Gray Wastes of Hades

Description
It is where evil springs eternal. It is a plane of endless apathy and despair. It is the great battlefield of the Blood War. Hades sits at the nadir of the Outer Planes, halfway between two races of fiends bent on genocide. Thus, it often sees its gray plains darkened by vast armies of tanar'ri battling equally vast armies of baatezu who neither ask nor give quarter. If any plane can be described as "truly evil," it is this one.

In this place, pure undiluted evil acts as an almost spiritual force that drags all creatures down. Here, even the all-consuming rage of the Infinite Layers of the Abyss and the byzantine schemes and plots of the Nine Hells of Baator find themselves subjugated by the hopelessness and apathy that dominate this place. Despair seeps into everything at the pole of evil. Hades slowly kills a visitor's dreams and desires, leaving but a withered husk of what was once a fiery spirit. Spend enough time here, and visitors give up on things that used to matter, eventually even ceding their own lives to the despair.

Hades has three layers, which it calls "glooms." Uncaring malevolence that slowly crushes the spirit permeates each gloom.

Hades Traits

 * Normal Gravity
 * Normal Time
 * Infinite Size
 * Divinely Morphic
 * No Elemental or Energy Traits
 * Strongly Evil-Aligned
 * Normal Magic
 * Entrapping; Will-Sapping

Hades Links
The River Styx flows through the uppermost layer of Hades, and a few of its small tributaries lead deeper into the plane. As with everywhere else along it, sinister ferrymen ply along its lengths, offering passage to other planes.

Portals to other planes are fairly common, at least on the uppermost gloom, Oinos. Portals usually appear as great, spinning coins of color. Golden coins lead to the Tarterian Depths of Carceri, silver coins lead to the Concordant Domain of the Outlands and copper coins lead to the Bleak Eternity of Gehenna. Rare platinum coins connect to the Astral Plane. Because everything in this place is leached of color, the coin-portals glitter for miles.

Planars
Foul creatures of every sort can be found here. Because this is the battleground of the lower planes, tanar'ri, baatezu, slaadi, formians and even the occasional deva can all be found here, spying for the war effort or deserting their unit. Of course, yugoloths abound, despite the fact most of their race has moved from this plane, their original home, to Gehenna (the reason for this move is unknown, though the most common one bandied about its to get away from the center of the Blood War, which satisfies most of the curious).

Night hags are also thick here, and they constantly seek special petitioners known as larvae, which they use as a special form of currency in their dark deals with evil beings and deities.

Petitioners
Petitioners in Hades are mostly grayish ghosts, spirits so depleted by the Waste that they lack solidity. They rarely speak, instead crowding around visitors like moths to a candle, desperately seeking the warmth of emotion and hope that such beings possess.

Spirits of a particularly selfish and malicious mortals become a special form of petitioner called a larva. Larvae appear as worms with heads that resemble their mortal bodies. They serve as the currency of the lower planes, especially among night hags, liches and fiends. Most are used as food or ritual components, though a few lucky ones find themselves "promoted" to a lower form of fiend.

In the gloom of Niflheim, those who commit suicide are sent to an end straight from Dante's "Inferno." Their spirits are scattered like seeds to an uncaring wind, where they grow as trees, filled with an especially viscous sap akin to black blood. These petitioners are mute unless their sap is spilled, in which case it is only while their sap is spilling they are able to speak. In this way, pain is their only outlet to speak. Philosophers have theorized that this is so because what is evil but supreme selfishness, and what is more selfish then ending your own life?

The petitioners that take the form of spirits only have one relevant ability: incorporeality. The tree petitioners are as described above. The larvae are as follow.


 * Additional Immunities: Cold, fire
 * Resistances: Lightning 20, acid 20
 * Other Special Qualities: Wounding, disease, no planar commitment

Wounding - Every time a larvae deals damage, the player takes ongoing 2/4/6 damage (save ends), and these instances stack.

Disease - Following a battle with a larvae, any player who took any damage from a larva is attacked (Level + 5 vs. Fortitude). On hit, player suffers a Level + 1 disease of DM's choice.

No Planar Commitment - Unlike most other petitioners, they can leave their plane of residence, whether willfully or forcefully.

Layers
The glooms of Hades are just that: dull gray lands. The earth is gray, the sky is gray, the petitioners are gray. Color is foreign here, as if vision itself is subverted. When visitors arrive, everything goes from color to shades of white, black or gray. There is no sun, no moon and no stars, just a bleak gray radiance emanating from above that waxes and wanes.

This grayness is not merely visual. It affects the spirit as well. It reaches the heart of all who spend time here. Those who spend more time here than they should, such as petitioners, lose all feeling. They don't laugh, or cry. They have been consumed by their apathy, left with nothing but despair, their hope gone and never to return.

Both the entrapping trait and the will-sapping trait are manifestations of the grayness of Hades.

Oinos
The first gloom of Hades is a land of stunted trees, roving fiends and virulent disease (it has the Diseased trait). But, more than all of that, it is a plane ravaged by war. This is the central battlefield of the Blood War. Fiends, warrior-slaves, trained beasts and hired mercenaries gather here to wage horrific battles on an epic scale. These battles despoil an already bleak terrain. The sounds of rending claws, clashing weapons and screams echo throughout the layer.

Khin-Oin the Wasting Tower
A twenty-mile high tower, it looks like a free-standing spinal column. Some say that is exactly what it is, the remnants of a deity slain by the yugoloths. Khin-Oin plunges as deep into the soil as it ascends into the gray skies, meaning its sub-levels also run twenty miles deep.

The Wasting Tower is ruled by an ultraloth prince named Mydianchlarus. In fact, some stories claim that the yugoloth race was birthed here, arising in a pit at the absolute bottom of this tower. None but yugoloths have ever held this tower, despite the huge arrays of fiendish armies outside.

The rooms and floors of the tower seem to have no end. Spawning labs, magical laboratories, meditation chambers, orreries, suites and drill fields can all be found here. Mydianchlarus rules from the tower's zenith, and the symbol of his office is the Siege Malicious.

Whomever rules the Wasting Tower is referred to as the oinoloth. Any creature able to successfully invade the tower and reach its throne room can attempt to claim the title for themselves. Claiming the title requires slaying the current ruler, and sitting upon the Siege Malicious. The Siege Malicious is a throne of artifact-level power, and as such grants power over the entire layer.

Siege Malicious
This is a major artifact, a gargantuan and immovable throne carved from the Wasting Tower itself. The throne is inlaid with tarnished silver, base copper and brass. A circular crown of rubies adorns the top of the high seat, which is just large enough to sit a Huge creature (many Medium creatures would look patently ridiculous on the throne, their legs dangling many feet in teh air like children).

In order to activate the throne's powers, the creature sitting on the throne must have defeated the previous occupant. If the previous oinoloth yet lives, one sitting on the floor suffers a -50 to all Charisma-based skills, as a consequence of being inflicted with a particular rare and powerful disease (it can only be removed with the rarest of remedies).

If the character has defeated the previous oinoloth, the powers of the throne is theirs. But the throne forever changes one who would use it. It deals 1d4 permanent Charisma loss as the user's skin sloughs off in a rather grotesque manner. This disfigurement is the mark of the oinoloth and cannot be remedied without abandoning the title.

But with this disfigurement comes the absolute control of all disease on Oinos. The new oinoloth, whether yugoloth or not, commands the diseases of Oinos, creating, modifying or nullifying them as they see fit. Newly created diseases could potentially spread outside of Oinos, but the oinoloth only has this power over the diseases so long as they are in Oinos. This power can be used whether or not the oinoloth is on the Siege Malicious. The oinoloth decides the infection, attack, incubation and damage. Once created, the oinoloth can infect any creature within 300 feet as a standard action, and that creature gets no saving throw.

Niflheim
The second gloom of Hades is a layer of gray mists that constantly twist and swirl among sickly trees and ominous bluffs. The thin fog limits vision to 100 feet at best, muffles sound and eventually saturates everything in dampness. Niflheim is not as war-ravaged as Oinos, probably because the mist hinders large-scale conflict. Many predators prowl the lands, hidden among the mist, including fiendish dire wolves and trolls. Perception checks suffer a -4, and this includes Passive Perception.

Death of Innocence
A small town tucked away in the misty pines, it is constructed of hewn pine taken from the surrounding forest. The town holds more than 5,000 planars and petitioners, though they generally remain inside their dwellings, giving the town a vacant feel. Strangely, those who live behind the town's walls sometimes strive to improve their lot and break out of apathy.

Great wooden gates bar entry to the town, and both the gates and walls bristle with spikes. Inside, a broad avenue leads to the town's center, where a grey marble fountain stands. The wood of the buildings and gates ooze their blood-like sap, confirming claims that petitioners live inside the wood. The will-sapping and entrapping traits cannot penetrate the walls of the town.

Pluton
The deepest gloom of Hades is a layer of dying willows, shriveled olive trees, and night-black poplars. It is a realm where no one wants to be and no one remembers why they came. Of course, petitioners have no choice in the matter. Usually, the Blood War does not reach this gloom, though some raids have occurred when one side or the other wished to retrieve the spirit of a fallen mortal captain who was particularly skilled.

Underworld
The Underworld is contained within walls of gray marble that stretch for hundreds of miles and are visible for thousands of miles beyond that. A single double gate pierces the marble walls of the realm. Constructed of beaten bronze, the gates are dented and scarred by heroes intent on getting past. However, the gates are also guarded by a terrible fiendish beast, a Gargantuan three-headed hound made from the squirming, decaying bodies of hundreds of petitioners.

Beyond the gate, the inside of the realm appears much like the outside. Blackened trees, stunted bushes and wasted ground dominate the landscape. Larvae are everywhere, writhing in the dust, as are gray, wraith-like petitioners who are on the verge of being sucked completely dry of alle motion by the spiritual decay of the plane. When they lose the last shred of emotion, their remaining essence becomes one with the gloom of Pluton.

Sometimes, great heroes or desperate lovers from one of the Material Planes travel here via a tributary of the Styx, or portals hidden in great volcanic fissures. They come here because they believe that they can find the spirit of a friend or loved one, and extricate that spirit from a hopeless eternity. Besides larvae, faded petitioners, and the occasional foolish mortals, fiends roam the land seeking choice mortals.

Some believe all spirits come here before being sent to whatever plane they belong, and this may be why many believe they can come here to retrieve souls.

Hades Encounters
Alternate between this table and this table for random encounters. Roll once per hour.