Lady of Pain

Thou shalt not fuck with The Lady of Pain. Being mazed by her will be the least horrid experience you'll get.

The Lady of Pain is one of the primary figures of the Planescape campaign setting. She is an immensely powerful being who protects the city of Sigil from outside forces. Despite being at least as powerful as any known deity, she accepts no followers and is known to respond to those who try to worship her with extreme violence (although strangely, not people who worship her in secret. There is at least one person in Sigil who secretly is a petitioner of The Lady whom she hasn't destroyed). While most Cagers don't like to invoke her name lightly, the phrase "Her Serenity" is commonly used to refer to the Lady of Pain.

Nobody knows exactly what she is. There are rumors that she's part of a group called the Ancient Brethren (or the Elders), who predate the gods and include such beings as Jazirian, Ahriman and Mok'slyk, also known as the Serpent. When the latter empowered Vecna in his bid to take over the Multiverse and setting up shop in Sigil she was unable to drive him off: while she managed to force Vecna into a stalemate, his presence there would have eventually destroyed the city and with it, the Multiverse, necessitating the party to take him down. This puts her around the same power level as Mok'slyk, and while it gives some answers as to what she is and what her goals are, it raises a lot more questions.

She has two famous unique powers. First, any one who sufficiently pisses her off gets transported to a maze-like demiplane. This is known as getting "mazed". These mazes resemble twisted and infinitely large copies of whatever part of Sigil the victim was in at the time. Victims do not age or need sustenance while mazed and cannot teleport out. The mazes can always (apparently, that's an inherent part of their nature) be escaped from but finding an exit can take an eternity. Since the mazes are located in the Ethereal Plane, it's also possible for somebody else to rescue (or kill) the victim, but even finding the right maze is a difficult task, making this highly unlikely. Second, anyone she casts a shadow on has their skin magically flayed from their body. Victims who are killed this way have their souls destroyed so they can never be resurrected.

Crunch

She is left deliberately statless to prevent powergaming players trying to fight her or actually coming up with ways to defeat her in combat and is automatically assumed to win whatever fight she gets into. Her attacks basically go like this: The Lady of Pain floats toward you. Her shadow falls over you, and you feel the pain of ten thousand knives flaying the flesh from your bones. You die. The only way to defend against the Lady of Pain's attacks is to grab your character sheet before the DM manages to tear it up.

If she knows what's good for her, she stays the fuck away from 15th level 4th edition rogues (how can She cast a shadow on herself?), Pun-Pun, and the Neutronium golem.

...We joke about the above, but it is, unfortunately, common for certain kinds of DM to kill her off with their BBEG to show how strong the campaign villain is ("oh mah Gawd, da villain just keeled da lady of pain, he's soo strong"). Any player faced with such a brand of dumbfuckery should seriously consider rebellion or physical violence.

Ignoring that killing the Lady of Pain would wreck the absolute balls out of not just Planescape, but utterly unravel every single aspect of the game system's settings on a fucking submolecular level, anyone who COULD pull off such a hypothetical would be placed far beyond the realm of actually having to worry about any threat in existence, let alone the hapless player characters whose sheets got wasted on this drivel. To give you an example, there used to be this god named Aoskar. He was what would've been the perfect god for Sigil if ever it were to have one, and she fucking ONE-SHOTTED HIM with a snap of her fingers! And the only reason why she even bothered to kill him was because one of her Dabus turned to worshipping him.

Very few sane players would try to take on a god, even if their character is at the max level with truly powerful gear (and in case of spellcasters, some really OP spells). The gods can do as they will to us, after all. In some editions some less-powerful gods might have one or two abilities that a PC would get a saving throw against... but the Lady of Pain can do as SHE wills to a god. DO. NOT. FIGHT. HER.

Some Internet Troll decided to make fun of both Planescape fans and the haters of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition by releasing a phony 4e-style "statblock" of the Lady of Pain, which still occasionally pops up on /tg/ when somebody really wants to piss off the Planescape fans, beyond just trolling them about the World Axis. Ironically, if you actually read the "statblock", it's basically done in the same vein as Cthulhu in most editions of Call of Cthulhu, where Her every action lets Her make an attack whose effect is "You're dead, no saves" and Her defensive stats are all some variant of "It don't work, and fuck you for trying".

Gallery

This article contains PROMOTIONS! Don't say we didn't warn you.

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  unused art from Planescape: Torment

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  An image of the Lady that won't result in Mazing if seen

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  Lady of Poke

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  She can even cause a pain in your dick.

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