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
• Some index card or scrap paper
• No dice

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Setup

In most games you'd start with character creation, and Gone to Hell is no exception. There's a little extra work to do first, though: before you can create the Slayer, you need to figure out what they're going to be up against! 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 that instead.
3. You'll see a fill-in-the-blanks section called Your Hunger, Your Instruments, Your Laws, Your Damage, or Your Demands, depending on your playsheet. Fill in the first line; the others will be filled during play when 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!

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How to Play

Gone to Hell plays out as a structured conversation. There are no dice, nor any other randomisers. If you're holding the Slayer playsheet, you're the Slayer. Your Opposing Force fades into the background for the duration; they're still a factor in the story, but they're not currently driving the plot. (No playing two roles at once!) Conversely, if you're not holding the Slayer playsheet, you and the other Opposing Forces (if any) act as co-GMs to challenge and react to the Slayer.

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 unreasonable situation the Slayer finds before them. They need not drop the Slayer directly into a fight, but should include some real, present danger.
2. The Slayer will investigate, 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 should take an action (see below); if not, refer to your Opposing Force playsheets 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 in the appropriate fashion.
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. Also move any unspent tokens in front of the new Slayer, and add one more from the pile.
8. Start the next scene!
9. Repeat steps 1–8 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 – 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!

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For Everybody

Before I get into the specifics of each role, there are a few things that everybody – whether they're currently the Slayer or an Opposing Force – should keep in mind.

Pre-Game Discussion

You've probably noticed that Gone to Hell's setup instructions are twice as long as the actual rules of play. There's a reason for that!

By default, the game doesn't assume you're using a pre-written scenario. Whatever the Slayer is up against, it's decided by putting together all the Opposing Force playsheets and seeing how they line up. You can discuss this beforehand if you want to, but it's been my experience that writing up the Opposing Forces independently and bashing them together after the fact is usually more fun!

When you're figuring out how the Opposing Forces fit together, a few useful questions to ask can include:

• What sort of world does it make sense for these Opposing Forces to inhabit? Contemporary, historical, fantasy, or sci-fi?
• If anything doesn't seem to fit together, how can you reconcile it with the fewest possible changes? Maybe one of the Opposing Forces is a bunch of time travellers or from another dimension – Gone to Hell's source material does it all the time!
• Which Opposing Forces are enemies? Which are nominally allied? Which are secretly manipulating or planning to betray one another?
• What setting or location would best allow all of the Opposing Forces to collide at once?
• Whose fault is this really?

The answers to these questions will leave you in a good position to define your group's Slayer. The Your Legend section of the Slayer playsheet will cover the most obvious questions that need to be answered to tie them into the whole mess, but don't hesitate to add your own if an interesting angle suggests itself.

The Principle of Narrative Truth

Gone to Hell doesn't put any walls between what you describe and what happens in the story. There are no dice rolls mediating between intention and action – if you say it happened, it happened! In formal game-design jargon, this is sometimes called the Principle of Narrative Truth.

This opens up a lot of space for over-the-top video game heroics. You don't need to hope for a good dice roll or hedge your bets against the possibility of failure; if you think it would be awesome for something to happen, just go for it! Whatever you describe happens exactly as you've described it.

With great power comes great responsibility, though. This shows up in two main ways.

First, there's the problem of blocking: that is, coming up with a reversal or well-actually to negate something another player just did. This is generally a bad idea – you should 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 the rules to yank the plot back on track will just piss people off.

Second, there's the more basic question of whether what you have in mind is reasonable. Not in terms of realism – in most games, the Slayer will often do objectively unreasonable things! – but in terms of the internal logic of the story. Which leads us to…

The Bullshit Rule

This is the flip side of the Principle of Narrative Truth. Every action and event in the narrative has a context. If the rules say you can do something, you still have to figure out how that makes sense story-wise. From the Slayer's perspective, that could mean using Routine Actions to set up a Heavy Action's knockdown. For the Opposing Forces, that means using your Routine Reactions to establish what's at stake before bringing down the hammer. Failure to do so may invoke the Bullshit Rule.

Basically, any player, Slayer and Opposing Force alike, has the right to call bullshit if somebody just did something that doesn't make sense. This might mean you contradicted a previously established fact, introduced an obvious plot hole, or failed to adequately justify an action or reaction in the narrative. There's no penalty for getting called out – you can just back up and try again. If necessary, you can also briefly discuss exactly what the problem was.

In any case, the Bullshit Rule isn't something you use tactically. Usually it only takes a small adjustment to bring things back in line. If you call bullshit, be prepared to offer constructive suggestions!

Content Ratings

Given the source material's preoccuption with sex and violence, it's easy for Gone to Hell to go places people aren't comfortable with. Both pre-game discussion and having some mechanism for pumping the brakes if a boundary unexpectedly gets crossed in play have their place.

There are any number of tools you can use 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. As a starting point, however, you can fire up your favourite search engine and look up The X Card and Lines and Veils.

Taking Notes

The last piece of advice I have to offer is pretty simple: take notes. Which role you're playing is going to be pinballing all over the place, and it's easy to lose track of important stuff. Since Gone to Hell doesn't have a dedicated GM role, the responsibility for writing stuff down falls on everyone equally! In a face to face game, index cards are great for representing important objects and named non-Slayer characters.

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Being the Slayer

The Slayer is the star of the story. If you didn't skip the intro, you'll know that the prototype of this game were called Doomguy, and first-person shooter protagonists still lie at the centre of the rules' comfort zone. They're adaptable, though. If the Doomguy isn't your speed, characters ranging from Samus Aran to Bayonetta to Jill Valentine can also make great inspirations for your group's Slayer; I even have it on good authority that this game has successfully been used to run Kirby's Adventure!

The most important thing to understand about being the Slayer is that you're the one in the driver's seat. If you've played tabletop RPGs in the past, you may be accustomed to a style of play where the GM is the proactive one, and the players just react. Banish this from your mind. Gone to Hell operates on video game logic; if you're the Slayer, you're the player, and like the player in a video game, you are the one in control.

Looking at the actions on your Slayer playsheet, you'll see that control. None of your actions are purely reactive: they're about taking control of the world, or actively ceding that control to the Opposing Forces. The Slayer doesn't fail unless you choose for them to fail, and the Opposing Forces can't even really attack you without your permission. The Opposing Forces do have a limited ability to spring stuff on you if you're idling, but that's mostly a concession to the fact that you're playing with other human beings, not a computer with infinite patience!

The upshot is that most of the time, you'll be describing the immediate outcomes of your own actions. The Opposing Forces can expand on your narration to describe how the world reacts to those outcomes, but they don't get to decide, in the moment, whether you succeed or fail.

So: let's look at how that control plays out in a few specific situations.

Beating the Bad Guys

As a video game protagonist, the Slayer's most basic act is to beat up the baddies. Both your first Routine Action and your first Heavy Action focus on this, at different scales. Overcoming a threat doesn't necessarily mean destroying it; depending on which Slayer playsheet you're using, it might not even mean hurting it at all! The basic idea is always the same, though: a threat stops being a threat, at least for the time being.

Gone to Hell doesn't expect you to spend a lot of time on any given threat. The Slayer can take out any number of minor baddies in a single action without spending any resources at all, and if you put down a token, you can take out just about anything. These are termed lesser and greater threats by the rules, respectively.

The distinction between the two types of threats is mostly mechanical: if the Opposing Forces used a Heavy Reaction to put it into play, it's a greater threat, otherwise it's a lesser threat. The only exception is threats that were already present at the start of a scene, which may be greater threats at the Opposing Forces' option. If you're not sure whether you're going to need a token to take out a given threat, just ask!

Going Places and Breaking Things

Defeating monsters won't necessarily help the Slayer achieve their goals. Usually, you'll be fighting them simply because they're in the way. Actually getting where you need to be is covered by your second Routine and Heavy Actions; the second Routine Action defines the Slayer's basic toolset for interacting with the environment, while the second Heavy Action lets you spend a token to just be there.

Likewise, the third Routine and Heavy Actions are about what you do once you get there. The Routine Action is your basic problem-solving approach, while the Heavy Action just lets you declare a problem solved. The term problem should be construed broadly; basically, anything you can't beat up qualifies!

Some care needs to be exercised with these actions, particularly the Heavy versions: just because the rules say you can go somewhere or do something doesn't free you from the need to describe how you do it. It's okay if you resort to video game logic, but you still have to figure out what it looks like story-wise. If you'd rather have the Opposing Forces figure it out for you, skip ahead a couple of sections, to Leading Questions.

Powering Up

The fourth Routine and Heavy Actions on the Slayer playsheet are about collecting powerups. Depending on how familiar you are with Gone to Hell's source material, how these actions work may be totally obvious or totally opaque. There's a whole chapter later in this document, Powering Up, dedicated to laying out one possible way to handle it.

Note that, like all Slayer actions, you don't need to wait for the Opposing Forces to give you permission to use this one. You can just invent a power-up that suits your idiom and narrate it into the scene, as long as it's at least vaguely plausible for something like that to be present.

Leading Questions

Remember when I said that, as the Slayer, you have to figure things out yourself? The final Routine and Heavy Actions on the Slayer playsheet are the way around that. Rather than describing the outcome of an action, you can use one of these questions to throw the ball into the Opposing Forces' court, asking them to figure it out for you. This is a way for the Slayer to cede narrative control without giving it up entirely.

As a Routine Action, you're asking for a direction. This is the Slayer saying I don't know where to go next – tell me where the next interesting or useful thing is. The way the question is phrased reflects what your particular Slayer archetype finds interesting or useful. As a Heavy Action, you're asking how you can win. It's a prompt for the Opposing Forces to hand you a golden opportunity to do something awesome – and you're paying for the privilege, so they'd better give up the goods!

In either case, you're flipping the script and inviting the Opposing Forces to be proactive for a little while. 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.

Giving Up Control

If your leading questions are about sharing control with the Opposing Forces, Light Actions are about putting the ball completely in their court. Each Light Action is an open invitation for the Opposing Forces to have something terrible happen to you – all you get to choose is the kind of trouble you're in!

You're not just throwing the floodgates wide open, though. Like any other action, it's still up to you to describe what the Slayer does and what the immediate consequences of that are. If you want to get your butt kicked, you have to actually narrate getting your butt kicked! The Opposing Forces will pick up that outcome and run with it. If you really want to give them free reign, ask the final leading question that appears as your fifth Light Action. Nothing good will come of it.

Winning and Losing

Victory and loss are defined by the scene-ending triggers on the Opposing Force playsheets. Unless somebody's using an unusual or homebrewed playsheet, these triggers are pretty straightforward: if you take three Heavy Actions before taking three Light Actions, you win. Conversely, if you take three Light Actions before taking three Heavy Actions, you lose!

Owing to the way the game's token economy works, losing is always a choice. You can theoretically break even on every 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.

That you never have to lose doesn't mean you won't, though. You might allow the Slayer to get their ass kicked because it's dramatically appropriate; because the Opposing Forces are on a roll and you want to see where they're going with it; because you've been backed into a narrative corner and can't pull a victory out of your ass without tripping over the Bullshit Rule; or just because you want to bank a few extra tokens for the sake of flexibility in future scenes.

One slightly inobvious implication of the scene-ending rules is that you can actually claim victory by powering up or asking a leading question as your third Heavy Action of the scene. There's no rule against this. Understand, however, that you're putting the Opposing Forces on the spot by doing so – now they've got to figure out how what you just did could plausibly result in the Slayer's immediate victory! It's good form to have a suggestion in mind, just in case you stump them.

If you'd prefer a grittier game, see the optional rules for alternative scene pacing for some suggestions on how to adjust this.

Having Boss Fights

It's not super obvious how to have a boss fight in Gone to Hell, since any threat can be disposed of in a single action. As always, the answer is that as the Slayer, you get to choose what constitutes a boss fight. 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.

If you want a multi-stage boss fight, this is one of those situations where you might want to take a loss on purpose: after disposing of a boss-worthy threat as described above, use your third Light Action to ask a leading question and prompt for the next phase. Note that, since this ends the scene, it's the next player in the scene order who will be stuck fighting the boss's true form!

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Opposing the Slayer

As an Opposing Force, your roll will mainly be a reactive one: the Slayer does stuff, and you describe not whether they succeed (the Slayer's player decides that), but how the world responds. Some games will encourage you to portray a living world that exists independently of the player character, but Gone to Hell isn't that kind of game: like a video game world, it exists purely as a reaction to the Slayer. If the Slayer doesn't hit those event triggers, nothing happens!

That said, there's one situation where you get to be a little more proactive. Namely…

Setting the Scene

Every scene begins with an opening narration by the Opposing Forces. Usually one Opposing Force will take the lead here – whoever was most recently the Slayer is a good default if nothing else suggests itself – but it's explictly a collaborative affair. Take a moment to discuss the situation the Slayer finds themselves in. You can even do it in character and have a little Evil Council of Evil sidebar, if you want to; just don't drag it on too long, or else the Slayer might get bored!

The essential elements of opening a scene are as follows:

• Engage the senses. Action-oriented video games are all about flash and spectacle, and you capture that at the table by focusing on sights, sounds, and even smells.
• Move the plot forward. If the Slayer prevailed in the previous scene, the staging of the next scene should demonstrate progress toward the Slayer's goals. If the Slayer lost, the advancement of the Opposing Forces' schemes takes center stage.
• Dangle an obvious objective or point of interest. The Slayer has the option to investigate, but they should never have to play Twenty Questions to figure out what they should be asking about.
• Establish the threat. If there's nothing standing between the Slayer and their objective, it's obviously a trap – and the Slayer knows this, so there's rarely any point in playing coy. This is also the only time you get to introduce a greater threat without the Slayer explicitly prompting for one, so you might as well exploit it!
• Set the dominoes tumbling. Events should already be in motion when the Slayer arrives on the scene, and all that's necessary for things to turn out badly is for them to do nothing.

From here, your role shifts to a reactive one: the Slayer acts, and you respond. Let's take a look at what those responses look like.

Introducing Threats

Your most basic reaction is to add more threats to the mix. In game terms, a "threat" is anything the Slayer can fight and at least theoretically kill or destroy. Things the slayer can't kill are obstacles instead (see below).

Since you can introduce threats as a Routine Rreaction, in principle you can just bury the Slayer under a pile of infinite monsters. In practice, that doesn't work out for two reasons: first, because the Slayer can get rid of any number of lesser threats as a Routine Action, and second, because repeating yourself is boring.

For lesser threats, the appropriate time to introduce them usually boils down to the of course factor. Of course the room is full of zombies. Of course a truckload of cyborg soldiers would arrive at that exact moment. Of course these guys are here to ruin your day. Obviously you're not trying to annoy the other players, but from an in-character perspective, lesser threats are often very annoying!

Greater threats, meanwhile, happen because the Slayer asked for it – literally! Introducing a new greater threat is a great response to nearly any Light Action, but it's particularly well suited the second and third Light Actions on each Slayer playsheet. These ones are your miniboss material – though as discussed above, it's up to the Slayer whether you're going to have a boss fight.

Getting in the Way

Your second reactions, both Heavy and Routine, are about putting obstacles in the Slayer's path. As a Routine Reaction, these are mostly passive obstacles: they're there, but the Slayer can choose to engage or not. As a Heavy Reaction, they're more obtrusive – something the Slayer has to deal with right now, whether they want to or not. You can take whatever steps you need to enforce that, up to and including literally dropping the Slayer in a hole.

Obstacles will usually require more consideration than threats. Any Slayer can blow up bad guys, but what sorts of more general obstacles they're equipped to deal with is going to depend a lot on their weapons and idioms. If you want to give the Slayer a chance to throw off, hit them with an obstacle they've got just the thing for. On the flip side, an obstacle with no obvious solution in the Slayer's toolkit can help to encourage lateral thinking. Just be ready to offer hints if you go with the second one!

Whatever form they take, an obstacle actually needs to obstruct the Slayer's goals. If it's not something the Slayer needs to deal with eventually, it's just flavour text. Flavour text has its place, but it's not what this reaction is for. This does mean that to pose effective obstacles, it's necessary for the Slayer to have clear goals, and for the Opposing Forces to know what those goals are. Don't be afraid to call a time-out and ask the Slayer what they're trying to accomplish, if it's not obvious.

Lore and Worldbuilding

Your third Routine and Heavy Reactions don't put anything directly in the Slayer's path. Rather, they're your tools for shaping the world around the Slayer. As a Routine Reaction, every Opposing Force has a specific prompt – always starting with the word describe – that fleshes out the world in a way that reflects your themes. As a Heavy Reaction, the reveal option makes it personal, directly showcasing your role in the world in a way that causes problems for the Slayer.

In both of its incarnations, this reaction's role is to establish facts. That makes it uniquely vulnerable to the Bullshit Rule, if there's anything important you're forgetting. Ironically, it's also your best tool for avoiding the Bullshit Rule: if you set up the badness with this reaction before bringing it home, nobody can say you didn't warn them!

If there are any unfilled slots under Your [Whatever] on your Opposing Force playsheet, the Heavy version of this reaction is a great time to fill one in.

Flavour Text

Just like the previous set of reactions is about facts, your fourth Routine and Heavy Reactions are about flavour. The Routine version puts the finishing touches on somebody else's narration, whether that's the Slayer or another Opposing Force. It's how you stay involved while letting another player take the lead; in conjunction with your mood and aesthetic, it's how you foreshadow your involvement even when your influence isn't directly present.

The Heavy version is also about setting the mood, but in the exact opposite way: you completely hijack the story and monologue for a bit. You won't necessarily have many chances to use it, since it's sharing a limited resource with all the other Heavy Reactions, so when the opportunity does come your way, I recommend hamming it up for all it's worth. Don't worry about going over the top – video games are not known for subtle acting.

Depending in the sort of Opposing Force you're playing, the Heavy version may be difficult to justify as in-character speech. Some Opposing Forces aren't in the habit of speaking at all, much less delivering monologues. That doesn't mean this reaction is off the table for you. If your group is okay with it, you can step into the role of a nameless narrator – or if nothing else works, resort to a mysterious voice over an intercom. It's a popular trope in Gone to Hell's source material for a reason!

Leading Questions

Unlike the Slayer, as an Opposing Force, asking a leading question is always Routine. This is because Opposing Forces' leading questions don't change who's directing the narrative: when you ask the Slayer a question, you're prompting for more of whatever they're already doing. Each question is an invitation for the Slayer to expand on whatever they just did, and ideally provide some insight into the why of the action as well as the what.

This might result in further action on the Slayer’s part, in-character banter with one of your mouthpiece characters, or some combination of the two – it’s really up to the Slayer how they want to handle it.

If the consequences and motivations of whatever the Slayer just did are obvious to everyone, there’s no need to use this reaction, because there's nothing to expand on. Ask the question if you, personally, think there's something worth exploring further there.

Like the flavour text reactions, Opposing Forces' leading questions can be posed out of character if necessary.

Hurting the Slayer

You've probably noticed that there's something pretty important missing in all the previous discussion: attacking the Slayer. You can introduce threats and put them in the Slayer's path, but how do you use them to directly hurt the Slayer?

The short answer is that you don't – at least, not directly. You can hurt the Slayer's objectives easily enough, but you can't lay a finger on the Slayer themselves unless they allow it by taking an appropriate Light Action. Usually this will be the fourth Light Action on each Slayer playsheet, though sometimes others may play the role as well.

When that happens, there's no specific reaction for adding insult to injury. If the Slayer's mistake attracted hostile attention, that's introducing threats. If it forced them into a bad position, that's obstructing their path. If you just want to make the description of the injury extra gruesome, that's interjecting details. Let the way the Slayer describes the triggering Light Action guide your response

Ending the Scene

When the Slayer takes a third Heavy or Light Action, it's time to step back into the leading role and wrap things up. Just like starting a scene, ending it is a collaboration between all the Opposing Forces. As before, one Opposing Force will generally take the lead, but this time flip it around: just as whoever was most recently the Slayer usually leads when opening the scene, whoever's going to be the Slayer next should usually lead when closing it. This is the perfect opportunity to sprinkle in some hints of what you'd like to deal with during your turn in the driver's seat.

How the scene actually ends is usually going to be obvious from context. If the Slayer triggered the end of the scene by taking three Heavy Actions, the baddies get their butts kicked, while a third Light Action means the Slayer gets the short end of the stick. In the latter case, the gloves come off a little with respect to directly harming the Slayer (they did just take a Light Action, after all!), but you still can't maim or kill them unless that wouldn't be a career-ending injury for them – they need to be capable of acting in the next scene.

Unless you've explicitly cleared it with the group during your pre-game discussion, you should avoid screwing the Slayer over by turning three Heavy Actions into a victory that just makes everything worse. In some games that'll be totally appropriate, but it's not the sort of thing you randomly spring on people. Alternatively, if you'd like the possibility of sour victories to exist, but you'd prefer not to be the one to decide, you can check out the optional rules for Diceful Scene Resolution.

One slightly subtle consequence of these rules is that 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.

Things To Avoid

I'm going to close out this chapter with a few don'ts for Opposing Forces:

• If two Opposing Forces come into conflict during a scene, always focus on how it affects the Slayer. Don't let it turn into a non-interactive cutscene!
• 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!
• Don't permanently kill off a named non-Slayer character somebody else introduced without asking first. It's bad form.
• Don't forget: what goes around comes around. In Gone to Hell, that's completely literal, since whatever you put on the Slayer as an Opposing Force is something you're going to have to deal with yourself when it's your turn to be the Slayer. Be the evil you want to see in the world.

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For Routine Actions

Whenever you run into something that lines up with the Slayer's idiom, you can add a new Routine Action to the Slayer playsheet. The next chapter discusses the anatomy of Routine Actions in much greater detail; as a brief introduction, the standard Routine Actions on every Slayer playsheet break down like so:

• How the Slayer deals with lesser threats
• How the Slayer engages with their environment in general
• How the Slayer finds a new angle on a problem
• How the Slayer recovers and obtains minor powerups
• How the Slayer asks for a hint

New Routine Actions give the Slayer additional ways of handling one or more of the above. They don't have to line up one-to-one with existing actions, but thinking of them that way can make it easier to come up with new ones on the fly.

Dealing With Lesser Threats

Every Slayer has the option to destroy any lesser threats within reach as a Routine Action, though some playsheets provide other options – for example, the Hunter can also evade. New actions of this type either create additional options, or modify the conditions under which those options can be used. Some examples might include:

• Destroy a lesser threat within line of sight using my sniper rifle
• Send lesser threats within reach into panicked flight with my battle cry
• Distract any lesser threats that can see me using my holographic decoy
• Take out a lesser threat without giving away my position by turning invisible
• Purify any lesser threats within reach without harming their human hosts using my exorcism technique

Dealing with lesser threats can also cross the line into environmental manipulation or finding a new angle by doing something useful with a threat rather than evading or destroying it. This could look like any of the following:

• Turn lesser threats within reach into ice statues using my freeze ray
• Convert a lesser threat into a loyal minion using my magic brand
• Use a lesser threat as a hypersonic projectile with my magnetic accelerator
• Trade places with a lesser threat using my teleportaton rune
• Have my robot buddy take out lesser threats within its reach

These actions take the form [do something to] lesser threat(s) [under some condition] by/using/with [method].

Engaging With the Environment

The most straightforward way of giving the Slayer new ways to engage with the environment is to grant a new mode of movement. Examples include:

• Perform death-defying aerial stunts with my jetpack
• Pass through walls and other thin barriers with my phase desynchroniser
• Reach distant vantage points and pull unsecured objects or creatures toward me with my grapple beam
• Run on water and leap impossible distances with my lightfoot technique
• Travel hidden paths by shifting into the Shadow Realm

Another, slightly less obvious option is to change how the Slayer engages with the environment by not engaging with certain features of it. In their most basic form, these actions let the Slayer claim immunity to a specific danger or environmental condition, like:

• fire
• extreme cold
• deadly poison
• underwater
• something scenario specific; e.g., life-draining shadow energy

These actions will usually represent a protective suit, chemical treatment, fortifying magical glyph, body-hardening meditative practice, or something to that effect. Technically the Slayer needs to burn a Routine Action to activate this protection when it's needed, though in practice the Opposing Forces may give them a free pass and assume it's always active. Conversely, the Opposing Forces may decide as part of a Heavy Reaction that it's temporarily worn off or been overloaded!

These actions take the form [do something unusual] by/using/with [method].

Finding a New Angle

There are a couple of ways to approach finding a new angle. The first and most basic gives the Slayer a new toy to play with that grants a specific set of problem-solving tools – e.g., a gun, gadget, gauntlet, or martial arts technique that works by:

• telekinetically manipulating unsecured objects
• remotely controlling non-hostile technology
• transforming your limbs into a variety of industrial tools
• projecting a pair of linked portals onto any two surfaces
• sculpting the nearby terrain

Some of these options may cross the line into engaging with the environment as well as finding a new angle, depending on how you approach them. That's okay – like I said earlier, thinking of each new action as a 1:1 counterpart with a standard action on the Slayer playsheet is just a convenient shorthand. A given action doesn't have to be restricted that way if it doesn't make sense for it to be.

The second and more comprehensive option is what you might call an alt mode: the Slayer transforms into or assumes the role of something that gives them a new set of capabilities to play with. Variations on this theme include:

• transforming into a bird, wolf, or other animal
• deploying a remote-controlled drone
• possessing or mind-controlling a lesser threat or non-Slayer character
• shrinking to one-tenth your usual size
• curling up into a ball and rolling away

These effects are mostly narrative, but the Opposing Forces might determine that certain other actions work differently until the Slayer changes back. If the Slayer spends enough time fooling around in an alt mode to invoke the stalling for time rule, the Opposing Forces can knock them out of it as a Routine Reaction.

These actions take the form Find a new angle on a problem by/using [method].

Powering Up

The standard Routine Action for powering up already reflects the Slayer's idiom(s), so adding a second one will be unusual. Normally it will only make sense to do so if the Slayer suddenly acquires a new way to power up mid session. (Maybe they get turned into a vampire?) The option does exist if such a scenario ever comes up, though!

These actions take the form Catch a reprieve by/using [method].

Asking For a Hint

New actions of this type supplement the final Routine Action on the Slayer playsheet by granting an additional question you can ask the Opposing Forces and be guaranteed to get a straight answer. This might represent:

• a technological scanner
• a trick of extrasensory perception
• a radio link to a helpful advisor
• a magic divining crystal
• a noisy fairy companion

Taking this option multiple times will usually expand the capabilities of the existing information-gathering method rather than adding new methods. Most extra questions will be something along the following lines:

• what am I missing here?
• what's about to happen here?
• what here is the biggest threat to me?
• what's interesting about [the thing that I'm looking at]?
• where should I go next?

These actions take the form Use [method] to ask the Opposing Forces [question].

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For Heavy Actions

Heavy Actions follow a similar pattern to Routine Actions, so all of the previous discussion applies here too. Your new Heavy Action would just have bigger effects: removing greater threats rather than lesser ones, wiping away problems rather than finding new angles, and so forth.

However, the standard Heavy Actions on most Slayer playsheets are already very flexible, so that approach will often feel unsatisfying. Another approach is to create new Heavy Actions that break the rules in some way, letting the Slayer do things that don't obviously fall within the scope of any existing Heavy Action. You can think of these as Gone to Hell's equivalent of those rule-breaking special moves in a video game that require you to charge up a meter or expend some limited resource.

A few examples:

Environmental Control

Spend a token to create a particular environmental condition spanning the entire scene. This action lets the Slayer exercise a moment of Opposing Force-like control over the staging of the scene. Possible effects include:

• calling for sustained aerial bombardment from off-screen allies
• revealing that you've rigged the whole area with deadly traps
• teleporting both yourself and your enemies to an arena of your choosing
• conjuring a violent thunderstorm with the force of your wrath
• setting everything everywhere on fire

Actions of this type just state the thing the Slayer does – there's no special phrasing.

Mass Destruction

Spend a token to take out all the lesser threats in the scene, regardless of whether they're within reach, as well as inflict variable amounts of collateral damage depending on how the action is described. This could represent:

• a smart weapon
• a swarm of hunter-killer drones
• a superspeed or time-stop technique
• a purification or exorcism ritual
• a really big bomb

Actions of this type take the form Destroy/banish/etc. all lesser threats in the scene by/using/with [method].

Perfect Defence

Spend a token to completely no-sell, well, just about anything. This one requires a fair bit of collaboration with the Opposing Forces in order to set up a sufficiently ridiculous attack or peril that simply surviving it is dramatic enough to be worth the token. If you absolutely need the Slayer to be able to shrug off a nuclear bomb to the face, though, this is the action for you. Possible justifications include:

• a limited-use force field
• an impossible parry
• a time-manipulation technique
• the ultimate body-reinforcing martial art
• getting blown to pieces, then rapidly regenerating/reassembling yourself

Actions of this type take the form ignore any single attack by/using/with [method].

Scale Up

Spend a token to change the scale of the conflict for the rest of the scene. The effects of this action are mainly descriptive, changing what counts as an obstacle or a threat from the Slayer's perspective: things that formerly constituted greater threats might be treated as lesser threats, and things that were simply out of the Slayer's league may now be approachable as greater threats. It may also modify how other actions work, at the Opposing Forces' discretion. This might involve:

• bodily transforming (e.g., into a dragon, a demon, some sort of werewolf)
• boarding a vehicle (e.g., a tank, a giant robot, a particularly scary horse)
• gaining a small army (e.g, summoning duplicates, deploying drones, hacking or mind-controlling numerous lesser threats)
• entering an altered state where only certain entities are capable of threatening you (magical girl transformation sequence optional)
• growing very large (self-explanatory)

If the Slayer uses this effect as a scene-ending Heavy Action, they receive the benefits of increased scale for the next scene instead. Actions of this type take the form change the scale of the conflict by/using/with [method].

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For Everybody

Every playsheet starts with a high-level concept. I start by coming up with at least three different examples of that concept from popular media and finding the common thread; ideally, these examples should be from first-person shooters, spectacle fighters, or – to a somewhat lesser extent – survival-horror games and Metroidvanias, since that's what will mesh best with the game's existing material, but your source material could be just about anything.

You'll want your go-to examples to be as different as possible from one another while still sticking to your central theme, or else you're going to have a hard time filling out some of the following sections, particularly the choose one or more bits. Once you've got them firmly in your mind, the next steps depend on what kind of playsheet you're creating – an Opposing Force, or a Slayer.

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For Opposing Forces

Every Opposing Force playsheet begins with a trio of pick-lists: Your Nature, Your Aesthetic, and Your Mood. Aim for around five entries on each list.

Your Nature is the most straightforward of the three: a basic statement of what the Opposing Force's deal is. This is the one where players are least likely to exercise the or more clause, so it's okay if they're mostly mutually exclusive, but be on the lookout for interesting pairings. Each entry should be around 3–4 words long; occasional outliers are okay, but if they're consistently longer, you're probably overspecifying.

Unless the Opposing Force is a singular being like the Rival, Your Aesthetic isn't just a fashion statement: it also establishes what sorts of descriptive cues you can use to signify that a given place or situation is under that Opposing Force's influence. Mutually exclusive options are less okay here – try to make sure that every possible pairing is a distinctly interesting option in its own right.

Finally, Your Mood sets the tone when this Opposing Force's player is in the narrative driver's seat. It doesn't necessarily reflect the attitude of any particular agent of the Opposing Force, though it totally can if it's the sort of Opposing Force the Slayer can talk to. The fatal temptation here is to break out a thesaurus and just find five different ways of saying the same thing, so mix it up!

Your Thing

Every Opposing Force has its own unique gimmick, from the Horde's hungers, to the System's mechanisms of control, to the Rival's bewildering array of psychological hangups. These are filled in during play, so you don't need to come up with anything right now, but you should put some thought into exactly how what's being asked for reflects the Opposing Force's core theme.

The secret trick is that each Opposing Force's Thing is the expression of its fifth Agenda: the Cipher has laws by which it may judge, the System has instruments through which to exert its control, and so forth. You may find it works better for you to skip ahead and figure out the Opposing Force's Agendas now, then come back and figure out its Thing afterward.

Your Agendas

An Opposing Force's Agendas are a set of basic storytelling prompts to help its player figure out how it should react to the curveballs the Slayer throws at it. They break down like so:

• The first two Agendas are the Opposing Force's hammer and nail: what broad goal does it chase after in the absence of any more specific objective, and how does it instinctively go about doing that? The Horde inflicts pain to enforce hierarchy. The System wields influence to serve it masters' interests. The World imposes its demands to make that which is not itself into itself. This document isn't terribly consistent about which one comes first and which one comes second – it depends on which order flows better!
• The third Agenda is always the Opposing Force's fatal flaw. How does it constantly screw itself over? Above anything else, this is the weakness that lets the Slayer win. Write down the phrase self-sabotage through, followed by a simple attitude or behavioural tendency.
• The fourth Agenda is the most purely player-facing of the lot. The others tell you what the Opposing Force does, but this one tells you how to present those actions to your audience. The Cipher knows more than you. The Rival is the Slayer's twisted mirror. The System desperately wants to be right.
• The fifth and final Agenda is usually the hardest to come up with: a one-word statement (always a verb) of the Opposing Force's most fundamental act. If you're playing this Opposing Force and you have one second to decide what to do, it's this. As noted previously, this Agenda is key that unlocks the Opposing Force's Thing, so you can tackle the two in whatever order works best for you.

Heavy Reactions

Heavy Reactions are how the Opposing Force brings the pain. There are exactly five, as follows:

• The first Heavy Reaction is always introducing a new greater threat – that is, the sort of thing the Slayer needs to pay a token to get rid of. What exactly constitutes a greater threat can vary a lot, but it should be something that can plausibly be fought and killed, or at least neutralised; provide at least three brief examples. It's the direct counterpart to the Slayer's first Heavy Action option, though the third will sometimes be applicable as well.
• The second Heavy Reaction is the Opposing Force's default way of introducing a big hairy problem or obstacle that needs to be dealt with right now. Like the previous reaction, the Slayer will often need to spend a token to deal with it. The Slayer's second and third Heavy Actions deal with this sort of thing.
• The third Heavy Reaction reveals far-reaching badness in keeping with the Opposing Force's nature. Unlike the previous two reactions, there isn't necessarily any immediate threat to the Slayer, but the information that's revealed may totally recontextualise their goals. This one always starts with the word reveal.
• The fourth Heavy Reaction is the one where the Slayer has to listen to you monologue. Everybody loves a good villain monologue – what would this Opposing Force rant about?
• The final Heavy Reaction is a boilerplate scene-ending trigger; just copy and paste it from one of the existing Opposing Force playsheets.

Routine Reactions

Routine Reactions are the workhorses of the playsheet. They're troublesome, but not terribly harsh; in response to any Slayer action includes Heavy Actions, and you don't want a Routine Reaction on your Opposing Force playsheet that can completely reverse a Heavy Action's victory!

• The first Routine Reaction introduces new lesser threats – the sort of thing that the Slayer is going to have to burn an action to deal with, but not necessarily a token as well. Like greater threats, these should be something the Slayer can plausibly neutralise or kill; provide three examples.
• The second Routine Reaction is how the Opposing Force generically makes the Slayer's life more difficult. This is the passive or reactive counterpart to a threat's active inconvenience. Always begins with the phrase obstruct the Slayer's path with (or occasionally by).
• The third Routine Reaction sets up the basic narrative responsibility of this Opposing Force's player: to describe some specific facet or dimension of the ongoing apocalypse. Always begins with the word describe.
• The fourth and fifth Routine Reactions are the same for every Opposing Force – the only thing that differs is the list of example questions. If you've gotten this far, you probably have a pretty good idea what sorts of questions the Opposing Force would ask. Leading questions don't have to be asked in character, so you should still come up with a list of examples even for Opposing Forces that have no obvious means of questioning the Slayer.

Light Reactions

Light Reactions have the least formal structure, which gives you an opportunity to inject some extra personality. The first four Light Reactions typically consist of some combination of the following options, in no particular order. No Opposing Force playsheet will have all of them, and some may have multiple versions of the same one.

• Acknowledge the Slayer's awesomeness in a backhanded or passive-aggressive way
• Impose a yes, but: the Slayer gets what they want, but this other bad or weird thing happens as well
• Toss in a yes, and: the Slayer gets what they want, plus an extra benefit that's of dubious utility or carries some significant downside
• Foreshadow the long-term consequences of the Slayer's actions
• Provide a narrative prompt for some aspect of the Slayer's personality or history this Opposing Force is interested in exploring
• Let the Slayer choose what sort of badness they'll face next
• Throw a tantrum and sulk

The final Light Reaction is another boilerplate scene-ending trigger – time to copy and paste!

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For Slayers

Like Opposing Forces, every Slayer's playsheet begins with a series of pick-lists: Your Look, Your Attitude, Your Weapons and Your Idiom. Each one should have around five options. That might not seem like a lot, but remember that the group can write their own entries when the playsheet is actually used; your goal isn't to exhaust every possibility, but to provide a solid direction for the group's brainstorming.

Your Look is probably the easiest – just steal bits of costumery from the examples you came up with in the first step. These can be both self-contained looks and individual touches of colour. Try to make sure that at least most of the options are amenable to being paired up, and watch for fun or unexpected combinations.

Your Attitude is the one pick-list where you shouldn't worry about having lots of seemingly incompatible entries. Slayers contain multitudes; picking two wildly incompatible attitudes and figuring out how to reconcile them is part of the fun!

Your Weapons is where the Slayer's basic problem-solving tools are established. You don't need to worry about any give entry providing a complete toolkit, since the group can pick as many as they want when statting out their Slayer, so your priority should be to get a good mix of straightforward options and weird ones.

Finally, Your Idiom describes what the Slayer's powerups and health pickups are going to look like. Try to provide at least a little bit of in-character justification for each entry, but you don't need to be terribly realistic about it – Gone to Hell isn't particularly subtle about the fact that it's a tabletop video game. Most of the entries should be able to justify powering up in some fashion, but it's okay if one or two are pure recovery options.

Your Legend

This section consists of a set of three brief backstory questions. They should be the sorts of questions that can be answered in a single sentence – we're not interested in making any group that uses this playsheet write a book here! The trick is making sure that all of the questions are equally applicable to all, or at least most, of the media examples you have in mind. If you can't come up with any such questions, it's possible your examples aren't as closely related as you thought they were.

Your Agendas

Like Opposing Forces, a Slayer's agendas follow a particular pattern. You can adjust or rearrange if you playsheet concept warrants it, but try to stick mostly to the following set:

• The first Agenda is a thing the Slayer does proactively. It's the primary driver that motivates them to fight against the forces of the apocalypse.
• The second Agenda is a thing the Slayer does reactively. It may complicate or complement the first Agenda, depending on the Slayer, but it's not something they actively pursue – it just seems to keep coming up.
• The third Agenda is how the Slayer fits into their social context and relates to any non-Slayer characters they might encounter.
• The fourth Agenda is the image the Slayer strives to cultivate. This may be different from the image they actually present!
• The final agenda is a pithy overarching mission statement, and also – by convention – a meme reference. The meme reference is optional; the mission statement is not.

Heavy Actions

Heavy Actions are how the Slayer gets shit done. Spending a token is basically an I win button, at least in terms of what's immediately in front of the Slayer, and these actions should reflect that.

• The first Heavy Action removes a greater threat from the equation, where greater threat is defined as a thing the Opposing Forces used a Heavy Reaction to introduce, and describes how the Slayer goes about doing so. Removing a threat often means killing it, but not always; the Hunter, for example, also has the option to evade.
• The second Heavy Action lets the Slayer get where they need to be regardless of what's standing in their way. Its limitations are implicit in its methods; for example, the Avenger wrests open a path through brute force, which might not always be the brightest idea!
• The third Heavy Action is the Slayer's optimal problem-solving strategy. This is the closest the Slayer's player gets to GM-like authority: when they do this thing and pony up a token, it Just Works.
• The fourth Heavy Action is a boilerplate powerup action; just copy and paste it from one of this document's playsheets.
• The final Heavy Action is a leading question that prompts the Opposing Forces to tell the Slayer how they can win. Note that it's completely possible for this question to be the third Heavy Action that triggers the end of the scene, so the nature of the question should be such that its answer could plausibly lead to immediate victory.

Routine Actions

Routine Actions represnt the Slayer's core competencies – things this particular Slayer can always do and expect to succeed, unless they've recently gotten the stuffing beat out of them. They're still things that cost, in terms of giving the Opposing Forces a chance to react, but they don't draw on limited resources.

• The first Routine Action takes lesser threats off the table – that is, threats the Opposing Forces didn't need a Heavy Reaction to introduce. All of the same considerations that apply to the first Heavy Action apply here, too.
• The second Routine Action describes how the Slayer engages with their environment in more general terms. More than any other action, this is the Slayer's core: the Hunter is a master of their trade, the Avenger is brutally strong and fast, and the Thrillseeker is just annoyingly hard to kill! What does this Slayer do?
• The third Routine Action is how the Slayer finds a new angle on a problem. This is usually going to be the setup for another action's knockdown, so the specifics will depend on the Slayer's strengths: the Hunter changes the problem's context, but the Avenger reduces the problem to a nail for their favoured hammer.
• Like its Heavy counterpart, the fourth Routine Action is boilerplate text.
• The final Routine Action is basically a lighter version of the final Heavy Action; rather than asking the Opposing Forces to do the creative heavy lifting, it just asks for a nudge in the right direction. What kind of leading question goes here depends on how to this Slayer goes after their goals: the Avenger is all about about the destination, while the Thrillseeker brings the action to them!

Light Actions

Light Actions generate the fuel for Gone to Hell's engine, and they all do it the same way: by looking the Opposing Forces in the eye and saying please hurt me. The Slayer's choice of action determines what form the hurting takes. You don't need to specify any particular consequences here – that's what the Opposing Forces' Heavy Reactions are for.

• The first Light Action is what failing to remove a threat looks like. It's usually going to be some variation of your attack didn't work, suitably flavoured.
• The second Light Action is how the Slayer gets off track. It can be a literal sidetrack, or just the most common way the Slayer gets trapped or bogged down.
• The third Light Action is how the Slayer's own actions most frequently screw them over. Self-sabotage isn't an agenda for Slayers like it is for Opposing Forces, but they always have the option!
• The fourth Light Action is what getting wounded looks like for this Slayer. This doesn't necessarily mean physical injury: the worst thing that can happen to the Hunter is to be deprived of their cool toys, and the Thrillseeker's deepest wounds are to their pride.
• The final Light Action hands the Opposing Forces a blank cheque to add new obstacles on top of existing ones. Like the final Heavy Action, this could be the action that ends the scene, so make sure the leading question is something whose answer could be a catastrophe in its own right.

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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 one 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 Your Role chapter, 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 discussed 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 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.

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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 handles the choose-one-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!

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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 greater threat option for an appropriate Opposing Force thereafter. If it makes sense story-wise, you can instead take a moment to 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.

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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!

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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 to free up space on the playsheet.
• 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!

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Diceful Scene Resolution

If your group wants a little more uncertainty in their lives than the basic rules of Gone to Hell provide – or if you just like to roll dice! – you can try the following rules on for size. For this variant, you're going to need three or four dice in each of two colours, where each colour represents a particular type of Slayer action. You can use any colours you want, but I'm going to assume for convenience that blue dice correspond to Heavy Actions, and red dice correspond to Light Actions.

Use the normal scene-ending triggers: the Opposing Forces can end the scene when the Slayer takes a third Heavy Action or a third Light Action. However, before describing the outcome, pick up a number of blue dice equal to the number of Heavy Actions the Slayer took this scene, and a number of red dice equal to the number of Light Actions the Slayer took this scene, and roll them all together.

Don't add any results up: instead, look for the single highest die of each colour. If there's a tie for the highest roll, discard all dice showing the high roll, and repeat until a clear winner emerges, or until one colour runs out of dice. Treat a colour with no remaining dice as having a high roll of zero.

Finally, compare which colour has the most (remaining) dice with which colour is showing the highest roll, like so:

• Mostly blue dice, blue high: The Slayer achieves a straightforward victory. Describe how the opposing forces are forced back or thrown into disarray.
• Mostly red dice, blue high: The Slayer is saved by outside forces. Describe how good fortune or unexpected allies rescue the Slayer from certain doom.
• Mostly red dice, red high: The Slayer suffers a straightforward defeat. Describe how things get catastrophically worse.
• Mostly blue dice, red high: The Slayer suffers a shocking reversal. Describe how the Slayer gets screwed by forces beyond their control.

Depending on the tone your group is aiming for, the reversal outcomes (i.e., mostly red, blue high and mostly blue, red high) can represent simple good or bad luck, but you also have the option of going for a full-on Shocking Twist. Maybe talk that one out first, though!

Breaking Ties

In scenes where the Opposing Forces declined a scene-ending trigger, or if certain other optional rules are in play (see below), it's possible to end up with the same number of dice of each colour. When this happens, treat the colour corresponding to the Slayer's final action for the scene as having the most dice. For example, if there are the same number of blue and red dice and the Slayer's final action was Heavy, read the mostly blue lines on the results table.

There's also a slight possibility of getting a tie for the highest roll, in the specific scenario that you're rolling three dice of each colour and all six dice line up into matching sets. If this happens, the session ends immediately with a bullshit sequel hook.

With Unbalanced Scene-Ending Triggers

If you're also using the optional rules for unbalanced scene-ending triggers, they'll need some adjusting to play nice with diceful scene resolution. Rather than requiring a different number of actions for each trigger, unbalance the dice by throwing in an extra die corresponding to the direction you want to skew the results: an extra blue for victory, or an extra red for tragedy. Other ways of adjusting the game's tone, like messing with the number of tokens awarded per scene, can be used as-is.

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