Baator

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Baator, also known as The Nine Hells, is one of the Lower Planes in the Great Wheel cosmology (and resides in the Astral Sea in the 4e cosmology). Few names evoke as many dramatic and terrifying images in the minds of mortals as The Nine Hells, and with good reason. Baator personifies the epitome of the Lawful Evil ethos as a place of punishment, oppression, and endless, soul-crushing conformity. It is the eternal destination for those who force their will through unjust violence, tyrants, cruel overseers, malicious judges, unscrupulous barristers, and (most) politicians. Basically, anyone who dominates others through authority or manipulates the law at the expense of others will probably find themselves on a one way trip to the big H-E-Double Hockey Stick when they get their ticket punched.

Traits

The plane has normal gravity and time characteristics. The layers get smaller the lower you go, and attempting to fall or fly off into the space outside them gets you destroyed by some kind of force (described as a "gnawing vacuum" in ). There are, however, several paths allowing walking to the lower layers, and there are places where you can fly through layers (notwithstanding flying patrols fucking you for trespassing). Deities can warp the plane in their vicinity as needed, but few do much more than alter their personal areas (since interfering with Asmodeus and his works is something even gods are sketchy about). Other than some penalties to Cha checks for Chaotic and/or Good beings, nothing really inhibits magic outright, and only a couple of the layers have any elemental traits that make them outright hostile to standing there.

That's the overall traits. Each layer, however, is very unique and has a myriad of dangers. For example, Avernus has the above traits, and you may think it would make for a pleasant little romp through the planes. That's how you end up in the dead-book, though: there's the fucking Blood War to deal with (either staging for an attack into the Abyss, or repelling one from there), the River Styx (which has its own unique dangers), and the fact that medium-strength fireballs fall randomly on the layer (though there are allusions that it's not entirely random). Just dealing with the press-gangs, patrols, and other bullshit on the first layer is an adventure unto itself; things only get more challenging as you get to lower levels where more powerful devils will challenge pretty much everything you do or say.

Note that each layer gets progressively more dangerous for various reasons. By the time you get to Nessus, you're dealing with a being that knows your every move on his layer, and armies of pit fiends (as in, pit fiends are the regular fucking soldiers down here), as well as legions of unique devils seeking favor, cultists who serve the King of Hell directly, and pretty much anything the DM feels like flinging at you, like a half-fiend great wyrm red dragon cleric of Tiamat (who's just down to deliver a gift or message for Tiamat's gracious landlord).

Geography

Just as in "The Divine Comedy", Baator is arranged in nine layers. Each one is ruled by an Archduke, a unique devil that is granted their status by Asmodeus. While the Archdukes aren't deities by any means, they manage to use various methods to alter the layers to their tastes and necessities. There are pacts with Lawful Evil gods, the use of slaves taken from across the entire cosmos, and powerful magic that is the envy of every wizard in creation.

Getting from one layer to the next isn't physically hard. There are paths that let you walk down to the next layers, and flight can really help with all of this. The real trick is avoiding the guards, patrols, etc. that are meant to keep devils and petitioners in their proper place... and to keep outsiders, well, out of the layers. Trespassing a lich's necromantic sanctum may get you killed, but doing the same thing in Hell gets you enslaved or tortured or worse.

Aside from the cities and strongholds of the devils, there are a few other unique landmarks. The deities Tiamat, Kurtulmak, Hecate, Set, Sekolah, and possibly others have their own personal domains among the various layers. The City of Dis actually ranks as one of the great planar markets, since devils have great need of armaments and war material for the Blood War. If you are brave (or foolish), you can even try to find the fortress guarding the Pact Primeval (and possibly tap some of that vast power of Law to use to fight creatures of Chaos).

4th Edition D&D changed the layout of the Nine Hells, so that instead of resembling a stack of floating pancakes, the Nine Hells can be seen from the Astral Sea like a single planet, with the visible "surface" of the "planet" being the first layer, Avernus, and the other layers now arranged as smaller spheres nested inside each other, with the final layer Nessus situated on the underside of the Eighth layer Cania, facing the "planet's" fiery core.

Avernus

Avernus, the first layer of Baator, serves as the proverbial "Gates of Hell" and is thus the layer most readily accessible from other planes of existence. Avernus is an endless, rocky, blasted wasteland where lightning streaks across the blood-red sky and balls of molten fire periodically streak overhead before crashing into the dust-choked hellscape in a pyroclastic explosion. Lesser Devils herd throngs of newly arrived petitioners through the gates like cattle, prodding with spears and lashing with whips, pausing at their fancy to torment and humiliate the terrified, shrieking wretches. Avernus also serves as the martial fields where the infernal legions muster and drill endlessly in preparation for the next battle in the eternal Blood War. The Pit Fiend Bel (AKA the Pretender) oversees Avernus as both military governor and commander of its forces, and is aided by pit fiend officers known as the Dark Eight (whose ranks change frequently due to them dying a lot). Other notable inhabitants of Avernus include Tiamat, the evil mother goddess of all chromatic dragons and Kurtulmak, the spiteful god of Kobolds.

If Avernus had a theme, it might be "the wages of betrayal" or "the wages of sin." Not only is it a horrible place where Lawful Evil damned souls end up to be painfully stripped of their identities and turned into fodder for the Blood War or fuel for Hell's Archdukes, but Bel (as detailed on his own section of the Archdevil page), who won his position via betrayal of his liege and became one of the nine Archdukes of Hell, is for all his strength and schemes effectively stuck where he is in Hell's hierarchy and can do little other than fight the demons who continually invade his layer. For all its awfulness, Avernus is just a taste of the horrors to come. What? You say you need to go deeper? Don't say the sign didn't warn you...

Dis

Dis is both the name of the second layer of Baator as well as its principal city. The two are used interchangeably, as the "City of Pain" sprawls across a blackened iron wasteland to the point where it is difficult to determine exactly where one ends and the other begins. Black mountain peaks thrust into the ash-green skies all along the horizon, although no one can tell if they are a geographic feature or simply a mirage brought about by planar metaphysics.

Within the city itself, the iron walls smoke with intense heat, causing painful burns to any exposed flesh. Once you are inside, the city is effectively infinite in size due to the way space is warped there, and short of magic you can't leave the city without devilish permission. The air is filled with the acrid stench of hot iron and the screams of the miserable souls who are condemned to spend eternity building, tearing down, and rebuilding the city with their bare hands. The archduke Dispater, Lord of the Second, rules the City of Pain from an enormous citadel of iron and lead known as the Iron Tower. From here, he oversees the ceaseless toil of petitioners while lording over his vassals with an iron fist. Mirroring Dispater's omnipresent paranoia, the Iron Tower always seems to be one block away due to spatial warping unless you have a Devil guide or magical means to truly approach the structure. A similar effect can be seen in how the City of Dis is visible on the horizon no matter where you look. The City itself also has a location named "God Street" where any Lawful Evil deities (including homebrew ones) not powerful enough to have their own godly realms can be found.

The theme of Dis is likely how it embodies the nature of Hell as a torturous prison for Lawful Evil souls, from the newest damned soul to the highest Archduke. Funnily enough, Dispater is both Dis' chief ruler and its chief prisoner, his paranoid nature leaving him holed up in his Iron Tower where he is invulnerable but still a slave to his fears, leaving the structure only at Asmodeus' summons, and then only when just sending an avatar won't do.

Minauros

The Third Hell is a largely a cold, fetid swamp. The air is thick with fog and the stench of rot and decay. Stinking, oily rain and sleet fall from the leaden skies, which are periodically illuminated by streaks of green and purple lightning. Sharp ridges of obsidian thrust out irregularly from the muck along with small, muddy islands containing the twisted boles and skeletal limbs of lifeless trees. At the center of the great bog looms the layer's namesake -- Minauros, the Sinking City. The world-sized metropolis is built upon great stone plinths that thrust into the fathomless depths of the swamp below. Here petitioners are lashed to the columns, screaming and wailing with increasing panic as they sink helplessly, inch by inch, to drown in the brackish, frigid waters. The walls and avenues of the city proper remain in a constant state of decay as the city slowly, inexorably sinks into the ooze upon which it was built. Work details of petitioners constantly extract stone from the surrounding mire, using it to reinforce the city's support pillars in a futile attempt to delay its inevitable plunge into the muck. It is said that the current city is but the tip of an impossibly vast structure, as each layer is built upon the ruins of layers that have been reclaimed by the endlessly hungering mire.

Somewhere far from the crumbling and reeking avenues of the city of Minauros lies Jangling Hiter, called the City of Chains. The city looms like a ghost out of the fog and quagmire. Turrets, spires, and towers thrust skyward along with massive links of corroded metal, disappearing into the dense lower atmosphere. These mammoth chains prevent The Jangling City from suffering the same sinking fate as Minauros, as it is anchored to the underside of Dis. As its name implies, the entire city of Jangling Hiter is fashioned of chains. That's right -- every dwelling, shop, tower, warehouse, abattoir, avenue, and alleyway is fashioned from links of metal which continually rust in the frequent rain, giving the entire city an acrid, metallic stench that barely overpowers the noisome stench of the swamp beneath.

Minauros' theme is almost certainly "the burden of greed." Never mind that Mammon, the Lord of the Third layer, is officially described as a patron of greed, or the way his abode continuously sinks, slowly consigning many of his servants, plundered riches, and booty to a bottomless swamp requiring them to be continuously moved or replaced with MOAR. Don't pay any attention to the fact that Mammon's avaricious and treacherous nature has alienated everyone else in the Nine Hells who might ally with him either; Minauros is not a layer that provides poetic justice to show what happens when greed overrides all other concerns, no sir.

Phlegethos

The fourth circle is the Hell that most resembles the stereotype of a fiery world of eternal damnation, filled with active volcanoes, rivers of liquid fire, molten rock, ash hills, smoking pits, unbearable heat, all wracked by tremors and earthquakes. Even the air seems aflame and thus Phlegethos is considered to be fire-dominant. In the World Axis view, Phlegethos is a cavern several miles/kilometers below Minauros, where burning lava pours out of fissures in the ceiling. The city of Abriymoch is the seat of power in this realm, built of hardened magma, obsidian, and crystal in the caldera of an extinct volcano which provides visitors some protection from the elemental environment found throughout the rest of the plane.

Stygia

Stygia is frickin' cold. Most of the layer is an icy, murky ocean fed by the River Styx. Tantlin, the City of Ice, is built upon an ice floe and is ruled over by Levistus, insomuch as much as he can rule over anything while popsicled in a huge iceberg. Interestingly enough, Levistus is frozen in an icy prison, because he actually propositioned Bensozia, Asmodeus' consort (and mother to Glasya); when she rejected him, he killed her.

The previous ruler of Stygia, Geryon, got caught up in a big scam to depose Asmodeus, and got fucked over for it (as in, destroyed, and then turned into a binder vestgie in a web supplement). Levistus was allowed to rule again... but he was still frozen in his ice prison. So Levistus has to use intrigue and betrayal as his weapons, which certainly makes him the most treacherous among the Lords of the Nine. He even has a unique spell, bind to Hell, that allows only his clerics to bless a weapon to banish a the soul of a slain victim to the Hall of the Vanquished in Stygia, where they are basically trapped for eternity to be a plaything or decoration for the devils. (You can try to rescue folks, of course, it's not even all that hard, just mildly difficult, and it certainly puts you on some shit-lists doing it.)

Other than that, it's the home of Set (which is fucking weird: it's on a glaciated wasteland covered with monuments and structures, with passages and catacombs through/under it all), and Sekolah (the sahuagin deity, looks like a giant white shark). Overall, if you don't have business here, it's kind of a lame place to stay.

Malbolge

Originally, Malbolge was an endless rocky slope made of craggy black stone and pits of fire. The air was hot and full of choking ash and vapors. There was no flat ground, so avalanches were common. Nobles dwelt in copper fortresses, the metal plating of which helped defend against the frequent rockslides. That, however, was before the gruesome fate of Malagard, the Hag Countess, reshaped the layer forever. Now, her exploded and grotesquely enlarged body is the layer, for all intents and purposes.

Malbolge has had the most known rulers of any layer of Baator. The first was Behrit, who was destroyed by Asmodeus for violating rules regarding devilish promotion. After him was Moloch, until his hag advisor Malagard tricked him into rebelling against Asmodeus. Moloch was deposed to Avernus (as a "rabble of devilkin", a pack of unique outcast devils) and Malagard was made ruler in his place. She didn't rule for long, though: Asmodeus made her body grow until it burst open in order to appoint his daughter Glasya as the new ruler, using Malagard's skull as her palace.

One special location is the Lakes of Bile, a nice little "factory" for an assortment of particularly nasty poisons that can be bought at a very high price. There's also the Tower of Pain, where the new Lord of the Sixth imprisons and tortures several enemies, such as the more loyal servants of Malagarde.

Maladomini

The seventh layer of Baator is made of ruins. Nothing exists here that hasn't been damaged, defaced, destroyed, or otherwise corrupted. Major tourist attractions, if you're crazy enough to try and tour the place, are Grenpoli, the city of diplomacy and treachery run by erinyes Mysdemn Wordtwister, and Malagard, the city of black spires from which Baalzebul rules over the plane. The Lord of the Flies is never satisfied with his domain, and always demands his cities torn down and reconstructed based on some tiny flaw. He wants nothing less than absolute perfection- even if he has to destroy his layer or all of Baator to achieve it.

Maladomini's theme seems to be how sin ruins good. Its ruler Baalzebul is a fallen archon named Triel whose pride drives him to continuously destroy his own realm because it isn't perfect enough, making the layer one gigantic ruin that will never be truly rebuilt. Triel went from being a beautiful angel to being corrupted into an obsidian-skinned, compound-eyed unique devil, and was later punished with the body of a giant, slimy slug for his part in the Reckoning. This is part of his image problem, and why he's constantly building and tearing shit down, trying to achieve a visual perfection that will never happen.

Cania

Much of Caina is a land of ice-covered boulders and mountains, ruins of stone and sprawling glaciers. The jagged mountains war with frigid glaciers, each grinding fiercely away at the other. Avalanches holding thousands of tons of snow rush down from the mountains regularly, crushing anyone slow or unlucky. A visitor will find Caina numbingly cold (-50°C). Without heat, most warm-blooded creatures can only survive for a few hours before suffering chills, later frostbite, and then death. Certainly any such creature that goes to sleep, falls unconscious, or is rendered immobile in the open without heat will die shortly.

Cania is among the most sparsely populated of the Hells, with a wary traveller standing a fair chance of avoiding notice. Were it not for the cold and the lack of food (some tales speak of remorhaz or glacier worms in Caina, but if any exist they must be very rare), Caina would offer intruders many inviting places of concealment there are many hidden valleys in the mountains, and countless ice caves. Beware though, the denizens of the plane are attracted to any fire, so in the unlikely even that any travellers are able to light one, it will likely be the last thing they ever do. The only parts of Cania that can be called even remotely hospitable is the area around the Castle of Mephistar, where Mephistopheles' experiments with hellfire have started warming the place.

Points of interest, other than Mephistar (the home of hellfire research) included Kintyre (an ancient city the Mephistopheles supposedly personally destroyed and/or transported to Hell), and Nebulat (where ice devils, displaced due to the new hellfire research, have retreated to try and figure out how to "reach" their poor archduke).

Nessus

If you make it this far, congratulations, you are truly fucked.

The final layer of Baator is a blasted oval plain, 2500 miles wide and 1100 miles tall, surrounded by that deadly void just outside of Baator itself. There's nothing on the surface of the plain: no trees, structures, no elevation, just flat, desolate wasteland. But across that plain are huge cracks, gorges, and canyons, some going miles down. It's in these crevasses where everyone/everything dwells. Because of this deceptive depth, the plain has a nigh-infinite amount of space (just down instead of across). Some of the canyons intersect and create labyrinths, others twist along their own solitary paths. Navigating is tricky, but maps provide a very slight help (though not much because of how hard it is to make a map when there are little or no landmarks to differentiate certain areas from others). Bridges across canyons are naturally guarded, and all of them are deeper than 200 feet (meaning if you fall and hit the bottom somewhere, you will be taking 20d6 damage).

And just what lives here? Asmodeus, Lord of the Ninth, King of Hell. This guy is one of the true badasses in D&D, right up there with the Lady of Pain and a few other beings like Orcus. Asmodeus tricked all the Lawful gods, managed to conduct and eons-long war with the demons of the Abyss, and has done nothing but continue to add damned souls to his plane. He was kicked so hard out of the Upper Planes that his fall is said to have been the reason that Baator has nine levels, each broken off from the one above in the great fall. That fall also tore wounds in Asmodeus that still weep blood to this day... with each drop turning into a greater devil (usually a pit fiend with max hit points), and when they shed blood it becomes a lower-order devil in turn.

So yes, Nessus is fucking filled with Goddamned devils, all of them retardedly powerful and kept in Malsheem, which spreads for miles in four directions in the junction of two large canyons; the devils here are to be used to storm the Upper Planes, when Asmodeus' great plan comes to fruition. There's also Fortress Nessus, located at the bottom end of The Serpent's Coil (the torn path Asmodeus created when he hit Baator in his fall), a vast but seemingly empty structure, where Asmodeus supposedly stalks through the corridors, dreaming up new schemes.

But there's a site that is the real reason some dipshits actually try to make it this far: Tabjari, the fortress housing the Pact Primeval, which can grant enormous powers to subjugate Chaos if you have teh balls to fight Asmodeus' favorite cultists for the right. (He can't put devils near the thing, because it's a perfect balance of Good and Evil, so it actually fucking demotes devils until they melt from lemures into nothingness.)

External Links

• Play a certain AWESOME vidya and you get to visit Baator, but (thankfully) for a brief time.