The Mad Meg post a while back included a bit about how she was literally going into the jaws of Hell, and I meant to write more about that, because the very idea is just awesome. Apart from the mythic nature of such a “dungeon” (are you actually chewed and digested by Hell? Can Hell be killed? Do you just slip in past the chompers and explore from there?) the jaws of Hell/Hell-mouths recall Mayan architecture (the portals to important buildings are mouths, as are the portals between worlds) and, to go from the sublime to whatever, there was also a great SNL sketch about Bob Villa rehabbing a haunted house, which is where the post title comes from (transcript here).
So, here are some more images of Hell-mouths I found online:
This was identified as set design (?) for a theater.
A fairly simple woodcut.
Another woodcut.
Note the porcine Hell mouth on the left.
A colored version of one of the woodcuts above; I found this at Monster Brains. Table for three in the Hell Mouth. People are just dying to get in.
Not sure if this a really weird archeological find or some kind of art installation or what.
Thy flesh consumed
I’m not terribly familiar with the canon of old, or even recent, D&D modules since we very rarely used them in my gaming groups. But I do recall a user-created level for the computer game Doom which, when mapped, was clearly the alimentary canal of … something, with a tangled labyrinth representing intestines and so on. You can guess what the exit was. I was hoping I correctly recalled the name of the level as “Fistula” but no, that was another Doom level that was not biological at all. Now I kind of wish I’d kept some of my old Doom books for the maps. There’s bunch online, like this hand.
Squidman did a neat dungeon based on his inner ear. Any other dungeons based on anatomy? Hmm. Like Fantastic voyage, but into Hell.
I smell a project for my potential DMing debut…
Word to the wise: It is probably best NOT to Google “anatomical dungeon” at work. Likewise “alimentary map” and suchlike.
But I did find some interesting things at home, like this, this, and this. Then again it’s hard to beat this.
The colored table for three androgenous hellmouth creature with its foot in a bucket makes a horrific image for a tarot deck. It is, of course, The Devil.
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Isn’t it annoying, when you’ve got a bunch of people having lunch in your mouth, and there’s some bugger frying fish on top of your head, and then you get your foot stuck in a bucket?
I hate it when that happens.
…these are some seriously peculiar and evocative images. Thank you.
There was an AD&D 2nd edition module called Nightmare Keep (under the Forgotten Realms logo) where the main dungeon was inside a weird enlarged body of a lich deep under a castle or something. Lots of imaginative areas for different parts of the body, and a very strange full color map of the dungeon.