Hellbent interest check

Something I happened to write up. I was wondering if anyone would be particularly interested, or if I should turn it into a fanfic.

The City of Hellbent is well-known for it’s breaking of conventional boundaries. It consists of four sections: Aesteros, the well-established merchant and noble district, Oberon, the industrial and engineering district, and the two groups of commercial/residential districts, Dis and Malebolge, are the sections with by far the highest crime rates. The sections, however, blend and mix, and aren’t well established by only property value. Instead, they are based on mutual protection, and thus each section has its own wall, its own guards, and its own police force. Technically, you could say that the city of Hellbent is four cities on a single place. Dis is by far the most dangerous, with the largest area for residential police to patrol and a huge amount of underground criminals dedicated to making as mush money as possible, not caring who they have to kill to get there. Dis is known for its unusually high instance of violent crime. Here, the factions and even outsiders battle for control of both the streets and the heavy drug trade.

Malebolge, on the other hand, is a fairly quiet residential district. Not to say shady things don’t go on there, but they tend to stay behind the scenes, where the Nox Continuum and Acheron’s Disciples battle for control of the tax dollars, not the very streets. The citizens of Malebolge have an agreement: you don’t mess with them, and they don’t mess with you. Their law enforcement is THE highest trained riot prevention and anti-crime force in the entirety of Hellbent. They will mess you up.

Oberon is primarily a manufacturing district, a fairly small area. It’s both well-defended and highly mechanized, and people there always have nasty little gadgets that will surprise you. Think of a mad scientist. Then add magic. The people who actually live in the district (rather than simply coming there to work) are generally quite insane.

As for Aesteros, it’s a highly developed district, but not a particularly large one. It’s entirely run by the Nox Continuum, and they keep crime at a minimum by essentially keeping everybody OUT. If you haven’t taken rigorous screening tests and submitted a passport for review, you can’t even get INTO Aesteros. It is, in all ways, a gated community.

Magic, in Hellbent, is not really magic. Rather, it’s an element that absolutely everyone can control. No matter how worthless a human being you are, manipulating your kind of matter is as natural as breathing. It doesn’t matter what the element is; it can be fire, water, ice, or sugar, but there are two basic tenants to the laws of magic. First of all, you cannot create it. You may only manipulate existing states of the fundamental element. That is to say, you could not conjure a fireball out of thin air, nor could you light a match with your mind, but you could light a match and then turn it into a fireball. The second tenant is this: Magic is constant. That means that rather than some practitioners being more powerful than others, it is a static tool to those who would use it. Two practitioners of the same element would be exactly the same in terms of raw power. Where they differ is in HOW they manipulate the element.

However, there are two additional subclauses to this ability to manipulate matter. The first is that, while all manipulators are inherently equal, the elements that they use are not. An element’s strength is inversely proportional to how common it is in the environment. Thus, an element like fire could be weak, as it is common in just about every place, but an element like lightning might be incredibly strong, as electricity is still a very new-fangled invention. The second clause is that while everyone in Hellbent is able to manipulate matter and bend energy to their will via elements, outside of the city, this power does not work. This is because of the natural ley lines buried underneath the city, allowing it’s inhabitants to change the very nature of the universe with only their wills.

As for the inhabitants themselves, there are three kinds. There are Gods, Humans, and Immortals. The things that separate them are not as clear as you would expect.

Outside Hellbent, in the “real” world, a god is simply a human who cannot die. They can be killed by a sword or struck low by disease, but after a certain age, their aging ceases. They can be killed, but they are reborn elsewhere in the world, with all the memories and knowledge they possessed when they died. When gods become old enough, they are drawn to Hellbent, where many of them meet other gods for the first time. They harness their elements here, and when they finally die in Hellbent, they return to the world full of knowledge they had not previously possessed. God make all kinds of livings, as doctors, artists, and highly-skilled craftsmen, receiving the benefit of their thousands of years of experience.

Humans, on the other hand, come to Hellbent primarily for two things: to discover that they are something more, and to make money. There’s a lot of money floating around in Hellbent, and if you’re lucky and careful, you can seize a chunk of it. Secondly, it’s always shocking to discover a part of yourself that you’d never seen before. Some people come to Hellbent only for the power, the ability that they want to see growing in themselves. These people are very dangerous at times, and are one of the reasons that Hellbent has such a dismal crime rate: people find it irresistible to test out their newfound strength, generally in extremely stupid, extremely violent ways.

As for Immortals, they’re kind of a “bridge” between the two. An immortal is a human who has eaten the heart of a god, and stopped aging. A human body can stay immortal indefinitely, inside the city limits of Hellbent. The human mind, unfortunately, is generally less well off. Immortals all tend to be rather “cracked” in one way or another if they’ve been around enough. Not every Immortal received their immortality trough violent means. Many gods are willing to give their hearts to their greatest friends, as they can live without them and they grow back when their bodies return, but most have. Immortals are a very, very dangerous breed.

The final pieces of the puzzle are the Nox Continuum and Acheron’s Disciples.

The Nox Continuum are a highly organized, highly trained covert force. They have their finger in all the pies, per say, and they have every intention of keeping it that way. The “Nox” themselves are the operatives of the continuum, who generally work in cells of four. These cells are highly specialized, and are given objectives by the management, whom they never see. The overall goal of the Continuum seems to be money, but don’t trust that too far. Also worthy of mention are single operatives, who are incredibly dangerous. These are generally Gods or Immortals who have extremely specialized jobs, and have gotten extremely good at what they do. They are referred to inside the continuum as the “Noxis” and on the streets as the “Silencers”. These are people you do NOT want to meet in a dark alley.

As for Acheron’s Disciples, they’re the new kids in town. They sprung up almost overnight in the districts of Dis and Oberon, and they’ve got some really, really nasty muscle. They are certainly not afraid to use it. They’re waging what almost seems a vendetta against the Nox Continuum, and both side have suffered appalling losses, including collateral damage. They’re brutal, sudden, always surprising, have amazing equipment, and above all, SMART. They don’t take losses unless they’re sure that somebody else is going to take more.

This sounds really cool. You've certainly piqued my interest.
This actually sounds a bit like the Darker Than Black anime, if you've ever heard of that. It's one of my favorites, which is why I was drawn to this.

So, what would the actual RP be like? Would us players get to choose between being a God, a Human, or an Immortal? Do we get to work for the Nox Continuum or Acheron's Disciples? Do we get to choose which element we will have control over?

Absolutely. Futhermore, it would be an open RP. I'd help you with whatever you wanted in terms of the setting, but there's really very few limits as long as you tick to two basic rules within the system. Those would be
1. please, please, PLEASE stick with the basic character types. that's either a God, a human, or an immortal. Once again, there's really very little difference between the three.
2. one character, one power. That's pretty much the most important concept. The basic idea is to take a city where essentially everyone is a superhero, and then make it interesting.

However, at this point, I'm entirely open to changing parts of the setting, if you think it could be more interesting in a different way.

So far I like what I see. I can't think of anything I'd change setting-wise. I hope you can get some more members to this thing can really take off. I'll tell the other people I'm RPing with currently. Some of them should get a kick out of Hellbent as well.

It's too bad more people aren't interested in this. I was really hoping to RP it.