Avalas, the Only Battlefield

The eternal battle

Teleportation circle

## Overview

### Avalas: First Layer of Acheron

Acheron is the more dreary of the three planes of Law and Evil. At least Gehenna and Hell have some variety to the individual battles you inevitably face in those foul places. On Acheron, you will fight the same battles over and over, forever, until you die. And on it goes.

Also called **The Plane of Endless Battle** and **The Infernal Battlefield**, Acheron is the final punishment for those whose evil came from following the orders of those with more creative evil minds – of putting Law over life and justice. Its first layer, Avalas (“The Only Battlefield”), is for soldiers. The cosmos offers Acheron a rich bounty of such damned souls.

## Discovery

Avalas consists of an uncounted number of iron cubes drifting in a weird gray haze. These cubes can be enormous – some are even continent-sized – but most are much smaller.

It is upon and within these cubes that the damned of Avalas wage their endless wars. Why do they fight? Because their commanders say they must. The dead pile up in uncounted numbers, but still the armies slog on. And not all the dead of Avalas are victims of the war.

The iron cubes are not naturally moored to one another, and occasionally they will collide. When two cubes hit each other, it is with a thunderclap, the sheer scale of the impacting bodies heating their colliding sides to cherry red. Anything caught between them, including the armies of the damned, is surely roasted alive if the crushing pressure doesn’t kill it first.

This brings us to why the commanders of the damned fight. Iron cubes can be delved, albeit slowly, and many of the inhabited cubes are honeycombed with tunnels and caverns, their gravity attuned to whatever constitutes “down” for the nearest cube face. Inside these caves, some of which are more like small kingdoms with running water and even plant life (albeit grayed and abrasive), the damned can survive the collisions outside.

But why would the damned want to survive at all? Is this not their eternal punishment? One might retort, was it not their desire to survive above all else that drove many of them to their evil? It is only fitting that the damned of Avalas retain their survival instinct.

But there is indeed a deeper reason for the damned to fight as they do for survival. A damned soul can indeed “die” on Acheron, though the process is long and slow. In a cruel parody of Ysgard, its moral opposite on the Great Wheel, Acheron resurrects its fallen after a time, stripping away part of their sanity and soul as it does so. The lost portion is fed to the plane itself, never to be regained save by powerful magic. Over time, the damned soul shrinks in body and mind until it could barely be called a husk. When this dies, so does the last vestige of the soul.

In this way, Acheron extracts its toll, greedily consuming the damned. A cruel fate, surely, but to those whose evil persisted even to their moment of death, not unexpected.

And so the ages turn in Avalas. No glory is ever won, just a few more hours or days before the next death. The grey haze flickers to darker and lighter shades sometimes, apparently a facsimile of night and day, but these are so faint as to be unnoticeable by any but a long resident. And anyway, few of these can utter the words to tell about it.

### **Travel**

One can enter Avalas through the normal methods. Portals and openings to the layer, like all Acheronic portals, appear like endless flames. Specific portals are rare, but a few can be found in isolated locations that have seen great, meaningless conflict.

The craters and divots of such awful battles can sometimes contain black pits descending ultimately to whorls of flame, bringing to mind stories of beings who have fallen great heights down caves to Hell itself. Sometimes, sheets of flame can be found free-standing between collapsed and ruined towers and buildings, and these act as portals to Avalas as well.

At least one place, the **Circle of Fire**, uses this latter effect in a sort of cruel joke played upon would-be travelers by an ancient wizard. The portal to Avalas there stands between two demolished pillars of a great round temple whose siege lasted two thousand years. A wizard, realizing that the portal was virtually indistinguishable from a *wall of fire*, crafted many of these spells to stand between the other pillars in the ruined ring. One must be careful if one wishes to traverse the portal, else one will trade a dreary hell for a decisively energetic agony.

According to rumors, the **Gate of the Mighty One**, a huge fiery pit in the middle of the arena of the hobgoblin capital, is actually a portal straight to Avalas. It would be appropriate, of course, as we will see.

## Survival

Life is hard in Avalas. There is virtually no water on the plane, and the air is bitter and metallic. You can usually forget about food unless you have a taste for the flesh of soldiers – and even that is a rare thing except among the relatively fresh damned souls, for the damned do not eat after their third death, and their flesh refuses to be eaten. If one wants to survive on Avalas, one must bring the ability to produce almost all the resources they require for life. Fortunately, there is one upside of the plane: you will never be short of iron for all your needs.

Gravity is dependent on the closest cube-face to your feet. This can produce weird sensations when moving between faces, as the contrast between the specific gravities of your feet at the corner can threaten to cast you out into the grey void. Movement in the void is actually much easier in such cases, since there is no gravity here, and you might move as you like if you have the ability to fly through an atmosphere.

It is best to avoid the surfaces of cubes at all costs, not just to avoid the collisions, but to also avoid the battles that take place there. Conflict is much rarer in the tunnels within cubes, and is of course absent in the grey void itself, for few things that know flight have ever submitted their will to another’s evil.

In fact, it is only inside the cubes of Avalas that life is possible at all on this plane. In some of the largest cubes, gods or powerful mages have conjured springs of water, and others – ancient travelers, perhaps, or damned druids – have planted seeds. In truth, the plant life is gray and scabbed, and is unappetizing, but it can sustain a traveler if they must continue.

The most familiar of the layer’s environments to the living world is probably **Landswaite, The Aging Kingdom.** Hidden within a gigantic, continent-sized cube, it almost looks like a kingdom like any other. It has a gray sky, rocks, trees, and even an artificial sun. But in truth, this is more of a demiplane or sub-layer, one devoted to the punishment of an entire kingdom. It is said that Landswaite was so gripped by conformity, and mass violence in the name thereof, that the whole land was damned. Landswaite is now a land of shriveled husks, any semblance of life or pleasure long cast from the inhabitants’ minds. Despite this, it does make a good stopover point to travelers who can reach it.

There is even an ocean on Avalas, though it is small. **The Sea of Retreat** was made by a powerful wizard in an attempt to slake the thirst of the damned. Instead, it has become a graveyard of ships. Despite resting inside an iron cube, it is rocked by gigantic waves whenever its home cube collides with others – and it collides with other cubes more than most. Regardless, the damned wage naval war on it still, in rusted hulks of iron spikes and black oars.

Magic-users on Avalas should take care to prepare spells that avoid Chaos. Chaos is suppressed on Avalas, as is Good magic to a lesser extend, but Law and Evil magic are more powerful. Spells that produce water and food have minimized effect, but spells that work or conjure iron and steel are of maximum efficiency.

## The locals

Most residents of Avalas are damned souls. Spare little pity for them, for even the most wretched was once a mortal who chose conformity over truth and justice, and took it to the grave rather than repent.

The damned on Avalas fall into several stages. There are the **fresh dead**, the recently-arrived souls with their mortal needs intact. These can live a long time before lack of water, attrition, or a cubic collision brings them low. When they return, clawing themselves out of the iron of the plane itself, they become the **withering dead**. Over the course of decades or centuries, their bodies become weaker, their flesh blackens to the color of pitted iron, and their minds lose any canniness or sanity they once possessed. When this process is complete, and naught is left of their bodies but a hollow iron shell, they become the **rusted.** Vast hordes of rusted are hurled at each other, corralled and shoved onwards by their commanders, until they die at last, crumbling to black powder that blows away in a wind no others feel.

The damned come from every age and every people, but certain races have found themselves fed to the grinding wheel of Avalas more than others.

To the **goblinoids** of the mortal world, Acheron is a scary place, but compelled by the priests of **Maglubiyet** and the pressure of their peers, far too many cross the threshold to the Only Battlefield. Hobgoblins in particular are prone to damnation in Acheron, if and when they do fall, for the worship of the High Chieftain is strong in their cultures. One need only listen to their warcry of “Acheron, Acheron!” to know this. Goblinoids in service to that god are marshaled in great legions on Avalas, the whips of the god himself behind them, urging them on to greater battles, but never to victory.

The goblins of Maglubiyet battle everyone around them, but the banners they most often find themselves opposite are those of the One-Eyed God. For some reason, it appears **Gruumsh** has built his divine realm upon the cubes of Avalas. His hordes of orcs rage against the shields of the goblinoids, neither gaining an advantage over the other, in a faint echo of the war of demons and devils far below.

The presence of Gruumsh on the Plane of Conformity has led to much confusion among scholars, which we will discuss at length later.

Occasionally - *very* occasionally – a spirit will escape Acheron, perhaps by a portal left by a careless adventurer, and reenter the Material Plane. These spirits cannot take the guise of mortals, but are instead clothed as the predators upon life and justice they truly are: the **rakshasa**. Upon the Material Plane, they forget the hardships of their damnation, and are able to experience pleasure once again. As evil beings, they cannot take pleasure except in the exploitation of others, but the sensation of pleasure itself is one almost completely denied to the Acheronic damned, and they cling to the mortal world with claws and teeth. Should a rakshasa be banished back to Avalas (or any of the other layers of Acheron, though the Only Battlefield is the home of many), the plane continues to feed off them, but it leaves the kernel of memory containing the pleasures of the Mortal Plane alive, sharpening the rakshasa’s suffering to a razor edge. For this reason, rakshasa feel incredible hatred for those that bring them to justice, and should they return to the Material Plane, they will seek terrible revenge. On Avalas, some rakshasa dwell in hidden caves and iron castles, brooding over their fading minds and plotting against their mortal enemies, but many more are simply cast back into the battle until fate or will brings them to another way out.

Sometimes, creatures other than damned souls find their way to Avalas. For **rust monsters,** Avalas is a kind of paradise, and vast colonies live in the uncounted cubes upon which no soul, damned or not, has tread. Of course, rust monsters do not go to Avalas when they die – that honor goes to the Plane of Minerals – but that does not stop the layer from attempting to kill as many of the happy little metal-eaters as it can, usually by guiding their cubes into many collisions as it can. The war between rust monsters and Avalas has gone on for millennia, and so far, it seems the infinite plane is the loser. Perhaps the cosmos is built on a foundation of irony. Heh.

Constructs of metal are often built on Avalas, usually by powerful wizards contracted by the evil gods for some purpose or another. **Iron golems** are of course popular, being often equipped with many rusty spikes and blades, but **steel predators** are sometimes built from imported flux and the raw iron wrung from mines deep in the cubes. Legends tell of an **iron colossus,** the work of a mighty archmage that took the iron of three cubes to finish, wandering the layer somewhere, but most of these reports should be disbelieved. To the lost and the damned, even the smallest golem can be a titan.

### Religion

The only gods worshiped on Avalas by the damned are gods of war, evil, and tyranny. Maglubiyet and Gruumsh are popular choices, for somewhat obvious reasons. More traditional gods like Bane, Hextor and Ares are often worshiped by whole companies and legions, usually led by the priest whose words opened the gates to their damnation.

But now we must discuss the troubling question: What is Gruumsh doing on Avalas?

Gruumsh is the god of the orcs, a violent and barbaric race. His portfolio is more concerned with Chaos than Law, in fact there is not a Lawful bone in his ancient body. By rights, he should be on Carceri or Pandemonium or even the Abyss, not a plane of pure Law like Acheron.

This question has troubled scholars for many centuries. Most theologians who debate the subject support one of two theories.

The first theory is that Gruumsh is on Avalas as punishment. It would certainly be poetic justice for a god so given to his own will to be forced to submit to the terrible conditions of a land of conformity. This is the more popular of the theories among those who concern themselves with such matters.

The other theory, one which has many fewer adherents, and which relies on several key assumptions about the gods being wrong, is that Gruumsh was once a god of Law, and the orcs once a Lawful people – and that perhaps Avalas once belonged entirely to the One-Eyed God.

The theory assumes that gods are not static, as most scholars believe, but are like mortals, driven by internal conflicts and emotions rather than base nature – or driven, perhaps, by some overarching force we do not understand. (It should be noted that many adherents of this theory worship this force in some capacity, so their bias cannot be discounted.) If gods can change, then it would make sense to say that Gruumsh was once a Lawful god.

Proponents of this theory carry certain evidences with them. Ancient records, brought from another time or perhaps another realm entirely, set down the nature of orcs as *machine-like bringers of war* rather than roving barbarians as we know them today. The orcs, so these records say, once marched in great legions, wielding unlovely but effective weapons and artifices that they used to bring death and destruction to the whole world. Orcs took pleasure in slaughter, but they were compelled to such lengths of war and siegecraft that all joy left their lives outside of war and death. Ancient orcs sound, the theory’s proponents say, exactly like damned souls on the endless battlefield of Avalas.

Gruumsh in those days (or that realm, as the case may be) would be a god of tyranny and conformity, like Maglubiyet, Bane, and Hextor today. His word would bring death and slavery to many, and his armies would wage endless war without ever knowing or caring why.

Why Gruumsh does not behave in this manner today, proponents of the theory have many explanations for. They claim the One-Eyed God was changed in a petty act by the “overarching force,” or that his battle with Corellon Larethian made him a beast of butchery and rage.

Such theories seem silly, of course, to this scholar. Regardless, if one wishes to understand the Only Battlefield, one must understand the natures of the gods upon its cubes. Gruumsh is one piece of the puzzle, albeit a confusing one, so he must be studied.

## Mysteries

Great opportunities for adventure exist on Avalas. Here are a few examples.

### Encounters

* The party must avoid a wave of rusted that are charging at the foe just behind them.
* A breach in a cube reveals a colony of rust monsters.
* A rakshasa wanders the rubble of a battle, muttering about revenge.
* A gang of fresh damned souls attack the party, clad in “modern” armor and weapons, seeking their flesh to eat.
* An iron golem lurches from beneath a pile of corpses, its commanding spirit erratic.

### NPCs

* Gnacus Sallustius, a human theologian, seeks orc territory, hoping to study the origins of Gruumsh’s hold on Avalas - and perhaps confirm his religious beliefs about the universe.
* Perditium XIV, a marut, searches the wastes of Avalas for a rakshasa that took bitter revenge on an entire city, its mission to put the spirit to its final end as quickly as possible.
* Paconia Sacnia runs a ferry service across the Sea of Retreat in her *apparatus of Kwalish*, collecting money from travelers and damned souls hoping to avoid the waves.

### Weather

* An enormous cloud of black rust, the cast-off effervescence of a rusted horde that was destroyed in a distant time or place, drifts at rapid speeds across the surface of the cube the party is on.
* A lightning spell has been cast upon the cube the party is on, sending an electric shockwave across the entire structure.
* A great wave on the Sea of Retreat approaches.

### Puzzles & traps

* The entrance to the cavern the players must enter is in the middle of a cube face that has recently been hit, leaving the surface red-hot.
* The surface of a cube hides a large number of rust monster lairs, each one barely covered by a thin layer of iron to separate it from the elements that causes it to function like a pit trap and cage fight all at once.
* A series of chains connecting several smaller cubes to a larger one have become tangled. The party must untangle the chains and select the correct one to traverse between cubes without causing any to crash into each other.

### Strange doings

* A cube has appeared out of the grey void, carrying healthy warriors who bear armor and weapons not seen in the mortal world for tens of thousands of years.
* Someone has linked thousands of cubes together with huge lengths of iron, forming a chain. Those that follow the chain to its supposed end never return.
* A tide of iron golems marches across Avalas, utterly silent. Their design has never been seen before.
* Despite dying more times than they can remember, one of the damned has suffered no loss of sanity or strength.
* A cube with tens of thousands of soldiers on it has vanished into thin void before the eyes of countless witnesses.

### Journal

This content is for players, including scraps of note and backstory elements.

*”8th of the month. Sergeant was killed a moment ago. Archer Four has taken his position, and Command is sending her replacement in four hours. Sergeant died during our morning offensive when the Enemy fired its second volley, along with most of the rest of the army group. Am told by Scout Nine that we are fifteen feet closer to Escape Hatch. Sky Cube is more distinct in the haze today.”*

*Every member of your family has been damned to Avalas. You’re determined that it won’t happen to you.*

*”In this plane, is the destiny of man or orc governed by some transcendental entity or law? Is Acheron itself holding us down, denying us victory over our enemies within or without? At least this is true: we have no control here, even – eventually – over our own will.”*

*Your ancestor returned from Acheron, so it is said, by atoning for his misdeeds in battle. You don’t know of anyone else who ever did that.*

*”The next time I die, I will no longer be able to write. I know it. Words are slipping from my mind. I used to know more of them, bigger too. When I dig myself out of the iron of whatever hellish rock I end up on, I will never write again. The commander is sending us out in ten minutes, or what he calls ten minutes anyway. I have to get to the cave, or I will never write again. I have to.”*

*You died and went to Avalas. You never want to go back.*