Baator

Outer Plane
Layers:	Avernus Dis Minauros Phlegethos Stygia Malbolge Maladomini Cania Nessus
Primary Faction:	None
Sect:	None

The Pit, the Nine Hells, the Nine Layers, the Depths of Depravity. These names and many others mark this place, but they all mean one and the same: the ultimate plane of law and evil, the epitome cruelty and corruption. Baator is arguably the worst place in all the multiverse. Sure, there's the Abyss and Acheron and all the other evil planes, and all these places are evil in their own right, but none really compare to the sheer vileness of Baator. The fiends here are more cunning, more subtle, and far more dangerous than the other fiends of the Lower Planes. Sure, the tanar'ri are fierce, and the gehreleths and yugoloths are powerful. The difference is that the baatezu are intelligent, and they delight in peeling those unlucky enough to fall into their clutches. A berk can never tell when a baatezu is going to release him, kill him, or hunt him later. Every baatezu of any power whatsoever has its own agenda, and each is willing to use pawns (read: adventurers, the unlucky sods) to obtain its goals.

There are three basic rules for travelling through Baator that apply to all nine layers. Echoing the Rule of Threes, these laws are as follows:

• Rule #1. DON'T. If a berk simply has to go there, refer to rule 2.
• Rule #2. Hire a guide rumoured to be trustworthy who also knows his way around the Nine Layers, or just the one layer the traveller's business is on. Note that finding a reliable guide is a herculean task in itself.
• Rule #3. Get out as quickly as possible, and don't stop to talk to the natives.

Anyone violating these rules deserves whatever he or she gets. Baator's not a friendly place, and though its denizens might act nice at first, they're natives of the plane of law and evil for a reason. If business is really that pressing, a body is best advised to bring quick wits, a ready blade, and a mind brimming with spells.

Baator is shaped like a mountain turned on its head. There are, as every cutter knows, nine layers to Baator, which is three times three as well as the division of the baatezu into least, lesser, and greater - two features once again reflecting the Rule of Threes. Each layer has its own distinct character. From the icy caverns of Cania to the flaming hot gorges of Phlegethos, Baator's a place of extremes, none of them good. The broadest part of the plane is found on the first layer of Avernus, the base of this inverted mountain. Each layer a cutter descends takes him farther along this peak, giving him a better view of the plane as a whole. The layers fit together like the pieces of a puzzle, and each subsequent descent allows a traveller to see how the puzzle comes together.

The chant is that anyone who makes it to Nessus under his own power will be granted the status of a cornugon or higher level baatezu. No one's been that far and returned to tell the tale, but it sounds plausible, knowing the baatezu. If people actually have made the attempt, perhaps they really have turned into baatezu without going through the intervening steps most petitioners must follow. Or perhaps they just died in the attempt.

There are several kinds of petitioners found on Baator. The first and most common are lemures, the infantry for the vast armies of Baator, and they're here regardless of who they worshipped in life. As long as their actions promote both law and evil, it doesn't matter who the god was - they're doomed to serve forevermore in the baatezu armies.

Those mortals who were selfish, proud, ambitious, but not evil enough to make the initial cut as lemures, find themselves petitioners in the form of mindless larvae instead. At this stage they must wait to be sold to the baatezu or tanar'ri before they can be promoted to lemure or imp.

Lemures, of course, are the spit-upon dog droppings of the baatezu race, and one in one thousand makes its way to a higher form of baatezu. Still, it can be truly said that any baatezu a traveller encounters is (or, more appropriately, was) a petitioner of either lemure or larvae status. After all, those high-ranking fiends had to come from somewhere, right?

There's other petitioners in Baator as well. Once mortals who consciously chose to follow the dictates of the evil powers, these beings now take the form of shades who worship the gods of law and evil. They can, however, take a multitude of other forms, depending on the will of the power. The spirits are found only in the realms of their gods, though there have been cases of such petitioners accidentally wandering outsider their power's realm. These unfortunates either have to find their way back or suffer along with the lemures and larvae in the cesspools of pain.

There's all sorts of creatures a body can meet in the Nine Hells, but most of them don't want to be met and most of them will show a berk why they live on Baator. Among these creatures are hellcats, hell hounds, imps, kytons, sympathetics, and larvae.

Some of the rarer monsters include bloodworms, eyewings, maelephants, nightmares, and rakshasas. That's certainly not all, but they do make up a large part of the nonbaatezu population. There are also the planars who've settled here, either to mingle and trade with the baatezu or to build fortresses against the fiends and hound them from one end of eternity to another. What most of these berks - whether they mingle or make war - don't realize is that the baatezu have neither love nor respect for them. The sods are seen as diversions, as a way to idle away the time until the next opportunity for advancement or skirmish in the Blood War presents itself.

No faction identifies its home plane as Baator. Even the most hard-core faction would have a rough time trying to recruit people, what with the notoriety of the plane and the fiends who make their home on Baator.