The Nine Hells

The Nine Hells of Baator, sometimes called Hell or Hells, also known as Baator in Infernal, is the home of the devils. It is a plane of sinister evil and institutional cruelty organized in a strict caste system with a very rigid chain of command. Unlike the demons of the Abyss, the devils are highly organized in their quest for power and status—scheming and plotting power plays, coups, and assassinations. Each of the nine Hells has its own physical laws or properties of matter, but all are inhospitable or deadly to outsiders.

Geography

Each of the nine Hells is unique and usually mirrors the malevolent characteristics of its ruler. Or perhaps it is the archdevils who are shaped by the domains they schemed to control -- no one can be certain.

Avernus

The first circle of Hell is also the "topmost" because Astral travelers emerge from color pools on this layer and reaching the next layer required descending to the lower depths to breach a barrier to Dis. By all accounts, Avernus is a desolate wasteland with rocky terrain, sparse, twisted vegetation, concealed snake pits, caves and warrens, volcanoes, and rivers of magma. The sky is starless, full of choking smoke, and glowed a dark red due to balls of flammable gas that float about or streak across the atmosphere, randomly exploding as a fireball. Here the land echoes with the marching of legions of devil troops preparing for the next campaign against the demons of the Abyss, the ground is littered with the detritus of countless battles, and blood trickles out of the ground in vein-like streams, eventually flowing into the river Styx. It is here also that Tiamat makes her lair, in her Cave of Greed.

Dis

The second layer, is a flat barren plane containing little more than black, stagnant rivers, stretching for thousands of miles until it reaches some rolling hills. The sky is a cloudy dull green, shot through with lightning. In the center of this plane rises the Iron City of Dis, several miles in height and hundreds of miles wide. The foul rivers radiate from a moat big enough to be called a lake surrounding the Iron City. The walls of the buildings and the stones of the streets glow the dull red of hot iron; more than brief skin contact results in severe burns. Prisoners of war, tormented underlings, criminals, and kidnapped victims are kept in underground dungeons where their wails of woe can be heard filtering up through small vents in the iron walls. Above it all rises the Iron Tower, where the archdevil Dispater, the Iron Duke, Lord of Dis, sits and schemes, untouchable.

Minauros

Minauros is described as an endless bog of vile pollution, decaying bodies, and rotting marsh, repeatedly drenched by rain, sleet, and hail storms. The soggy, bone-strewn, disease-ridden swampland make movement very difficult and is only broken occasionally by serpentine ridges of volcanic rock. Nameless creatures even the devils fear inhabit the swamp. Minauros is also the name of the city built of black stone by the archdevil Mammon, King of Greed, Lord of Minauros, on the treacherous surface of this place. Only the ceaseless efforts of thousands of minions and slaves prevents the city from sinking and being consumed by the bog. The city of Jangling Hiter, also known as the City of Chains, hangs by massive links of chain above the noisome fen of Minauros and is ruled by chain devils.

Phlegethos

The fourth layer is the layer 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 was considered to be fire-dominant.

Stygia

The complete opposite of Phlegethos, Stygia is a bottomless ocean covered by an ice sheet up to three miles thick. The river Styx cuts across the ice, forming a channel. The Styx also supports small but hardy plants and mosses which, after millennia of decay of this vegetation, result in swampy areas along the banks of the river. A few floating islands are the only non-frozen ground in Stygia, their peaks wreathed in lightning arcing from the coal-black sky. Where lightning struck, a strange phenomenon called "cold fire" erupts: white flames of extreme cold that "burn" for a short time and then disappear without a trace. The great city of Tantlin was built upon one of these islands, in the curve of the swampy Styx. Due to the proximity of the Styx, Tantlin is a cross-planar trading post for those brave enough to attempt to navigate the treacherous river.

Malbolge

Malbolge is a gargantuan tumble of angular black stone blocks, each block ranging in size from a small city to a large metropolis, that forms a pile hundreds of miles thick. The randomly tilted and ill-fitting blocks are honeycombed with angular passages and caverns, causing non-flying travelers to frequently need mountaineering skills and risk avalanches. Stinking clouds of vapor rise up from the depths and light the sky with the color of blood, causing cosmologists to speculate that the blocks of Malbolge may rest on an infinite sea of lava. Flammable materials left on the ground spontaneously combust in a matter of moments. Most habitations in Malbolge are copper-clad fortresses built from black stone.

Maladomini

The seventh layer has vapor-polluted skies similar to Malbolge, but the surface is solid. The layer is filled with ruins of old cities, stagnant rivers, exhausted and abandoned quarries and strip mines, stone aqueducts and lava canals, decaying fortresses, swarms of biting flies, and black pools of ichor that erupt from the ground. The Lord of the Seventh is never satisfied with the construction of his capitol and repeatedly builds and abandons city after city. The largest and most beautiful is Malagard, a sprawling metropolis/palace/fortress/arcology with a myriad of black towers linked by a tangled web of bridges and walkways. Malagard is rumored to contain a million rooms and to cap an equally complex dungeon labyrinth.

Cania

Cania is a bitterly cold-dominant realm of solid ice mountains, titanic, unnaturally fast-moving glaciers, and nearly continuous snowfall that makes Stygia seem balmy by comparison. Unprotected travelers are exposed to temperatures of −60 ℉. On the positive side, there are few creatures that hunted in the icy wastes. Travelers to the eighth hell describe Mephistar, the Lord of the Eighth's fortress/palace as an enormous citadel made entirely of ice. Despite this, it reportedly has a heated, luxurious interior and sits atop a gargantuan glacier called Nargus, whose speed and movement are under the control of Mephistopheles himself.

Nessus

The ninth and deepest Hell is a land of extremes: regions cold as Cania, volcanoes like Phlegethos, a lake of ice, a flaming forest, sheer cliffs, firewinds, and a citadel even larger than Khin-Oin in The Grey Waste. Malsheem, the Citadel of Hell, rises out of this blasted and torn landscape. It is said that Malsheem can hold millions of devils within its mountainous edifice, from the lowest warrens deep in the trench to the soaring spires miles above the tortured plane. It is an endless progression of rifts, pits, and chasms leading down and down, forming a vertical maze hundreds of miles deep that contained great cities, fiendish armies, and the mighty fortress of the Overlord Asmodeus.

Alternative Name(s)

Hell; Hells; Baator

Type

Planar Sphere/Grouping

Included Locations

• Cania
• Dis
• Maladomini
• Malbolge
• Minauros
• Nessus
• Phlegethos
• Stygia