Dungeons and Dragons Lore : Avernus

hello everybody its AJ Brittini once again to the nine hells and this time I'm going to take some time to talk about the actual environment of a Vernis this is the surface layer of the nine hells the surface of this this weird planet as we know it's very volcanic and classically held like it's a blasted landscape however this doesn't mean that it's necessarily devoid of natural life it was once a planet with a thriving ecosystem that fell to a cosmic disaster and was then later claimed so it was once a viable prime material plane which was then locked off as a sub dimension completely under the control of Asmodeus and populated with the former Prime Evils who were battling demons and it's it's basically become this the surface of the world is the first place that you visit when you enter the nine hells there is no other direct means of accessing the lower planes you have to come in through a Venice and although there may be exceptions to this rule in your game this is the classic literature and it has lots of interesting features the primary feature of interest is the bronze citadel which is a massive ever-expanding structure which is part palatial Palace part dune temple of torture and part well most part is massive barracks and staging grounds for the armies of devils the armies of the nine hills and the plains around the bronze citadel is a huge staging ground and exercise area essentially for Devil's so that they can train to fight demons so imagine that this is a dig a devilish and demonic danger room where all sorts of horrific things can be summoned and put into play where the armies of Devils character said tactics constantly fighting all sorts of all manners of aberrations and horrors that would pour out of the abyss so you will see things like mock-ups of tasks and Dragons legions of dragons and all sorts of like flotillas of the holders and slides and all sorts of captured demons which they've brought up brought down to the nine hells which they are practicing on fighting against so you'll have you know all sorts of things that are going on there that seem very very confusing and very chaotic but natural fact it's it's highly regimented and disciplined training maneuvers for the armies of Hell so that's one of the few places on a Vernors we will find all kinds of Devils for the most part the rest of the plane is is restricted to a few main groups of devil types and that is of course the Lemieux's the the most of the surface of Avernus has got at least a few Lemieux's creeping around eking out a meager existence of pain and torment and just basically trying to avoid the notice of their superiors the Devils that surround them then of course you've got the earring knees and yeah I looked up that's the pronunciation of ironies these are closest really to what the pro menial primordial look like when they first fell into the the nine hells so they actually look very angelic and they prey upon the mistake that most mortals make that because these are good-looking humanoids with feathered wings they think they're angels when an actual fact they've had definitely not they pre-exists predate the existence of angels most of their in years have been around since the very dawn of creations and the dawn war they are incredibly a ancient beings for the most part and of course it's one of the aspirations of amps and spider Devils to rise up to become a renews but they have to have a specific set of qualities which is mostly martial skill and ironies are incredibly skilled warriors that fight in the classic sense the classic means that the the primordial first fought against the demons so they wear armor and they have wickedly poisoned blades that create weakening wounds and they are quite adept at harrying foes from the air and on the ground and yeah they they really like it they love combat and are constantly at work honing their skills and most of the politics of the Ring arenas is against each other rising in their own internal ranks to become the most capable master of any particular weapon that they pick up and their entire society then is martial and built around that pride and their combat abilities um unlike something like a succubus rule or other sort of wind humanoid that looks good they're not really interested in seduction that was that would be a huge mistake to make they are really only interested in a challenging foe that can better their combat abilities so they will seek out to fight the most martially capable beings in the universe that they can even at the risk of death and the outer Plains however they probably will only engage in combat against foes that they know they can beat while on the plane of Avernus because they can't actually die permanently in the nine hells so typically they won't fight to the death because it will weaken the army overall and they do have a mandate from Asmodeus that they must survive and become capable members of the the armies of the nine hells so they don't typically fight each other to the death to utter destruction on the nine hells if they did that the victor would very quickly come a cropper of Vernet Asmodeus himself and that is something they don't want of course you have tons and tons of em and spines Devils now the spines Devils are the upgrade of the imp that's basically what the IMP is going to turn into if it doesn't prove itself better and they are the messengers of the nine hells and all sorts of beings and very very capable spies and their information brokers so they're not really to be underestimated that much they are a definite upgrade from the amp they have the same capabilities the amp and in the armies of the nine hells they have the ability to fire bomb terrain so they have the ability to devastate forests and all sorts of cover that is flammable by using their tail spines to peltor the area with essentially incendiary grenades that's what their spines on their tails are capable of doing they detach hit the ground and explode and they will burn like phosphorous anybody that they sink into on contact so they're quite devastating really they don't do a lot of damage but if you imagine you have a cloud of thousands of these things they could firebomb entire cities to the point where you know lead guttering is melting and running on the streets much like Dresden okay so the the ruler of the nine hells is s modus and they have quite a large hierarchy of pit fiends and the generals of the armies and things there is a lot of cross play between their prominence as strategy strategic military leaders and their favor with Asmodeus so because they've been engaged in the blood war and because the blood war is so important for the overall survival of demon of devil kind because without the blood war they they essentially wouldn't have the the pact with the gods which allows them to be independent and they wouldn't have access to the souls which give them divine power to to reform creation so for them it's all about continuing the blood war so that they can be independent and not live under the heel of the gods to have their own way and Asmodeus values this detachment and freedom above all else so yeah so the one of the the leaders the leadership of a Vernis has shifted between Zarya land Bell these are two pet fiends who Bell is a very very capable general he's a strategic mastermind who has the respect of all the other pet fiends and was once a member of the Dark Age which is a cabal of pet fiend generals who lead who lead legions and legions of other Devils and it's a strategic mastery that gave him favor with Asmodeus however he is he regarded as someone who will turn on his superior in order to advance himself so he's not trusted and doesn't have a lot of alliances amongst the other leaders of the nine hells there's a lot of infighting amongst them of course to to jockey for Asmodeus its favor and gain more power themselves because more power means more freedom and more independence and less people telling you what to do and Sariel is the current leader of the nine hells because of the politics and between Asmodeus and in others ins ariel is a female pet fiend I'm not entirely sure how that works out but she's pretty much the well the only one in literature i've noted which is definitely a female put feet so yeah that's just a quirk of her her nature I suppose I don't think gender really has a lot to do with the reaper should've put fiends per se it's just a personal preference of their put fiend to be to be female anyway it it makes for an interesting story plot and role playing that character for sure okay so the and so's Ariel is currently ensconced in the bran Citadel and doing a thing and the other sort of environment you've got lots of features of Avernus which I don't see listed a lot elsewhere so you've got the wastelands the realm of drew Carey the worm lands the plains of carnage the nether reaches the maggot pit did the city of dis 'less city of darkspine the city of Bane home and the tower of high sorcery city of a Pathan ever following and the dragon pets as a rule you've got the pillar of skills which is just before the entrance to the lair of disks and the pillow skulls is a massive edifice over a mile high constructed fury of skulls of all sorts of different creatures right down the base of it of course is very ancient prehistoric creatures and it's constantly added to by M su build upon this thing day after day after day and it's a truly epic in size and scope and terrifying to witness as you approach this thing from miles away you can see it reaching up into the red sky and as you approach you realize it is a tower of skulls the size of a mountain well over the size of a mountain that seems incongruous it seems that gravity could not support such a thing you know it would collapse under its own weight as as it's a constructive bone but no true there it is there is a strange place called the peaceable lens and that's bordered by the river Styx and the Blood River which is one of its tributaries which leads from nough bellend and su Jarrell there's a city called the ribcage which sounds exactly like it is and the darkspine city this is why the Sigma s mountains and and yeah so there is all sorts of stuff environments on the the plane of Avernus it is a land without seas but it has lakes and rivers of magma really they're only sort of water sources around other river styxx in the blood River and they of course are highly toxic I certainly wouldn't recommend drinking them so if you were in hell there is no water to drink there is no food to eat which is not tainted in some way the entire place is not very pleasant for a living being to visit and you would need to carry all of your supplies with you so living in hell is almost an impossibility without some sort of outside aid or some sort of replenishing magical artifact that can produce water and food otherwise you will quickly perish within a matter of a few weeks if you have food of course you're going to live for a while but without water you will quickly perish in a matter of a week or so the environment is mountainous rocky cavernous there's all sorts of caves and caverns and things the place has been extensively worked over over millions of years by all of the denizens of the nine hells and all of the martial efforts and things have built all sorts of mock cities and ruined towers and terrain that mimics a lot of the other terrain in the nine hells so you'll have mazes and things and places it look very organic you'll have forests of imported exotic trees all of which are poisonous and quite nasty so there'll be a basically a hell terrain of jungles that of carnivorous plants that are constantly seeking things to tear apart and nourish themselves so venus flytraps of nightmarish proportions you'll have places which mimic aberrant terrain so places where the rock is porous and you can worm your way through it or places where the rock is actually sort of phased out semi sea phased out so you can move in and out of things that that feel like solid matter or appear as solid matter you'll have terrains which automatically spontaneously manifest illusions of different types of terrain to confuse the senses and laid out with traps and things like that pets and spine traps and kissing maidens and that sort of thing you'll have desert environments that are very very hostile and there's also a lot of small pockets of elemental incursion such as frozen areas or muddy areas or sulfurous bogs that sort of stuff typically though none of these places are very pleasant to live and maybe you could eke out an existence of sort of getting some water out of a muddy elemental incursion and selling it a great cost to to other people who need water to survive but you're going to yes it's it's very nasty I mean the insects that fly around are poisonous the and the size of your hand you know there are rock worms with magma for it their insides there's giant bats that tear your head off just but on a flyby attack the place is full of things which are extremely nasty and they need to be so to survive and they need to be completely predatory and seize any opportunity to tear things apart particularly any mortal morsels that may happen across the their path so yeah that's a Venice for you I won't give in to the the great politics of things I will mention that Tiamat does have her own realm that's the worm lands and there she has many little offspring was called ever shy which kind of like herbs in a way they're larger they're more sort of medium sized like diminutive Dragonborn really and they mimic the chromatic colors of tmn and each have different natures according to the color that they are some two dragons have different natures if you want to explore that further just check out my videos on the dragons for more of their personality types and they're more like the draconians of Dragonlance in a way and there's a lot of them in the worm lands so if you are going past the city of Sevilla bronze and the city of desolace past the mega pits towards us the pillar of skills you will come across TMX hordes because that is through the worm lands that you'll be traveling and yeah and the dragon pets of course where she lives so yeah it's a it's an environment it's a world in and of itself that you can have all sorts of adventures in and every time you visit there if you so wish you could go to a completely different place and it'd be quite a different impression of what hell is like and in further videos I'll talk about different environments that you can go to in the nine hells and talk about the denizens that live there as a sort of ecology so if that's of interest to you just let me know and I'll carry on with specific Devils in this series as we go thanks for listening you

Channel: AJ Pickett

Views: 49,680

Rating: 4.9513779 out of 5

Keywords: Avernus, The Nine Hells, Environment, Monsters, RPG's, Dungeon Mastery, Asmodeous, Bel, Erinyes, Imp, Spined Devil, Devil, Devils, Tiamat, Zariel, Abishai, Role Playing Game, Habitat, Ecology, Fantasy, D&D 5E, AJ Pickett, TMG, The Mighty Gluestick, Tabletop, Infernal, Fiend, Pit Fiend, Armies of Hell, Map of Hell, d&d lore, forgotten realms, monster manual, dungeons and dragons, dnd lore

Id: ef7x5Nz1DIs

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 16 2016