The layers of Hades are called the Three Glooms — places without joy, hope, or passion. A gray land with an ashen sky, Hades is the destination of many souls that are unclaimed by the gods of the Upper Planes or the fiendish rulers of the Lower Planes. These souls become larvae and spend eternity in this place that lacks a sun, a moon, stars, or seasons. Leaching away color and emotion, this gloom is more than most visitors can stand. The “Shadowfell Despair” rule earlier in this chapter can be used to represent a visitor’s despair.
Geography
The glooms of the Gray Waste truly earn their name. Everything is leeched of color and emotion, though the landscapes vary a surprising amount. Most of the things that lurk across all the layers of Hades are evil and seek nothing more than to drain the life and will out of travelers, so adventurers are cautioned to be on their guard at all times. The Gray Waste is not a forgiving place. The layers of Hades are called the Three Glooms:
Getting There
Hades is one of the most accessible planes in all the multiverse. Portals and gates spontaneously appear throughout the multiverse to the Gray Waste, and the god of death,
Neltharion hold sway over great portions of the plane.
Vanadon-Necroth monitor the flow of souls to the gray waste and other planes. Unclaimed souls from across the multiverse end up in Hades.
Portals leading out of Hades are a bit rarer. They appear as spinning coins, shining brightly in the gray twilight. The color of each roughly determines its location – red coins almost always lead to the
Seven Hells while green ones lead to the
Abyss. Other coins are more random and can lead to any other plane. Most of these portals are fixed permanent features of the plane, making them prime hunting grounds for the monsters of Hades.
Traveling Around
Hades is a depressing plane of gray gloom but moving around isn’t directly hampered by natural effects. The sameness of it all eventually makes travel difficult as there are few landmarks, especially on Pluton, and the misty pine forest of Niflheim obscures vision and eats light.
Portals between the layers are solid black that appear initially as smooth obsidian stones. They ripple like water when touched but there’s no indication where they lead directly by simply looking at them. Orientation on all of the glooms is difficult at best and getting lost is a real problem for travelers that have no magical guidance.
Creatures & Denizens
Powerful & Mighty
Nightmare Princesses
Nightmares gallop across the barren stretches of the Gray Waste in great herds, their burning hooves scorching the ground and leaving a trail of black soot in their wake. The powerful beasts are coveted by wicked minded individuals across the multiverse as the mount of choice but taming them is a difficult and timely endeavor. Those that run free on Hades are prized above all others but they swear fealty to an enigmatic group of leaders known only as the nightmare princesses.
Three princesses are known to planar scholars, but it is widely believed there are more. They are each a powerful specimen capable of telepathic speech with mortal creatures, and each travel in a herd with hundreds of fellow nightmares. They are willful, proud, and stubborn, characteristics normally bludgeoned by the unrelenting gloom of Hades, but their nature keeps them strong and running free.
The nightmare princesses have witnessed much in the Gray Waste and they are an excellent source of information – if you have something they want to trade. They are not interested in mortal trinkets or golden treasures, but they’re always in the mood for larvae to devour or a celestial to crush beneath their hooves. The nightmare princesses meet irregularly at the Dreaming Bones, a great hill filled with nightmare skeletons on the gray sand dunes of Pluton. Nightmares regularly go to the site to die and be reborn again, but the nightmare princesses discuss other matters. Some say they meet to keep up the strength of the herd on Hades, while others say they come to receive the blessings of some power that presides over them.
Troll King of Finnvang Forest
The fog that chokes Niflheim is thick and gloomy, like everything in the Gray Waste, and it hides multiple secrets. One of those is Finnvang Forest, a stretch of pine woods where the trees are skeletal remnants of their former selves, reaching out with claw-like branches to grasp and scratch at the unwary. This realm is run by Zulkaz the Troll King, an immortal troll with an iron crown intrinsically tied to the forest.
Denizens
Dangerous monsters prowl the Gray Waste of Hades looking to take advantage of weakness, sickness, and despair. Demons, devils, and yugoloths can also be found in great numbers, especially on Oinos, so there’s another reason to be cautious if traveling to Hades for any reason.
Fiends
As depressing and gloomy as Hades is, it sees a large amount of traffic from fiends of all kinds. Demons and devils constantly clash against one another, and often run afoul of the native fiends as well. Night hags are common and believed to have originated on Hades, where they drive herds of writhing larvae to barter and trade with other infernal traders. Enormous herds of nightmares thunder across the blasted wasteland, kicking up gray dust to choke the skies.
Many creatures dine on the lesser fiends of Hades, such as the Wharf rats, but these pests can prove troublesome for other creatures due to their life-sapping bites. Flocks of flightless diakk hop around the wastes as well and serve as fine dining in infernal feast halls across the Lower Planes. Niflheim’s foggy grayness hides dangerous wolf-like garmr. Larviathans churn through the wastes as well, spreading despair wherever they sense emotions, and are nearly unkillable on the plane. Enormous gray webs spun by rakkix are nearly invisible in the landscape but are capable of ensnaring any who fall into them, where they become food for the spider-like fiends.
Giants
The gray pine forests of Niflheim hide many dangerous monsters, but few are as bloodthirsty as the savage trolls. They wander the fog looking for fresh meat. Finnvag Forest holds the largest population of trolls all serving Zulkaz the Troll King, who constantly searches for his missing body parts cut up by a hero long ago.
Undead
Undead horrors can be found on any of the glooms of Hades. Those who wander the foggy forrest of Niflheim mwill find foglet. Skeletons are the most commonly found monster, and many of these are animated by the natural gloom of Hades and serve as nothing more than natural extensions of the plane itself. Ghouls, shadows, and ghosts also haunt the regions, and numerous of those shadow are under the control of
Durnehviir.
Features
Vile Transformation
At the end of each long rest taken on the plane, a visitor must make a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw. On a failed save, the creature gains one level of exhaustion, which can’t be removed while the creature remains in Hades. If the creature reaches six levels of exhaustion, it doesn’t die. Instead, the creature permanently transforms into a larva, whereupon all levels of exhaustion afflicting the creature are removed.
A larva is a miserable fiend that retains the facial features of its previous form but has the body of a fat worm. A larva has only a few faint memories of its previous life and the statistics in the larva stat block.
Hades is crawling with larvae. Night hags, liches, and rakshasas harvest them for use in vile rituals. Other fiends like to feed on them.
Cruel Hindrance
The plane’s cruel nature makes it difficult for visitors to help one another. Whenever a visitor casts a spell with a beneficial effect, including a spell that restores hit points or removes a condition, the caster must first make a DC 10 Charisma saving throw. On a failed save, the spell fails, the spell slot is expended, and the action is wasted.
The Graying
Hades isn’t known as the Gray Waste without good reason. On every layer in almost every realm, all colors have been leeched away, leaving only shades of gray over the entire landscape – the skies, the ground, the hills, everything. Anything brought into Hades eventually discolors to a shade of gray, an effect known as the graying. Brighter and more vibrant colors can take a full week to lose their original shade while duller colors take less
Time. This effect is largely cosmetic, and there are wizards in planar trading cities that specialize in restoring lost color to things found or left on Hades too long.
Comments