FROM ONE-SHOT TO DAMNATION: THE MAKING OF HELLSPAWN
The trouble with Hell, as it turns out, is paperwork.
HELLSPAWN started as a one-shot generator. A silly, slightly mean-spirited thing meant to cough up names and missions for doomed bastards. Roll a few dice, summon a few horrors, call it done. It was meant to be a distraction, not a theology.
But ideas have a habit of refusing to stay where you put them.
The Joke That Learned to Walk
I asked, "What if Hell is an office that never closes?"
Soon, there was the Ledger Eternal, the Ministers of Hell- each with their own damned domain, the Infernal Authority, contracts bound in living parchment, and an entire metaphysical world-lore built on a wheel spinning and connecting the Dying Worlds.
Ilias (Lee), who is handling the layout and overall design, took one look at the growing pile of drafts and said, "You realise this is more than a generator, right? This is a full game."
I tried to laugh it off, but the laughter stuck somewhere between admiration and horror. He was right. What we had made was not a table. It was a trap. And we were already inside it.
Building the Machine
We decided that if we were going to build a game about Hell, it should feel like a laborious task.
The kind of work that never ends, where even success comes with another form to fill out. That is where Abyssal Debt came from, the idea that every victory carries interest. You can win, but you will pay for it later, and the rate compounds daily.
Then came the Collapse Die, a small change to the Miseries mechanic with significant implications. It measures the strain on the system. Every time it rolls a one, Hell fractures a little further. Eventually, the whole machine comes apart, and the game ends not with triumph but with entropy.
It is strangely comforting, in a bleak way.
The Beauty of the Grind
Somewhere in the middle of all this, HELLSPAWN became beautiful.
Not pleasant, not kind, but precise. Every rule slots into another like teeth on a gear. Every piece of lore grinds against the next, sparking heat and meaning.
What Comes Next
HELLSPAWN arrives on November 11th.
Between now and then, we will be sharing how it was built. The sketches, the mechanics, the fragments of bureaucratic scripture that became a book.
It began as a generator. It became an engine.
And now the engine is hungry.
OBEY. BURN. REPEAT.
-Richard, Minister of the Words Suffering