Dis, the infernal city

## Author

The walled city of Dis

Teleportation circle

## Overview

Cupped in a vale and surrounded by black hills and jagged monstrous peaks, it seems a place a person could walk across in a day, and reach those hills to trace the burning rivers back to their sources, and so walking beside them and crossing passes through the ebon mountains, escape.
But the hills can never be reached. No matter how far or how fast, or on what mighty steed one travels, the rolling black stays fixed to the horizon, and the city unwinds beneath, on and on without end. The city of Dis is small, but infinite, and a day’s journey on foot merely brings the traveler back to where they began.
Wizards would say that the hills are not hills, and the mountains not mountain, but rather shapes imposed by the minds of creatures born in a limited set of dimensions. These minds are equipped for a mere four, cannot process the folds and curves through nine or twelve or a thousand.. The space around Dis ramifies and infiltrates the entire cosmos, and touches everything in every realm. If mortals were granted a vision of what was really there, they would see everything, the whole multiverse at once, and go mad from the revelation.
The center of the city is an immense iron spike. A thousand feet high, it dwarfs the structures around it, and makes the city look like some angry god drove a nail through it to keep it in place. Like the edges of the city, the Iron Tower always seems to be just a little further. Unlike the hills, it can be reached, but the way is indirect, labyrinthine,
wildly complex and nonsensical, and known only the those trusted by the ruler of this realm: Dispater, The Lord of Secrets. Space in Dis is bent and warped in ways mortals cannot perceive, and so travelling straight towards that colossal spire only serves to bring one further away.
The structures of the city are iron, and all of them are hot enough to burn, at best, uncomfortably warm, at worst incandescent, vaporizing flesh and bone at a touch. When chained wretches shuffle from torment to torment, their feet sizzle, and their hair curls.
Most buildings are baroque, tangled formations of twisted, razor-edged iron bars, like black thorn briars hundreds of feet tall. There are flat black obelisks without windows or doors, some small enough to trip over and others the size of palaces. There are huge open pits with red-hot floors, whose walls are a honeycomb of galleries and balconies. Grotesquely wrought fountains in broad plazas run with black, boiling water or molten iron.
The spaces between the buildings are cramped and narrow, and crowded with devils and the damned. The black-iron buildings themselves are mazes of narrow staircases, cramped hallways, oddly shaped chambers, some empty and seemingly without purpose, and others teeming with vile and squalid life. Some doors lead to other buildings in different parts of the city. Some rooms can only be reached by climbing the black-iron sides of the towers along creaked ladders or rusting staircases not quite wide enough for balance. High up above the streets, cruel winds blast the unwary to their deaths, and patrolling clouds of Erinyes delight in tormenting climbers before pitching them from the heights into the red-hot streets below.
This plane serves three purposes; the agony of souls, the industry of hell, and the fortress of its master, Dispater. No clear distinction between these exists, and most activities in the city accomplish all three.
Dis is always reshaping itself. Doors and walls appear and disappear randomly. Creaking iron stairs and skeletal bridges grow along the
structures like ivy, then rust and collapse without warning. And always the damned labor. Armies of souls burn and strain and cook on the searing streets, erecting mighty buildings in a day, and tearing them down as fast.
The endless wars of hell have their birthplace in Dis, for this is where the armaments of devils are made. Fortress forges accept endless streams of molten iron through one end, and send equally endless streams of weapons out the other. These are collected by representatives of all the planes of Baator, loaded onto the backs of suffering wretches and packed off to the front lines of the Blood-War. The furnaces never cool, and doors of the forges blast out oven heat, foul alchemical clouds that melt flesh from bone, and deafening, endless noise. The concussions of ten-thousand trip-hammers combine into an eternal racket that drowns out even the screams.
In the center of it all sits Dispater, the Lord of Secrets, the Watcher from Below, the Iron Spider. If mortals can comprehend this place at all, Dis is best understood as a single, mighty fortress with layer upon layer of potent defenses both brutal and subtle, encircling and protecting its lord.Most intelligent and least confident of the Arch- Devils, Dispater spends eternity reducing all of reality to a game that he can win. With superhuman intellect and a planning horizon that extends into millennia, heroes, monsters, emperors, beggars, nations, and worlds all become cogs of the wheels within wheels within wheels of Dispater's schemes. He is always nine steps ahead, has always seen all possible outcomes and has a plan for every one. When encountered, he knows precisely what to say to any mortal intruder to get them to do exactly what he wants them to. To look upon him is to become his slave, and for the rest of your life never to know if your actions are your own, or just another part of his plan.

## Survival

### Heat and Healing

It would seem that survival for mortals is impossible here, but Dispater is as clever as he is cruel, and has arranged his realm to maximize the suffering of those within it. The quick release of death would be too kind.

The streets and buildings of Dis burn unprotected flesh; mortals and damned souls begin to cook within minutes even if they are protected with thick garments.

But the city is also suffused with a black and hellish vitality. Every creature in it heals disturbingly fast, and needs no sleep. A place of constant healing would seem like a blessing, until you see someone impaled on a glistening steel hook for a thousand years, unable to die.

#### Mechanics

The background heat in Dis does 1 point of damage per round. The flux of demonic vitality heals 1 point per round. Characters who are reduced to 0 hit points always succeed on death saves. Sleep is not possible, and not needed. Hunger and thirst are painful, but not damaging, and so characters that go without food or drink become ravenous, but cannot die from it. In the event that a character suffers catastrophic damage, (beheading, dismemberment, heart torn out) the city reassembles them and they return to life in 24 hours. Characters resurrected in this way emerge naked and dripping from one of the black rivers that flow through the city.

Though most places are merely uncomfortable, heat in the city scales up almost without limit. Some common areas are as hot as a kitchen stove, and cause 2d6 fire damage per round. Some are hot enough to melt lead, and cause 6d6 damage per round.

### Physical Environment

Think of Dis as a circle of iron structures two miles deep and sixty miles across. At fifteen feet per story, that makes the tallest of these structures 666 stories tall. The first 333 levels are what is

thought of as “below ground” although the surface of Dis is a fiction; merely the place where the connections between the buildings are thickest. The second 333 stories look like huge buildings under an open black sky, although these are webbed together so often and so thoroughly by bridges, walkways, galleries, and girders that exactly where “below ground” ends and “above ground” begins is never certain.

The black plain around Dis appears flat, and the entrances through the great iron wall all look to be at the same level, but wall gates all lead to different levels within the city.

The rivers of molten iron and boiling water do not begin above the 333rd level, although they can enter the city on any level below that. Cascades of these liquids are everywhere, and new ones begin frequently when a river breaks through its enclosure, showering unsuspecting levels below with scalding water or liquid metal.

Most of the buildings are rectangular solids. They vary wildly in size, some no bigger than a cottage, and some a quarter mile on a side. The two most common construction styles are solid metal plates, and dense tangles of iron rods. The sides of these are endlessly, wildly complicated, with galleries, bridges, balconies, and perches reaching out and often joining other building in a way that makes it difficult to tell where one ends and another begins. Some buildings stand alone, with blank, impenetrable iron sides visibly cut off from the structures surrounding it.

It’s possible to reach the end of one street, descend a half-mile staircase or elevator that feels like going into the bowels of the earth, but emerge on yet another street. A person can walk into a building on ground level, but out the other side find a chasm that drops a full mile, the sides uncertain and jagged with an endless complexity of windows, ledges, and staircases.

At the command of Disapter, teams of demons and damned are always tearing down structures and erecting new ones, and so the city is constantly warping and shifting. This also means that collapses are commonplace. Most of these are

relatively minor; sections the size of houses dropping a few hundred feet. From time to time though, some thoughtless imp will destabilize something in the deep levels and a full two miles of iron will come crashing all the way down to the bottom, pulling with it anything attached, and crushing anyone unlucky enough to be near.

#### Mechanics

Climbing the sides of these buildings is usually easy because they are mostly made of iron bars. The main hazard is becoming exhausted because of the distances one has to climb.

* Climb a building: strength (athletics) DC 8
* Climb an overhang or transition between buildings: strength (athletics) DC 15
* Every 10 stories, make a Constitution Save DC 12 or suffer one level of exhaustion.

The boiling rivers are a constant danger.

* Splashed with liquid iron droplets causes 2d6 points of fire damage; Reflex save DC 10 for half
* Immersion in molten iron causes 10d10 points of fire damage per round
* Splashed with boiling water causes 1d4 points of damage
* Immersion in boiling water causes 3d6 points of fire damage per round

### Finding Your way

Moving around in Dis is difficult, and keeping track of your position is even harder. There are broad boulevards, but these are crowded with demons on errands of their own. They are not automatically hostile, but they have little patience with mortals. Some will ignore the characters. Some will crush anything in their path. Others would butcher a PC party just to hear what kind of noises they make.

Moving through less traveled ways is safer in some respects, but these ways have challenges of their own. They tend to wind up thin staircases, across creaking bridges, down long cables, or close to the rivers of molten iron.

#### Mechanics

Encounter tables for both main streets and side street are provided in the encounter tables in the Toolkit section.

There are two ways to keep track of your position in Dis. Since some major features of the city remain in the same place for longer, it is possible to remember how to get from one place to another by memorizing major landmarks. There is no perceivable pattern to the layout, and so there are no easy rules to help with this. Everything must be learned by rote. Players wishing to find the way from one known location to another known location may make an Intelligence (Survival) check to remember the sequence of directions. The difficulty depends on the distance between the two; 10 for something close, and 20 for something far.

Predicting where to find specific sites in the city, and what series of steps to follow to reach them, is very difficult and requires a good working knowledge of planar mechanics and six- dimensional topology. Finding your way around the city like this requires an intelligence (arcana) check DC 30. This goes down by one per day until it reaches 20.

### Mental Stress

To exist in the city of Dis is to be in constant pain. Everything burns. Everything is sharp. Anyone who has ever had a toothache can tell you that even moderate pain can become maddening if it’s inescapable.

In Dis pain is inescapable, and it will drive you mad.

#### Mechanics

At the end of every 24 hours, characters in Dis must make a Wisdom save DC 12, or suffer one level of exhaustion. Every 24 hours they may save again. Success brings the character down one level, and failure moves them up one.

In addition to the normal penalties, each level also causes insanity.

At the first and second level of exhaustion, PCs roll on the short-term insanity table. At the third, fourth and fifth on the long-term insanity table. At the sixth level, roll on the indefinite insanity table. This permanent insanity represents the way that the PCs mind has bent to deal with the constant pain.

Begin the process again. This time reduce the DC to 8. The next time reduce it to 4, then zero. Once a mortal has become mad enough, they can be considered fully acclimatized to the plane of Dis. This has one benefit: for the rest of their lives; characters who have been through this agonizing process have a +2 on all concentration checks, and furthermore can choose to pass one concentration check per day automatically. Anyone attempting to intimidate this character with threats of pain rolls with disadvantage.

## **Locations**

*from* Codex of the Infinite Planes v. 18, “Weird Dave” Coulson

* The Shadowcast Forges: a foundry connected to The Spire where living shadow iron is created.
* The Bronzed Bazaar: Marketplace on the surface of Dis. Primarily sells weapons and armor made there, but just about anything can be found there, if you know where to look.
* Mentiri, the prison: Deep under the surface, a section of the city is sealed off. Half is dedicated to imprisoning irritating mortals, the other half to converting promising souls into devil.
* The Jangling Hiter: City of Kytons, it hangs from the underside of Dis, suspended over the plane of Malbolge by immense chains

### The Spire

Most of the time, Dispater’s palace resembles a monumental black-iron spike a thousand feet tall. It exists in a large number of dimensions, and so its topology isn’t simple. Looking at it from different points in the city changes its appearance drastically; it could be infinitely tall, a floating

sphere, a wall that bisects the city, a house or a cone, castle, torus, fog bank, or an open pit in the sky. It is visible from everywhere in the city, and always seems to be only a block or two away. Walking directly towards the version of it that you see doesn’t get you any closer.

Reaching the spire requires passing through a series of gates within the city. They are in obscure locations, no two are the same; some are disguised, some are guarded, some are trapped. Discovering this way requires making contact with and bribing shady demons, befriending lost souls, exploring hostile buildings, or traversing the city in strange directions. The demons who sell PCs directions believe they are part of a black market, but are really just one more layer in Dispater’s defenses. He owns, or controls, everything in Dis, even gangs, groups, and cabals that are opposed to him. If someone sells the PCs the directions to Dispater’s lair, it’s because he wants them to come to him.

### Strange Meats Market

This market is one of the few stable points in Dis. It seems to occupy a space close to the palace. In a city of black iron towers and obelisks, it is a low, rambling place built from bits and pieces of whatever metal was lying around.

The center of the Strange Meats market is The Butchery. Here the demons take advantage of the healing provided damned city to provide themselves with a never-ending buffet. Living creatures of all types are impaled on iron spikes behind counters and the butchers carve pieces from their flesh to be sold to the patrons of the market. Every kind of creature in the multiverse can be found here. Some have been here for hundreds or even thousands of years, carved to pieces again and again, but constantly re-growing and unable to die.

The stalls are sized for their victims. There are tiny stalls the size of bedroom doors that sell peeled fairies. There are huge ones where the butchers hack pieces from wooly mammoths with long- bladed axes.

You can tell when you are getting close to the market because of the sound that comes from it. The victims scream and scream and scream, and their howls of agony merge together and echo off the black iron and create a bizarre harmony; a prayer to Dispater, who listens with satisfaction, knowing that his city is performing its function.

The Strange Meats Market is the center, and it is surround by a larger, less ghastly, market, where the odds and ends of the multiverse collect and are sold. Devils, wizards, djinns, dragons, Gith, Illlithids, and other dimensional travelers skulk the narrow streets in search of things forbidden.

### Raduphaels Prison

Deep under the Market, where the sewage and filth collect, an Angel is nailed to a wall; wings spread, arms outstretched, obscured from the waist down in black and stinking filth. There are hundreds of spikes securing Them there. These have been hammered into the hot black iron behind the angel, and bent into hooks so that They cannot escape. Even in this state They are heartbreaking beautiful; the incarnation of everything pure in the cosmos. Their back sizzles against the wall, the sewage pours down over Their wings, but Their head is upright, proud and defiant and from under Their halo of snow-white hair, brilliant purple eyes shine like stars.

Raduphael is fallen. Cast out from the Silver City for some unspeakable crime, They wandered hell for an age before settling in Dis. They were one of Dispater’s generals, and commanded hosts of Erinyes. They fought in the blood wars, tall and shining, and carved through legions with a sword made of light.

It could be that They betrayed Dispater. It could be that the paranoid demon lord merely suspected Them, or feared that the angel’s power should be turned against him. At the cost of thousands, the angel was subdued and dragged here. Dispater himself drove the nails that hold the angel fast.

Raduphael is old, frighteningly intelligent and profoundly evil. They are capable of tracking the billions of branching futures that have their roots in the present, and whenever someone comes

within earshot of them, They say the thing that will lead to the worst possible consequences for the unfortunate trespasser.

In conversation, the angel seems kind, and wise, and gentle, but every second that conversation continues permits Them to exercise more and more control over the future of the trespasser, steering them towards calamity.

If the PCs encounter the Angel, something in their future will go absolutely, perfectly, all the way to hell. An important event will unfold in ways that are utterly wrong. Whatever the worst possible outcome is, that’s what will happen. When the unwitting emissaries of Raduphael step back into the world, dynasties fall, cities are slaughtered, famine drives nations to cannibalism, and the Angel looks up through Their shit-drenched hair and laughs and laughs and laughs.

### Foundry District

The weaponry of the blood war comes from many places, but nowhere produces as much by itself as the Foundry of Dis. Liquid metals pour through the canals of the city like rivers, and converge on the foundry from all direction. Viewed from the air (which usually means that the Erinyes have got you, and you’re about to get some flying lessons) the foundry looks like a mishappen spider at the center of a glowing red web.

Inside the foundries the rivers of iron splash into troughs and sluices that direct it into molds. It is oven-hot in here. Damned slaves labor over anvils; their skin bubbles, their eyes boil. Drops of liquid metal sear through their skulls. There is no respite from the heat, and no rest.

The noise is incredible. Normally a forge hisses, clangs, and roars, but here thousands of massive trip-hammers create a stupendous cacaphony that drowns, crushes, strangles, and obliterates every other sound. Nothing else can be heard here. This means that characters are unable to hear any speech, and must find other ways to communicate. Characters that spend more than a day in the Forge go permanently deaf, and require *lesser restoration* to return their hearing.

Characters visiting this place suffer 1d10 fire damage per round. Every minute, they must make a dexterity save DC 14 or take 3d6 fire damage from gobs of liquid metal raining down from above.

Most of the foundry looks like it was bolted together from titanic offcuts. The whole place has a slapped-together, ramshackle sort of feeling to it. Gear trains jump and thrash on irregular cog- wheels. Troughs leak molten metal. In some places the floors and walls are just sketched out in iron bars, leaving open pits for the unwary to fall into. The exception is the center; the Forge Cabal. Rising up over the foundry is a strange building carved from grey stone. It is square and utilitarian, without decoration or wasted space. Here reside the master smiths of Dis.

This is not a place of torment. It is a place of craft. The damned are not permitted here. Dispater recruits talented smiths from all over the multiverse, and provides them with excellent materials to work with. Some of the most dangerous items ever created came from these forges, and some of the greatest metalworkers on any plane served an apprenticeship in hell. The halls of the central forge are of seamless chromed steel and intricately carved black basalt. Every room seems to have a specific purpose, each filled with clinically organized racks of specialist tools. There are furnaces here that can reproduce temperatures and pressures normally only found in the hearts of stars.

The Shadowcast Forges and the Forge Cabal are part of the same building, even though they are separated by great distances. The bottom layer of the Cabal connects to the top of the Shadowcast by three doors. One admits smiths from the Cabal into the Shadowcast, but not out. One is an elevator that ships Shadow iron up into the Cabal. The elevator shaft doubles as a chimney, and the whole machine is sterilized by the immense heat. Living creatures take 6d6 points of fire damage per round in the shaft. The third door is secret, its existence and location known only to a few. People can go into the Shadowcast forge, but only Shadow Iron ever comes out.

Every being who comes into the Forge Cabal is scrutinized by a flock of Erinyes. They know exactly who Dispater has given permission to be there, and will immediately dismember anyone else. Some forge-masters run afoul of the Lord of Dis, and only find out about it in the last few seconds of their lives, when they realize their permission has been revoked, and the Erinyes now regard them as lawful prey.

### The Slaughter Pits

Scattered throughout the city, but concentrated around Dispater’s palace are the slaughter pits; a demon’s first choice for entertainment. They are exactly what they sound like. Cylindrical holes, the smallest fifty feet wide and twenty deep. The largest is the Circus Diabolica, large enough to swallow palaces.

Dis is foamy with tunnels, and shot through with underground rivers of lava and boiling water. The edges of the slaughter pits slice right through all of this, like Dispater himself cut out a perfect circle with a scalpel and lifted it out of the city. Subterranean galleries and rooms terminate at the edge of the pit and provide viewing platforms for the infernal masses that crowd and gibber around the edges, hungry for gore. Rivers and lava streams that intersect a pit pour down in hellish cataracts, to pool at the bottom, or run through grates that lead yet deeper into the city.

The bottoms and sides of the pits are adorned with architectural complications; platforms, ladders, grates, bridges, swinging blades, suspended weights, dangling cables, dimensional gates, spikes, and pits. These are surrounded by the lava streams, making all movement hazardous, and possibly deadly. Devils construct these for entertainment. They have competitions with each other to see whose traps can achieve the goriest dismemberment, whose arrangement of surfaces and walls presents victims with the worst choices. They gather around the pits and scream and gibber and howl in grotesque arousal.

Demons, singly or in groups will occupy the bottom of a pit and defy all comers. Other demons will fetch strings of damned souls, smaller demons, or unfortunate mortals and toss them

over the sides. People that they want to actually see fight are forced to climb down.

Nobody dies in Dis and so the losers generally wake up in a few hours at the banks of one of the rivers, cold, naked, choking, and slathered in oily black water. Not all are so lucky. If a demon is particularly pleased with his kill, or insulted by his opponent, he may claim their living body as a trophy. There are a few magical tricks available that will let a demon keep just a head alive, and they wear them like pearls on a necklace.

Dispater attends the Circus Diabolica when a new champion arrives that would make a suitable tool for one of his schemes. Like all true masters of an art, he chooses only the implement most perfectly suited to the task, and only he knows exactly what that task is, and so his choice of tools is often surprising. because they are not always the most powerful, or even the most willing. One of the only ways out of Dis is to fight through the Slaughter Pits, gain Dispater’s attention, and accept whatever offer he makes.

## Moving between Planes

### Planar Gates

Dispater depends on the influence gained selling arms manufactured in Dis and so the city needs doors. Raw materials, finished products, and customers must be able to move in and out. On the other hand, he doesn’t want damned souls and indentured devils escaping. Caught between these two opposing necessities, Dispater has had to find a balance point.

The markets and foundries of Dis all contain interplanar gates. Most of these connect to the other eight layers of Baator, but some connect to the Prime Material, and some to the Elemental planes.

These are easy to open from the other side, but from Dis they are made purposefully difficult to access. Each one is under the care of a minor infernal lord; Knights of the Gate. Large and public gates are guarded by Pit Fiends or Erinyes.

Smaller gates are guarded by lesser devils. All are proud of their status as Knights, and terrified of Dispater’s wrath, and so all of them will fight to the death.

Each gate can only be opened by a key in the possession of that lord. Like the gate keys in Sigil, these could be anything; a word, a feather, a dance, a sacrifice or a rhythm. If the wrong key, or no key is used, the gate opens, but instead leads to Mentiri: Dis’ prison.

### Up to Avernus

Dis is physically connected to the other planes of Baator; Avernus and the Blood War above, and the mephitic swamps of Malbolge below. Getting to these places doesn’t require a gate; you can walk.

Three buildings in Dis connect directly to Avernus. They are superficially identical to the buildings in the city, but whereas the rest of Dis is always in flux, these three structures are fixed. These connections are vulnerable to marauding demons from above, and escaping souls from below, so they are well guarded.

There is no obvious transition within the building from one plane to the other. If a person climbs up one all the way to the top, first they would notice that the windows disappear. Then the sounds of the city would fade. The walls gradually include less iron, and more stone, until they become a winding staircase through a cave. At the end of the cave, the climber emerges on to the gory plains of Avernus.

Almost all the black mountains that surround Dis are illusions, mortal mental interpretations of vastly more complex phenomena, but one of them is an intrusion of the Plane of Shadows that overlaps both Dis and Avernus. In Dis, it’s a mountain. In Avernus, it’s a crater. Both are called Nightshade.

Dispater goes to some length to keep the existence of Nightshade mountain and its connection to Avernus a secret. It is a place that he does not, cannot, directly control and so he regards it as a threat. PCs will find no more than rumors of its existence. Exploring the black vale

of Dis looking for it is hazardous. The mountain itself is home to the cruelest denizens of the Shadow Plane, who delight in tormenting mortals before consuming them.

Characters who climb the mountain will perceive no transition between the planes. While climbing the mountain, its only possible to see up the next ridgeline. At some point, crossing over a ridge reveals, instead of the mountain peak, the plains of Avernus.

### Down To Malbolge

This is a disorienting trip for natives of the Prime Material Plane. They tend to think of “down” as being “deeper into the earth” rather than “towards another plane.” So it comes as some surprise to them that, if you get deep enough into Dis, you can fall out the bottom.

Under the deepest layers of the city is a vast open space full of swirling cloud. Between the city and the cloud layer, the air is merely foggy for about 100 feet, and so its possible to see the ragged underside of Dis. Monolithic iron buildings hang down into the fog. These are surrounded by black, skeletal structures which serve as docks or perches for clouds of winged devils. These are always obscured by fog and are all the more threatening for being half-seen.

The black rivers of Dis, thick with sewage and gore and industrial waste, vomit from ragged holes in the city’s superstructure, and disappear into the mists below. It’s far enough down to Malbolge that these vaporize long before they reach the swamps below. Any creature unfortunate enough to be flushed out falls all the way down.

Near the center of Dis, iron chains hang down and disappear into the mist. These represent one of the most impressive pieces of engineering in all of Baator, and their size destroys the viewers sense of distance. Seen from afar, they look like normal chains, and it’s difficult to tell how far away they are because the underside of the city is irregular, and because the mist makes everything uncertain.

As the viewer approaches, they loom larger. Again and again it seems like they are close enough to touch, and still they grow, until it becomes clear

that each individual link is the size of a house. From a distance they look like cast black iron, but close inspection shows a dense web of black struts the size of a man’s arm, interlinked in a bizarre symmetry that both fascinates and nauseates.

These chains suspend the Kyton city, The Jangling Hiter, halfway between Dis and Malbolge. There the Chain Devils labor ceaselessly to perfect the art of torture. Devils, demons, monsters, gods, serial killers, inquisitors, and psychopaths summon the Kytons to learn the ways of pain. The devils advertise their proficiency by leaving their prized work, bloody and shredded, dangling from barbed chains.

This is a dangerous path. If travelers are caught in the Citadel of Pain, chances are they will never leave, and will spend the rest of eternity being expertly, endlessly vivisected.

## Toolkit

### Crowded street encounters

These encounters can usually be dealt with charm or violence. The first few encounters are the major, fixed locations in Dis. These can serve as points of reference for navigating the city.

### Random building generator

#### Size and shape

 6-10
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#### Construction style

 5-8
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#### Getting in

 3-4
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### Room generators

#### Room dimensions

Rooms are described as if the door the players enter from is the south door. Dimensions are given first east-west, then north- south. Features and doors are described with compass directions out of convenience. Once you know what the room looks like, you can rotate it to fit into the map that you are building. If a room doubles back to overlap previous rooms, re-roll or cut it off. Join the two if either one shares a side with a door. If two rooms are only 5’ or 10’ apart, doors can lead through short passages to the adjoining room. Rooms that go over the edge of the building can be cut off, and the doors treated as windows. Alternatively, they can be treated as either balconies or bridges, as convenient.

 2
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#### Doors

Rooms need doors. Each one has 1d6 doors. To determine where they go in the room, roll a d12 and distribute them by clock numbers. Roll below for random exits. If the room has large creatures or other special features, design exits accordingly.

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#### Room features

Positions of these features have sometimes been left intentionally vague. Since the rooms will have different dimensions, the placement of these features will be largely up to the DM. Many of the features extend to different floors. If the PCs are ascending, then they encounter the bottom of the feature. If they are descending, they encounter the top. Some features are incompatible. If you roll a ladder through the ceiling, and roll a lake of lava in the room above, re-roll. Unless otherwise stated, every room has a 50% chance of an encounter.

### Building encounters table

There are two parts to this encounter table. The d100 is for generating truly random encounter. The d20 side is for leveled encounters that make more sense in whatever context the PCs are working in. When rolling on the d100 side, bear in mind that there are encounters beyond CR20, and if the PCs have no reasonable chance to avoid them, rolling these might result in a nearly automatic TPK. Flavor text accompanies each roll. Ignore it if it doesn’t fit the situation.