Hellegeat, the Pits

Hellegeat, the hell-gate, is not a place on any map. It is the fiends’ own dungeon, and no stair, road, or quest leads there. A Pit opens only when a miscast tears the floor open, and every such opening is a Pit of its own. Pits can open in any world you play.

How a Pit opens

Four of the worst miscast results split the floor beside the caster. Stairs go down into the Pit, and a gate stands at their head, letting fiends through. A creature that miscasts can open one too.

A Pit opens anywhere but on the overworld and on a Pit’s own floor: in a town, in a dungeon, even on a floor of Grundlēas. Where it cannot open, the gate comes alone. There is no limit to how many Pits a run can have.

The stairs stay where they opened. Climb out of the Pit’s first floor and you come back up those stairs, however you reached that floor. A Pit opened on a floor that forgets, such as Grundlēas’s, is forgotten with that floor. Go down into it and the floor above is forgotten, stairs and all: climbing out brings you to a new floor, with no way back into that Pit.

A Pit has five floors of hot, red-lit caves (45 °C). Its traps are fireballs and pits. Two floors in five hold chests, one or two each. It has no shops and no special rooms.

Who lives there

Fiends, and only fiends: from lemures and dretches up to vrocks, nycaloths, and the erinyes. Demons and devils hate each other, so they fight on these floors as readily as they fight you (see Factions). Nothing strays into a Pit, and nothing that lives there strays out.

A Pit grows with you. Its first floor is danger 12, and each floor down adds 4. On top of that comes half of every level you have past 10, at most 30 more. The danger is read when a floor is made, at your level then.

The warden

The fifth floor is the last. It leads nowhere deeper. Its hall belongs to the warden of the gate, a level-50 fiend with claws and a barbed whip that can hold you. Every two minutes it tears open a new gate, a rift or a hellmouth, two at most at once, and what comes through fights for it. The Pit’s other fiends leave it alone. A gate a miscast opens is different: the fiends it lets through attack the warden too. The hall has lava in its corners, four locked chests, and a hoard of finds.

Every Pit has its own warden. Killing one seals that Pit, and only that Pit. Make the fifth floor again after that and the hall is still there, with a new hoard, but no warden.

A sealed Pit’s stairs close behind you. The next time you arrive anywhere outside every Pit, its mouth crumbles to rubble, and that Pit is gone for good. You are never shut inside: the stairs close only once you are out.

Floors that forget

A Pit’s floors forget, as Grundlēas’s do. Leave a floor and everything on it is gone, your memory of it too. Climb back up and the floor above is made again: the same caves, but its dead are back and its loot is new. A floor pays experience for arriving only the first time you reach that depth of that Pit.

Your allies come with you as anywhere else. Those too far away stay behind, and that is the last of them. Your companion or familiar is never left behind.

See also: Miscasts, Dungeons and danger, and The dungeons one by one.