Thank you for joining HELLCRAWL! A project that I am very excited to bring into print. I started writing HELLCRAWL over 3 years ago, it was my love letter to Dante's Inferno. I was inspired by my AP English teacher Mrs. Jensen who had us create our own circles of Hell and decide what modern day sins deserved to be new circles of Hell. A very impactful project!
I ended up setting aside the project when I began work on The Painted Wastelands with Tim. Even though the book was 90% written at the time, I assumed it would simply never see the light of day. Imagine my surprise when Gavin asked if I'd like to join Old-School Essentials month. "It's about demons and devils if you want to write something." I was champing at the bit! Buddy, you have no idea! I have a whole hexcrawl campaign setting ready to go! So I got to rewrite the book and finish it. More importantly, I got to team up with my new creative partner and friend Tim Molloy to illustrate my dream adventure.
On Join Shipping We are not participating in joint shipping with Exalted Funeral and Necrotic Gnome this time. Partly, this is because I believe we can deliver our projects more quickly on our own, as we have for the past 4 crowd funding projects. We plan on delivering this project by Fall 2026.
What's Inside? HELLCRAWL is 50,215 words long. It's going to be about 100 pages or so and hardback. I don't have the final page count just yet, we're working on the layout. It has:
The characters are dead. When the characters die, they go to Hell because they're all horrible sinners! This is a way to keep the adventure going without having to roll up new characters. They can even escape Hell and return to the land of the living!
Devil Dollars: Why do demons torture souls? They do it because if you torment a soul enough they will turn into a devil dollar, which is the currency in Hell.
Despair: The horrors of Hell are so awful that they start to corrupt your very soul and can transform you into a devil.
Randomly Generated Hexes: The Hexcrawl is randomly generated. There is a chart that can change the nature of this particular hex (everything is made of flesh or everything is on fire). This adventure is designed to be ran multiple times and it will never be the same. There is a table of random events or features associated with the area, and there is a table of encounters with demons or monsters. Let's take a look at a sample hex:
