Pandemonium (PWH)

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Pandemonium represents the barmy side of chaos, the chaos of the mind—insanity. Howling winds and horrible darkness await a planewalker here. The fierce winds make it difficult to perform any action, let alone something as delicate as spellcasting. Worse, after a while, the noise that the winds make—whether it's a low whine or the deafening roar of a gale—drives a body insane. The lucky ones go deaf first.
There's also no natural light on Pandemonium, and the winds blow out torches and lanterns, so the only hope a berk has of seeing is by magical light. These limitations on light mean that a planewalker never sees much of Pandemonium at once. Only small areas are illuminated, with the rest always remaining a shadowy mystery—and folks swear those shadows move when glimpsed out of the comer of an eye.
The folks who live on Pandemonium, for the most part, have been exiled here; at least, no one admits to being a native. As a general rule, the plane's population is insane. It's simply a condition of life on the plane, and not every resident is a screaming, drooling barmy. Some seem stable and normal (at first, anyway), but a planewalker has to assume they're all touched in some way by the wind madness.
Pandemonium's four layers are a network of caverns and tunnels bored through solid rock. Gravity is always oriented to the ground under one's feet, so a body can stand on all sides of the passages and caverns. In general, as a traveler goes deeper into the plane, the passages get smaller and less accessible with each layer. The last layer is made up of caverns within the stone without connecting passages. It's rumored that some of these isolated bubbles have both treasures and prisoners stored within them, placed there by powers hoping that the caverns would be forever inaccessible and secret.
In Phlegethon, the third layer of Pandemonium, stands a town called Windglum. Like most islands of civilization on the plane, Windglum's characterized by an aura of suspicion. Everyone's peery of strangers, and at least a little touched. The only reason to visit is the Scaly Dog Inn, where a planewalker can get a decent mug of bub and talk to others of her profession, since many planewalkers use the Scaly Dog as a meeting place. It's a good place to gather mercenaries, become well-lanned, or seek employment.
The latest chant regards a site called the Harmonica in the second layer of Cocytus. In this place, which was obviously intentionally created long ago, the winds whip through a huge cavern with holes and tubes cut into various rock columns, creating a noise worse than anywhere else on the plane. Somewhere within this horror of noise and wind, it is said, lies the secret to true planewalking—traveling the planes without need of a gate or portal of any kind. This is, in all likelihood, just the screed of some addle-cove who spent too much time on the plane of madness.
Tarsheva Recommends: Yard gum, the sap of a tree found on Carceri's second layer, is extremely useful in making effective earplugs against the maddening howl of Pandemonium's winds. This gum can be found for sale in many places, even in Sigil.