Legends of Old Urthe - Hell on Urthe  (D&D v3.5)
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Fourth Age - Old Urthe: The Road to Hell

Finding themselves on a battlefield, shrouded in mists, the party befriended a young elven girl named Venelia who had been a captive of a band of Dark Elves. As the Shades of the Lost Kin rose, the party followed them down to the banks of an unearthly river, there to board the craft piloted by a strangely haggard and silent boatman that demanded each pay their due fare.

The journey down the river was, to say the least, eventful. To begin with, there were the stilted conversations with the Shade of one of the Dark Elves who was also a passenger in the boat, and who expected to be punished for his failures in life.

But stranger still were the many and varied landscapes through which the boatman steered his craft. The river flowed through dark caverns that resounded with a terrible cacophony and bitingly cold winds. Then the darkness was banished by a malevolent hell-red sun that shone upon the parched plains of dust to either side of the boat, and where the party was attacked by a swarm of flying creatures that engulfed Nanoc and managed to latch on Melzakre, Slayer, Alasha'an and her kitten.

The creatures were eventually overcome, but both Nanoc and the kitten breathed no longer. The Shade, moved by who knows what emotion, reached out his hand and somehow cured the big Barbarian, though he himself was consumed in the exchange. Saffaris, calling out to the Urthe Mother, was similarily able to bring the kitten back from the brink of death.

The landscape changed once more, the dust and heat giving way to fetid marsh as the river moved on and the impassive boatman guided his craft along it.

Impassive, perhaps, but not when the safety of his craft was threatened (the safety of the passengers being of far less concern), for when a giant figure came striding out of the mud and attempted to stop the boat, the boatman summoned forth a creature of water that fended him off, enabling the party to escape, as the lands changed once more.

A grey place, a place of despair and desolation, the rocky lands dotted with withered and stunted plants, and with a dreadful miasma that badly affected those wounded in the battle with the flying creatures; all save Nanoc, no doubt thanks to the sacrifice of the Shade.

Slayer weathered the illness stoically, but a silent scream was forced from Melzakre's lips as the flesh of his ruined stump ebbed and flowed, forming a new hand, but of obsidian stone. Alasha'an and her kitten both huddled together, as a strange sickness took hold of them, sapping their strength.

The river picked up speed, and the boatman poled with a vengeance, as the sky took on a reddish hue reflecting the light from gushes of lava that spurted forth to run down the sides of the great mountains that stretched in a chain as far as the eye could see, visible even through the gouts of steam that issued from the river where it lapped against the dark banks.

The craft descended rapidly, almost, but not quite, out of its master's control as the river plummeted into the gaping mouth of a cold, dark cave.

And then it was light once more, and around the boat was a great frozen sea, cut only by the thin channel through which the craft passed. Dotted here and there on the ice were unpleasant patches of dark mosses, and, even more sparsely, areas where the icy sea rose up in a solid mass to form peaks, around which danced balls of blue flame, and coronas of lightning which illuminated the ground and cut across the jet black sky like rifts in the fabric of creation.

Small chunks of ice, broken off from the banks to either side, bobbed around the boat, striking the hull, as the boatman steered his craft onwards, in the direction of one of the larger ice-islands ...

A terrible cold and dread forboding filled the party as the boat reached the shores of that island, and the boatman held his craft steady, wordlessly, impassively waiting for the party to depart.

This is Hell.

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