666; The Bottomless Pit.
Note - Most of this content is compiled from every source I could find on this Layer. This includes but is by no means limited to Fiendish Codex 1, Green Ronin's Book of Fiends and notably some content from one of Rip's websites. I have always been interested in what lies here, and this is my attempt to weave together some of the most interesting ideas I have seen. Cheers to anybody who came up with any of this stuff - Dalmosh
“Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the Beast, for it is a human number, and that number is 666!” – Revelations 13:15-18
Variants upon this same cryptic passage baffled religious scholars across the Multiverse for millennia. Similar lines of scripture occur within countless divine treaties collected from many different worlds. As the Fraternity of Order began to catalogue the Layers of the Abyss, the horrific meaning of this ominous passage came slowly to light. Carved into monolithic blocks of granite, painted into ancient tomes with the blood of angels and even mechanically transcribed into technological lore banks was echoed the same simple warning; “beware 666, for something truly terrible is waiting here for you.” As explorers and diviners found and listed more and more Abyssal Layers, those more superstitious amongst the Fraternity waited with heavy hearts and bated breath for what the Plane would inevitably reveal at their 666th exploration site.
The Bottomless Pit is sheer unadulterated evil made incarnate, harnessed and channeled by the basic forces of the Planes into a jet black mockery of a sun, but one that greedily sucks away at the very fabric of Creation. This Layer exemplifies the entropic nature of Chaotic Evil. The evil condensed here manifests itself as blinding energy that burns with a corrosive edge to metabolize the planar firmament and all souls that are drawn here. The Bottomless Pit is a chilling void of inky blackness, but one that routinely gleams blinding white when titanic waves of energy are released from its core. Bleached white chunks of fallen worlds litter this layer and hang in the void. These ruined cities were seared white by the layer’s sporadic bursts of radiation, and eventually they collapse inwards to join the titanic white ring at the layer’s centre.
The ruin of worlds
Throughout the eons, Abaddon has watched impassively as numerous cities and even entire worlds of the Prime have fallen utterly to Chaotic Evil. Creation is occasionally rocked by all-out Demonic invasions through Extraplanar portals, apocalyptic magic unleashed by Abyssal cultists, and entire populations surrendering to their most primal sins through the corruption of their governments and religions by Succubi and Lilitu. Despite the best efforts of both the Celestials and the Baatezu, sometimes the Demons do win, and sometimes this literally allows physical parts of the Prime to drift into the Abyss, which swells beneath a fresh influx of souls. Every such event marks a local Apocalypse for the people of that doomed land and is another step closer to Abaddon’s final destiny. When such an area joins the Abyss, the damned are twisted into Bodaks, whilst any last survivors who remain pure of heart immediately die awful and horrendous deaths and neutral souls simply vanish.
The Abyss’s most powerful entities, such as Lolth the Spider Queen, can actually seize these doomed areas as personal conquests and bind them to their own Layers; for doing so means an increase in power and influence. More commonly however, parts of a Prime world that fall to the Abyss are not directly bound to any specific Layer, and are simply absorbed into the Abyss itself. The Bottomless Pit is where most of this absorbed matter and energy coalesce. Some Demonologists liken this Layer to the “stomach” of the Abyss, lying deep below its massive maw upon Pazunia, and beneath the gullet of the Grand Abyss.
The Bottomless Pit is the absolute manifestation of the aligned mindset of Chaotic Evil across the Multiverse. This concentrated belief has such a strong force here that it draws these fallen areas of the Prime into itself. The Pit also constantly gnaws and sucks at the other Abyssal Layers – always hungry for the belief that shapes their firmament. If an Abyssal Layer gets significantly altered, such as through the death of its Lord, then eventually other aspiring Lords or more dominant proximate Layers can begin to reshape its fabric. The 666th Layer perpetually pulls at these weakened layers too, and those that are not otherwise stabilized will eventually be drawn into the maelstrom at the Abyss’s heart. Errant magical energy, heat and even light itself are drawn here too from right across the Plane. The Bottomless Pit has the hallmarks of being one of the most primal and ancient Layers of the Abyss discovered yet by the Fraternity of Order.
Inhabitants of 666
Any Chaotic Evil being that falls through the Secondary Grand Abyss eventually emerges inside the Bottomless Pit. Manes and Dretches frequently fall screaming out of the surrounding sky, to clutch helplessly at the islands of matter that litter this void. Manes spontaneously arise amidst the floating ruins here too in bleating hordes. These lesser Demons are instinctively fascinated by the Maelstrom at the heart of the Layer, and are perpetually drawn closer and closer to it by its fell allure. Chaotic evil belief is condensed here, making the Petitioners an added menace. The presence of Manes blocks Planeshifting magic in this Layer, adding a further hazard to this grim place. No such spells will function unless every Mane is first scoured from the surrounding 50ft. A particularly unstable region of the Demonweb Pits also disgorges hapless travelers here, and a Drow town called Free Will hangs from a strand of the Demonweb above this rift.
Titanic swarms of horse-sized demonic locusts cluster all over the older buildings and areas, and attentively examine any newcomers to this Layer. These are the eyes and feelers of Abaddon the Destroyer. His Locust Demons viciously attack any stronger Demons they find here, except for those who have been granted express entry permission from the ruler of the Layer.
For the most part, the other Demon Lords shun the Bottomless Pit, and only use it to cast away the bodies of their most powerful enemies. Many of the overthrown Obyrith Lords met their ultimate ends here; with their corpses tossed into the Maelstrom by Laz’bral’thall the Butcher. The wiser Lords have an inkling of the true nature of this place, and those who suspect the ultimate purpose of the Maelstrom seek to have as little to do with the enigmatic Abaddon and his sinister work as possible.
An Alienist cabal called the Daughters of Leviathan claim that the divine atrocity known as Tharizdun has some connection to the 666th Layer as well. Certain obscure grimoires attributed to the Kaorti suggest that the energy that the Bottomless Pit converts is magically channeled out of the Abyss to keep Tharizdun sealed within his crystalline prison within the Deep Ethereal. If this should prove to be even partly true, then Abaddon the Lord of Locusts could paradoxically be serving an integral duty to the very stability of the Multiverse itself. Mythrin dal’Ra, an Entropomancer who once spent several weeks here, observed that prolonged exposure to the Maelstrom, even for those capable of withstanding its titanic physical power, leads to terrible hallucinations and vivid dreams that were too awful for her to disclose in detail.
“Truly there is no place in all Creation where Tharizdun has a stronger direct will than here. Terrible though this accursed realm may be, it yet guards a floodgate to something immeasurably worse. How fitting then that the Prince of the Apocalypse should also be the appointed jailer of a force that one can only describe as being the Multiverse’s own Apocalypse made flesh”.
dal’Ra speculated that this deeper and more hidden danger of the Bottomless Pit may be the reason why Abaddon allows no Demons stronger than Dretches within the Final Gantry.
History and Leadership
“We burned our last bull for Apollyon the Angel of Destruction, that he might bring us freedom from the yoke of the Pharaoh Hebrothaia. But our release came in the form of a plague of locusts the like of which these lands have never before seen. They took everything from us. The land was stripped bare and then even the river ran dry. But even as we die we know in our hearts that Hebrothaia and his family will choke on the dust alongside us”.
Ancient Vaatic texts exploring Fiendish origins mention the name “Abaddon” much earlier in planar history than would be possible if he were any mere Tana’ari. One theory links him to the ancient Baernoloths, and postulates that the Protogenoi, the very first Gods, bound and punished him for seeking to attain Greater Divinity. His hubris was rewarded with being granted possession of that which he most coveted; the key to the absolute death of all Creation, but They also bound him by Divine oath for all eternity to ensure that he would never be able to use it. According to legend, Abaddon’s soul is entombed within a phylactery inside a floating monolith somewhere in the lower reaches of Gehenna, and this structure is composed entirely of mezzoloth corpses. Abaddon is therefore shackled to the Abyss in spirit for eternity; supposedly in order to maintain a far more potent prison that houses The Dread One who struck fear into the very hearts of the Protogenoi but was far beyond even Their collective power to destroy.
Abaddon is the patron of nihilists and fatalists and he is said to smile upon those who invoke his name and wish for ruin to befall their own lands and people. Demonologists sometimes also name him as Apollyon the Angel of Destruction. Any temples to him have long ago fallen to rubble in the disasters that are said to unfold whenever his name is invoked. In truth, he would love for the prison he is forced to guard to fail, as in time he knows it must. Abaddon waits contented with the knowledge that one day the Bottomless Pit will tear through reality itself and the Maelstrom will explode. Then and only then will Tharizdun break free and crush the Multiverse. Most other Lords of the Abyss despise and fear him, for they rightly suspect that he desires to see their Layers engulfed by the Bottomless Pit. Many all too readily recall the entropic blasphemy unleashed in the Swallowed Void (Layer 68) after he helpfully began to reveal prophetic lore to an Alienist cabal called the Daughters of Leviathan. Zuggtmoy the Lady of Fungi is a marked exception, and her dabblings on the Prime with the Cults of Elemental Evil fascinate Abaddon. The Locust Lord is not free to take a hand in her work directly but rumour has it that he sardonically whispers forbidden truths to her about Tharizdun, perhaps sensing a chance to hasten his own release.
In the years pending the fall of the Queen of Chaos, the Demon Lord Eltab attempted to hijack this Layer to his own ends. He sought to channel the Bottomless Pit’s entropy towards the Grand Abyss and Pazunia, hoping that this would create a Layer-shattering magical backlash, destroying most of the other Tana’ari Lords and allowing him to absorb their essence. Planar scholars can only speculate as to the disastrous outcome of this reckless plan had it come to fruition. Luckily for the rest of Creation, the arcane Lord Abraxus got wind of the brash and impulsive Lord Eltab’s tinkering and managed to out-maneuver him and alert Abaddon before it was too late. Cryptic lore gleaned from the Black Scrolls of Ahm implicates Abraxus as playing a direct hand in Eltab’s banishment to Faerun, possibly in retribution for this staggering display of folly and arrogance.
Marduk, the Demon King of Fire Demons also travelled to the Bottomless Pit in ages past, hoping to glean secrets of the ultimate fate of the Multiverse and uncover new powers of entropy and destruction. Marduk slew hundreds of the Locust Demons, and attempted to focus his magical power into a single spot of the Maelstrom in the hope of catching a glimpse at what lay behind for just a split second. His tampering allowed a surge of Psuedonatural power to break through into the Layer, and he immediately found himself set upon by a giant formless atrocity whose touch sickened and confused him. Even though Marduk slew the fell horror, he was never the same again afterwards. To this day his inexplicably bizarre Inverted Ziggurat (Layer 131) and the Chaos Cube he later built in the Abyss of Flames (Layer 132) remain testimony to the ever-present dangers of the Maelstrom and what lies beyond it. No one knows for sure whether Marduk’s architectural experiments in the fractal nature of causality and the inherent chaos present in even the most lawful systems have any specific goal in mind. If there should be a method behind Marduk’s madness, then we can but pray to our Gods and hope the Multiverse is strong enough to withstand such intrusions into its basic laws of existence.
Locations.
The Terminus.
A faded reddish, many-pointed smeared glyph across the sky. This is a portal up into the Secondary Grand Abyss, accessible only to Chaotic Evil beings. Sufficiently strong beings can return this way provided they can bypass the massive swarms of Locust Demons that perpetually fly around this entrance and monitor all who visit the Layer.
The Courts Gate
A portal to the Woeful Escarond sits on a hexagonal floating dais. The Court of Woe occasionally dispatches an Alastor here to retrieve an important Mane that has accidently fallen into the Bottomless Pit. The portal key needed to operate the Gate is a symbol representing judgement. Alastors are tolerated by Abaddon, but they are never permitted within the Final Gantry.
The Final Gantry
This ring-shaped expanse is composed of bleached and ruined sections of streets and temples, combined with the withered cysts of ruptured and seared Abyssal layers. The Gantry has a relatively stable core of very ancient coliseums and auditoriums, and also includes random jigsaw patches of bleached and empty Abyssal landscapes.
These remains are routinely scoured by titanic waves of positive and negative energy (20% chance per hour) – which remove and denature almost all life and functioning magic that could survive here. These sterilizing waves have no effect upon Demons but any other evil creature they kill turns into a Bodak. Good beings are utterly destroyed by the raw power of the Abyss itself without Will saves, should they be caught by one of these waves. Neutral planewalkers struck by these rays are unharmed, but are instead teleported to a random Abyssal layer. Good and Evil souls who die here are drawn instantly into the Maelstrom and they are supposedly used to fuel the prison gate beyond.
There is something distinctly unsettling about this older core of the Gantry, almost as though its matter no longer reliably conforms to conventional Multiversal physics. Temporal anomalies abound here, and anyone setting foot here must save vs. insanity every hour as they begin to hear maddening whispers in nonsensical languages and see impossible visions amongst the arches and streets. If you happen to believe the dark about this place, then this effect is caused by close proximity to Tharizdun himself, who can apparently exert a maddening and corrupting influence over all solid matter that survives within 10 miles of the Maelstrom. The Locust Demons maintain a constant vigil for anything of Psuedonatural origin that should manifest here, and will stop at nothing to eradicate anything they suspect as being in service to Tharizdun.
Bodaks stalk the streets of the Final Gantry in abundance. Most were once evil beings whose lands were drawn into the Abyss, and were themselves transformed by the layer’s energy into vile Abyssal undead, though a small portion of them were once hapless Drow who fell here from the Demonweb Pits. The layer’s energy waves sustain the Bodaks with negative energy, but they rarely live longer than a few weeks before giving in to the rising urge to walk into the Maelstrom and their oblivion. The energy waves enervate them with bolstered power for the extent of their brief time on the Layer, giving them maximum hit points per hit die. They obey the mental commands of Abaddon until they eventually enter the Maelstrom, and he is able to stir them en masse as a last line of defense. A few Bodaks however, do manage to hide themselves away deep within the ruins and resist the urge to leap into the Maelstrom. The longer they remain here, the more resistant they become both to the call to jump inside, and to the mental commands of Abaddon. These rare survivors gain no respite, for they instead inevitably succumb to Tharizdun’s pervasive influence, and become unwitting pawns against the Layer’s ruler.
Gulthrax
Abaddon’s Ever-falling Palace appears like a greenish black teardrop, adorned with curling spines and inscribed with the histories of every Apocalyptic event in the history of Creation. This great palace has normal time and gravity, and hangs in the void directly above the Maelstrom. A phenomenal level of magic is needed simply to protect and ward this stronghold from the dangerous energies of the Layer, which perpetually lash and suck at its very fabric.
Abaddon’s magic is bolstered and strengthened by an ancient network of arcane wards set in place by the Demon Lord Abraxus that act as a second line of defense if Gulthrax should ever begin to fail. To Abaddon, Gulthrax is falling through time, from the early days of the Multiverse to its terrible end when the Maelstrom will finally explode, tearing into the Prime Material Plane and releasing its prisoner. As the eons pass, Gulthrax is drawn closer and closer towards the Maelstrom below.
Gulthrax has several large libraries and observatories where Abaddon hosts those rare Demons of stronger caste that he allows upon his layer. After the disasters with Eltab and Marduk, he refuses to allow other Demon Lords within the Bottomless Pit at all, though he will graciously entertain select representatives of any Lords who should happen to express any interest in his Layer. The one exception to this rule is his staunch ally Abraxus, whose arcane wards are an integral second line of defense against power surges from the Maelstrom below. There is generally at least one of Abraxus’s Xacarba wizards present in Gulthrax at all times. Abraxus and Abaddon have many goals in common; they both weave eon-spanning plans associated with the basic stability of the Abyss, while also delighting in short-term cataclysms caused by the tinkering of power hungry fools. Most of Gulthrax’s visitors are not Demons though, and Abaddon has frequent dealings with various Yugoloths and members of the Doomguard, as well as with independent researchers into entropy and apocalypses.
Most of the palace’s structure is composed of hives and warrens where the Locust Demons congregate in swarms. Bizarrely, Abraxus himself has no physical form on the Layer at all. He is little more than the will and director of the Locust Demon swarms, and is capable of speaking through any Locust Demon’s mouth anywhere upon the Layer. This Hive Mind spans right across the Bottomless Pit. Any Locust Demons encountered outside the Bottomless Pit, such as those in the Grand Abyss, act as proxy servants of Abaddon, though they are not directly part of his will. Occasionally the Horror beyond the Gate surges against the Layer’s wards, prompting Abaddon to concentrate and focus all of his powers to keep him contained. Abaddon also directs his Locust Demons to drag any Demonic corpses they should find on the Layer into the Maelstrom.
The Black Maelstrom
“And when you gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss also gazes into you”.
A city-sized sphere of anti-light lies in the centre of the Final Gantry. The Bottomless Pit tunes the evil energy of the Abyss into this titanic maelstrom, which sucks away the light, magic and souls of creation. Staring at the roiling inky black surface for longer than a round begins to induce visions of Abyssal Layers, Demons, lost sights from the Obyrith Empire, horrors beyond the stars and much much worse.
Manes and Bodaks pitifully crawl here in droves to leap from the edges of the Gantry into inky black Oblivion.
Planar scholars wonder whether this maelstrom predates the Abyss as we know it, speculating that it spontaneously arose before the Abyss was even composed of Layers, at the heart of the first howling sea of malice and destruction that grew out of the first primitive minds in the cosmos.