The Abyss

First visible as great cracks and yawning chasms within the chaotic Maelstrom, the Abyss is a plane of malignant chaos, evil unconstrained by law, and an unplumbed realm of horror where all desires and torments are made flesh. The Abyss has no rules, no order except for the transient, and no laws except those which can be enforced by the strong upon the weak. The Abyss is a perversion of freedom in which the strongest abuses of others are glorified—a manifest nightmare in which the strong survive by whatever means they see fit.

Geography

Spiral Path: This twisting network of tunnels is not truly a realm; rather, its labyrinthine passages connect the underground of every known Abyssal realm. Yhidothrus, the Ravager Worm, formed these tunnels over eons, but he doesn’t rule so much as wander this confusing rocky maze. A host of monstrous leeches and worms, as well as ghosts and corporeal undead, wander these warrens with the demon lord, rending the flesh from all encountered.

Abyssal Layers

Descending through any of the ever-shifting chasms in the Maelstrom’s borderlands, travelers find that the demon-infested cracks ultimately open into individual, self-contained realms larger than planets on the Material Plane. Many such “layers” of the Abyss are uncharted, everchanging wastelands unclaimed by any ruler or fought over by many. Each such layer connects to one, two, or up to a dozen others, either by natural portals or via cracks and chasms, all of which shift and change at random and at their own pace, sometimes even opening onto the inner surface of the Outer Sphere to abut other planes.
While the hordes of the Abyss pose one of the greatest threats to other planes, and each newly opened rift heralds the emergence of marauding armies of native fiends, the forces of the Abyss have a very distinct reason why they have yet to overwhelm the rest of the cosmos: the Abyss is also at war with itself. No single demon lord can truly abide the existence of its rivals, and while they make alliances and pacts, such things exist only to be broken as soon as it is convenient. As much as demons enjoy the slaughter of other races, the children of the Abyss indulge themselves in bloody sadism against one another even more often, simply because their plane provides a more immediate array of targets and threats.
Those layers claimed by a unique demon lord, prince, or queen (the titles vary and hold little difference in their meanings) are different in that their masters possess control over the landscape, much in the same way that gods control their own realms. Weather changes, terrain shifts, and the very ground becomes a pseudo-living extension of a demon lord’s will; such power is one of the reasons why unclaimed layers often serve as battlefields between the demon lords of the Abyss.

Notable Sites

While the demon lords of the Abyss possess near-godlike power, a select number of true deities dwell within the Abyss as well.

• The Ashen Forge

• Basalfeyst

• Diovengia

• High M’vania

• Kurnugia

• The Midnight Isles

• Nesh

• The Rasping Rift

Fauna & Flora

Native Creatures

While the majority of Abyssal creatures are demons, there are other beings of evil and chaos that roam its depths.

Demons

Comprising such monsters as succubi, vrocks, mariliths, hezrou, balors, and others, demons appeared relatively late in the history of the Abyss, and originated somewhere else entirely. The Abyss, in those ancient eons, was ruled by primeval entities known as the qlippoth, fiends removed from the cycle of mortal souls that later came to dominate the Outer Sphere. The first demons began as a corruption of the qlippoth, when a long-forgotten daemon lord performed a hideous experiment—the mixing of a newly-formed qlippoth with an evil mortal soul. The experiment vastly exceeded the daemon lord’s hopes for success, resulting in a chain reaction in the Abyss. As more mortal souls came to the plane, more demons arose. Soon, a single soul could fuel the birth of dozens of demons, and it took little time at all for the demonic host to vastly outstrip the numbers of qlippoth and daemon-kind combined. So potent was the combination of Abyssal scion and mortal soul that a new category of life emerged—the demon lord. Legend holds that the daemon responsible for this hideous evolution was executed by a source even more ancient, while others hold that the daemon lord lives still in a self-imposed exile in one of the deepest rifts of the Abyss.

Demon Lords

The godlike demon lords are capable of generating most of their lesser kindred out of the raw stuff of their native plane to suit their whimsy, though just as often their subjects form from the exposure of mortal souls to the energies of the Abyss, from conventional breeding and crossbreeding, and even spontaneously.

Qlippoth

When the Abyss first opened into the Outer Sphere, it was already inhabited. Creatures of primal chaos and unrelenting evil, the qlippoth survive today although their numbers have been greatly reduced by the far more fecund demons. Qlippoth are direct manifestations of the Abyss—chaos and evil unsullied by the failings of mortal souls—and as such represent an altogether more bestial cruelty than even the demonic host itself. The qlippoth are inhuman in shape and mind, yet their goals of destruction and cruelty are all too familiar.

Abyssal Fiends

Mortals most often encounter fiends created by and nominally loyal to one of the plane’s lords, and as such they often share common traits favored by their demonic masters. But while this allows for convenient categorization, such generalization truly underplays the horrid variety inherent within the everchanging Abyss. Some are mindless constructs like the dangerous retrievers, others are hideous predators like the bebiliths, or others even more monstrous in form.

Type

Dimensional plane