only managed to pull out a handful of coins with some random pieces of paper that I deposited into a box.

The woman took me into the other room where I saw a scantily clad woman with her back to me. She had dark brown hair and what looked like ears. of an animal sprouting through her hair. She was watching what appeared to be a small, old television sitting on the floor in front of her. Her assistant walked around her and said "Wolf!" with her arms outstretched. They embraced and kissed ...and I promptly woke up after my son rolled over on me.

The name Wolf was rather ironic since that happens to be the name of a character I've been working with. The first thing that went through my mind when I saw her was....well....pretty smutty: "Am I allowed to be intimate with my new boss?" quickly followed by "Wait - Succubi are demonic, not devils. What is this woman" and then "Well, Erinyes are cute female devils but have red eyes and black feathery wings." and "Hrm..various other devils can shapechange" to finally "Eww....fiends tend to eat the human males they mate with shortly thereafter".

After getting my mind out of the gutter, I was trying to figure out why the place I was didn't look like any of the levels of Baator - not remotely hellish. Then I realized....duh. Sigil (The City of Doors) is the perfect place for fiends to deal with mortals. Said seedy motel was probably some random kip in The Hive - the ghetto of Sigil.

Pretty neat, actually. At least once a year I do some reading on Astral travel and Lucid Dreaming. I only wish I could have stayed asleep longer to see where it lead. Though, truth be told, I immediately told my wife about the impure thoughts out of some guilt. Dream guilt - who woulda thunk.

I know what you're thinking.....I like to think at a minimum I'm a Neutral Good kind of guy. But while I did go to see the devil named Wolf, I didn't sign any contract but I'm always willing to listen to what a person has to say before I dismiss them. Especially when it involves the crazy politics of the Outer Planes.

[BrainStream]
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Comments

[voxmaille.livejournal.com]

Dude, I tried RPGs in high school, and I could not focus long enough to participate.

[bkdelong.livejournal.com]

I don't know how'd I'd do with playing this stuff in PnP. I just think the canon & sory possibilities are really cool and it offers a fascinating look at religion. In addition to the D&D gods residing on the various Outer Planes, they also have the gods from the Norse, Celtic, Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese and Greek pantheons. In fact, just today a group "converted" the Slavic Pantheon which includes Czernoborg, recently highlighted in Neil Gaiman's "American Gods".