Hades
Hades, also known as the Gray Waste, is the Outer Plane where pure, unrelenting neutrality of evil festers into despair. It is the spiritual sinkhole of the multiverse, draining all color, emotion, and meaning from those who enter. Known as the Three Glooms, its layers are barren realms of apathy, where nothing thrives and hope is not merely rare—it is actively eroded.
Hades does not rage or torture like the Abyss or Baator—it saps, grinds, and dulls. It is a plane of emotional entropy, where the very essence of the place works to strip creatures of their passion, ambition, and will. Even the most vivid memories lose their color here, the most fiery tempers go cold, and love is forgotten like a dream fading at dawn.
The grayness of Hades is more than visual—it is spiritual. The landscape is ash-colored and lifeless, the sky a flat, featureless expanse of dull gray. The plane is eerily silent, broken only by the distant sound of wind rustling through withered trees or over lifeless plains. Rivers flow like thick, slow sludge; the soil is infertile dust; even fire burns without warmth or light.
More than a realm, Hades is a condition—a spiritual disease that afflicts anyone who lingers. It is where ambition fails, where righteousness flickers and dies, and where the weight of apathy becomes inescapable. It embodies the truth that evil does not need fire or malice to triumph—it only needs emptiness, inertia, and the absence of light. To walk Hades is to forget what it is to hope.
Geography
Hades is divided into three layers, each gloomier and more soul-sapping than the last:
- Oinos, the first gloom, is a land of disease and decay. Trees grow twisted and barren, and the air is filled with invisible sickness. Corpses of forgotten soldiers litter the ground, and undead often rise as husks of forgotten causes.
- Niflheim, the second gloom, is a land of mist and isolation. Perpetual fog hangs heavy, reducing vision and muffling sound. Creatures become lost not just physically but existentially, unsure of where they are or why they came.
- Pluton, the third gloom, is the realm of oblivion. Here, memory and identity unravel. Souls that linger too long forget who they are entirely and fade into nonexistence, their essence absorbed by the plane itself.
Fauna & Flora
Hades is home to night hags, daemons (yugoloths), and souls lost to despair. Petitioners here become shades, joyless echoes of what they were in life, slowly dissolving into the substance of the plane. Fiends use Hades as neutral ground for vile dealings, and some gods of death, forgetfulness, or entropy may hold dominion in its gloom.
The plane is also a battleground in the Blood War, with fiends sometimes meeting in its wastes to engage in proxy conflicts, often leaving behind cursed battlefields and abandoned soul-forges.
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