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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 2389634" data-attributes="member: 11697">Generally speaking, the Styx runs all over the first layer of Carceri, and the first layer of all of the lower planes, plus some other, deeper layers on some planes (Sygia in Baator for instance).How long it takes isn't a set thing, and it might even vary in duration for two groups of people leaving from the same spot and going to the same place. It's the whole 'how do I get anywhere specific within an infinitely large place, or between two infinitely large places'. Gloss over that and as a DM, set the duration to what you want, and describe what they see as they travel.Veil guarding the river? Not entirely sure what you mean, but no sane person without protection is going to linger near the river for a prolonged period of time. It's toxic, the breeze off the river smells like a cesspool half the time, smells pleasant but probably laden with virulent disease the other half of the time, and not exactly friendly things swim under the generally opaque surface (Hydroloths, Wastriliths, perhaps Amnizu, etc). In any event, the touch of the water on a person's body causes utter and irreversible amnesia (though the memories of the person solidify in the rotten silt of the river's bottom where some types of fiends may collect it and horde it [hydroloths mainly]). The vapors off the river will make you feel light headed from miles away, so the river doesn't exactly hide from you, plus it tends to seep into the groundwater of the swamps on Carceri's 1st layer, so you never know if you've found a source of water when you're dying of thirst, or if you've found something to erase 'you' as a person from existance. Just another betreyal really, Carceri is full of them.The river doesn't take you from one plane to another, the boatmen do. And when I say boatmen, I mean the Marraenoloths. They know the Styx and every single tributary of it, plus where the river passes through border regions between planes. Pay them off enough to carry you, and to not dump you into the river, or put you off in the middle of nowhere on the opposite side of the bank, and they'll ferry you most anywhere in the lower planes. Just don't trust them. Ever.No guardians on the Styx, just hungry things swimming around in it, and yugoloth boatmen who know that the desperate will be willing to pay them (and who they'll screw over at random just to see the misery of those same desperate people's crushed hopes.)And it's less a prison plane for demons/Tanar'ri, than a prison plane for those who make it a prison for themselves, continually reinforcing the planes hold on them by their own actions and nature of betrayel. There are also the Titans, and some other beings who were imprisoned by other beings, and supposedly they cannot get out by any means till they've grown more powerful than those who put them there in the first place.The Tanar'ri, except when they march armies in the millions across the surface of Othrys and other layers of the plane, don't rule Carceri. The two major powers on the planes (outside of the domains of deities) are the Gehreleths (demodands in 1e and 3e) and Yugoloths. The Gehreleths are -everywhere- and any mortal that dies on any layer of Carceri has the potential to be transformed into one of them by the racial deity/creator of those beings, Apomps the Triple Aspected, who lurks down in the depths of Agathys. Not a pleasant fellow. The Yugoloths are trying to lay claim to Carceri the same way that they colonized and laid claim to Gehenna; they want to utterly control the three planes of conflict (Gehenna, Gray Waste, Carceri) and only Carceri isn't firmly under their grip. But 'loth propaganda aside, they aren't an organized force outside of the 1st layer of the plane where they're constructing a miles high tower composed entirely of still living petitioners used like screaming bricks, called the Tower of Incarnate Pain. Yugoloth influence on the plane is going to be spotty anywhere beyond Othrys, though more pervasive than the Tanar'ri, just not omnipresent like the Gehreleths.</blockquote>

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