Hell

The god-fiend Asmodeus rules the infernal plane of Hell with absolute authority, promising law without mercy and a salvation of servitude to the cosmos. Like bishops in an unholy church, eight unique archdevils oversee Hell’s first eight layers, ruling its resident devils in their master’s name, promoting his will and waging eternal war against the forces of chaos and good. It is mildly law- and evil-aligned.

Hell—translated into every mortal tongue under one name or another—has become synonymous with the mortal conception of organized torment—such is the malevolence of its deific king Asmodeus. While the other planes represent the base concepts of reality, containing those outsiders and gods who personify and promote them, most of Hell is the domain of Asmodeus, the God-Fiend, his reach so great that as far as most are concerned, Hell is both a plane and a deific realm.
The planes of the Outer Sphere are vast, comprised of distances and areas incomprehensible to mortal minds, but the fiendish geometry of Hell is something altogether different. Like warped nesting dolls, Hell encompasses nine layers, each superimposed upon the other, inaccessible except by progression from one to another sequentially, deeper and deeper into the Pit, unless granted quicker ingress by Asmodeus, his chosen lords, or another god.
Hell is a place of torment and purification, agony and rigid perfection, a plane where reality’s laws subsume themselves and kneel to a darker structure. Souls are tormented not for the sake of petty malice, but for a reason and an ultimate plan, slowly, progressively, inevitably carried out by Hell’s fiendish inhabitants.

Geography

Layers of Hell

• Avernus

• Dis

• Erebus

• Phlegethon

• Stygia

• Malebolge

• Cocytus

• Caina

• Nessus

Avernus

Hell’s first layer, the Iron Wilderness of Avernus, offers no gilded pretenses about its nature. The blasted, volcanic wasteland provides no safety or reward for the mortal souls arriving fresh from Pharasma’s Court, and only the promise of swift, brutal annihilation at the hands of the proteans and demons surging from the surrounding borderlands.
Beneath a sky perpetually hidden by volcanic smoke, the arriving souls—like prospective slaves for auction— gather under the watch of lesser devils. The fiends forcibly march their collections toward any of the layer’s pyrite-gilded fortress-courts that dot the landscape, looming like artificial mountains, passing barefoot atop the still-cooling lava f lows. On occasion the crust breaks, miring dozens or hundreds of souls, only to be trod underfoot like screaming, agonized bridges by their fellow damned.
Within the great Fools’ Citadels, devils in service to Barbatos, Lord of Avernus, brand each newly arrived soul with a mark of ownership of one of the Lords of Hell and send them off to serve their new master. Barbatos manifests as a tall, powerful figure almost entirely obscured by a dark robe untouched by dirt or time. Observers see only the fringes of a strangely animate beard, and the hints of things serpentine and writhing within the cowl.
The Mantis God Achaekek keeps his realm on Avernus, and goes unmolested by devils when he wanders elsewhere in this layer. Achaekek and Barbatos have little interaction and do not interfere with each other, though it is clear the archdevil dislikes having a foreign (if like-minded) power on his doorstep.

Dis

Dominated by a massive city of the same name, Hell’s second layer of Dis is a land of extremes, divided between a vast, cold wilderness broken in its monotony only by the meandering length of the River Styx and fiendish garrison cities extending outward from their parent in a great and diabolic fractal pattern.
Many souls that arrive here are fated for exile into the wastes, abandoned for use as target fodder, or used as bait to lure daemons onto the shores of the Styx. Outside the city walls, such abandoned spirits slowly starve without dying, suffering from the elements and unable to find shelter, often staring longingly at the distant walls of Dis. Those not exiled are enslaved within the city for various purposes or tortured until their spirit-flesh becomes malleable and can be used as building materials for the city’s ever-expanding walls.
Dis and its garrison cities serve many diverse roles, much like any other cosmopolitan nation across the planes. Planar travelers wanting to do business with Hell typically make Dis their only stop, and there are portions of the city where such travelers are absolutely safe from harassment—but also extremely limited in terms of what they can do and how long they can stay.
Dispater, the archdevil ruler of this layer, is a great politician and jailer, appearing as a tall and stern man with smoldering flesh pierced by decorative iron and golden barbs, who views his realm as rival to any planar trading hub. But unlike many others, Hell’s great trade city, even with all its portals, exports a corruptive ideology along with any wealth gained therein, as the devils’ influence leaches into each and every merchant and visitor.

Erebus

Below the streets of Dis—like a labyrinthine sewer that makes the greatest cavern systems on the Material Plane look like a scratch in the earth by comparison—the layer of Erebus exists in nearly lightless glory. Known to many as the Eternal Counting House of Mammon, Hell’s third layer serves as a vast repository of its material fortunes. In its immense vaults, petitioners chained to the ground like dogs count and pass along each object, whether coin, book, blade, or especially valuable soul or contract. Each greed-stricken slave creates a mental record of impressions that their osyluth keepers tap to ensure their accuracy and complicity. Of course, while the souls operate in a sensory void, the darkness puts no blindfold over the fiends themselves. These blind wretches are the lucky ones, as most souls arriving in Erebus face wealth-related torture (such as being crushed by gold bars or coins) or ritualized dismemberment to create soul-fragments (currency for minor transactions).
Ultimately the souls pass along the contents of Hell’s coffers (and the contents of their minds) to ruling devils in service to the layer’s lord, at which point their minds are wiped clean of their plunder and they are given more to record. Once collected and counted, the layer’s devils sort the wealth, apportioning it to nearby vaults assigned to each archdevil. The greatest of Mammon’s servitors are the Judicators of the Golden Chain, a circle of 15 devils chained to each other—primarily pit fiends, the circle also includes a trio of unique devils and a pair of erinyes shorn of their wings and fitted instead with a trailing, animate silhouette of golden chains. These manage the affairs of Erebus, deal with requests from mortal spellcasters, and arrange the transport of valuables to other layers when the archdevils need them.
Ruling over the layer is Mammon himself, best described as a genius loci infusing Erebus. Without a corporeal body at all, the Lord of the Third manifests from the layer’s treasures, forming temporary bodies of coins, gemstones, and any other form of wealth. Thus, far from being simply the greatest of its accountants, the wealth of Hell that flows through Erebus is Mammon, and Mammon is the wealth of Hell, omnipresent and observant should even a single coin or jewel be taken without leave.

Phlegethon

Descending from Erebus through gates of smoke and iron wrapped in the flesh of suffering souls, travelers find themselves in Hell’s forges. At once a place and a thing, the Burning Legions of Phlegethon are both Hell’s smelting pits and foundries and that which they produce, for the flames and hammers forge both steel and souls.
In Hell’s fourth layer the hammers fall and bellows rush to the sounds of melting ore and the screams of spirits undergoing their own metaphorical separation of ore from slag. Weapons are forged, and so are the souls of the unworthy—the petitioners rendered down, purified by misery and force of will, and recast into the forms of armor, weapons, or even body piercings at their new masters’ will. These items end up in the hands of devils or the poorly trained soul conscripts used as disposable fodder in Hell’s armies. The least valuable souls are used to stoke the fires of the forges or to quench red-hot metal. Directed by his master to craft Hell’s arms, Aegrizok the Denuded oversees the forges, his flesh long ago shorn of its devil-spikes from the intense heat and now covered in a speckled patina of scars and splattered metal permanently bonded to his hide.
The master of Phlegethon and the mind behind its great pits of burning souls is Belial. A paragon of desire and adultery, with a level of promiscuous sophistication at odds with his role directing the forges, the layer’s captivating lord is a master shapeshifter and seducer, and he makes a sport of maintaining and expanding a massive harem within his towering palace, keeping concubines of both genders and everything in between, some of whom have no idea of his true shape or even his true identity. More than anything, he prizes the seduction of the diabolic nobility loyal to his neighboring peers Mammon and Geryon, and according to rumor, at least half of Erebus’s conjoined Judicators were those fiends who submitted to his desires.

Stygia

Lower still, through gates of barbed trees cast in rusting iron, yawns the layer of Stygia. A vast swamp dotted by inundated jungles and bottomless underwater sinkholes, the layer’s devils and its allotment of souls reside in vast stone ruins slowly settling into the muck, or crumbling atop the few stretches of truly solid rock protruding from the tainted waters. Stygia’s remnants are dominated by temples to the base sins and libraries of diabolic scholars where lies and heresies are continually devised for the purpose of corrupting religions and leading mortals astray.
The River Styx flows through Stygia as well, but its essence is weakened by the layer’s waters as the river slowly winds its way like a black, blurred ribbon through the swamps. Yet the swamps remain devoid of Abaddon’s daemons, who fear the swift wrath of greater beings lurking below the waters, waiting and whispering. Amid the quiet, rushing hiss of river reeds and swamp grasses, the air whispers a much more subtle hiss of serpents that lurk in the waters and hang from the trees like jungle vines, themselves answering to Stygia’s master, Geryon the Serpent.
Drifting through the waters, often revealing himself in hallucinatory visions or whispers in his subjects’ ears, Geryon appears as a pale, powerful warrior with three heads, three torsos, six arms, and a body made from the twisting coils of three intertwined snakes from the waist down.

Malebolge

Accessed through portals in the foundations of Stygia’s cities or the deepest darkness of its flooded sinkholes, Hell’s sixth layer is a series of walled territories radiating from the central citadel of Moloch, General of Hell’s Armies. Within each walled section is some new harsh terrain that the devils use to practice warfare, whether fields of jagged rock, staggered cliffs, scouring deserts, frozen tundra, or stranger places where contrasting adjacent terrain creates strange localized weather, such as hail made of frozen blood or rains of carnivorous frogs. Moloch’s favored diabolical warlords keep their personal fortresses in outlying areas beyond the hub of the General’s command center. For sport, Moloch and the generals bring souls here under the pretense that they are being rewarded, only to betray and exile them so they can be hunted like animals.
While the terrain variance continues near these officers’ territories, as a traveler gets farther from Moloch’s citadel, more of the walled territories contain what are called the Smoldering Forests. These poison-blackened woods constantly give off smoke, ever on the edge of combustion. The charred trees—themselves damned souls—leak curls of smoke beneath a constant and eerily beautiful snowfall of white ashes. Slaves and minor devils constantly hew down acre after acre of the trees to create open fields for battle maneuvers. Vast armies of devils camp within the layer’s clear-cut regions, waging war on one another and training to march out into the more hostile walled regions, the warped lands of the Maelstrom, the depths of the Abyss, and even the upper planes. Some of these camps are little more than places for the devils to recuperate in between battles, while others have crude shelters, forts, and siege towers built out of the still-smoking trees.
Moloch is personally involved in the brutal, horrific training of Hell’s armies. Never seen without his ornate, soot-blackened armor bristling with horns and spikes, Malebolge’s lord is rumored to lack a physical form of his own. This is only partially true, however, as Moloch’s baroque armor obscures not a conventional body, but a flowing form of raging, living flames, like bones to the flesh of his armor.

Cocytus

Opposite Malebolge’s lurking flames, and one layer deeper into the Pit, Cocytus is a realm of frozen, ice-choked seas and jagged glaciers. Mountains of pure ice spew cold lava (liquid rock colder than the darkness between the stars), while a few constantly leak trickles of conventional lava, melting paths across the ice and warming the air enough that mortal visitors do not immediately expire from the cold. Entire villages of damned souls eke out a longsuffering existence near these lava banks, grateful for the warmth but wary of the lava turning on them. Overhead, floating glaciers wander through the sky, casting black, cold shadows on the ground beneath them, sometimes colliding with each other or plummeting to earth for no apparent reason. Some of these sky-glaciers are the warrens of the gelugons, masterminds of Hell, while others are capped with cities filled with other devils and damned souls. These cities, built of ice and brittle steel twisted into exotic shapes, are where fiends taunt the dead locked away in the icy floors and walls, sometimes chiseling them partially free to inflict pain and suffering, only to let them freeze solid again.
One of these floating glaciers is Betzebbul, the Lofty House, home of Baalzebul, Lord of Cocytus. Tethered to the glaciers beneath it by massive chains, it never falls unless its lord wills it, and only upon enemy forces that dare approach by land. Obsessed with the destruction of purity, Baalzebul wanders amid his subjects in the form of great masses of buzzing flies, only rarely appearing as a tall devil comprised of countless insects amid tarnished angelic armor. Like his underling fiends, the archdevil takes pleasure in taunting the souls in their prisons of black ice with his excess, forcing them to watch the devils feast as they in turn starve, or chewing off a frozen limb of a particularly delectable soul, leaving its owner to scream silently within its icy prison.
Deep under the planar surface, having passed through mile-long stairwells carved through the ice, Cocytus’s devils meet in devotion and great debasement within cavernous, sculpted cathedrals. Surrounded by darkness and the slow creak and shudder of shifting glacial ice, the soft light of their candles reflects back from the open eyes of the millions of damned trapped within the walls, glittering like frozen stars. In one of these cathedrals, barely visible through a glass-like wall of ice, the eye of some immense creature stares back, rarely blinking, perhaps a primordial entity who once challenged the lords of Hell.

Caina

Hell’s penultimate layer, the endless chains of Caina stretch across a seemingly bottomless void of glowering darkness. Comprised almost entirely of iron bridges and labyrinthine arrangements of island-like stone platforms, the layer bristles with a network of hanging cages and suspended, screaming forms. Hung by hooks with their tongues removed, starving in isolation, or dissected and skewered without the mercy of a final end, the layer’s mortal souls suffer the worst of fates as tortured sacrifices to the yawning void below.
Caina’s lord, the archdevil Mephistopheles, accepts his allotment of souls, if only to punish, defile, and condemn them to enforced silence. The dark-haired, red-skinned embodiment of many mortal visions of devilkind, the silver-tongued devil is the keeper of Hell’s secrets. Mephistopheles’s handpicked chorus of gelugon servitors torments the souls in an ornate display of warped faith. Above the moving, whispering void, like the scuttling of roaches heavy with eggs, the torturers of the eighth layer whisper to each of the damned a single, horrible secret, and then condemn the souls to think on those secrets as they sway like hideous chimes on the cold, bitter wind.
Foolish or desperate visitors try to bargain with Mephistopheles or his chorus, offering wealth for secrets, but the Black Son is willing to reveal little except at great cost. Some more clever mortals have tried to steal imprisoned souls to squeeze the knowledge from them, but often end up lost among the maze of cages or imprisoned along with those they would free or exploit.

Nessus

A place of dark majesty and even darker mystery, Hell’s final layer of Nessus is swathed in suffocating darkness. With the exception of the eight lords of Hell, no others know with any level of certainty just what awaits within Hell’s innermost realm, other than it is the heart of the domain of Asmodeus. If the entirety of Hell is his realm, Nessus is his palace and bedchamber.
Among the furiously suppressed rumors that escape Hell, Nessus is described as a searing volcanic wasteland, a realm of formless darkness (as it appears from Caina), or a realm of pure light cloaked from the eyes of an unworthy cosmos. Little is known, and excepting the archdevils and those devils summoned there by Asmodeus himself, none return from that place. The archdevils refuse to speak of it, and the others have difficultly describing what they experienced, if they remember anything besides their orders, burned and searing within their minds.
Strongly suspected, however, are those wonders and horrors created and kept by the God-Fiend or given to him for safekeeping, such as the key to Rovagug’s prison. Unlike Abadar’s First Vault, Asmodeus keeps no relics or tokens from the Material Plane, but only those of a world yet to come, should he reshape the cosmos to his designs. The contents of that nameless vault of future things weigh prominently in the archdevils’ dreams, and mortal prophets gone mad speak Asmodeus’s rhetoric with poisoned tongues: that everything that will change is for the betterment of all, and that the role of mortals is simple—accept, comply, and suffer.

Fauna & Flora

The Devils

Unlike nearly every plane in existence, Hell was designed and populated at the will and demand of a single being: Asmodeus. Over time, creatures such as kytons, asuras, and others also came to live there or were created by gods or other powerful beings, but devils are the most common, and most mortals consider any creature of Hell to be a devil. The devils and their allied creatures possess a common goal—serving Asmodeus—and are devoted to this cause even more rigidly than axiomites at their tasks. The eight lords of Hell, each granted rulership of one of its layers, act more like administrators and governors than subordinate kings under a greater emperor. They rule in Asmodeus’s name over a land that is given to them; they arbitrate but do not own.

Type

Dimensional plane