Malbolge

Malbolge is a realm forever in motion, its default state a treacherous slope of endless scree, where shards of stone the size of daggers mingle with boulders as large as houses, forever grinding and creeping downward. Towering Execution Cliffs loom like curtain walls of bedrock, shedding rockfalls as naturally as rain; at their bases, devils convene public trials, their voices magnified by the cliff’s perfect acoustics. Between these slopes lie the deceptive stillness of Crush-vales, valleys flattened by centuries of avalanches, always ready to collapse again at the faintest provocation. In the low places gather the Smog Basins, where poisoned dust hangs unmoving and light takes on the dull hue of faded decrees.    

Notable Locations

Ossiea

Glasya’s own fortress, constructed near the Hair Forest from the grotesquely enlarged skull of Malagard, the Hag Countess who ruled before her. Its towers pierce the sulfurous sky like fangs. lasya rules from The Lady’s Lament, a palace-fortress mounted upon colossal sled-runners and chained anchors. Its streets are ramps of oiled basalt, and its courts move with the shifting land, where verdicts are proclaimed on the march.   Beyond her fortress lies the Garden of Delights, a walled garden adjoining Ossiea, where swarms of hellwasps drift among grotesquely twisted flora. This “garden” serves both as an execution ground and a pleasure pen for Glasya’s favored captives, its perfumed air masking venom, and its beauty hiding cruelty.   The Slipchain prison clings to a fault line, perpetually sinking by a meter each hour, prisoners man the failing brakes to delay its descent, bargaining minutes of reprieve from their sentences when the ledgers deem them worthy. In the Ninefold Quarry, punishment becomes industry, with bound souls singing in harmonic resonance to split stone, leaving the blocks forever stained by their suffering song.   The Quiet Gully, one of Malbolge’s rare silent valleys, serves as the chosen ground for clandestine councils and assassinations; contracts sealed here are said to elude even infernal oversight. Finally, the Screed dangles from a cliff face by a forest of chains, a perilous marketplace where merchants peddle crampons blessed by contract, “pardon-pegs” that anchor even in cursed stone, and maps designed to expire with the next tremor.    

Malagard’s Rest: A collapsed massif where the previous hag-suzerain’s essence is said to have fused with the rock. Shards here bleed pitch; witches mine it for hex-ink.

 

Hair Forest

An unsettling thicket of massive, scaled hairs that sway without wind, their roots sunk deep into the stone blocks themselves.  

Lake of Bile

A cluster of reeking, acidic lakes whose vapors corrode even infernal steel.  

Maggoth Thyg

A cavern at the base of one of Malbolge’s slopes, avoided by even the most fearless devils. None who have entered have ever emerged.  

Pillars of Adamantine

Massive supports driven into the slopes, suspending cages of condemned devils who suffer perpetual injury from falling rock but rarely find the release of death.    

Inhabitants

While inhospitable even by infernal standards, Malbolge teems with those adapted to its lethal environment:

• Favored of Glasya: Erinyes, paeliryons, and succubi who form her personal cadre.
 
• Other Devil Castes: Barbed devils, bone devils, cambions, gelugons, legion devils, lemures, nupperibos, spinagons, storm devils, and war devils.
 
• Native Terrors: Giant centipedes, hellwasps, hell lice, kalabons, and night hags, whose presence makes the slopes and caverns doubly dangerous.

 

Government

Malbolge is ruled by Glasya, daughter of Ashmedai, whose dominion here blends brutality with an almost decadent sense of control. Her court is composed primarily of erinyes, paeliryons, and succubi, each selected for loyalty, beauty, and ruthless efficiency.   Only one duke serves her directly, Tartach, whose role as both jailer and war-leader gives him immense influence over the prison-fortresses scattered across the layer. Glasya’s power is absolute, though she cloaks her commands in the guise of seductive bargains and whispered offers.  

The Penal Ledger

Erinyes prefects, hamatula wardens, osyluth auditors; every crime becomes a sentence, every sentence becomes a slope allocation.   “Mercy” means a lighter grade of gravel. Everything is transactional—clemency, footholds, even the angle of your street.    

Access and Travel

From Stygia

Black-ice causeways and iron bridges surface from the floes into Malbolge’s first switchbacks.  

Toward Maladomini

The grinding slopes steepen into quarried terraces and ruined avenues leading into the seventh layer’s decayed imperial works.  

Transit Chutes

Official Processional Cut, which are essentially saw-toothed canyons reinforced with infernal rebar andpermit caravans (and chain gangs) to descend without being pulverized… usually.

The plane itself seems to enforce its laws. Gavelfaults lie hidden within the strata, snapping open with shockwaves whenever an oath is broken nearby, their force sundering steel and hurling oathbreakers to their doom. Those condemned by official decree suffer from Sentence Creep, finding their gear, camps, and even secured pitons sliding steadily downslope in their sleep, as though bookkeeping had been written into the laws of gravity. Finally, the Echo Warrens, hollow caverns that stretch for miles, carry whispers with crystalline clarity. In these places, a devil’s court-martial may be held a kilometer away, and still every word of the trial resounds in perfect detail.  

Additional Phenomena

Judgmental Gravity

The plane “reads” guilt and shifts accordingly. Those bound by harsher sentences find their footing betray them; the blameless (rare here) find unlikely ledges.  

Living Rubble

Rock flows like a glacier in slow moments, then sprints like a river. Stable ground is a privilege, leased by devils, audited nightly.  

Confessional Stone

Cracking a particular banded shale releases a chorus of forced confessions; useful for intel, ruinous for sanity.  

Senses

Every footfall echoes like a gavelfall; the hills remember who set them moving.

Malbolge’s weather is as violent as its terrain. Stonefall squalls erupt at the slightest provocation of sound; a single trumpet note can summon a landslide from leagues away. From the skies falls ash hail, marble-hard pellets that pit flesh and metal alike, forcing devils to don glass-smooth helms to shed the impacts. Pressure winds howl downslope without warning, pressing travelers to their knees beneath their crushing weight as though an unseen magistrate were delivering judgment.

Malbolge was once ruled by Moloch, until his own advisor Malagard, the Hag Countess, manipulated him into rebelling against Ashmedai during the Reckoning of Hell. When Moloch fell, Ashmedai rewarded Malagard with rulership.   Her reign ended in horror when her body swelled to monstrous proportions and ruptured, transforming the layer into a grotesque landscape of decaying flesh. In the aftermath, Ashmedai installed his daughter Glasya as ruler, reshaping Malbolge from a realm of rotting viscera into the prison-world it is today.