Gone to Hell

What You'll Need

• 2–4 people, yourself included
• Copies of all the playsheets
• A pile of tokens – beads, coins, poker chips, or (ideally) little plastic skulls
• No dice

Setup

Usually you'd start with character creation, and Gone to Hell is no exception. Things are going to work a little differently from what you might be used to, though, because rather than having one Gamemaster and multiple players, Gone to Hell has one player and multiple GMs! Here's how it works:

1. Go around the table and have each player pick an Opposing Force playsheet. This is the facet of the apocalypse you'll be responsible for in play. There's no separate GM role, so every player has to choose one! If there are more players than Opposing Force playsheets, or if some of the available playsheets don't seem appropriate for the game you have in mind, see the Optional Rules section for some ways around that.
2. Underline your choices in the choose one or more lines on your Opposing Force playsheet. If none of the options on a given line appeal to you, you can write your own at the end of the line and underline it instead.
3. You'll see a fill-in-the-blanks section called Your Hunger, Your Instruments, Your Laws, or Your Damage, depending on your playsheet. Fill in just the first line; the others will be filled in during play whenever inspiraton strikes
4. Optionally, cross off and re-write one (and only one) of your Opposing Force's Agendas to better suit your personal vision for them. This can change how your Opposing Force plays pretty significantly, so it's okay if you leave the Agendas as-is the first time you play.
5. Give your Opposing Force a suitably sinister title.
6. Write your name on the playsheet so you don't forget whose is whose, and pass it around the table so everybody can see your choices.
7. Once everybody's Opposing Force playsheet is filled out, spend a few minutes brainstorming what sort of world the apocalypse is taking place in and how the various Opposing Forces fit together. Don't pin anything down too firmly, though – everything could change once you start playing!
8. Make any final adjustments to your Opposing Force playsheet that came out of the brainstorming phase.
9. Bring out the Slayer playsheets and decide as a group what sort of Slayer would work best for your game. Each one lends itself to a different sort of story – the Slayer playsheets section will outline how.
10. Collaboratively work through the choose one or more lines on the Slayer playsheet in the same way as above. You can either collectively brainstorm a choice for each line, or go around the table and have each player choose one at a time.
11. Answer as many questions as you wish from the Your Legend section of the Slayer playsheet. Again, you can collectively brainstorm each answer, or take turns. Any questions you don't answer now can be filled in during play.
12. As with Opposing Forces, you have the option to cross off and re-write one Agenda; decide as a group.
13. Give your Slayer a name and an appropriately terrifying epithet. (The Slayer is always an appropriate epithet, if an unimaginative one!)
14. Decide on the order in which players will take turns being the Slayer; this is called the scene order. It can be any order you want, but I recommend starting with whoever owns the most metal albums.
15. Whoever's first in the scene order, pick up the Slayer playsheet, and set your Opposing Force playsheet aside for the moment.
16. Also pick up one token from the pile and put it in front of the Slayer player.
17. Start the first scene!

How to Play

Play is divided into scenes, which work a little like this:

1. At the start of each scene, the Opposing Forces collaborate to describe the utter bullshit situation the Slayer finds before them. The scene need not drop the Slayer directly into a fight, but should include some real and present danger.
2. The Slayer will investigate the situation, ask questions about what they see, and talk to any non-Slayer characters who might be present (if they're the talkative sort), and the Opposing Forces players will answer. After a minute or two of this, the Slayer will ideally take an action (see below); if they don't, refer to your Opposing Force playsheet to find out how to handle the Slayer stalling for time!
3. The Slayer takes an action according to the rules on the Slayer playsheet.
4. One or more Opposing Forces respond by taking reactions according to the rules on the Opposing Force playsheets.
5. Play returns to freeform question-and-answer mode until the next time the Slayer takes an action (or gets caught stalling for time).
6. After several action-reaction cycles, the Slayer will trigger the end of the scene – your Opposing Force playsheet will explain how. One of the Opposing Forces will step forward and wrap up the scene according to which scene-ending trigger the Slayer hit.
7. Pass the Slayer playsheet to the next player in the scene order. They are now the Slayer, and the former Slayer picks up their Opposing Force playsheet.
8. Also move any unspent tokens in front of the new Slayer player, and add one more from the pile.
9. Start the next scene!
10. Repeat steps 1–9 until each player has been the Slayer at least once. After this, you can collaboratively narrate a cliffhanger or epilogue to end the session whenever it feels like you've reached a good stopping point.

You've no doubt noticed that the Opposing Forces are largely reactive. After each scene begins, everything is driven by Slayer actions; the Opposing Forces can't inititate unless the Slayer is stalling, and even then, they're limited in what they can do. This is very much intentional: though the Opposing Forces act as co-GMs, the Slayer drives the plot. Don't worry, though – you'll get your turn as the Slayer soon enough!

All of the above notwithstanding, you may always ask questions or offer suggestions to help another player out when they're stuck. This does not count as your action or reaction, and overrides every other rule. If you're wondering how to square this with the stalling for time rule, it's simple: if it's the Slayer who's spinning their wheels, hit 'em where it hurts. If it's the Slayer's player who's floundering, throw them a lifeline!

Random Advice

The previous sections cover how to play the game. This one includes some pointers, observations, and miscellaneous long-winded blather about how to get the most out of those rules.

For Everybody

• Since Gone to Hell doesn't depend on pre-written scenarios, pre-game discussion is super important for getting everybody on the same page. There's a reason the setup instructions are longer than the actual rules of play!
• Take notes. Which role you're playing is going to be ping-ponging all over the place, and it's easy to lose track of important stuff.
• Always build on what the other players are doing rather than blocking or reversing. If somebody's taking the game in a direction that totally torpedoes your vision, call a sidebar and talk it out; trying to use your rules-based actions or reactions to yank the plot back on your favoured track will just piss people off.
• Given much of the source material's preoccuption with sex and violence, it's easy for Gone to Hell to go places people aren't comfortable with. There are any number of tools that can be used to tackle this issue; I don't advocate any one in particular, because I don't know your group, and the wrong approach for the wrong group can hurt more than it helps, but as a starting point you can fire up your favourite search engine and look up The X Card and Lines and Veils.

For Opposing Forces

• The scene-opening description is the only time you get to introduce a major threat or obstacle without waiting for the Slayer to drop a Light Action for you to react to. Take shameless advantage of it.
• Switch between in-character and out-of-character voice as needed, and take advantage of environmental descriptions to express your reactions without dialogue. Very few reactions require any particular mouthpiece character to be present – even your leading questions can be asked OOC, if need be. If nothing else works, don't be afraid to resort to a mysterious voice over an intercom. It's a popular trope in Gone to Hell's source material for a reason!
• Use index cards to represent any named non-Slayer characters you introduce. Ask for permission before permanently killing off somebody else's named character – it's just good form.
• If two Opposing Forces come into conflict during a scene, always focus on how the fallout of their scuffle affects the Slayer. Don't let it turn into a cutscene where the Slayer is stuck watching!
• This one isn't advice so much as pointing out a slightly subtle interaction, but: since the scene-ending triggers are tied to specific reaction types, you can decline a trigger simply by not taking the relevant reaction. You shouldn't do so often, since it messes with the token economy, and you definitely shouldn't do it to deprive the Slayer of a victory they're clearly gunning for, but you're not required to cut short a scene that's still got legs just because a trigger came up.
• Unless you're the only Opposing Force in play, don't feel obligated to react to every single thing the Slayer does. It's 100% okay to sit a reaction phase out if you've got nothing to add. Just don't make a regular habit of it!

For the Slayer

• Remember that you're in the driver's seat. Gone to Hell changes it up compared to many other tabletop RPGs by making the player role the proactive one: once the scene is set, the Slayer does stuff, and the Opposing Forces react.
• Whether you're going to have a boss fight is totally up to you – the Slayer always has the option of spending a token to wipe away any threat. The general flow of a boss fight is to get your ass kicked for a while by taking a couple of Light Actions in a row, then rally with a Heavy Action to finish the fight. Note that this means boss fights will often result in a net gain of tokens; this is intended!
• For a multi-stage boss fight, use the leading question that appears as the final Light Action on every Slayer playsheet to prompt for the next phase.
• Speaking of the Slayer's leading questions, you can and should throw in a bit of narration establishing how you're seeking the information you've requested. This won't affect whether you get it (Slayer actions always succeed!), but it will inform how the Opposing Forces describe it. For example, the questions on THE HUNTER's playsheet could be framed as the output of a high-tech scan visor just as easily as the result of deductive reasoning.
• Note that owing to the way the game's token economy works, losing is always a choice. You can theoretically break even on ever scene in which the Slayer emerges victorious: gain one token when the scene starts, plus two more for Light Actions, and spend all three on Heavy Actions for the win. If you'd prefer a grittier game, see the optional rules for alternative scene pacing for some suggestions on how to adjust this.

Alternative Scene Pacing

The pace of Gone to Hell is mostly determined by the the action economy within each scene. The Slayer can take at most five Heavy or Light actions before hitting a scene-ending trigger, and will often reach it before that, which puts a cap on the number of significant events that can occur in each scene. An enthusiastic Slayer can burn through them in a real hurry!

As noted in the Random Advice section, the token economy also determines the Slayer's expected ratio of wins and losses. I'm going to cover some options for adjusting that as well.

For Longer Scenes

If you're interested in longer individual scenes, your first impulse might be to bump up the number of actions of a particular type that are needed to end a scene, to four or even five. That doesn't always work out in practice, though: requring a very large number of the same type of action may strain the Slayer's creative resources.

A better option is to institute a rule that the Slayer can't take two of the same type of action in a row. Here type refers to Heavy, Routine, or Light. There's still nothing to stop the Slayer from taking nothing but Heavy Actions (or, conversely, nothing but Light Actions) whenever the opportunity arises, but they'll have to do other stuff in between, thus preventing scenarios where a scene is over in three cycles flat. This rule can be relaxed during boss fights and high-tension scenes.

For Grittier Games

While fiddling with the scene-ending triggers isn't the best way to adjust the pace of the game, it's a great way to adjust the tone. As noted earlier, the Slayer can theoretically emerge victorious in every scene if you're careful to always break even with your tokens. For a game where the Slayer is obliged to take some losses, you can use different thresholds for victory and disaster: for example, it might take three Heavy Actions to emerge victorious, but only two Light Actions to end a scene in catastrophe – or four Heavy Actions to win and three Light Actions to lose, for slightly less tension.

This can be extended to even larger imbalances, but even a one-point difference is enough to ensure that the Slayer will lose fairly often. In particular, if the Slayer ends a scene with zero tokens, it becomes impossible for them to emerge victorious in the following scene. Even with the free token to start the scene, you can't gather enough tokens to win without triggering a loss in the process. A bigger imbalance expands that guaranteed-loss threshold accordingly.

Removing the free token at the start of each scene will have the same effect on the token economy as unbalanced scene-ending triggers, but it feels harsher, so it's best reserved for games on the grimmer end of the scale. If you decide to institute unbalanced scene-ending triggers and remove the free token at the same time… well, it's your funeral!

For Fluffier Games

All of the preceding advice can be applied in reverse to achieve a game where the Slayer literally never loses: either skew the scene-ending triggers in favour of victory (e.g., three Heavy Actions to win, but four Light Actions to lose), or increase the number of free tokens awarded at the start of each scene to two.

Variable Grittiness

If your group is prepared to put in some extra work, you can decide whether to use unbalanced scene-ending triggers on a scene by scene basis. Just bear in mind that if the imbalance you decide on is bigger than the number of tokens the Slayer finished the previous scene with, the next scene becomes unwinnable! This can create an incentive for the Slayer to accept some early losses and hang onto a few extra tokens, just in case.

Doubling Up on Opposing Forces

If you're playing with a very large group, or if a smaller group has a specific scenario in mind where some of the Opposing Force playsheets don't fit, you can allow multiple players to choose the same Opposing Force. There are two specific changes to the usual setup process that need to happen here:

• Each player still handles the choose-or-or-more and fill-in-the-blank sections of their copy of the doubled-up Opposing Force playsheet individually. After those sections are finished on both playsheets, the players should confer and decide whether they're playing as different factions of the same Opposing Force, or as two unrelated Opposing Forces that just happen to have similar modi operandi. (They're treated as separate Opposing Forces for rules purposes regardless of what they decide, though!)
• Erasing and re-writing an Agenda becomes non-optional for the doubled-up Opposing Forces, and each player must erase and re-write a different Agenda. The end result should be that the two copies of the Opposing Force playsheet have three Agendas in common and two that differ.

I don't recommend doubling up like this in two-player games, nor that three or more players pick the same Opposing Force. If you've come up with a premise where that would actually be a good idea, I'd love to hear about it!

Two-Slayer Co-op

Sometimes you might feel like playing with multiple Slayers – you know, get a little of that two-player co-op action going. That's totally doable, but it complicates the process of play a fair bit. Here are the high points:

• During the setup phase, the group can collaboratively create both Slayers, or divide into two roughly equal-size groups to create one Slayer each.
• The two Slayers share a single pool of tokens; if either one takes a Light Action, the token goes into the same pool, and both spend from the same pool to take Heavy Actions.
• Both Slayer can take actions in each action-reaction cycle, but they may only take one Heavy or Light Action between them. The other can take a Routine Action to help, hinder or react to the main action. I recommend using some sort of tangible marker – an action figure works well! – and passing it back and forth after each cycle to keep track of whose turn it is to take a Heavy or Light Action.
• Both Slayers share in the benefits of each Heavy Action and the consequences of each Light Action.
• Rotating the Slayer role becomes a two-step process. First, whoever's been playing a Slayer longest hands their Slayer playsheet to the other Slayer player. Second, the other Slayer player (i.e., the one who's been playing a Slayer for the shorter amount of time) hands their Slayer playsheet to the next Opposing Forces player in the scene order. Thus, each player gets to play as both Slayers, one after the other.
• If one of the Slayers is suborned or turns coat, it's generally best to handle that by removing their playsheet from the game and treating them as an additional major threat option for an appropriate Opposing Force thereafter. If it makes sense story-wise, you can instead take a moment to re-rewrite them as THE RIVAL and swap them for one of the existing Opposng Forces.
• Slayer-on-Slayer PVP is beyond the scope of these rules. If your game goes there, you're on your own!

The game's narrative flow strongly depends on having at least as many Opposing Forces as Slayers, so two-Slayer co-op is recommended for groups with at least four players. (This may require doubling up on Opposing Forces – see above.) If you're thinking about running a six-player group with three Slayers, you're a braver soul than I.

Branching Paths

An alternative way to handle multiple Slayers in a single game is to take a page from those video games where multiple protagonists are pursuing the same or related goals, but via different routes that only occasionally intersect. In this variant, the role of the Slayer doesn't rotate, but the narrative spotlight does.

• Each player should create their own Slayer, rather than collaborating on a single Slayer for the whole group.
• At the end of each scene, rather than handing off your Slayer playsheet, the camera simply shifts to the next player's Slayer to see what they're up to.
• Unlike the co-op variant, each player maintains their own separate supply of tokens. You can only gain and spend tokens during scenes where the spotlight is on your Slayer.
• If your Slayer happens to show up during a different Slayer's spotlight scene, they're treated as a non-Slayer character. Any Opposing Force (including you) can incorporate them into their reactions just like any other non-Slayer character.
• You retain veto power if an Opposing Force other than you wants something horrible to happen to your Slayer during a scene where they're a non-Slayer character.

Note that your Slayer will never directly face your own Opposing Force, since you can't play both roles at once. Put some thought into why this should be the case story-wise.

I don't recommend this variant for groups larger than three. Partly this is because there are only three Slayer archetypes in the core game, but mostly it's because every additional narrative branch multiplies the amount of information you need to keep track of. It's by no means unmanageable, but if you decide to pull a Game of Thrones at your table, don't say I didn't warn you!

Downtime Scenes

Gone to Hell's basic format is a headlong rush into endless peril where something is trying to kill you in every scene. If you'd prefer to take a breather now and then, you can institute downtime scenes, which work like this:

• After each player has been the Slayer once, the next scene is a downtime scene. This might represent returning to a safe location after completing an objective, or just finding a temporary refuge in the midst of danger.
• A downtime scene doesn't count as any particular player's turn – it's outside the regular scene rotation. You can continue with whoever was playing the Slayer most recently, or pass the Slayer role from player to player as needed.
• There are no threats or scene-ending triggers in a downtime scene, and the Slayer can't spend or earn tokens. The whole scene is played out in freeform question-and-answer mode, and ends by mutual agreement.
• At the end of the scene, recover any crossed-off actions on the Slayer playsheet, and optionally erase any custom actions that are no longer needed, freeing up that action slot.
• Reset the Slayer's token pool to one, and start the next scene!

A downtime scene is a great opportunity to take stock of the Slayer's next objective, interact with NPCs without something horrible breathing down your neck, and brainstorm ideas for the following scenes. It's also a good time to decide whether anything that happened during the previous set of scenes warrants answering any unanswered questions from the Your Legend section of the Slayer playsheet, or filling in any remaining blanks on the Opposing Force playsheets.

Finally, if you're using the branching paths variant in your game – and if it makes sense to do so – you can use a downtime scene to have different players' Slayers meet up!