[ Pandemonium ] [ Pandesmos | Cocytus | Phlegethon | Agathion ]
Pandemonium
The Howling Lands, the Maddening Plane
Pandemonium is a good place to go mad and end it all. The labyrinthian tunnels of Pandemonium ain’t just insanely tangled and as desolate as a barmies graveyard, but they’re filled with wind like the screaming of tortured powers. You can hear all sorts of things on the wind in Pandemonium, none of it pleasant. It sort of marks a blood’s soul, does this place.
PANDESMOS — LAYER THE FIRST
Imagine an endless expanse of light-snuffing rock with tunnels twisting this way and that. Often they open out into vast caverns or bore down into narrow crawlspaces. And the wind, cutter! Sometimes a stale breeze but more often a powerful gale, the wind never sleeps. It carries the sounds of insanity; screams, cries, an incessant buzz. It’ll drive a body barmy before long too. Of the four layers of Pandemonium, Pandesmos is the least uninhabitable, and some of the larger caverns contain sparse settlements clinging on to the rock like limpets. Gravity here orientates towards the nearest wall, so a cutter can walk—or be blown—up the walls and across the ceiling. The locals are a bad-tempered bunch, driven half-mad by the winds and the other half by the darkness. This is the plane of incessant paranoia and twitching insanity.
COCYTUS — LAYER THE SECOND
Called the Layer of Lamentation by detractors and inhabitants alike, Cocytus is also a confusing mass of tunnels through rock, but these ones have been chiselled out by unseen hands. Whoever did it is long gone and were clearly quite insane, because these passageways twist, turn and overlap each other in all dimensions. They’re much more narrow here than on Pandesmos, and seem to have been carved in a way to make the unceasing wind wail and moan like a barmy banshee. Gravity here orientates towards the walls, making navigation of this place even more of a maddening challenge. This is the plane of loss and sorrow, so intense it’ll drive a cutter mad.
PHLEGETHON — LAYER THE THIRD
The tunnels of Phlegethon are ice cold and pitch dark, and even the wind has lost some of its ferocity. Once smooth walls, looking like they were bored out by some enormous tunnelling creature, the constant drip of water over the millenia have filled the ceilings with stalactites and the floors with stalagmites. Yes, gravity here is ‘normal’, meaning the mineral-rich waters drip incessantly. The rock here seems to absorb light and heat, making Phlegethon even more forlorn than the higher layers of Pandemonium, if that’s possible. This is the plane of bitter loneliness.
AGATHION — LAYER THE FOURTH
The strangest and deadliest layer of Pandemonium, Agathion is almost entirely solid, light-stealing, soul-crushing rock. Here and there are isolated pockets of space; cavern-bubbles unconnected to any other, some with air and some filled with pure void. It’s a place of sensory deprivation, except for the wind which still somehow finds its way into any place with air. This is the hiding-place of the powers; inaccessible vaults of absolute seclusion and impenetrability. This is the plane of secrets that need to be forgotten.
Powers of Pandemonium
- Anshar (Babylonian power of darkness)
- Auril (Faerûnian power of winter)
- Belinik (Cerilian power of feuds)
- Cyric (Faerûnian power of murder)
- Diirinka (derro power of magic)
- Eloéle (Cerilian power of darkness)
- Erythnul (Oerthian power of malice)
- Garagos the Reaver (Faerûnian power of destruction)
- Gorrelik (wandering power)
- Ho Masubis (Japanese power of fire)
- Hruggek (bugbear power of violence)
- Loki (Norse power of trickery)
- Talos (Faerûnian power of earthquakes)
- Tuonetar (Finnish power of the dead)
- Tuoni (Finnish power of the underworld)
- Zeboim (Krynnish power of envy)
More details to follow!
Source: Jon Winter-Holt and Alex Roberts
Recently found your site, and I’m loving it. I’ve been frustrated that every outer plane doesn’t have an outsider race, and have been digging through mythology and languages to find something for Pandemonium. Deimos is the Greek god of terror, and it would keep the D fiend theme of devils, daemons, Demodands, and Demons. Maniae are spirits of madness, which would fit the maddening theme of Pandemonium. Otherwise, some sort of primordial castoffs of the original cosmic chaos would be cool; someone had to have carved Cocytus, after all.
Ooh some nice ideas there. I think maniae especially, although would need to differentiate them from the maenads. Deimos is a good call, that power needs some Planescape love, although calling the fiends that themselves is gonna be a bit confusing, daemons and demons are already a bit too similar. I have some thoughts of my own that I need to write up, based on the idea of mental parasites / dark passengers. Think conspiracy theories, paranoia, secrecy and control. I’m toying with the name ‘kolax’ which is Greek for ‘flatterer’, or a person who ‘eats at the table of others’. The idea would be a spirit of emotion, like an incarnate, that doesn’t so much ‘possess’ a mind, as be invited in like a vampire. The kolax grants the host occult powers, in exchange for them making a dark bargain with it.
And yeah, who made the tunnels, that’s definitely a mystery for a future story!
Apparently somewhere in Pandamonium is a black tower haunted by undead, said to have been the abode of Vecna at one point. Can you provide me with some location details as well as the history of Vecna using this tower?
Ooh, nice. I did some research and there’s virtually nothing on this anywhere. So it got me thinking, and here’s what I came up with…
https://mimir.net/places/shackled-spire/