Yesterday was our second time playing He Who Fights With Monsters, the dungeon crawling game where the PCs are medieval warriors battling the forces of hell.

We spent a lot of time yesterday working on and testing out new Virtues (which are basically equivalent to feats in D&D: little abilities you assign to your character that manipulate/change the rules in your favor).  We also spent time working on and testing out different types of demons and what their powers and abilities might be.

It wasn’t really much of a playstorm since the current set of rules seems to be working pretty well (as evidenced by the fact that we had loads of fun playing).

I think the next step for this game is to write up a rules document (which I will post on this site for everyone to see!) and start playing with different groups of people.  In other words, I think this game is done being playstormed and now it’s ready for  some casual playtesting.  Exciting!

We talked a little bit more about Hellspace (which may need a name change) today and the theology of its universe. I got it into my head at some point that the demons of Hellspace are not the conniving types you might find in D&D or some other fantasy game, but rather animalistic predators. In the hundred or so years since humans first opened the Hell portals, the demons have adapted into a sort of infernal deep-sea angler fish. They use sin as their lure; so, one demon’s belly might glitter like a pile of gold (while the rest of it remains camouflaged until its too late), while another may possess a lustful siren’s song.Of course, this brings up the question of religion, and I think we’re going to try to make faith something resembling a sanity-point mechanism. Now, the setting is dominated by the Christian religion (after all, they have proof that Hell exists). But that doesn’t mean that every character has to be a true believer. Those with strength of faith, may use that to either harm or drive away the demons. However, they’ll have to deal with temptations of sin. Those weak of faith may instead take those same temptations and turn them into indulgences, bringing some much-needed relief after dealing with horrors from another dimension.

Of course, this all needs to be tested out.