Thousand Hells is a game about performing heists, jailbreaks, and other quests in a variety of mythic underworlds. Each mission will take you to one of several underworlds. Even an experienced hell-farer will find surprises, but I can give a quick orientation for the underworld I wrote, the Other Sun.
Having multiple underworlds helps make each playthrough unique. But with multiple settings, we can’t easily create an entire game worth of lore for each one (as in the Six Ages games). So instead, we borrow and remix mythology. For example, Robin Laws derived the Great Below from the ancient Mesopotamian underworld. That’s less familiar to most players than a place like Hades from Greek mythology, and like Robin I wanted to start with something that could provide inspiration but wasn’t well known.
I came up with the idea of trying to find really early underworld myths, which made me think about how linguists studying Proto-Indo-European have tried to reconstruct (or invent) early stories. So what about Indo-European myths? The problem is, we really don’t have any. No one was writing them down 4500 years ago. We do have myths from cultures that speak an Indo-European language, but by the time chroniclers like Snorri Sturlusson wrote down Norse mythology, they were Christian and may have given their own slant to the old stories. But Christianity came much later to Latvia and Lithuania, and their mythology is considered less likely to have been distorted from its original form (which presumably preserved more of its PIE origins). That’s where I found the Other Sun. It’s named for the fact that it’s the nighttime domain of the sun goddess.
Despite the name, my underworld isn’t supposed to be the Other Sun. I’m trying to make a game, not present Baltic mythology. In particular, I want to have the elements of a hell as established by Robin Laws and Aaron Reed. First there’s a distant hellmouth, where you enter the underworld. As you travel to your mission’s goal, you’ll make choices about which type of challenge you’ll face along your journey. You may interact with the shades of the dead. Usually you need to get past a guardian or steal a useful item. And once you gain your objective, you’ll have to escape hell, which can be just as dangerous as getting there.
But there’s lots of ways to work with that basic structure. The game’s original prototype had an episode loosely inspired by the epic of Gilgamesh, where he cut down 120 trees to help cross the ocean. Robin didn’t use Gilgamesh in the Great Below, so I updated this to be part of the hellmouth, essentially moving some of the otherworld challenges to before you literally crossed into the land of the dead. After you sail west, you’ll need to figure out how to follow the Sun’s chariot into the underworld.
There seem to be a lot of underworld goddesses in Baltic mythology, and you’ll probably meet several of them while you travel the Other Sun. You might even help the seven sisters fashion your own burial cloth. Every hell has its own type of demon. Latvian dogsnouts normally live in forests, but since I’m not trying to be true to the sources, into the underworld they went. A few other supernatural creatures ended up in my Other Sun by the same logic.
Other events came from common elements of Indo-European myth, like the Horse Twins, a dog guardian, and crossing a bridge which judges you.
Ideally each hell has a distinctive look. The Great Below is dry and dusty, while the Hell of Nightmares is right out of Hieronymus Bosch. For the Other Sun, my art direction used beautiful caverns as a starting point:
Unlike the caves of the Great Below, the Other Sun has more spectacular features (treat it like a wet cave, still growing). It won’t be lit for commercial tours like a lot of the reference art but it has stalactites, stalagmites, curtains, and the occasional pool.
So the Other Sun takes a lot of Baltic mythology, scrambles it with other mythic ingredients, and serves up a setting for you to explore, different each time you play.
- David
P.S. If you'd like to discuss this update, please visit the Thousand Hells channel in the Kitfox Discord.