Hellhound

Overview

Hellhounds are demons built on the lines of a great hound: four-footed, lupine, and a good deal larger than any wolf, with two tails behind them and hellfire moving through their fur.

Where they live

Hellhounds are born and live in the Veil, a level or two deeper than the tieflings. The two are separate peoples, and they are in frequent contact with one another.

Physical traits

The frame is lupine and quadrupedal, scaled well past a wolf’s. A full-grown hellhound stands around six and a half to seven and a half feet at the shoulder on average, with individuals running either side of that, and the paws are wider for their size than a wolf’s are.

A lion-like mane grows around the neck and shoulders. The ears are tall and fox-like, and they swivel fully in any direction.

Every hellhound has twin tails. Two is simply the anatomy, the same in every hellhound, and it says nothing about how much power any of them holds.

Magic

Every hellhound carries dark magic, as every demon does.

They also carry hellfire. Only some demons do, and why some carry it and others do not is unknown — but every hellhound is among them, as every tiefling is. With the hellfire comes an absolute immunity to being burned.

Everything past that is individual. Some hellhounds carry a great deal of other magic and some carry none at all.

Hellfire

Hellfire is an extra force, and a hellhound’s is the same fire a tiefling carries. It burns materials that are not flammable, it burns through magical wards, and it forges things that very little can break.

In a hellhound it tends to live in the coat. The flame moves through the fur and burns nothing it touches until the hellhound decides it should, and how freely it roams is theirs to control — some let it run through them openly, and others keep it in. It can be delivered in other ways as well.

Shared instincts

Hellhounds carry the instincts of a wolfhound, which sit close to a wolf’s own. They pick out movement at a distance and are built to run it down, and they have a strong pull toward guarding their own.

Each of those is an instinct, and a hellhound can set any of them aside. Who they are is their own.

Where the name comes from

Hounds guarding or haunting an underworld turn up across a great deal of folklore. Greek myth sets Cerberus at the gates of Hades. Norse myth has Garmr, the hound bound before the way down to Hel. Welsh tradition has the Cŵn Annwn, the hunting hounds of the otherworld, white-coated with red ears. English folklore is thick with black dogs with burning eyes — Black Shuck in East Anglia, the Barghest in Yorkshire, the church grim keeping watch over a churchyard — and many of them were read as omens of death.

What we take is the great hound, the fire, and the home below: here that means the deeper levels of the Veil. The omen stays with the folklore. A hellhound on the road is a hellhound on the road, and means nothing more about anyone’s future than any other traveller does.

Field notes

Coat and eye colour, how a hellhound’s fire looks when it moves through them, and what they do with it belong on each member’s own page.