Death Dells
This is the dismal and fetid 422nd layer of the Abyss, a layer of endless yellow forests and dun savannas where the gnoll god and his retinue hunt the lesser tanar'ri and any visitors. The grasses are edged as sharp as daggers, thornslingers and strangleweed are common, and the water is infested with parasites and diseases. Since tanar'ri are immune to poison, the waters themselves are venomous. Yeenoghu rules the layer from an enormous pile of cracked bones that looks like a white mountain visible from most points; those who have disobeyed or displeased him are added to it at regular intervals.
Geography
Layer Number: 422
Ruler: Yeenoghu
Traits: Finite
The savage demon lord Yeenoghu, Prince of Gnolls, rules the dun savannahs of the 422nd layer of the Abyss, which others call the Daeth Dells, but he unimaginatively calls “Yeenoghu’s Realm.” The name fits, for the countless gnolls and mortal slaves who dwell under its low-hanging red sun consider Yeenoghu the unquestioned leader of all he surveys from the ledges of his towering mansion. The edifice, as large as a human city, rests upon great stone rollers, allowing it to be pulled throughout the layer by thousands of slaves kidnapped from the Material Plane.
Roughly every year, the palace makes a great widdershins circuit of the realm’s three primary encampment sites, stopping at the immense dormant form of the obyrith lord Bechard for Yeenoghu to gain telepathic council, and at the Gathering Gate to replace those slaves who have died under the strain of pulling the layer’s capital.
A catalogue of locales upon Yeenoghu’s route, and a few some distance beyond, follows.
Azael’s Waste: Long ago, before the coming of Yeenoghu, this layer of the Abyss was a sprawling desert of shifting dunes and toppled cities. The barren landscape reflected the dour nature of Azael the ensnared, a potent fallen angel hero of the Upheaval. The demon ruled the layer—then called the Savage Searing—from the crumbling foundations of an enormous plaza to which he had been chained in ancient days. Despite his bondage, Azael ruled a cult that extended deep into the Material Plane, but it was not enough to save him when the bestial god-killer Ma Yuan paid a disastrous visit. Only an oily black stain remains of the once mighty demon prince, a seeping wound in the living Abyss. Despite Azael’s absence, his influence lingers still. The layer north of the Screaming Peaks refuses to give way to Yeenoghu’s will, retaining its original desert features as a stinging reminder to the Prince of Gnolls that he has a great distance to go before achieving the status of Demogorgon or Graz’zt.
Bechard’s Landing: Before even Azael ruled this layer it was the domain of the obyrith lord Bechard, Lord of Tempests. Although treachery at the hands of the tanar’ri eventually severed Bechard’s connection to the layer and drained the life from his pallid husk, the obyrith’s death throes have spanned millennia. The enormous demon now resembles a knotty beached whale, incapable of movement and constantly baking in the layer’s scorching sun. From time to time, the coastal outcropping that bears his barely alive corpse is battered with ferocious hurricanes of treacherous winds and acid rain—Bechard’s once flawless command of the weather triggered involuntarily by the agonizing throes of an all-too-slow death.
Although the creature cannot so much as move his mouth to speak, Bechard retains a fragment of his once vast sentience. If contacted telepathically, he converses in slow, melancholic tones about an era before the tanar’ri, about the rise and fall of the earliest demons. A trusted frequent visitor might eventually hear Bechard say that the demons did not originate on the Abyss but instead migrated here from elsewhere after abandoning a race of fiendish creators now lost to history. Yeenoghu marvels at these tales, even if he does not fully understand their import, and the Prince of Gnolls recently amended the regular journey of his rolling mansion to include an annual stop to converse with the dying obyrith.
The Curswallow: The savagery of gnolls breeds inattentiveness, and some of the uncounted thousands of mortal slaves toiling under the realm’s open skies are bound to escape. Disciples of Yeenoghu and dangerous predators choke the Seeping Forest, and with the ravenous undead of the King of the Ghouls infesting the Screaming Peaks, the safest direction for a mortal to flee is due east, to the sanctuary of a rough yellow ocean called the Curswallow.
The Prince of Gnolls and his yapping thralls abhor the soupy sea, refusing to approach its bitter waters. Far from shore, an armada of escaped mortal slaves bands together for survival, skirting back and forth from shore to rescue escaped slaves or even mortal gnolls disaffected with Yeenoghu’s revolting pretensions. While an occasional harpooned sea beast can feed the armada for a month or more, their most common provender is man-flesh. When food grows scarce, the ships’ crews isolate weak passengers and murder them, preparing their flesh for consumption by everyone on the ship. Each person eats a small sample of their former shipmate to prove their loyalty and dedication to survival, but the real feast doesn’t begin until some of the newest refugees refuse to partake in the grisly meal. The tense crew then falls upon these “cowards” with ruthless savagery, murdering them and immediately dressing their corpses for the main course.
The leader of the Curswallow armada is Malagash Unosh (male human rogue), the self-styled Cannibal King. He travels upon the galleon Harvester, at the center of the fleet. Every few months, Unosh leads his armada far from Yeenoghu’s shore to the limits of the layer and into the transplanar Abyssian Ocean, where they prowl the seas in search of more ships to add to their growing fleet.
The Dun Savanna: Packs of feral gnolls, scavenging hyenadons, and numerous intemperate beasts crowd the endless grayish-brown flat grassland known as the Dun Savanna. Carnivorous beasts aggressively hunt the savanna’s other inhabitants, including Yeenoghu’s enthralled gnolls. Only the fittest creatures survive. The stubborn grass grows in huge clusters rather than uniformly over the plain and bears edges as sharp as daggers. Thornslingers and strangleweed are common, and the few pools of collected rainwater are choked with disease.
The Screaming Peaks: At times it seems as if the layer itself conspires to keep explorers from passing through these peaks to the near-forgotten desert beyond. Paths inevitably lead to defiles packed with hungry undead, and colossal flying tyrants of rotting flesh prowl the skies of the range’s jagged valleys
A forlorn mountain cave near the Vujak-Sesko encampment houses an ancient gate to the 421st layer of the Abyss, the domain of Doresain, King of the Ghouls and vassal to mighty Yeenoghu. Civilized beings known as true ghouls dwell within the layer’s White Kingdom, a cosmopolitan undead society composed of a rotting, flesh-craving aristocracy. A handful of maurezhi (Fiend Folio 50) dwell within the layer’s gnoll population, taking on hyenalike forms with their assume appearance special ability.
The Seeping Woods: An endless expanse of twisted yellow-leafed trees defines the Dun Savanna’s western periphery, effectively marking the traditional extent of Yeenoghu’s influence in the layer. Southwest of the mortal-inhabited logging encampment of Vujak-Riln stands a colossal statue of the Prince of Gnolls, casting a contemptuous glance to the horizon as if surveying an already conquered landscape. A group of 14 succubi currently commands the territory within a mile radius of the monument, planning to destroy it to bring humiliation to the Prince of Gnolls with the sensuous blessings of Malcanthet.
The Gathering Gate: This huge circular portal can be manipulated to allow two-way access to a number of Material Planes worlds known to Yeenoghu. The gnolls of his wicked cult harvest slaves through the gates to join the pitiful wretches forced to pull the prince’s imposing mansion or the even less fortunate wretches cast into the wilderness as the provender of fiendish beasts.
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