Gray Waste - Oinos
Author(s)
talespire://published-board/R3JheSBXYXN0ZSAtIE9pbm9z/00fed24545d06f885cf2bc8f495d50e0
Features
- Plane of selfish apathy, hopelessness, despair
- The Gray Waste slowly leeches all color from one's clothing, equipment, and skin, until a person is entirely grey and monochrome; after that, the plane leeches a mortal's hope, compassion, and motivation, leaving them a withered shell of their former self, too depressed to even remember why they came, how to get out, or even their own name; mortals who wander aimlessly in the waste for too long undergo a horrific transformation, degenerating into fiendish larvae - mindless, slimy, man-sized maggots with disturbingly human faces; larvae are the petitioner souls of the Gray Waste, and fodder for its fiendish inhabitants
- The plane is strongly evil-aligned; considered by many to be the most evil place in existence
- The Gray Waste is known by most primes as "Hades," but Hades is only one of many realms of the dead residing in the wastes, including Nifelheim and Annwyn, the celtic underworld
- The first gloom of the waste, known as Oinos, is a dreary plain that serves as a battle-scarred no man's land in the endless Blood War between the devils of Baator (Baatezu) and the demons of the Abyss (Tanar'ri)
- Fiendish mercenary yugoloths (a.k.a. daemons) inhabit the plane, preying on the weak and selling their military services to both sides of the blood war
- Night Hags wander the waste, invading the dreams of any visiting mortals and torturing them with nightmares, hastening the mortals' degeneration into larvae, which the hags then corral into great herds and sell to sentient undead as food, or to devils and demons as fodder for their blood war
- The toxic river Styx crosses the waste, poisoning all creatures who touch it with permanent and catastrophic memory loss, but the Styx is also one of the only ways off the plane; daemon boatmen (known as Merrenoloths) offer safe passage down the river, but their prices are extortive
Notes
- This map could very likely double as a map for the Shadowfell (plane of Shadow) in 4th/5th edition.
- Neutral evil souls with no sense of morality (compulsive liars, heartless manipulators, treacherous bastards, etc.) end up in the Gray Waste when they die, transforming into bloated, grotesque larvae that gather in slimy swarms
- Being the plane of hopelessness and despair, I designed this map as a vast, grey, largely featureless void of a landscape that stretches on and on with no change or possibility of escape. If players attempt to go beyond the map's edge, I recommend teleporting them to the opposite end, so they must traverse it from the beginning, to reinforce the plane's sense of pointlessness.
- Portal (blue fire ring) can be closed with a hide volume.
- A merrenoloth boatman can be found at the south end of the map at the river Styx; the boat can be removed with a hide volume.
- A night hag has a small "larva ranch" at the northeast corner. Players might be led to the ranch by trails of slimy black ooze that streak across the landscape.
- The corpses of dead planewalkers dot the waste, and occasionally have useful equipment, and letters of suicide
- The larger, withered trees on the landscape have hanged corpses on their branches
- The strange, alien black structures and formations visible on the map are inspired by concept art of the Shadowfell; narratively, I'd explain them as mysterious, inexplicable secretions of fiendish larvae, when the maggots are left to their own devices for too long
Assets from Tales Tavern
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