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he Lady of Pain is the de-facto, unquestioned ruler of the interplanar city of Sigil, a donut-shaped city atop an infinitely tall spire in the very center of the multiverse. Sigil is known as the City of Doors, for it contains an innumerable amount of portals to every plane imaginable. One wrong step and you could end on Baator, or worse!

Appearing as a monolithic, unmoving, unfeeling, and unchanging woman adorned in flowing robes and with a face wreathed with blades, the Lady of Pain silently watches over the City of Doors and rules it with an iron fist. She never speaks, instead communicating through her servants, the dabus, whom also maintain the city through general maintenance. She is said to have power over every single portal in Sigil.

Perhaps less or somehow more than a deity, the Lady of Pain is an insurmountable force that has stood as long as Sigil has. Perhaps she is but a prisoner of the city, forever cursed to watch over her own cell; maybe she is a fallen demon lord who is quite fond of her new home; perhaps she is simply six squirrels standing on top of each other and floating about using a ring of levitation. Whatever the truth may be, it is likely incomprehensible to mere mortals and thus is rarely brought into question. All that the city's residents need to know is that she is not to be crossed, questioned, or worshiped.

The Lady of Pain possesses cosmic power, and her displayed abilities truly suit her title. With but a mere thought she can lacerate anyone within her sight; anyone that stands in her shadow will suddenly sprout wounds and will die in mere seconds. Crossing her path is nothing short of a death sentence. Those who attempt to worship her meet especially gruesome fates, and are known to suddenly be reduced to puddles of blood and sinew.

However, the most horrid punishment that can be inflicted by Her Serenity is her ability to maze her victims, a spell often reserved for the most grave offenses that threaten the stability of the city itself. This is different from the standard maze spell that can be cast by a wizard of power, trapping the victim in an escapable maze that can be solved in an hour or two; the Lady's mazes vary from prisons designed to last for hours, to inescapable, unsolvable labyrinths that entrap the offender for nothing short of eternity, slowly driving them to a mental state worse even than insanity.

It is said that gods have fallen to the Lady of Pain, and that she is perhaps the most unchanging presence in the multiverse. When the Blood War reaches its end, when the planes lose their magic and collapse, when the D&D equivalent of the heat death of the universe arrives, there is no doubt that Her Serenity shall remain, floating in utter silence as she observes the ever-standing, ever-present City of Doors.

Lots of people have made homebrew stats for the Lady, which while cool, is ultimately futile, as to properly implement the Lady of Pain is to basically roll a D1 and say "the Lady of Pain eviscerates you with a thought, and in the span of a millisecond you feel the equivalent of ten million eternities of unfathomable agony".

My personal favorite statsheet is this one, though, because it outlines the sheer absurdity of her maze ability.



The Lady of Pain was first introduced in 1994 with the release of the Planescape Campaign setting, written by David "Zeb" Cook. Some folks might recognize her as the symbol for the 1999 CRPG Epic, Planescape: Torment, in which she features prominently.