A desolate wasteland, Avernus is a blasted landscape of hidden, snake filled pits, and bone-filled craters. Balls of fire streak through a starless sky to impact the landscape, found to be targeting moving creatures (and mortals in particular) upon only cursory study. Volcanoes and rivers of lava add to the low, red glow that pervades the atmosphere twenty-four seven. The smoke choking the sky also lends a ruddy tinge to everything here, reflecting the brilliant tint of the flaming balls of gas that float randomly around the barren sky. The distant beat of marching feet is a constant companion, here in Avernus. The legions battle endlessly, scorching the ground wherever they draw their battle lines. Many of the giant blast craters are filled with the bones of both demon and devil; quick and efficient cleanup after some devastating and bloody battle, past or present. Bald hills and barren mountains dominate the landscape, here, and it is unwise to move at speed. Chunks of jagged obsidian, and blast-knapped flint sharp as any razer, fill the terrain, slicing into clothing and flesh alike. Such rubble covers the vast plains between the fiery mountains. The landscape houses only military strongholds; vast fields wherein to muster hellish legions. It is a place of madness and blood, and of endless heat and fire. The only vegetation are twisted, stunted thorn bushes that shelter in the cracks of the blasted landscape. It should be noted that in an emergency, these can be used for potable water, if one is careful and avoids the poisonous barbs.
Dis: A burning city of iron. Its ruler is Dispater, who inhabits a great Iron Tower.
Minauros is a fetid morass of death-stinking bog as far as the eye can see, the third layer of Ba'ator is truly dank. Covered entirely in a faintly glowing mist of foul vapors and radioactive pockets of atmosphere that did unfortunate things to our former pack mule. The research team needed to return to the drawing board for this one several times; the air itself is acidic and breathing it will kill you, never mind the damage and scarring to the skin. Acidic rain and glowing hail fall unsettlingly often, and many times, hard enough to leave bruises. The bog is mainly inhabited by tiny, biting flies that will mob any warm blooded creature they sense.
3 Seeking to draw the blood of mammals,
with which to feed and
within which to lay their broods, these little bastards are insidious and destructive. They will try (and eventually succeed) in getting through any fabric, covering any creature they can sense it is covering; and as soon as that happens, your acid protection is compromised, your lungs begin to scar and become cauterized, and you die. It took some time, but this project was never meant to be easy! We eventually came up with a solution by devising a set of rings that could be worn, each with a slight variation of the
Protection from Energy spell, as well as the Research teams'
Rebreathers, and clothing devised of a combination of fine
Adamantite mesh and
Molten Bronze Skin. Bedecked in such finery we set forth, and lo and behold the protective features of our new gear worked handily. At least, for the environmental hazards. The cyclopean denizens of Minauros are...I believe 'tetchy' is the word I am looking for here. They should be avoided if at all possible, as their favorite pastime is languidly wrenching the limbs off of other creatures. The cyclops' live in scattered communities of brutal and barbaric tribes that roam the swamps, hunting always. Always hunting. They do not stop salivating, and it covers them in a glistening sheen of spit and snot that makes them difficult to grapple. It also, coincidentally, protects them from the poisonous atmosphere. Bearded devils are the main inhabitant of this plain, with spined devils coming in a close second. Imps, surprisingly, do not flourish on Minauros; but chained devils love it, there, so look out for those as well.
Greater Invisibility was a great help until the spell caster tripped over a root and drowned in the bog. That event precipitated our evacuation, which was harrowing, but also worth a fortune in information.
Before we needed to make our hasty withdrawal, however, we
did manage to get into the eponymous city, and into the pavilion of the Archdevil Mammon. Using a psi-stone and a tiny helpful spider, we recorded an entire day of State Proceedings. Fiendish petitioners beseeching their lord for favors or gifts or titles, or any of a thousand other things. Land disputes seem common, as there is very little usable land available. Mammon the Viscount is a very severe judge and ruler. Many of his proclamations involved tearing someone apart, usually limb from limb, and leaving their entrails somewhere for the crows. Mammon the Viscount is, first foremost and always, an information merchant. He is, in fact,
the name in information merchanting. Entire subterranean vaults are stocked full of the paperwork required to keep track of so many secrets. Entire forests worth of paper, catalogued using a secretive coding system that has changed hundreds of times over the years. Boxes and crates and warehouses, packed with receipts and bills of lading, or (in a surprising number of cases) the original documents signed by those who have sold their souls to various devils. Entire warehouses of documents signed by mortals, selling their very souls, and more often than not, for no more than riches. Far, far more often. However, this is a side of the lower planes best left to the School of Philosophy at the world famous Bardic College Campus. An interesting tidbit; Mammon is uniquely the only arch devil that will barter in gold and platinum (and electrum and mithril) as well as souls.
Returning to Minauros (the city and the Plane...same name...Mammon is
not the creative type the sinking city could as well be called the Stinking City, for filth and offal rot odoriferously in various corners of the city. Eyes of strange colors and shapes stare out at you from all directions and then disappear. It is one of the more unsettling places within the Lower Planes.
Because it is continuously and eternally sinking into the bog, foraging missions are on a constant rotation out to a nearby ridge of volcanoes and basalt for rocks and stones to repair the roads and byways. They forever build the structures taller, even as they sink deeper. It is a fascinating cycle.
Phlegethos: Phlegethos: A realm of fire and pain. It is ruled jointly by Archduke Belial and his daughter Fierna.
Phlegethos is a plane of liquid fire and molten rock. The dancing flames that spontaneously bloom from the superheated atmosphere seem almost sentient; certainly, any unprotected flesh here would be immolated in moments. The flames here do their best to caress and kiss at visitors...in fact, it is a tell-tale sign that one is not who they appear to be if the flames are licking hungrily at them. The volcanoes here never stop flowing, filling and refilling vast rivers of lava that flow into a ruddy surrounding sea of incandescent magma. Fissures slash the barren landscape, randomly spewing gouts of liquid fire and molten glass. Ruled jointly by Fierna and Belial (an exception made to the 'one arch-duke per level rule, made by Asmodeus himself), this is the center of Ba'atorian justice. Featuring the Pit of Flame
Stygia: A frozen sea of icebergs and glaciers. Its ruler, Prince Levistus, is trapped deep within an iceberg here.
Malbolge: An treacherous rocky slope. Ruled by the Hag Countess, one of Moloch's trusted advisors prior to the Reckoning of Hell.
Maladomini: The landscape here is liberally dotted with abandoned and decaying cities under a blasted sky so deeply red that it, at first glance, appears black. The unhomed find their way to these cities as often as not. Fugitives. These places are shelters for disavowed, petitioners, deserters, and criminals. Lost creatures from other planes often make their homes, here, in the places that seem to be wholly ignored by the Archduke Baalzebul. And everybody else, for that matter. Between the cities, the rivers are choked with industrial waste and slag, and slick with oily sludge deposits that seem to have minds of their own. Reaching for, nay, grasping at, passersby; only to immediately perish in the toxic air. Whatever forests remain after Baalzebul's obsessive and eternal city building efforts are stunted, stagnant affairs, either rotting where they stand or spontaneously bursting into gouts of vivid, searing flame. A syrupy black ichor begins seeping from any organic matter or material almost immediately; from the pores of the very plants themselves, to the eyes, ears, and other (more unpleasant) anatomical regions of a living organism's body. If you will pardon the chronicler's euphemism, it was like walking around in a frog suit full of snot. Until, that is, the research team happened upon the solution in, of all places, the
Codex Baalzebul. In the back there is an unlabeled and unindexed schematic for a device that will protect one from the plane's insidious necrotic drainage. The atmosphere, as well, is toxic with sulfur fumes, yet retains enough oxygen to breath were one to filter out the sulfur dioxide from the air. Again our research team stumbled upon a solution, but the idea occurred to us while tripping our faces off at a masquerade ball, so therefore we unanimously decline one hundred percent credit for it.
Maladomini is governed mercilessly by the gluttonous bureaucratic behemoth that is Baalzebul. Variously named Beelzebub, Baal-zebub, or sometimes just Baal, the archdevil was once a beautiful and gracious archon effortlessly floating upon the ceaseless updrafts surrounding Mount Celestia. Falling, in the end, to gluttony and greed, Baal was transformed into an archdevil by Asmodeus himself. Many of the other archdevils took umbrage with this 'newcomer' and his quick ascendency; but when his greed and ambition ran him afoul of Asmodeus, he was transformed into a noxious slug for a thousand years. Dispater and Baalzebub have a particular distaste for each other, although Mephistopheles is not too far behind the Lord of the Second in his hatred of Baal, the Lord of the Flies.
Baalzebub currently rules from the currently-under-construction city of Malagard. Directly in the center lies the Palace of Filth; now a soaring pinnacle of black marble, during Baalzebub's 'enslothening' it, too, was transformed. For a thousand years it has been an amorphous pile of feces
shaped like a building. The curse has only recently been lifted from Baalzebub, and with it the curse on his palace, although he still calls it the Palace of Filth, to remind himself of his hatred for Asmodeus. For while right now he shows deference and obeisance to Asmodeus (his wounds are still fresh, the memory of the long years as a slug too new), he will almost definitely try again to depose the Lord of Hell himself. Asmodeus is, of course, well aware of this, but finds Baal's intellect useful, and his enmity with Mephistopheles and Dispater keep all three of them occupied enough that they cannot mount any serious threat against him. The Palace of Filth is home, also, to Baal's otyugh servants, and the virtual army of ghargatula he had needed to consume and dispose of all of the feces and rancid organic matter he, himself, had been cursed to ooze and deposit while he was a twenty-five foot slug. He is back to his tall, bald, jet-black-skinned-humanoid self, with the famous multifaceted eyes of a fly replacing his own. He dresses well, and is neurotic about odors and aromas, now. He is very fit in his humanoid form (he is obsessed with perfection of form, after all), but he
is known to adopt the cursed form of his slug when it suits him well enough.
It is easy enough to find shelter in Maladomini; the entire plane is nearly coated with abandoned cities. Be wary whilst searching, however; there are worse things than devils lurking within these ruins. Without the correct adventuring gear, however, one will perish in short order while touring this plane of hell. The famed and storied gnome artificer,
Gnicholas Bottombiter, contributed the amazing respiration packs we all wore, as well as the
Relative Compass we used to track direction under the sunless skies. The acidic air will make short work of non magical, or unengineered, clothing and armor; and from thence, the skin. Therefore, we wore protective outer clothing designed, tested, and manufactured by the
The Bardic College Campus's College of Astromagical Theory. Used, as they are, to radioactive and acidic environs, we were quite successful at staying alive using their equipment.
Cania is a lethal frozen wasteland ruled with an iron fist by Mephistopheles. It is pervaded by blindingly violent snowstorms, and harrowingly cold howling winds. Glaciers are the predominant geographical features of Cania. Glaciers and icebergs, all doing their best to smash violently into the stark and ice capped mountains that seem to surround the entire vista. Icebergs can move as quickly as a running man, with glaciers shifting back and forth just as fast and seemingly with a mind of their own. Cracks and fissures in the (at times) miles-thick ice tend to open explosively with a cacophony of cracking and high-pitched crystalline squeaking fit to make your skin walk off your flesh, begging the honorable panel's forgiveness for such a turn-of-phrase. The relative temperature rarely rises above -60°F; or -51° in the antiquated and somewhat clunky 'Celsius' systems of measurement used by the humans. Only a human would try to distill the world around them into tens! However, I digress.
Unsheltered creatures run the constant risk of freezing to death whilst in Cania. Unprotected creatures will freeze within minutes, and even those with cold weather gear will last mere hours without some type of magical or spiritual protection. Colliding glaciers often uncover perfectly preserved corpses; often of unknown spined creatures, fighting Archons, or Devas. And, although no objective evidence could be attained of this, it is suspected that unknown frozen creatures exist encased in the ice of the biggest glaciers. Some of the shapes encapsulated in the ice suggested entire alien cities to the research team. Scattered citadels house laboratories and and libraries that fuel the most bleeding-edge magical theory on the Arcane, and the very deepest understanding of Planar and Transplanar Logic. They are all protected with sinister devices, but the overly clever magical traps are no match for any nominally clever Gnome with a simple psi-spanner. It is worth noting the brutal efficacy of the mechanical traps, which can, and often do, include geological phenomena such as
ice volcanoes. Entire 'honeypot' towers; meant to lure in the unsuspecting adventurer and trigger cataclysmic events when they perform a certain task, have been designed and built with the greatest care and precision. "
The Paladin raids the tower, discovers a hidden door and pulls the lever to open it, the tower explodes in a cloud of white dust and flying shards of razor sharp ice crystals...the trope has been evident as far back as we have ever discovered any records for. In this case, the point still stands. The devilry will use sentiments such as 'heroism' and 'honor' to entrap the deliciously rare mortal that ventures this far into hell, and relieve that poor creature of its very soul.
Nessus: A land of trenches and ravines of impossible depth. Its ruler is Asmodeus, who resides in the deepest pit, called the Serpent's Coil.
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