Tarterian Depths of Carceri

Description
It is a plane of exile. It is the prison plane of the multiverse. It is where the overthrown plot their return. Carceri seems the least overtly dangerous of the lower planes, but that impression disappears quickly. Acidic seas and sulfurous atmospheres may be rare on this plane, and there are no areas of bitter cold or infernos of raging heats. Its dangers are more subtle than all of that.

This plane is one of darkness and despair, of poisons and passions, and of kingdom-shattering betrayals. On Carceri, hatred run like a deep, slow-moving river. And there is no telling what the flood of treachery is going to consume next. It is said that a prisoner on Carceri may only escape when their power has eclipsed that of those who imprisoned them. That is a tall order on a plane whose very nature breeds despair, betrayal and self-hatred.

Unlike most inhabitants of Carceri, the deity Nerull made his home willfully, not because of exile. Carceri has six layers. Each layer has a series of orbs like tiny planets, in a row. A gulf of air separates each orb from the next. On a particular layer, little distinguishes one orb from the next, and it is possible these strings of planets continue on to infinity.

Carceri Traits

 * Normal Gravity
 * Normal Time
 * Infinite Size
 * Divinely Morphic
 * No Elemental or Energy Traits
 * Mildly Evil-Aligned
 * Normal Magic
 * None

Carceri Links
Portals on many planes allow travel here. But almost all of these portals are one way portals. One exception is the River Styx, which runs through the first layer, mixing with the bogs and canals that crisscross the orbs of this layer, on its way to the Gray Wastes of Hades.

Carceri Inhabitants
Almost no creatures live here voluntarily. The exiled, shunned and defeated are sent here, as are traitors, backstabbers and the souls of those with underhanded ambitions. It's the prison plane, pure and simple.

Carceri's residents are a mixed bagged, racially and culturally. Most continually plot and scheme to leave Carceri and find their way back to their homes and former positions.

Planars
Besides prisoners from a thousand worlds and petitioners, Carceri hosts fiends that partake in the endless Blood War. Demons, devils and yugoloths all roam Carceri, as do madly galloping nightmares and other evil outsiders.

Petitioners
Even if they wanted to, Carceri's petitioners couldn't leave, so they hold a powerful resentment for those who are merely passing through. Most petitioners are souls who abused trust and betrayed friends or family. Like all petitioners, they have no memory of their past lives, but they retain their treacherous natures. They lie -- constantly, compulsively and with great cunning.

Petitioners on Carceri reside on one of five layers according to their particular treachery. Orthrys holds politicians and national traitors, and Cathrys holds those who betrayed reason and logic by giving in to animal lusts (the Transcendent Order seems to have a special affinity with this layer). Minethys imprisons hoarders who betrayed the common good by valuing personal wealth over the greater good. Colothys confines liars whose untruths brought others to great harm. Lastly, Porphatys houses those who betrayed their fellow man, by refusing to offer aid when opportunity presented itself due to shallowness and self-absorption.

These petitioners all share the following qualities.


 * Additional Immunities: Cold, Acid
 * Resistances: Lightning 20, Fire 20
 * Other Special Qualities: Petitioners on Carceri lie often and well, receiving a +10 on all Bluff checks. They have also learned to intersperse truths and half-truths with their lies.

Carceri Layers
Carceri is called the sixfold realm due to its six layers, nested inside of each other like wooden dolls. On each layer, a strand of small planets stretches in two directions towards infinity. Many of these layers are battle-scarred and wasted, a legacy of the Blood War's ravages. While the deepest layers remain oblivious to the eternal battling, portions of Carceri serve as staging grounds and battlefields.

Natural light seeps upward from each orb, bathing everything in a reddish light. Despite this, vision is normal on carceri, and night and dary are differentiated by the lightening and darkening of this hellish light.

Orthrys
Orthrys, the first layer of Carceri, is a realm of vast bogs and quicksand. The River Styx runs freely through the layer, saturating the ground with its foul magic. Channels carved into the soft ground through eons of erosion are wide and deep. Where there is no river, there are swamps. Though patches of truly dry ground exist, they are rare and usually climb quickly to rugged mountains where titans dwell. Mosquitoes swarm the air above the bogs, annoying travelers and threatening disease (Level vs. Fortitude, appropriate level +/- 1 disease of DM's choice, roll once per day in swamps). Even more annoying are the smooth-talking petitioners that populate this dreary realm.

Bastion of Last Hope
A fortress made of black igneous rock squats in a mountain range of Orthrys. The ambient, reddish light of the plane lends the Bastion Last Hope a brooding air of menace. Only one entrance offers itself, and those entering can't help but notice that the entrance strongly resembles the maw of some massive demonic toad.

No one entity rules the Bastion. Instead, it serves as a sort of outpost for anarchists. Here, a traveler can obtain all manner of forged documents, surgical alterations to aid a permanent disguise, and various other nefarious goods and services. It is a good place to find assassins, spies and others of ill repute. But the cunning recognize they are on a plane full of traitors, so they trust no one here.

Mount Orthrys
The highest peaks on two of this plane's orbs reach ridiculously high, just bridging the planetary gulf between them. At their intersection is a titanic palace of white marble columns, ampitheaters, and galleries. Here lives a race of titans, banished from a Material Plane long ago. The titan lord of Mount Orthrys, Cronus, resides at the center of this palace in a throne room a mile wide. Visitors may seek audiences with Cronus to hear his wisdom, but those who seek such counsel must be always aware that the titan's eons-long anger at his confinement may lash out unexpectedly at those who can come and go at their leisure. Cronus has the power of a lesser deity inside his palace.

Cathrys
The orbs in the second layer of Carceri are covered with fetid jungles and scarlet plains. The stench of decay fills the air, a rot fueled by acidic secretions of jungle plants. Those without immunity to acid are soon reduced to their component materials if they stay too long amid the swaying trees. The jungle air deals 1d4 Acid damage per hour, and this damage ignores all resistances and cannot be healed while in the jungles.

The plains are more hospitable. Vast, windswept grasslands cover the layer. Some patches possess razor-sharp leaves, which can cut the unwary traveler. Those who move twice in a round or run during combat cut themselves for 1d4/2d4/4d4 damage.

Apothecary of Sin
Located deep in the fetid jungles of this layer is the Apothecary of Sin. The Apothecary is built from cunningly-woven scrap wood atop the trunk of a large tree, raising the one-story structure high above the waving branches of the acid-laden leaves below (customers suffer no acid damage and can even heal previously-incurred damage here). Rope-suspended catwalks provide access above the treetops, though random sections are missing, possible victims of caustic storms. Mundane and exotic posions and acids are bought and sold here.

A tanar'ri called Sinmaker runs the Apothecary. Sinmaker is a glabrezu of average abilities, except for his special affinity for acids, poisons and venom. He delights in all things poisonous -- the more diabolical, the better. Any poison can be bought here, and unique concoctions bought from travelers or created by Sinmaker himself can also be found here. Sinmaker sells his wares by the dose or the keg, and does not care about the size of the purchase or the nature of the purchaser.

Minethys
The third layer of Carceri is filled with sand. Stinging grit is driven so hard by the wind that it can strip an exposed being to the bone in hours, should one of the plane's terrible windstorms spring up. Sandstorms are 10% likely in any given area each day, All who dwell on this layer, mortal and fiend alike, cover themselves in cloth garments to block out the stinging sand.

Tornadoes are common on Minethys. To avoid these hazards, petitioners live in miserable sand-filled pits, dug by hand. These crude pits must be constantly dug out to provide even the slightest shelter.

Sand Tombs of Payratheon
Payratheon is the name of a vanished city built on an orb of Minethys eons ago. The city is long-buried, but its sand-drowned avenues, crumbled towers and silted porticos still remain far below the shifting surface of the layer. Sometimes the shifting sands reveal Payratheon for an hour or longer, but it is always engulfed again by the sands, smothering most creatures who were tempted by its appearance and entered the sand-blasted city.

Particularly resourceful adventurers have burrowed down to find outlying suburbs of the city durings its phases of submersion. Tales of terror walk hand in hand with these accounts, which tell of dragonlike "sand gorgons" that swim through the sand as if it were water. Also mentioned are are the remnants of the former inhabitants that force their way through the streets as petrified undead, so weathered and eroded that little can be discerned of their original race or size.

Colothys
The fourth layer is a realm of mountains so tall, rough and cruel as to stagger the imagination of a traveler from a Material Plane. Travel on foot here is almost impossible, because the land is divided by canyons miles deep where it is not lifted to absurd heights by tectonics. A few trading routes do exist, usually in the form of rickety bridges and cliff-face trails barely wide enough for one.

It is impossible to move normally away from the areas along the trading routes. Characters must make Athletics checks (Medium DC) to move one-half their speed, and this requires a standard action.

Garden of Malice
The hanging gardens of Colothys are found on a single orb of the layer that travelers would do well to avoid. To the inexperienced eye, many of the cliff faces and sheer slopes of the orb are home to thick vines and tubers that spout a riot of beautiful flowers. Characters who attempt to collect samples for their botanical collections quickly learn that the vines are animate and determined to wring the life out of any creature that would use them as climbing aids, defoliate the flowers or even just move to close.

It may be that the animate vines represent one large entity that has grown through the eons to cover one entire orb. Once every two years, the vines release tiny seeds into the air that look like dandelion fluff. The winds of the layer often send the seeds blowing across several hundred other orbs of the mountainous realm. Though many are eaten by vermin, many others have found nourishing soil and have sprouted tubers in small nooks and forgotten cliff faces on other orbs.

Porphatys
The fifth layer of Carceri is a realm where each orb is coated in a col, shallow ocean fed by constant black snow. The snow and water are mildly acidic, dealing 1d6 acid damage per 10 minutes of direct exposure.

Artificial structures do not last long here. Small islands barely taller than sandbars rise above the waves. Most petitioners crow from atop the small sandbar islands, promising anything to those who can take them away. Despite their entreaties, they reward any charity with betrayal at the first opportunity.

Another exiled titan lives here, but even his palace is half-sunken and slowly crumbling before the acidic waves.

Ship of One Hundred
A ship rides the cold swells of this layer's seas, called the Ship of One Hundred, though in some accounts it referred to as the White Caravel. It appears as a ghost-white caravel unmanned by any visible crew. It wends between the islets of many orbs, picking up stranded souls and other travelers who are brave (or foolish) enough to book passage.

Passengers soon discover that apparently no one moves on board the craft. The lower deck and hold are stuffed with exactly one hundred unadorned stone sarcophagi. No one has ever successfully opened a sarcophagus and lived to tell the tale. Any time this has been tried, some unrecorded calamity devours all creatures currently on board, and the next time the ship pulls into port it is utterly empty of life. Stories have it that the ship seeks to deliver its terrible cargo, but it waits for the end times to do so.

Between the 'cleansing' that occurs when the curious try to open a sarcophagus, travelers (generally petitioners or fiends) infest the ship. Some make it their temporary home, happy to move from place to place by whatever mysterious force moves the ship. Such denizens are often in hiding from something, and take extremely dim views of anyone who would open a sarcophagus.

Agathys
The coldest layer of Carceri, it is also the lowest, or innermost, considering the plane's nested nature. Unlike other layers, this layer is but a single orb of black ice streaked with red. The air is bitterly cold, and is considered both cold-dominant and minor negative-dominant. Petitioners here are half-embedded in the ice, their liez frozen on their lips.

Necromanteion
A black citadel carved out of ice is the focus of the greater deity Nerull's realm. Nerull is a deity of death and is called the Reaper, the Foe of All Good, the Bringer of Darkness, and similar names. Petitioners are frozen flush into the floors, walls and ceilings of the citadel, just as they are in the surrounding ice.

The deserted entrance leads quickly to a wide hall called the Hidden Temple, which crawls with all manner of undead. The pallid, green glow of gibbering ghoul-light lanterns illuminates the area. Hundreds of onyx altars are evenly spaced around the hall, and demonic clerics constantly chant stanzas of a ghastly necromantic ritual. Besides chanting, the demonic priests spend endless hours attending grotesque experiments on necrotic flesh piled on other altars.

Nerull's throne stands at the center of the Hidden Temple. Woe betide the creature who would disturb him, a rust-red skeleton wearing a dull black cloak. Always clutched in his his skeletal hands is his sablewood staff, Lifecutter, which projects a scythelike blade of scarlet force that has the power to slay any entity.

The Hidden temple has several satelite chambers. Some hold food and quarters for the clerics, others are cells for living captives waiting to be eaten, experimented on, or both, and others are vaults where the relics of Nerull's faith are sealed away. Finally, small tunnels lead deeper into the layer, supposedly leading to vaults of horror so ghastly that even the priests avoiding exploring them. Otherworldly wailing and whispers rise up from the depths.

The chant is that Nerull has been slain, and his famed weapon gone missing. The Raven Queen has claimed the mantle as the deity of death, though she has not chosen to rule from this dread place. Yet the experiments here still continue unabated, and there are whispers that say that if any deity could master death, it would have been Nerull.

Carceri Encounters
Use this table for encounters, roll once per hour.