Chains of Asmodeus

Random Encounters in Stygia

Objectives in Stygia

C1: The Entrance

It is enough to give a living traveler hope and drive devils to a rage. In either case, the idea is to draw the traveler inwards and downwards. From the depths of the cave can be heard faint sounds: the echo of voices, confused and distorted. The caves are occupied; the dwellers at the threshold have retreated deeper into the ice to escape Stygia's harsh climate. And the caves truly are warmer, a little. Enough that meltwater is constantly flowing into them, carving runnels on the floor and trickling inwards so that all the caves resound to the music of it, further confusing the suggestion of life and voices from below. The keen-eyed visitor might feel that signs of habitation at the cave-mouth seem oddly shallow and staged but by then it may be too late. Every visitor drawn to the cave mouth feels a powerful fascination with the depths, a need to know what is down there, the certainty that what they seek can be found below. Those equipped with divinatory magic may discover that the ubiquitous infernal taint of the Nine Hells really is weaker here, and perhaps mistake that for virtue. In truth there is only ever a choice of evils.

C2: Congregation of Gjaaki

Progressing downwards from the abandoned structures at the cave mouth the visitor finds a maze of twisting ice tunnels, slippery with the constant run of meltwater, and from this point they're observed. The heedless or weary visitor will just stumble deeper and deeper, but more careful explorers find upward-sloping spurs to the caves that lead to larger spaces clawed out from the ice. Here dwell the first of the Chasm's inhabitants, the Congregation of Gjaaki.

How kuo-toa even reached the Nine Hells is unknown to scholars, but they dwell here in some numbers, farming albino fish in shallow pools and constructing for themselves a truly byzantine mythology. The Congregation are pallid, eyeless, and stealthy, stealing about the upper passages of the Chasm and sporadically descending on visitors, mortal and devil alike, to claim sacrifices for their complex pantheon of gods. Their theology is entirely unique, quite separate from their usual deities. They worship that which lies deeper within the caves and have constructed a whole idiolectic myth-cycle to account for their presence in the Chasm, which they see as the center of a cold and uncaring universe. They make pilgrimages into the depths, sacrifice each other or those that fall into their hands, and conduct meaningless rituals according to nonsensical texts carved into the ice. Sometimes their artisans venture to the cave mouth and create another fake ice dwelling to add to the lure of the caves.

The Congregation is deranged and murderous, but luckier visitors might happen upon them when their bloodlust has been sated, or when their ritual calendar prescribes periods of contemplation. In times like these their philosophers are only too happy to talk about their beliefs for hours and hours, to the degrading sanity of their listeners.

The Congregation consists of three dozen kuo-toa monitors and a trio of kuo-toa archpriests. The kuo-toa are in a period of contemplation and therefore peaceful, if not attacked. However, they're so deranged that they provide scarce information and the characters would need to spend considerable time moving between the various tunnels to encounter all of them. If a kuo-toa is attacked here, it summons all its brethren to defend it. If the entire kuo-toa populace in this area is slain, the characters recover 8,000 gp worth of various gems and other valuables.

C3: The Echoes

Below, the tunnels twine and corkscrew downwards. In these reaches, travelers might encounter Congregation pilgrims trekking towards their ultimate religious experience, or sometimes fugitive devils—ice devils and pain devils (see appendix B)—drawn into the caves seeking mortals to torment or escaping more powerful devils. Most common, though, are the Echoes. Read the following:

Each time a character attempts to move past an Echo (a location marked as C3 on the map), in the direction of the surface of Stygia, they must make a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw. If they fail the saving throw, they gain a level of exhaustion and fall (they now have the prone condition). They may repeat the saving throw each hour.

C4: Angel of the Ice

Like any religion, the Congregation has heretics to persecute. Separate caves hold a smaller community of dissidents led by the Angel of the Ice (lawful evil deva). This fallen Celestial claims to have been sent to the Chasm to reclaim it from the Nine Hells and build a gateway to the higher realms, preparatory to ushering in a vast army to cleanse all the lower planes. It is just as deluded as the Congregation, dwelling before a mirror-like wall of ice on which it has scratched out a vastly complex diagram that it says holds the secret to the movements and future of the planes.

C5: The Aboleth

At last, the caves begin to open out. A network of interconnected lakes collects the meltwater, each lake vast and lightless. Here dwell the aboleth, each the master of its own circumscribed domain, each a minor deity in the Congregation's tangled pantheon. Chuul servitors act as guards and food in times of need, and the lake bottoms are a sifting morass of bones and forgotten treasures brought by devils and mortals alike who got no further. But even this is merely a station on the way down. For each hour the characters search they have a 75 chance of finding an aboleth clutch (one aboleth and 2d6 chuul protectors). This chance is reduced by 25 percent for each clutch found.

C6: Keeper of Found Things

What is the Keeper of Found Things? Not a devil, certainly. Something ancient that has dwelled in the Chasm and tended its collection for longer than infernal records have been kept. A thing of the shadows that even the keenest eyes can never quite make out in detail or gain a complete picture of. Rambling accounts speak of too many arms, long-fingered hands, a twisted wedge of a head with a vertical mouth bristling with needle teeth. And a voice. A quiet, reasonable (so very reasonable) voice that speaks to mortals about salvation, rest, and peace—all the promises that lured them down into the caves past all those other tribulations. To forlorn devils, the Keeper instead whispers of a great and endless order, a perfect moment of torment perpetually prolonged. The Keeper has only terrible things to say, and yet it is hideously persuasive. Every moment of the journey through the caves goes to prepare its visitors to accept its blandishments. The Congregation's nonsense theology, the Echoes, the tentacled monsters thrashing blindly in the depths, all plant the seeds of surrender in the mind.

Within the icy walls of the Chasm everything that has filtered down to the Keeper over the long years is buried. There are treasures that have washed down with the meltwater or that have been brought by great heroes and devils. There are monsters, trapped forever—dimly glimpsed against the strange flat light that emanates from every direction. And there are the mortals and devils, hundreds of them, who came this far and no farther. Who couldn't resist the soft entreaties of the Keeper. Here is rest and peace and an endless perfect cruelty. Over time the ice draws its captives deeper, to become the most recent prizes the Keeper claims. Anyone who travels to the end of the Chasm must make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw. A creature that fails the save begins to be enveloped by the ice and has the restrained condition. The restrained creature must repeat the saving throw at the end of its next turn, becoming encased in ice on a failed save or pulling free on a successful one. Anyone encased in ice takes 19 (3d12) cold damage at the start of each of their turns. They can be freed by destroying the surrounding ice, which has AC 13, 40 hit points, vulnerability to fire damage, and immunity to poison and psychic damage.

For those of stronger will, the ice itself reaches for them. The Keeper reshapes the very stuff of the Chasm to entrap less compliant victims by drawing forth frozen golems, gleaming facets flickering with echoes drawn from their victims' past. The luckiest might find their way back to the caves, to struggle against the slope and the water, braving all the perils they've already passed for the dubious safety of Stygia's surface. Others, in desperation, might fly or climb upwards out of the reach of the Keeper's influence, or plunge into the waters of the freezing sea below.

C7: The Awful Fisher

[image: Kuo Toa give offerings to Gjaaki.]

The ceiling offers the most mundane of fates. It has one inhabitant, that has scavenged from the Keeper's leavings since time immemorial. It is known to the kuo-toa as the Awful Fisher (see accompanying stat block). Those who fly or scramble upwards from the Keeper's grotesque collection find a great many-legged thing watching them, letting fly with a long, sticky thread. Nothing more than a preternaturally large cave fisher, in fact; those crablike creatures that bedevil the mortal Underdark. The Awful Fisher has grown vast and cunning on a diet of infernal flesh over the ages, though, given most of those who fly into its reach are devils. It is eternally hungry, malevolent, and armored beyond the bite of most blades. After the Awful Fisher dies, it falls to area C6 and the corpse begins to freeze over as described in that section.

C8: Gjaaki

And the waters? Nobody has ever returned from the waters. The kuo-toa Congregation's greatest deity, Gjaaki, resides there, a being of utter negation, an anti-creator. They say that all things that it becomes aware of cease to be and fade from the memory of the universe. Their myths speak of heroes who never were, offered up in proof of the power of this god. Of course, the Congregation are utterly divorced from reality and nothing they say can be taken seriously. But something is down there that even the Keeper and the aboleths don't speak about, beyond the knowledge of devils and the powers of the Nine Hells.