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Malsheem is a vast stone fortress, as large as a city, but it has no streets or open courtyards; it’s all one vast building, with rooms, lofty halls, and skylights here and there with fountains. Asmodeus loves high ceilings, and he loves them to be vaulted...
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@TheEdVerse, Loved your most recent video on the Cult of Asmodeus that lurks in Waterdeep! I was wondering if you might be able to provide some insight into Malsheem, Asmodeus' palace in Nessus? Even if it is unmappable, are there certain rooms to take note of? Thanks as always!
Feb 12, 2026 · 7:32 PM UTC
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..(curving stone ribs overhead, converging and joining at bosses that in his case are always adorned with stalactite-like downward-jutting spires).
Malsheem fills a large, bowl-shaped mountain valley, and is flanked by black, jagged peaks that are huge natural..
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..masses of chipped obsidian. The roofs of the fortress are steeply sloped tiles that rise into ridges and spires except where there are domes (skylights of fused-in-one-piece glass).
The ceilings and walls of Malsheem are of dark stone fused by magic into..
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..smooth, solid seamless surfaces (except where doors and archways are located). Asmodeus prefers ramps to steps, and loves staircases where two curving ramps descend to meet at a landing, from which a lone ramp descends “back” under the level where the two ramps..
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..came from. Windows are tall, narrow, topped with pointed arches, and contain stained glass scenes in their transoms but not their main panes, which are large and of single pieces of glass (like modern real-world windows, but not like most windows in the Realms).
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The stained glass scenes move like slowly-writhing flames, and are composed of the staring, elongated faces belonging to souls trapped within the glass—for Asmodeus stores thousands of souls in Malsheem, and can call them forth into bodies he creates on the spot...
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..(almost always known forms of devils, or handsome humans).
Every doorknob in Malsheem—and it does have knobs, like real-world doors of the early twentieth century, not the pull-ring doors common in Faerûn—is of one human-fist-sized piece of glossy-polished..
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..ruby. Garderobes flush with running water, and have adjacent sinks with hot and cold taps.
Hangings in Malsheem (that is, curtains one passes through; there are no tapestries on walls as adornments, only portraits of moments when mortals were entrapped in...
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..contracts, or damned) are black, translucent, and ribbed like the wings of giant bats, but are of silk and bone ribbing; they are not real beast-wings.
The largest and most impressive room in Malsheem is the throne room. The high seat, an arch-topped highbacked..
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..chair atop a dais of nine steps, each representing one of the layers of Hell (and being a teleport to—but not from—its corresponding layer—is formally known as The Throne of the Archfiend, and the chamber itself is formally the Fane of Nessus.
It is reached by..
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..The Walk of the Damned, a high-vaulted, long straight hallway (usually lined with gelugon guards) that has a crimson marble floor, and runs (via hundred-foot-tall ironbound doors upon which magical glyphs glow in a slow, fitful sequence) directly from the..
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..Entry Hall of Malsheem, that its towering Front Gates (actually hundred-foot-tall double doors) open into. Most visitors to Malsheem never see more than these three rooms: the vast and echoing high-ceiling Entry Hall, with its domed ceiling painted with..
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..scenes of Asmodeus in triumph over the devils and dragons and tarrasques he’s just slain and humbled, and its internal balconies where guards stand watchfully; the Walk of the Damned, and the Fane.
Asmodeus himself inhabits far cozier chambers (with low...
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..ceilings, carpets, lounging furniture, floating animated orreries of various clusters of celestial bodies across the multiverse, and elaborate canopied beds and bathing pools, all in their own side-chambers) that visitors never see.
About halfway across the..
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..vast labyrinth of Malsheem is a big oval chamber that roughly marks the public rooms of the fortress (the “palace”) from the private ones (the “home” of Asmodeus). This is the Chamber of Iqarrlus, named for an archdevil Asmodeus slew here. That victory was why..
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..Asmodeus chose this site to build his home.
The Chamber of Iqarrlus is a smooth-white-gold-veiny-marble-floored hall with an oval pool at its heart of deep, cool, clear, drinkable water.
It’s rumored in the Nine Hells that a being that can speak to the living..
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..and rise up as an amorphous cloud dwells in the pool, and Asmodeus sometimes debates with it when lonely or depressed—and that it is mightier than the Lord of the Nine, and he can’t destroy or dispel or exile it, though he’s often tried.
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