Grathe-Dzerin, the Sanctuary in the Abyss

The location described below is an idea that I’ve been pondering for awhile now: a relatively safe settlement in the Abyss that PCs can use as a base of operations for adventures in tiers 3 and 4. One of the things about the Abyss is that it can be so awful and corrupting that it’s hard to have a fun adventure. (D&D isn’t great at hostile environmental conditions of any kind.)

The Town of Grathe-Dzerin

In the Astral Sea and the Abyss, would it mean anything to speak of time, of years? In the past, the obyriths devised a plan to corrupt divinity, to feed the infinite hunger of the Chained God at the bottom of the scar of the Abyss. (Is this canon? Well, it’s canon for my purposes here.) They claimed the stone body of a dead god from the Astral Sea and, through a powerful working, Plane Shifted it to the fifteenth layer of the Abyss, and studied it for a long age.

They discovered that it possessed more resistance to Abyssal corruption than they had ever encountered before, even when broken into pieces. They considered returning it to the Astral, but repeating the working would have cost more than ignoring the divine body for the rest of eternity, so they settled on doing nothing.

The rest of the multiverse came to other conclusions, because the incorruptible nature of the divine body was an opportunity. Over time, as Abyssal lichen grew on the scar-ward side of the body, the ground around the body became clean and survivable for mortals. If the obyriths had learned of this they would have been overwhelmed with rage. What’s more, a creature bearing a sliver of the sacred stone could traverse the Abyss for a time without succumbing to its foulness, and larger pieces granted more time.

The lost and the desperate have found their way to Grathe-Dzerin, “Defiant in Exile,” to the one almost-safe place within the worst place in the cosmos. They built something there—a few hidden shacks became, bit by bit, something better. It has grown to house three score souls, plus a few sentient things that are more dubious in matters of the soul. Those who dwell here defend it fiercely against harm, but welcome strangers who are willing to submit to certain tests.

They may never know the name of the dead divinity, and perhaps it’s better that way. Perhaps the secrecy of its name protects it from corruption. Other powers from outside the Abyss have taken a modest interest in Grathe-Dzerin, not wanting to overcommit to so precarious a toehold in the seemingly unstoppable might of the Abyss.

Locations within Grathe-Dzerin

The body of the god is small compared to the body that forms Tu’narath; it is only a mile long, only 300 feet thick for most of its length. The form is humanoid, but with a second set of arms that sprout from a more complicated shoulder joint, and the shattered stumps of what might have once been wings. It has been broken in other places: its upper right arm has broken off near the shoulder, while its lower left hand is a floating field of shards that only suggests its original shape. Its chest was excavated by obyriths convinced that its heart would be an astral diamond.

The Heartless Home

That cavernous hollow has become a gathering-place for the Dzeriani, lit by Continual Flame that casts dancing shadows on the furrows cut into the ancient stone. Tiny flecks of astral diamond and lesser gemstones create the semblance of a starry sky in the deepest cuts. The “natural” sky of the fifteenth layer is a deep red, in which holes to nothingness sometimes appear and spew out tar, so this imitation of cave ceiling and sky offers both comfort and safety to the residents.

This space is never entirely empty—people eat their meals, get drunk, or converse here, but even when every living thing is gone, a ghost keeps watch. A former cultist of Orcus, Polvor the Repugnant, realized late in life that he no longer wanted power, that it had all been for nothing, and he would soon join the shambling legions for eternity. He rejected his patron and defended Grathe-Dzerin with his life, and a kindly necromancer named Simbeline bound him here as a ghost until the death of Orcus. Polvor offers the secrets of the cult—locations, objects of power, passphrases—to anyone willing to face the cult.

The Heartless Home is also the closest thing they have to a market square. The Dzeriani only occasionally trade in coin, concerning themselves far more with barter for necessities, artwork, or labor.

The Tower of Spirits

One of the first ramshackle huts was built into a platform jutting out from the body’s belly, with a rope ladder as its only access. That has grown into a creaking four-story building, with bedrooms on the top floor (under a gabled, rune-inscribed roof that sheds tar easily), a floor each for drinking beer and drinking spirits, and a bottom floor dedicated to brewing and distilling. The building is maintained, to use that term rather generously, by Erasmina Coscordia, a dwarf woman who is a marvelous brewer, but very much not a carpenter.

The most important thing she brews, though, isn’t alcoholic. It’s called simply Permission, as in “have you gotten Permission to be here?” It is a syrupy green potion that compels the user to wax eloquent about their goals, and successfully resisting it causes the drinker to cough it back up. In this way, those who want to infiltrate Grathe-Dzerin are nearly always discovered before they cause substantial harm.

As with taverns and wine-shops throughout the multiverse, the Tower of Spirits is a likely place to find people who are down on their luck (even by the standards of Defiant-in-Exile) or ready to make some questionable decisions. The back wall of the two drinking floors is the divine body, and many adventurers have taken up Erasmina’s adamantine chisel to cut a tiny silver of stone as a warding charm for some journey outside the town.

The Shattered Hand

The divine body’s lower left hand is shattered, and the fragments float in place. They can be moved with a great effort, but they can also support several tons of weight. Two monadic devas keep watch here in meditative postures. Amrathiel and Cazorinë are the last survivors of a band of seven, sent from the Upper Planes to investigate Grathe-Dzerin and, if it was the haven it claimed to be, defend it at all costs. The others have been slain (two, Exorialt and Tsenithe), banished (Ouluminn and Gharond), or fallen (Vesperiel, now called Venathrix).

If something moves to threaten Grathe-Dzerin in the range of the devas’ sight, they trumpet a warning that is audible throughout the village. Their watchpost is some 400 feet from the ground, and complicated to reach without flight; there are numerous gaps of 10 feet or more, and no one has yet made the time to construct a bridge. The two devas welcome Dzeriani for discussions of philosophy or the sharing of stories.

The Providing Trees

A circle of sixteen trees grows a short distance from the body, near the Heartless Home. A blue-leaved dryad named Hesperia lives here, protecting the trees by drinking in the poisons that fall from the sky, so that only clean water reaches their roots. In return, the trees grow fruit of wondrous variety: apples of silver and gold, yes, but also plums and pomegranates to nurture mortals. Hesperia can’t keep doing this forever, as the poisons slowly kill her, but perhaps something out in the wilds of the Abyss can restore her?

The Providing Trees are a major source of fresh food for the Dzeriani, though still far short of what they need to survive. The rest comes from hunters who can distinguish Zuggtmoy’s fungi from edible fungi and find the cleanest cuts from the Abyssal monstrosities. Create Food and Water doesn’t seem to work well here, so gathering sufficient food remains a trial.

Ivorian’s Shop

There is one merchant who comes here to buy and sell, but doesn’t do business in the Heartless Home. The mercane Ivorian travels here with a Plane Shift to sell magic items to the adventurers who pass through Grathe-Dzerin and buy the things they bring back: antiquities of long-forgotten worlds, secrets, trophies of slain demons, and more. The most important thing, when visiting Ivorian’s shop, is displaying appropriate manners—offending her could lead to her ceasing to travel to Grathe-Dzerin, so the Dzeriani ostracize anyone who can’t behave appropriately.

She accepts special orders for specific magic items, with half payment up front, and can usually (75% likely) fulfill them within two weeks. If she cannot, she returns half of the up-front payment, keeping the rest for her trouble. Her search for secrets in the Abyss can be a major source of quests in Grathe-Dzerin.

Bounty on Secrets

Anything Ivorian pays money to uncover has to be harder to learn than casting a single Contact Other Plane; often the answers are obscured by the nature of the Abyssal layer. Otherwise she would just hire a mage with bad judgment, as is traditional.

What is the name of the culture whose ruins are 120 miles scarward of here, what happened to their high priestess, and what is bound with mithral chains in the deepest part of the ruin?
What would happen if the name of the forgotten deity were to be learned? Where was the forgotten deity worshiped? Have the obyriths truly abandoned this project?
How many layers of the Abyss or other planes can be reached from the portal complex that is twenty miles on the far side of the divine body? How can we use it to reach other planes? Who built it, and why?
What is the fiendish cataclysm dragon guarding, and why? What is the dragon’s name, and what is the source of its power? What god or godling has taken such an interest in it?
What cosmic transfiguration allows Hesperia to endure the rains of tar? What bargain have the Archfey made that grants them influence here? Are there any significant powers mobilized against this realignment?

Stygian Tributary

A thin tributary, little more than a creek in a deep ravine, runs within 600 feet of the extended legs of the divine body. It is slow-moving and phenomenally dangerous to drink or touch, but the Dzeriani have a small number of expertly made boats that they use to navigate it and reach other regions, even other layers of the Abyss.

As they are careful about avoiding all contact with the water, the more important danger they face is the great flights of vrocks in the area and the demonic trolls that bury themselves in the mud to grab travelers.

Decantery

Fresh water was a problem for the village for a long time, until they bargained with Ivorian for six Decanters of Endless Water. The town has placed them in a building that they call the Decantery, where the water flows into a covered cistern built with Stone Shape. In the years since, one of the Decanters has failed, and another is starting to weaken. The wisest minds of Grathe-Dzerin have no explanation for this failure beyond Abyssal degradation.

Stables

The kinds of horses that Prime-born are used to wouldn’t long survive in this hostile environment. Instead, the Dzeriani use fiendish unicorns (controlled with magical bits and bridles) for riding and dreadhorns (a fiendish rhinoceros-like creature) as draft animals. The grooms, Roshal and Teguna, charge reasonable prices to Dzeriani they know and exorbitant rates to outsiders, who might not survive to bring the animals home.

Nearby Dungeons

There are three major areas to explore within a few days’ travel of Grathe-Dzerin.

The nameless ruined city takes about eight days to reach on foot, five if mounted, and four by boat. Buildings of green marble rise out of the pale ash soil and continue deep belowground. A legendary chimera named Nholigam (CR ~18ish) and several other draconic creatures spawned from it make it very difficult to enter the lower levels.
The Passage of the Emerald Titan is a structure of rusted iron and verdigris-covered brass, built on a scale so vast that a giant thirty feet tall can pass easily. Its corridors hold many strange things that seem to hold symbolic meaning, as well as portals to other layers of the Abyss. It is ill-suited to the passage of armies, however, so tanar’ri generals have ignored it in favor of other means of transit.
The Fallen Sky Field is an area of six square miles with large portions of twenty-nine crashed spelljamming vessels, airships, astral skiffs, and other flying vehicles. The unusual density of hulks in this area is somehow connected to obyriths’ great working that brought the divine body here, but the vessels come from different times, planes, and cultures. Several of them have been picked over extensively, but others may still hold treasures—or answers.

Design Notes

That’s as much as I have right now. I would love to keep expanding this, with more descriptions of buildings and characters in Grathe-Dzerin, as well as interesting things to see and do elsewhere in the fifteenth layer of the Abyss. My hope is that it makes an interesting quest hub for tier 3 and 4 adventurers by bringing them to a place as deadly as the Material Plane was when they were tier 1 or 2.

If you like this kind of thing, let me know! I have some ambition of making it a DM’s Guild product. Also, consider becoming a Patreon backer—you can support my writing and get early access to everything I post in this blog for just $1 a month!

Brandes Stoddard

Harbinger of Doom