Good for a high-powered, high-level game.
Sometime in the past all the characters sold their souls to an infernal power. An even more powerful cleric has discovered a way to retrieve the contracts. The quest is in three parts:
- Searching out the pieces of the artifact that makes up the key to Hell.
- Finding the Gates of Hell
- Fighting your way in and out again.
There are of course some limitations. Since this is a quest for redemption, the characters cannot engage in grossly evil acts. Picking a lock to access a room? Fine. Slaughtering the 800 guards in that room for no particular reason? Not good. This applies for the first two parts; onces in Hell, all bets are off. If a character engages in too much evil activity, s/he will be unable to leave Hell at the end of the quest. Also, the rules are that the number of people able to escape Hell is one less than the number of qualifying characters. Someone is going to be left behind. Either in a heroic stand to buy time or as the result of betrayal, one person isn't leaving.
This just came to me. Itd be really fun to run. What do you do when one part of the key is the Papal Crown?
Yes, a lot of this was inspired by the Key to Time story arc in Dr. Who.