If some resolute pilgrim were to limp or crawl through miles of the sepulchral dust and crumbling, cinerous statuary of anguish of Hades, they might find the leaden skies giving way to a void of eternal night. They would see before them a landscape of tortured rock formations, and boiling, mephitic, salt-rimmed pools that make the lurid colors of the surrounding rock manifest with their wan glow. Beyond, they would see broken and lava-clotted crags rising ever upward, disappearing into distant darkness. They would have reached the border of Gehenna.
Those who don't succumb to despair in the gray wastes are potential fodder for the Devils' war against Chaos. But first, they must be broken and reconditioned to that purpose. Yugoloth patrol the border, and their press gangs conscript all available prospects. Captives are whisked off to a number of re-education centers. Under the conditioning of their fiendish captors, they become suitable, perhaps, for minor positions in the apparatus of Hell, or either for future service of the Yugoloth.
It is possible to scale the forbidden scarp of Gehenna. If one can avoid the plateau encampments of the Yugoloth, the monsters of the lava tube caves, and assorted natural dangers from jagged rock, blasts of toxic gas, and flows of lava, you can stand upon the mountains ringing Hell itself. It is not a trip anyone would wish to make except with the direst of need.
Adventure idea - the party is recruited by Sir Hillary, an obscenely wealthy madman who's "conquered" every worthy mountain on the Prime Material and now has his sights set on the Outer Planes. He's saving Mount Celstia for last, but in the meantime he wants an escort to scale the greatest peaks of Gehenna. Can the party get this loon there and back safely? Or will they just turn him over to some ironic punishment for his hubris - perhaps spending eternity climbing an unending mountain would be appropriate?
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