Vudra

ripvanwormer's picture

Vudra is the 531st Layer of the+Abyss. It is ruled by Shaktari, Queen of Mariliths.

An adventure ("Nemesis" by Christopher Perkins) involving an expedition into Vudra appeared in Dungeon Magazine #60. It was described as "a dismal aggolomeration of tropical islands choked with impenetrable jungles and surrounded by oceans of heaving blood." Shaktari was described as "a marilith of gargantuan proportions, with flaming red eyes and skin of blackest night... this dark fiend is said to devour all that she sees, although she spends most of her time 'sleeping' in the crimson oceans of her realm." Each island in the ocean of blood is ruled by a marilith, one of Shaktari's many vassals. The layer is also inhabited by rakshasas, bar-lguras, yuan-ti, otyughs, carrion crawlers, poisonous snakes, guardian constructs, monstrous centipedes, vrocks, and various minor Abyssal creatures and plants. There are also a few tribes of humans and elves called the Alives who were abducted from the Prime Material Plane by the rakshasas and kept to be sacrificed to Shaktari, their corpses turned into skeleton and zombie servants.

Vudra is poisonous to everything but natives. The water and plants are poison, and even the air is poison - after 12 hours of breathing it, visitors have to make a saving throw every hour or suffer damage. I'd probably consider it equal to black adder venom (DC 12, 1d6 Str damage), as that seems the most serpentine of the 3e poison types. So basically, if you go by that rule, the PCs shouldn't stick around very long. There's also a brown syrupy liquid called Shaktari's Ichor or q'laari which springs up naturally in various parts of Vudra - those who drink it become temporarily immune to all poison for a week, which makes it very handy if the PCs can find a spring of it (The Alives know where to get some). Purify Food and Drink will also make any native food edible.

Shaktari herself wasn't encountered in that adventure - the confrontation was with a less powerful marilith called Kaliva, who ruled the island on which the adventure was set. I imagine Shaktari would be an advanced paragon marilith with levels of assassin (for the poison use class feature) and the ability to manipulate the layer she controls as if she were a lesser goddess. Personally, I'd take her description literally and make her Gargantuan in size (32-64 feet in height).

Planescape, Dungeons & Dragons, their logos, Wizards of the Coast, and the Wizards of the Coast logo are ©2008, Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro Inc. and used with permission.