Fire and brimstone are the order of the day. Your name just went up in lights, you've joined the choir invisible, and now you're in the hot seat. Darkness envelops you and the next thing you know you're a shade of your former self with Hades' castle, circled by screeching harpies, looming above you in the shadowy darkness of the underworld lit only by the flowing fire of the Styx. The dead residents eye the new arrival curiously for a moment before going back to their endless tasks, but you don't plan on sticking around. Hades can try his best to keep you there, and he will, but you aren't going to take it lying down! So, where do we go from here?

Despite the various options we'll outline below, death for everyone will have one thing in common no matter what you do. You will lose any experience in your experience pool along with an equal amount of fame (see Character Information for more) and you will need to take time to recover your health once you escape.

Your Options
You basically have three options:

1. Beg your god for help.
2. Try to get out.
3. Sit there and rot.

We don't recommend the third option, so let's cover the other two.

Begging for Help
Your chosen deity is nice enough to offer you their help, but once he or she thinks you've grown enough, they won't be offering such indulgences for free.

Up until a certain level you will be able to DEPART from Hades with no penalties. Even without any penalties, however, we do not recommend you just depart right away. Explore a bit, try to find your way out. That way when you are at the level where you are penalized for departing, you might just know how to get out on your own. If you get frustrated to the point that you are ready to kick your monitor, though, by all means -- DEPART!

Once you reach a certain level in your career as a professional hero, however, you will get penalties for departing, and these are many and varied. Some have cures, but many do not. What you get for departing is a curse of some sort. It could be hair loss, warts, a lisp, obnoxious body odor...any number of nasty things. But it can also result in temporary skill loss, stat loss, and lower experience earning rates. These are all temporary and, as we said, most can be cured.

So, how do you tell what curse you got? Some are readily apparent. Sniff at yourself . Do you smell? Well, that's the curse.

But how can you see skill loss? All you need to do is find someone well versed in lore to IDENTIFY you. If they are skilled enough they can tell you all the curses you have, how long they will last, and what can cure them (if anything).

Getting Out On Your Own
So you don't want to anger the gods and wish to try to escape on your own. You currently have three more options. We say "currently" because more options are likely to be discovered by intrepid heroes in the future.

The three you have now are whether you wish to go through Tartarus, the Asphodel Fields, or by rafting the River Acheron. Each route poses different dangers and require different skills to get past. We recommend you try all three to see which you prefer.

Tartarus is your basic turning in on itself, dead-ends at every turn, and misleading paths type maze. It makes very little sense that you could walk in a northern direction from Hades' castle for fifteen minutes then take one left turn and end up back at Hades' castle, but them's the breaks, kid. This is the underworld, it doesn't have to make sense. You'll be dealing with gates galore, crossing the Styx on dangerous bridges and sometimes nothing but stepping stones, and various mazes along your way.

The Asphodel Fields are quite pretty, but you won't remember much of it since you fell in the River Lethe on the way there. This route is full of puzzles that you must accomplish to recover your memory. Pieces of it are scattered all over the fields and it's up to you to retrieve them. Charon isn't going to let you on his ferry if you don't remember who you are, so be sure your memory is intact before you attempt to leave. We'd explain some of the puzzles you'll be dealing with, but that would be giving them away, and we're afraid Hades will come beat up our webmaster for posting them.

Rafting the River Acheron is a mix of puzzles and good timing. If your reactions are keen enough and your timing is good, then you won't need to worry about the puzzles. But you likely will. To raft the river you simply need to grab a pole from the stack available by the raft, get on the raft, and go. You POLE LEFT and POLE RIGHT to steer the raft past bloated corpses and other hideous sights. Water hydras will clamber upon your raft from below while harpies dive down from the ceiling above. If you can concentrate between all those things attacking you, you need to steer the boat too. Swerve past treacherous bends, avoid sunken logs and snags beneath the water, bounce at a good clip over submerged rocks and you might just reach the breath-taking end of the journey.

Do any of this wrong ,though, and you're washed onto the banks of the river along with what's left of your raft. This is where the puzzling bit comes in. Each shore you wash up upon will have everything you need to fix your raft. You just need to figure out how to use the hodgepodge assortment of junk around you to get what you need. Make deals with insane shades protecting their hordes of fools gold, sit down for dinner with a group of skeletons gnawing putrid bones, sneak past giant hydras and battle wits with black widow spiders, contemplate the living trees and battle angry swarms of bees... it's all waiting for you down there.

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