Hello everybody, Jorphdan here the PH is silent.
Hades… the gray waste.
The Neutral Evil outer plane of the great wheel cosmology.
Where evil springs eternal.
A plane of endless apathy and despair.
This plane is a divide between the demons and the devils, whom are in eternal conflict
with one another.
Many battles have been waged between the two in Hades and will probably continue to for
the unforeseeable future.
In Hades the pure undiluted evil that inhabits the realm acts as a powerful force that drags
all creatures down.
Down in the sense of hopelessness, apathy, and despair.
It seeps into everything in Hades, visitors often give up on things that used to matter
eventually giving in to total apathy.
Hades has three layers known as glooms, the uncaring malevolence that crushes the spirit
permeates each gloom.
The River Styx runs through the top most layer of Hades where travelers can catch a ferry
to other evil aligned planes.
There are also portals that can take you to nearby planes fairly easily, nobody is physically
trapped in Hades.
Emotionally it can drain you to the point where you never leave.
At the end of a long rest a visitor to Hades must make a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw.
On a failure you take one level of exhaustion that can’t be removed while you’re in
Hades.
If you reach six levels of exhaustion you don’t die but are transformed into a larva.
A miserable fiend that has the face of the creature it changed from.
A larva has only a few faint memories of it’s previous life and spends the rest of it’s
life in Hades.
Night hags, liches, and various evil wizard type creatures use these larvae for terrible
rituals.
Some fiends enjoy eating them.
Aside from the Larva there are devils, demons, slaadi, night hags and formians that all exist
here.
Yugoloths also exist here in Hades, which was once their home plane but they have mostly
all migrated to Gehenna at this point.
A few still remain.
And herds of fiery nightmares exist in hades, galloping across the gray waste.
Most everything is gray in Hades.
The glooms are called the gray waste because they are just that: dull gray lands with a
gray sky.
Color is foreign here, when a visitor steps into hades the color disappears around them.
Changing everything into a white, black, or gray.
There is no sun, or moon, or stars in hades, just the bleak gray color emanating from the
sky.
This gray reaches into the hearts of anyone who spends time in Hades.
Nobody laughs or cries, they all just don’t care, or worse yet they simply lie down in
despair.
Oinos is the first gloom, the first layer of Hades is a land of stunted trees, and fields
full of disease.
This plane was also the home of the Blood War, a war between devils and demons.
Which ran throughout 3rd edition and ended when Asmodeus hurled the Abyss into the elemental
chaos during 4th edition.
Up next is Niflheim, the second gloom of Hades.
It’s a layer of gray mists that twist and swirl among trees and ominous bluffs.
The fog limits vision to 100 ft and muffles sound saturating everything with an awful
dampness.
There is a town in Nifelheim known as Death of Innocence.
Tucked away in the misty pines it’s constructed from a surrounding forest.
It holds around 5,000 mortals who spend most of their time indoors giving the town an abandoned
feel.
Plution is the third layer.
A realm where nobody wants to be there and no one can remember why they came.
Stretching for hundreds of miles are the walls of gray marvel that contain the underworld.
A single double gate is the entrance, dented and scarred by heroes who attempted to get
past.
Here these gates are guarded by a three-headed hound made from squirming, decaying bodies
of petitioners to this realm.
Many heroes or adventurers come here hoping to find the spirit of a loved one or friend.
To remove them from Hades and return them to the prime material plane.
It is a dangerous place, besides larvae and petitioners there are demons, yugoloths and
devils that roam this land.
Continuing that cheery thought, up next is the Bleak Eternity of Gehenna, the Neutral
Evil, Lawful Evil realm.
A plane without charity, mercy, or pity.
The Oven of Perdition, and home to the yugoloths.
Gehenna has four layers, of which a giant volcanic mountain dominates each of them.
Each layer is differentiated from the other by its degree of volcanic activity.
The natural surface of this plane slopes at 45 degree angles, and moving from place to
place is dangerous.
Each layer of Gehenna (called a mount) is slightly different, but each burns with an
evil will.
Lava flows out and seeks out the casual traveler, opening fissures under a visitor’s feet.
Khalas the first and lowest layer has a crimson tint near the ground, due to it’s magma
flows.
The slopes of Khalas are streaked with waterfalls and cloaked in steam.
The falls never find the bottom to form rivers, but are instantly turned to steam.
Evaporating or disappearing into fissures.The mightiest of these waterfalls are made by
the River Styx which crosses this layer on it’s way to the Nine Hells.
Chamda the second mount is the most savage.
There is constant magma flow that solid, cool, ground is rare.
Soft gray ash falls everywhere like a deadly snow, often making it difficult to see.
On any of these layers there isn’t a naturally occurring level ground.
However Gehenna’s inhabitants have carved artificial ledges, some of which large enough
for entire cities.
This second level contains the Tower Arcane.
A large tower that rises above the lava flows, decorated with spikes that promise pain and
death.
It’s controlled by Yugoloth wizards and functions as a record vault for the yugoloth
race.
Deep in the tower lies a vast library extending for miles full of dark arcane secrets and
history.
Mungoth is the third mount and is fary less volcanically active than its predecessors.
It is considered quite cold with snowfall being a common occurrence.
The ice that covers the rocky peaks gives a -4 to all climb checks made on this layer.
The snow is deadly though, it’s a snow-ash mixture that deals 1d4 acid damage per minute
exposed.
Only artificial structures or caverns can offer any lasting protection.
One such place of protection is the Valley of the Outcast.
A deep chasm that houses a castle belonging to an outcast fire giant wizard named Tastuo.
Tastuo lives here with her eight siblings hiding from their enemies.
The Valley of Outcast can be a way station for visitors in need, but only if they can
find it.
The final layer of Gehenna is Krangath, the death furnace.
This mount is devoid of all volcanic activity, going inactive a millennia ago.
No wind stirs, no light glimmers, the layer is shrouded in silence, it is a dead world.
That’s where we’ll end today.
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I assume the Yugoloths migrated to Gehenna simply to leave the emotionally draining Hades
for a physically more dangerous plane.
Interesting choices.
If you’re interested in the nine hells of Baator check out my earlier video, links in
the doobly do.
Next week will be the end of the outer plane videos with Acheron and Mechanus.
Thanks for watching and I’ll see you all in the next video.