Dragon Anniversary: Return to the Nine Hells by Rich Baker Illustrations by Jack Crane, Anne Stokes, Warren Mahy, Daarken, Carl Frank, Thomas M
Dragon Anniversary: Return to the Nine Hells By Rich Baker Illustrations by Jack Crane, Anne Stokes, Warren Mahy, Daarken, Carl Frank, Thomas M. Baxa, Eric Deschamps, and Dave Allsop In 1983, Ed Greenwood laid out the D&D game’s the iron streets of Dis, or battled for their lives in the first great vision for extraplanar adventure in a two- frigid wastes of Stygia. The master villain of many part article appearing in Dragon issues 75 and 76. an adventure waited for the heroes in some hellish Before “The Nine Hells” articles, all that we knew retreat . or in fact turned out to be one of the arch- about Hell in the world of Dungeons & Dragons devils in person. is that it had nine levels and was home to the race To this day, the layers of Avernus, Dis, Minauros, of devils (and a few stray lawful evil gods). But in Phlegethos, Stygia, Malbolge, Maldomini, Cania, and Dragon 75, Ed Greenwood took us all on an unfor- Nessus remain the best known of all the outer planes. gettable tour, filled with vistas of infernal grandeur Ask any D&D player what the first layer of Acheron and dozens of the most fully realized villains to be is like or what the names of the Seven Heavens are, found anywhere in the multiverse. It all began with and you’ll probably get a blank stare. But every true a wonderful full-page illustration of two heroes D&D fan knows that you’ll run into fireballs and standing over the smoking corpse of a barbed devil, spined devils on the plains of Avernus, that Geryon and perhaps the biggest, boldest, and most purely was once the lord of Stygia, and that gelugons—or epic call to action ever written for a D&D game: I ice devils—haunt Cania, the frigid eighth hell.
[Show full text]