Ed：Guide to the Gray Waste（节选）

"The Gray Waste" is universes of outer darkness and utter tedium, where all colors fade, all lights are dimmed, the sky is empty, and no semblance of love is to be found. Colors, even dimmed, hurt the eyes of the locals. This is the spiritual home of creatures that are utterly vicious and without love, who seek power through sheer cruelty and intimidation. As on all the evil planes, the locals say that love is a cruel charade and that no creature is genuinely good. Instead, they like making others miserable for its own sake. The spiritual powers of the Gray Waste seek to corrupt souls in the most primitive ways, appealing to vanity, lust, greed, and cynicism. Here they are addictive, and will quickly destroy the ability to be happy. In the Gray Waste, even the things here which may once have brought joy now no longer do this. The locals find full satisfaction only in carrying out acts of heartless cruelty. The most cynically evil creatures have their lairs here. Some visitors seek out the plane as the ultimate test of one's strength of body and soul. Any un-repented crimes which visitors may have committed may prove to be public knowledge here. New arrivals have vivid dreams of their most intense feelings. Upon awakening, they find the feelings gone. Monoliths flash brilliantly-colored searchlights, and those upon whom the beams fall lose the emotions or memories which are most precious. Visitors must save vs. wisdom at the end of every week or become insane and despair of ever leaving. They will find their power to love others, and to create and to enjoy beauty and goodness, is being drained from them. However, alignment will not be compromised. Having a good cleric in the party, and accepting this cleric's ministry and struggling to be kind and generous, might prevent this -- provided that this is an actual role-playing focus. If you have not yet despaired, you will reach any destination in three times the normal time. Yet if you have given in, you probably no longer seek to travel. A referee might reasonably decide that no healing or restorative magic of any sort works here. All creatures look more or less dead. The locals seldom show feelings, and never show love. Faith communities exist and are dedicated to the pursuit of members' self-interest. They are not just selfish -- they actively seek to do harm to others in order to demonstrate their own superiority. What is most likely to unite these communities is the attitude that kindness is weakness, and that goodness is an illusion or a sickness of the mind. They are enormously proud of having realized what they think to be the truth -- that everybody who claims to be good actually has a hidden, selfish agenda. They claim to see the world as it really is, uncolored by lies about the possibility of real altruism. This is the only place in the universe where evil offers no excuses or additional agendas. Because evil is so powerful here, the locals lack even the ordinary loves of our world -- family, friendship, romance. These instead become ways in which a stronger being preys on a weaker being.
The locals will know if the player-characters have ever harmed others simply for personal gain, regardless of professed alignment. They will use this information to try to persuade the adventurers that the Gray Waste is indeed their spiritual home. Of course, open-faced evil is poor politics. The locals will present themselves to outsiders as people who "really understand life", without illusions that make people weak or foolish. There are many models for this in the non-ideological dictatorships of our own world. The locals will talk a lot about cruelty as a way of "building character." Evil deeds, or any use of death magic or necromancer's spells might tend to transform the character progressively (1-10% chance each time, DM decides how to check, and what result.) Those who persist (i.e., six failed checks) become NPC permanent residents. Primitives will find ice-cold realms of utter boredom, populated by owls and spiders. Mottos mostly involve "promoting excellence" and "looking at things as they really are". Public portals between the layers and to remote planes appear as temples to the idols of ignorance, sensuality, lust, greed, vanity, bigotry, bad magic, and hate.