Chapter Four: Planar Geography
Hell’s Geography Like the mortal realm, Hell has cities, rivers, lakes, and other landmarks. Unlike in the Material Plane, just about everything in Hell is dangerous or deadly, and many things are also deceptive, harsh, cruel, or gruesome.
Cities For a place teeming with millennia of dead souls and tens of thousands of fiends, Hell is sparsely populated. Demons and souls tend to congregate near places of interesting torture. Other parts of Hell are barren landscapes of parched earth and blasted rock traversed by only a few rogue demons or other strange monsters hunting for stragglers. Hell has two major cities, and in them the demons grow thick. Other than these cities, dozens of strongholds controlled by powerful demons, great fallen angels, or half-forgotten gods dot the plane. However, none are of any particular strategic or historical significance. Dis: The walled city of Dis is famous for its appearance in Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Inferno. Its inhabitants are fiends and condemned souls. The majority of the fiends are erinyes, and most of the condemned souls are heretics of one faith or another. Within the city’s walls is a seemingly endless vault of stone crypts, each containing an evil soul and each burning brightly with punitive fire. Dis stands near the Hellmouth. Fortress of Wet Bone: This flying citadel made of dark, strong metal glides about in the vicinity of Gehenna in Hell, although it has also been spotted on the Astral Plane. It is essentially a flying torture chamber where the dead are flogged and slashed until reduced to bloody skeletons.
Fields Most of Hell’s open space is bare rock populated by an occasional demon occupied with beating a few lost souls. Some parts are more unusual. Adamnan’s Barrens: Named for the mystic who saw a vision of this place, this semicircle of relatively flat, broken terrain bounded by a ridge is a fiery place of torture. The ground itself is red-hot rock, and souls lacking more specific punishments are required to march back and forth across the near-molten stone while demons shoot them with flaming arrows. Some souls are lashed to burning stone columns with chains of molten serpents. Others are immersed to the neck in a lake of flame that drains to the River Phlegethon. Particularly wicked beings are also pierced through the tongue with scalding-hot spikes. Occasionally the demons turn the souls loose in a false promise of freedom, only to set wild dogs and hell hounds to chase after and devour them. Alberic’s Valley: This shallow spot in Hell is named for the monk who experienced a vision of it. It is a river valley located on an offshoot of the River Phlegethon. The river offshoot scours a path in Hell’s landscape, creating the valley before
disappearing underground through a nearly vertical chasm. The top of the valley is ringed with piercingly cold ice that only Phlegethon, the river of fire, can melt. Trees of thorns fill most of the valley’s interior, and only a few bare places remain where the river has burned clearings in them. Near the center of the valley is a lake of boiling blood in which damned souls must stand, swim, or drink, depending upon the depths of their evil. Suspended in the river are great iron cauldrons of human excrement in which the damned roast in boiling filth. The exit chasm of the fiery river has a few landings partially ringing it where demons have placed cauldrons of burning pitch. Ladders extend upward from the cauldrons. The damned are told that if they reach the top of the red-hot ladders, which rest against the top rim of the chasm, they will be freed from Hell. Invariably the souls fall into the pitch. Aralu: Aralu is a hot, dusty place at the base of a huge mountain. In this depressing land, the souls of the dead are heaped in mass graves. The weight of other souls upon them is crushing and prevents most movement. Cursed with a terrible hunger, they must dine on dirt and filth, while rats gnaw on their flesh. Outside the mass graves prowl monsters and horrific fiendish beasts that snatch any soul that manages to free itself. Sometimes demons or evil gods drag souls out for unique tortures and then throw them back into a mass grave. Drugaskan’s Sinkhole: If it weren’t for the bottomless pits, this sinkhole would be the lowest spot in Hell. It is named for the demonic son of Samael, who gloomily rules over this place. Drugaskan’s Sinkhole is an oppressive place so thick with darkness that everyone who goes there is permanently blinded. At its center, the darkness is so great that it exerts a crushing pressure on anything within it. Gehenna: Once a place on the Material Plane sanctified to the evil god Molech (who presumably lies bound in Lelwanis’ Realm), Gehenna was a place of many human sacrifices, including the sacrifice of children. Condemned (or drawn) to Hell for its vileness, Gehenna is festering mound of constantly burning filth and garbage. Souls hang or roast as punishment here, though some are merely left to choke on the horrible smoke and fumes given off by the fires. The agony of the torture is amplified by Gehenna’s proximity to Jacob’s Ladder, for the evil souls know they are just a short distance away from unattainable paradise. Gottschalk’s Desert: This place of torment is named for the peasant who experienced it in a vision. The land is a desert full of thorny plants. On one end is a tree with many sturdy shoes, but the shoes can only be claimed by pure souls, because they burn the hands of the impure. The dead are forced to walk barefoot across the desert with the thorns rending their feet into bloody stumps. At the end of the desert they must cross a river full of razor-sharp blades (a finger of the Acheron) and enter a maze populated with
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