The Maw

Overview

At the very bottom of the Pillar of Souls, the Celestial Staircase ends in a steep drop, falling down and down into an endless darkness deep in the core of the planet. The Maw is said to be an endless and infinite prison, but not by control or force like the Devils of the The Black Fortress. Instead, there are truly no rules in the Maw, nor laws, order, or hope. The Maw is a perversion of imprisonment through freedom, a nightmare realm of unmitigated horror where desire and suffering are given demonic form, for the Maw is a spawning ground of the innumerable races of demons, among the oldest beings in the entire universe.

Planar Traits

Gravity normal
Time normal
Realm immeasurable
Structural sentient
Essence mixed
Divinely Morphic and Sentient: Deities with domains in the Maw can alter the plane at will, as can the Maw itself.
Strongly Chaos-Aligned and Strongly Evil-Aligned
Enhanced Magic: Spells and spell-like abilities with the chaotic or evil descriptor are enhanced.
Impeded Magic: Spells and spell-like abilities with the lawful good descriptor are impeded.

Denizens of the Maw

Larvae - Mortal souls consigned to the Maw transform into hideous maggot-like petitioners known as larvae. These writhing abominations can manifest anywhere in the Maw, but they are most common in its uppermost reaches. Demons - Demons exist for one reason—to destroy. Where their more lawful counterparts, the devils, seek to twist mortal minds and values to remake and reshape them into reflections of their own evil, demons seek only to maim, ruin, and feed. They recruit mortal life only if such cohorts speed along the eventual destruction of hope and goodness. Death is, in some ways, their enemy—for a mortal who dies can often escape a demon’s depredations and flee to his just reward in the afterlife. It is the prolonging of mortal pain and suffering that fuels a demon’s lusts and desires, for it is partially from mortal sin and cruelty that these monstrous fiends are born. Demodands - Although the titans who sought to become gods were defeated and cast into the Abyss before the Calamity, some of them sided with Callus Starbane during the great war that came after. They were all said to be defeated, but many weren’t killed, instead shoved and imprisoned in the Maw. With their divine sparks, they brought something godlike with them: the creation of life in the form of demodands. These minions are loyal to their creators but have little interest in the divine. Unlike many other outsider races, all varieties of demodands are powerful, for each carries a tiny spark of divinity that ensures even the weakest of their kind is truly dangerous. Qlippoth - Once the rulers of the infinite Abyss far far before the Cradle was formed, the qlippoth are now an endangered species. While some exist in the Maw at its deepest points, most of them were destroyed or did not enter Aralla before the Cradle was made. Titans - The titans of the Maw are universally bitter, cruel, and jealous of the gods. Once hoping to be counted among the divine, many of them, fighting alongside the Court of Shadows, were summarily defeated by gods of Aralla and cast into the Maw as punishment.