The Divine Comedy in The Strange

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

I see what you did there.

So, Hell Frozen Over, a recursion in the main rulebook, is essentially the Divine Comedy, or a version of Dante's Inferno. Only it is all ice. With carnivorous demons. And ice that heals you. And a mastermind demon named Treachery who lies to you. And powerful artifacts under the ice.

It is a strange "meta version" of Hell that sidesteps having Hell in The Strange and also from forcing everyone in the setting to deal with those concepts (and religion) when the game took the more middle-of-the-road path and sidestepped the issue. I get why not everyone wants Hell in their games, and this could turn into the Doom video game far too quickly with a "heavyweight" topic like that intruding on every other idea, work of fiction, and fun idea that can happen in The Strange. This was an intelligent dodge, but the concept of Hell being a fictional place sucked into The Strange is too good of a story to pass up for me.

It also brings up some reasonably dark topics. First, you get something like Event Horizon combining Hell and high technology.

Would Hell, even a fictional version, become a significant force in The Strange? Honestly, this would be a game I play once, and once only, as "The version of The Strange that ended up with Hell." It is a concept that is primarily all-or-nothing but could be done well. Better than most fantasy games have treated Hell, most notably the horrible job D&D has done with the concept as a sort of suburbanized and isolated place that never influences anything and the merging of demonic heritages with the planar background soup (and how they took the succubus and incubus out of the demonic heritages).

But this is The Strange; you could have a serious "Hell as a recursion" and have it exist, possibly influence several associated recursions, and still firewalled off from the rest of the central "The Strange" game universe. You could firewall it off and have it be a significant force in its sphere of influence. So honestly, you could have the best of both worlds - keeping your primary Strange Cosmos-verse book standard while creating a separate "server cluster" for Hell and its associated recursions.

This is imagination we are dealing with, and The Strange is a place where you can define the structure - or not - and just say how things will interact.

So firewalled off, I could do this and have it take over and spread influence through several recursions. I would also use this firewall structure for other "high pollution" ideas, where the spillover from crossing recursions could seriously change the game's narrative.

Or say the entire game universe, The Strange and all, is a recursion; run it once and see how it ends up, possibly have it destroyed, and then reboot the whole game again and start fresh.

Once your mind opens up and you can imagine all the possibilities, you will understand that The Strange is not a "metaverse framework" but more of a way of thinking and managing imagination and how it blends and interacts.