The Beareucracy is alive and well in hell ^.^;

Actually...

... for a while, I'd really liked the idea of the Styx as part of a roleplaying game - sort of. I guess, more like the Boann in Irish mythology, where this big river goes through the real world, and through all the various upper and lower regions as well, such that characters can travel pretty much everywhere in the cosmology. It'd be the big way you could get stuff from one chunk of the mythological world to the other. I liked this idea before I read through Monte Cook's module A Paladin in Hell which actually has characters taking a voyage down the Styx.

Call it my fondness for roadtrips, and the early influence of Apocalypse Now, which has that seriously vivid roadtrip moment - where they're all doing their various things, and there's "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" on the PA.

And Hell? I figure Hell is a big sprawling bureaucracy (in D&D cosmology they're lawful evil, after all). So the chunk of World-River that Hell sits on is theoretically highly policed, with the Styx being a little like how the Tokugawa shoguns used to really regulate traffic on the Tokkaido Road, because that's how people might potentially move armies around. (Oh. Yeah, another thing I really liked was Blade of the Immortal.)

So the Styx has these little checkpoints and fortresses whenever you go into or leave a layer, and some of them are staffed by really bored, potentially bribe-able devils doing their jobs, and other layers have bazaars around the checkpoints so big you can barely remember the place had an actual function, and other layers have checkpoints crammed full of militaristic badasses who are looking for a reason to pound heads. This one here is one of the first type - the clerk has seen it all over the last number of centuries, the hellhound/Andrewsarchus is content to just nap, the armored guy is pretty much the only person actually trying to do his job - possibly because he's been especially bred or flesh-crafted to be an obedient warrior goon, and doesn't have the brainpower to think of anything else, really.

The only problem with this concept for a game is this; Greek mythology is set up for a roleplaying adventure like this, because everyone winds up in Hades - good, bad or indifferent - and Hellenic types regularly wander down there to break people out, talk to their parents, mess with the deities (Theseus tried this one. It didn't work.) But D&D myth tends to be based on more of a Christian/Moslem/Buddhist sort of place, where the only people who wind up in the Hells/Abyss tend to be either evil or really really evil - so there's little reason for characters to want to show up and get them out. Unless you've got some really hard core roleplayers who'd go for sort of a Journey to the West type of scenario, where filial piety alone gets them going in.

Well, if the good-aligned deities are insanely strict, maybe only a tiny number of stuck-up ***holes straight and narrow folks don't go to Hades, so the whole place is more of the natural destination for most of humanity*: bad, indifferent, or "insufficiently good".

You could get a whole thing going with Hell being full of working-class regular Joe types pissed off at the whole system and either trying to make do on their own terms or even in some cases plotting rebellion against a Heaven that's actually unjust.

Ahhhh, I was gonna say this looks a lot less, pure evil demon, than "just doing our job" demons, now I know why.
Curious why you invent this cool hell on the one hand, and then on the other, say DnD rules won't allow it. As if DnD Cosmology is the be-all, end-all of how to RP, surely, with all the loads of Werewolf and Shadowrun stuff you've done, you know very well it isn't!

awsome! =)

Oh look! A puppy dog!

"Hi puppy dog!"

* pets the puppy *

"Ow! Ow! Ow! OW!"
"no bities! bad puppy!"
"Stop biting me!"
"ow goddammit ow ow ow ow"

The armor on the guard looks neat, the pointy things are a nice touch.