Detail map of County Hell
Places to visit
Hell City
The capital and one of the largest cities of the Fredonian mainland, Hell City is a bustling metropolis in the heart of Fredonia. Being an Orcish and Communist city, its architectural appeal has been likened to that of Vladivostok, although the air of Vladivostok is probably cleaner.
Glittering Tar Airfield
The international airport of Hell and one of the busiest in Fredonia. Glittering Tar is just a few minutes from Hell City by steam train or car. Several airlines use the airport; most importantly, though, it is the home base of the Orcish airline TRANSPORC which offers flights to all major cities of Fredonia as well as a growing number of interdimensional flights.
Hell Beach
As a holiday resort just a few kilometers from the City, with a wonderful beach stretching out along the river Ouiskie, Hell Beach is frequently visited by Hell City inhabitants when they take a day off. A great place to relax, though getting there is surprisingly difficult. In fact, for some unclear reason, you have to row across a canal and then break through a brick wall halfway between the City and the resort.
Cynics say that getting the chance to smash a brick wall is the reason why most orcs frequent Hell Beach in the first place.
Fort Ebbing-Email
Hell's largest single military installation, not counting The Wall. The fort is a spread-out, World-War-I-style complex of bunkers and trenches which protects Hell City against incursions from the north, and also serves as the county's military headquarters.
The Waterworks
Due to industrial activity, the river Wet is so polluted that it actually glows green in the night. Fredonian authorities, and to be honest everyone else, therefore pressured the Helluvan government to clean the river up before it reaches the Ouiskie. The government thus built Fredonia's largest water treatment plant near the mouth of the Wet.
The cleaning of the water also provides many workplaces for Hell's population. An unexpected side effect was that environmental campaigns to clean up Hell's industry are now easily brushed off, with the argument that this would render the Waterworks superfluous and destroy its jobs.
Ghoulag
One of Hell's oblasts half-way between Hell City and Empthy. Ghoulag has an extraordinarily cold climate. Though it is only a small area in the middle of the balmy, temperate Ouiskie plains, Ghoulag is frozen and covered in snow all year. Because of this unfortunate climate it is sparsely populated, mostly by dissidents who have been banished from the rest of County Hell. Ghoulag's tiny capital is named Frosthy.
The reason for the climatic oddity is the second greatest ecological catastrophe in Fredonia's history (second only to the immigration of the balrogs). Here, about fifty years ago, Hell's biggest refrigerator factory exploded due to general misplanning and overwork. Tons of coolant fluids were sprayed over a wide area and lowered the temperature.
For a while, the Helluvan government tried to build wintersport facilities in Ghoulag and advertize it as holiday resort with the slogan "Hell's Hell", but success was very limited. One reason for the failure are the nearby Ashlands, another oblast shaped by reckless industrialization, where skiing on fine powdery ash and grime is also possible all year round, in a much more appealing climate.
It is of mild anecdotic interest that Hell's refrigerator models are named after pop stars. The explosion initiated in a hall stacked with luxury models of the series Cher Noble.
The Ashlands
This large oblast is the center of Hell's mining industry. Centuries of reckless mining of coal, phosphate, fossilized bad jokes and balrog bodies (see History) have transformed the once lush meadows along the Wet into a moon landscape of ash heaps, holes and craters. The orcs think it looks really nice. Here they go skiing and climbing on the Ash Heaps - the highest elevations in the otherwise flat area - while their children ride on tame cliff racers.
The largest settlement, and seat of the oblast administration, is Bitterfelt, a major center of chemical industry. Worth a look is also the village Gartzwailer, which sits at the center of a big crater about 100 meters below the surrounding area. Originally scheduled to be evacuated and destroyed by coal mining, the inhabitants convinced the authorities to bagger away the coal below them, so that the village slowly sank down in a controlled fashion. Today, about half the population works as "bucketeers", a unique job: Because water from the close-by Wet continually seeps into the crater, they have to keep carrying it out in large buckets.
Tourists are welcome to hike in the Ashlands, but they are advised to stick to the marked routes. The uprooted ground can be quite unstable, and some areas are prone to landslides.
The Monorail Ruins
Before the Revolution turned County Hell into a communist land, an absurdly rich, bleeding-heart liberal capitalist named Brute Whine built a monorail system throughout the whole county to provide the starving masses of Hell with cheap public transportation. However, the project was oversized and technically far too ambitious. After the revolution, the county fell back to steam trains, and the Monorail fell into ruin. While parts of the trails have been torn down, large stretches remain in various stages of decay. They can be quite scenic in moonlight, but there are rumours that the ruins are haunted by ghosts.
Empthy and The Wall
A few generations ago, a minor error happened in a study on Hell's population growth. A 0 was added where it shouldn't be. Faced with what seemed like a population explosion, panicking bureaucrats ordered the construction of a whole new town in the sparsely settled south-eastern heathlands.
When the error was discovered, construction was quickly halted. Nobody moved into the half-finished settlement; it became a ghost town and was now known as Empthy. After a while, the slowly decaying ruins became infested with smurrows. As orcs are, for some reason, mortally afraid of smurrows, the government opted to build a wall around all of Empthy to keep the blue pest contained.
To this day, The Wall rises out of the flat heathland as a gigantic, absurd monument and a dire reminder for everyone to be accurate when you do statistics.
The Trotsiquendi
A tribe of Elves that got stuck on the wrong side of the Cordon Sanitaire, when their kinsfolk created that barrier to keep the orcs out. Unwilling to give up their homelands, they were isolated and desperate, until their chief Lenindil united them and converted them to Hell-style communism.
After Lenindil's death, however, the Trotsiquendi started to squabble and split into smaller and smaller mini-groups. Today, the loyalty of the Trotsiquendi to Hell is disputed at best; frustrated orcs have called it impossible to determine what they really want, as every single one of them is a member of at least three different organizations, and voices different opinions depending on which organization he currently represents. But as the Trotsiquendi are few and live in such an outlying, resource-poor region, the orcs mostly let them argue in peace.
