The Nine Hells

### **Avernus**

**The** **First** **Circle** **of** **Hell** is also the "topmost" because Astral travellers would emerge from colour pools on this layer and reaching the next circle required descending to the lower depths to breach a barrier to **Dis**.

**Avernus** is a desolate wasteland with rocky terrain, sparse, twisted vegetation, concealed snake pits, caves and warrens, volcanoes, and rivers of magma. The ground is littered with the detritus of countless battles, and blood trickles out of the ground in vein-like streams eventually flowing into the river **Styx.**

The sky is starless, full of choking smoke, and glows a dark red due to balls of flammable gas that float about or streak across the atmosphere.

**Zariel, The Fallen** is the current ruler of Avernus, after **Lord** **Bel**, the former lord, was demoted to being her advisor by **Asmodeus**. She resides in a soaring basalt citadel.

**Zariel, The Fallen** is the current ruler of Avernus, after **Lord** **Bel**, the former lord, was demoted to being her advisor by **Asmodeus**. She resides in a soaring basalt citadel.

### **Dis**

**The** **Second** **Circle** **of** **Hell** when described as its own layer, is a flat barren plane containing little more than black, stagnant rivers, stretching for thousands of miles until it reaches some rolling hills.

The sky is a cloudy dull green shot through with lightning. In the centre of this plane rises the **Iron** **City** **of** **Dis**, several miles in height and hundreds of miles wide. The foul rivers radiate from a moat big enough to be called a lake surrounding the **Iron** **City.**

**Dispater, Father of Strife** is the current ruler of **Dis.** Paranoid and reclusive, he never leaves the inner sanctum of the **Iron** **Tower** at the centre of the city of **Dis**. He is stoic, emotionless, and expressionless. He remains this way constantly even in the heat of battle and while committing acts of unspeakable evil.

### **Minauros**

**The Third Circle of Hell** is an endless bog of vile pollution, decaying bodies, and rotting marsh, repeatedly drenched by rain, sleet and hail storms.

The soggy, bone-strewn, disease-ridden swampland makes movement very difficult and is only broken occasionally by serpentine ridges of volcanic rock.Nameless creatures even the devils fear inhabit the swamp.

The huge stone city of **Minauros****the****Sinking** is located here, so called because the weight of the city causes it to continually slip beneath the slimy waters; only the endless efforts of thousands of slaves prevents it from doing so. The city sits in a marshy bowl in the centre of these volcanic lands, and is constructed of a black stone gleaned from another plane

**Mammon** **of** **Avarice** is the current ruler of **Mammon**, Despised by his peers, no one trusts **Mammon** thanks to his record for duplicity. Condemned to his stinking mire, he dreams of one day throwing off **Asmodeus's** curse and attaining his rightful place, with **Glasya** at his feet.

### **Phlegethos**

**The Fourth Circle of Hell** is the Hell that most resembled the stereotype of a fiery world of eternal damnation, filled with active volcanoes, rivers of liquid fire, molten rock, ash hills, smoking pits, unbearable heat, all wracked by tremors and earthquakes.

The city of **Abriymoch** is the seat of power in this realm, built of hardened magma, obsidian, and crystal in the caldera of an extinct volcano which provided visitors some protection from the elemental environment found throughout the rest of the plane.

**Lady** **Fierna** is technically the current ruler of **Phlegethos;** in truth it is her father **Belial** who is the power behind the throne. **Belial** advises his daughter in the arts of love and pain, taking a personal hand in ensuring she learns all there is to know. Up until now, the situation suited **Fierna** just fine. But thanks to her flowering relationship with **Glasya**, she has become more interested in taking **Phlegethos** in more than just name.

### **Stygia**

**The Fifth Circle of Hell** is a freezing layer of cold and ice dominated by a murky ocean fed directly by the **River** **Styx**. The dark sky is constantly filled with lightning storms, and the ice may be lit by weird cold flames.

**Tantlin**, the City of Ice, is built on a huge ice floe with a large harbour to the river **Styx**, and is ruled over by a huge pit fiend. The lack of any kind of law enforcement leads itself to gangs controlling much of the city.

A few floating islands were the only non-frozen ground in **Stygia**, their peaks wreathed in lightning arcing from the coal-black sky.

**Lord** **Levistus** is the current ruler of **Stygia, Asmodeus** imprisoned Levistus in ice for a past betrayal, namely attempting to ravish, and eventually killing **Bensozia**, consort to **Asmodeus** and mother to **Glasya**. **Levistus** was, for millennia, trapped within his tomb, unable to act, but recently **Asmodeus** made an inexplicable gesture to his lover's murderer, displacing the formerly loyal ruler of Stygia, **Geryon**, and passing the position over to the frozen prince, though leaving him trapped within his tomb. **Levistus** rules his layer via telepathic instructions issued to his many Amnizu courtiers.

### **Malbolge**

**The Sixth Circle of Hell** isa steep, infinite craggy incline often subject to avalanches that crushed most anything that got in the way.

The copper-shod redoubts were teardrop-shaped or otherwise engineered to deflect tumbling boulders, but even those could not long withstand a direct hit from a major avalanche

**Glasya, The Dark Prodigy** is the current ruler of **Malbolge**, a Princess of the **Nine** **Hells** and ruler of the sixth layer of Hell. She is noted as one of the most powerful and influential of the female devils and for being the daughter of **Asmodeus**.

**Glasya** was once **Mammon's** favoured consort. However, this relationship changed when **Mammon** sided against **Asmodeus** in the **Reckoning**. **Mammon** slunk back to the Lord of Hell and **Glasya** was taken from him and appointed **Queen** **of** **the** **Erinyes**, a position she absolutely despised. Since becoming Lord of the Sixth, **Glasya** has had a thriving friendship with **Fierna**, which frightens **Belial** as his 'loving' daughter may believe she no longer has any use for her manipulative father.

### **Maladomini**

**The Seventh Circle of Hell** is a colossal maze of passages each several miles across that eventually led to Cania, Malbolge, and Nessus

The **Seventh** **Hell** is filled with ruins of old cities, stagnant rivers, exhausted and abandoned quarries and strip mines, stone aqueducts and lava canals, decaying fortresses, swarms of biting flies, and black pools of ichor that erupted from the ground. The Lord of the Seventh was never satisfied with the construction of his capitol and repeatedly built and abandoned city after city.

The largest and most beautiful was **Malagard**, a sprawling metropolis/palace/fortress/arcology with myriad black towers linked by a tangled web of bridges and walkways. **Malagard** was rumoured to contain a million rooms and to cap an equally complex dungeon labyrinth.

**Baalzebub** is one of the most powerful archdevils. Formerly a celestial archon known as **Triel**, he bore the titles **Fallen** **One, Lord of the Flies, Lord of the Lies,** and **The Slug Archduke.** The last refers to the form he was cursed with after the **Reckoning** **of** **Hell**; **Asmodeus** has made his natural form that of a filth-covered giant slug with tiny arms.

### **Cania**

**The Eighth Circle of Hell** is a bitterly cold-dominant realm of solid ice mountains, titanic, unnaturally fast-moving glaciers and nearly continuous snowfall that made **Stygia** seem balmy by comparison. But on the positive side there are few creatures that hunt in the icy wastes.

Early lore describes the great citadel **Mephistar** as being constructed of iron,but later reports say the Lord of the Eighth's fortress/palace was made of ice. All accounts seemed to agree the tower had a heated, luxurious interior and sat atop a gargantuan glacier called **Nargus** whose speed and movement were under the control of **Mephistopheles** himself.

**Mephistopheles, The Lord of No Mercy** and **The Cold Lord,** was the main opponent of **Baalzebul** during the **Reckoning of Hell**, and still holds a claim to his own layer. He seeks to take **Baalzebul's** layer away from him, that he may gain enough power to one day challenge **Asmodeus** for ruler ship of all the **Nine** **Hells**.

**Mephistopheles** is something of a walking contradiction. Unstable and thoroughly wicked, he presents multiple faces to those he meets. On the one hand, he can be charming, erudite, and civil. But beneath the veneer of respectability is a vicious temper and unchecked ambition.

### **Nessus**

**The Ninth Circle of Hell** is a place of pits and ravines of virtually endless depths. The great citadel of **Malsheem** lies immediately below the portal between **Cania** and **Nessus** and is the largest fortress in all of the Outer Planes. Here, **Asmodeus** rules over the entire plane, and thus the entire race of devils.

The surface of **Nessus** is a plain shattered by rifts deeper than the deepest ocean trench. Many of the ravines and canyons here reach thousands of miles into undifferentiated, dead stone. Rumour has it that an offshoot of the River **Styx** flows here and there, dropping into trenches and trickling its way across the layer.

**Asmodeus**, **Prince** **of** **Evil** was a lawful creature with the goal of becoming the supreme creature in the multiverse even if it required destroying the current one and creating a new one. He genuinely believes that a bright future awaits the multiverse, if he was to rule it. As arrogant this claim sounded, **Asmodeus** has the competence to back it up.