Nothing Dies

It is the first fact of the place, and a game that hung health bars on the damned would contradict it on the first screen. So MALEBOLGE has no damage column: the only quantities are how long somebody stays pinned, how long he stays scattered, and how many one shot takes. The rule starts at the gate, where for the first time you face a crowd of souls instead of a beast, and it holds down to the ice.

Every weapon has one verb and one only. The arrow pins: it goes clean through and holds as long as it stays in, so the price of stopping somebody is the arrow left in him, and take it back and he starts walking again. The Miserere scatters: consecrated matter unmakes whoever takes the shot for twenty two seconds, and the return is slow on purpose, so the hit reads as a hit and the recomposing as something reforming in front of you.

What you buy is not their end, it is twenty seconds of clear road: whoever runs through wins, whoever stops to finish them off spends beads and finds them all standing again. On somebody already standing still an arrow opens nothing, which is why a crowd cannot be shot apart. From the fourth circle down there are creatures that are not damned souls, and for them being hittable is the window of a mechanism and not a state of health: a beast swelling up cannot be touched, the same beast deflated can.