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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6513403" data-attributes="member: 82106">Baator, AKA Hell, in the 4e cosmology is an astral domain which is a prison. The devils are incarcerated there in repayment for the crime of rebelling against their god. They were originally angels, paralleling biblical Hell. Asmodeus was the author of this betrayal, he's just as imprisoned as all the other devils, none of them can voluntarily leave, though apparently their prison is far from perfect. Its certainly quite possible for a Death Knight to be ensconced in Hell, OTOH Asmodeus probably values servants that are NOT locked in prison far more than ones which are. In fact the primary way that devils get out of prison is to be summoned by some servant or other from another plane. So the Shadowfell idea would certainly be a good one. Beyond that there are of course many possibilities, the Astral Sea is full of various little domains and such, and most of the Elemental Chaos is just wild empty landscape where a guy can build a nice castle and kick up his feet. You could use the Shadowfell and cast this as a 'Domain of Dread' ala Ravenloft. Nobody has really ever explained the nature of these domains exactly, but each one has some sort of dark lord trapped within it. Most of them would probably like to escape, though they may or may not really be able to due to their nature. I'd note that the Shadowfell is not actually an inherently evil place as Pemerton seemed to suggest. It is simply the land of shadow. Things there are often echoes of the material world, and the spirits of the dead cross this shadow realm on their way to their fate. OTOH there are towns and cities of living humans, shadar kai, and other beings who live in the Shadowfell. Its a gloomy place, filled with a kind of ennui, tinged with a kind of hopeless madness, but its not a dead world. In fact most of the Domains contain communities of living people, such as Barovia where Straad of Ravenloft fame resides. Your Death Knight could well be such a lord, holding sway over a domain that he rules in the name of his liege, the Lord of Tyranny and Deception. There's another part of the backstory of Asmodeus too BTW. The Shard of Evil which created the Abyss originated in another universe, a dead universe in which ultimate evil prevailed. Tharizdun merely PLANTED it, and was then himself lost in the Abyss with the shard. However, some certain group of Angels was set up to guard the shard, or the place where you could access the final pit where Tharizdun presumably carried it. Asmodeus was in charge of this detail IIRC. In any case he managed to acquire a fragment of the shard. The demon's unrelenting hostility to devils stems from their desire to recover this only bit of ultimate evil which they can access. There's a plot hook in which the demon lord Pazuzu (one of the entities from the dead universe perhaps) has some sort of an alliance with Asmodeus, or Asmo owes him one, etc. The point is they built in some hooks you can use to create plot twists that involve demons and devils and their unhappy evil family relationships.</blockquote>

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