Dungeons are Hell

I've been doing a bit of genre-fantasy slumming by reading Michael Shea's Nifft the Lean. It's quite the most D&D book I've read - but in a good way; I loathe books that read like, or actually are, write-ups of someone's campaign.

Nifft has much to recommend it. The influence of Jack Vance is clear; Shea's first novel was a Vance-approved follow-up to the Dying Earth sequence. And Shea isn't as good as Vance at the Vancian stuff - all those Wodehousian wizards and disdainful potentates. But Shea's stuff has attractions of its own: principally in its gruesomeness and its monsters.

The book contains four novellas. I'd read one or two of them a few years back, but they repaid rereading. The first and the third both involve descents into the underworld. And this is where it gets really interesting for the RPG-minded. For Shea's underworld is truly hellish:

There were huts with door-curtains of strung teeth still chattering from the denizens' quick hiding. (I alone heard their rank breathing within, and the groans of their tightly muffled victims.) There were ghoulish smithies too, where toad-bodied giants hammered smoking limbs onto struggling souls stretched on anvils, and other shops as well where similar giants with pipes blew screaming dwarves into being from cauldrons of molten flesh. There were rat-men struggling in thickets of tarantula weed, and there were groves of dung-bearing trees with twisted trunks, translucent like gut.

But what a setting for adventure!

Now, I know that the "dungeon as mythic underworld" has been kicking around the internet for many a year. But while Philotomy's musings are wonderful, I think that to confine the mythic nature of the underworld to an absence of infravision, doors that close by themselves and a generally inimical environment is to miss the obvious point about a mythic underworld: it's Hell.

Once you accept that your adventurers are delving into the upper reaches of the Inferno, everything starts to make sense. Of course the place is crawling with the walking dead - it's where you go when you die. And of course there are goblins, hobgoblins and orcs: minor demons who merely hint at the greater dangers of the deeper levels. Elf-hills and dwarf-caverns are almost certainly the upper reaches of the Infernal regions too.

There's plenty of resonance in this. Odysseus adventured in the underworld, as did Heracles. And so did Orpheus and Aeneas and Gilgamesh. Indeed, the descent into the underworld - katabasis - is a staple of heroic narratives.

And best of all, as with Shea's underworlds, no nods to realism are required. Your guides here are Milton and Dante and Giotto, Breughel and Bosch.

"If only we hadn't met in that tavern ..."