Comfy fantasy underworld thread

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Remarkably little interest in this topic considering the board...

> Remarkably little interest in this topic considering the board...

I used to feel the same way (this happens all the time) but I guess you're dealing with a niche inside a niche.

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the idea of an underdark inma fantasy setting js really comfy to me. bump for the thread, love this stuff

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youtube.com/watch?v=l6IfyGL6hn0 - somehow i find underground locations to be super comfy - i often have ambient like in the vid when i paint.
I love the idea of underground cities and even nations - for example in post-apocalyptic fantasy world where the Sun has been extinguished (or other kind of catastrophe happened, like mana going out of control) and all sentient races had to move underground, closer to the warm lava rivers and planet core and rebuild their societies there. Here's a concept i did a while ago for a small vidya we are developing with a friend.

Aside from your standard mushrooms, what food could sustain a whole underground city in a fantasy setting?
Also, what other unusual challenges could this society face? So far i have !notgoblins molefolk who followed humanity underground, feeding on the scraps but growing more bold over time and the danger of toxic sewege from experiments in the city, creating ugly and aggressive mutants in the Slums below.

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Drow skin is black because of a curse, to mark those who gave their souls to the demon Lolth.

But their pretty much albinos at this point. They have spent so long in the underdark that the sun burns their eyes and skin.

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I'm sorry, I'm drooling over all of the beautiful artwork to type anything coherelsakdngdnvnvlkblksdnvgsjdfdpngofvoietkfvldnblkefjgoejgsfdgm;afjsfbb;lkd

Depends on what kind of lighting sources the races in your setting have access to, and where they'd get fresh water.

If they had something approximating the same light as the sun and steady sources of water, it would be possible to bring surface crops down into the depths and grow them there instead. Farmed meat would be considerably harder considering the amount of energy and resources needed for 1lb of meat is much higher than that for 1lb of grain, let alone the amount of space many animals need while growing.

I see such a diet consisting mainly of plants and vegetable matter, shrooms, and only on rare occasions meat (celebrations, major events, things of that nature).

As for hazards and risks, cave-ins are always a threat (you're under who knows how many dozens of meters of rock and stone). Earthquakes if the city/underground cavern is near a major fault system, or lava blowouts if near a volcanically active region and someone hits a lava-tube. If you go with the out of control mana scenario, say, someone ruptured a leyline somewhere and the whole smash went up, another hazard underground could be trying to keep the out of control mana/leylines away from the population centers as best you can.
Hostile life could be anything from your aforementioned !notgoblins, the mutants, ancient diseases sealed in the rock through by the sands of time, or even !notdemons from the greater still depths who take offense to the interlopers from the surface.

>lichens and mosses for vitamins(you can eat certain species just fine IRL)
>snakes, bats, and the insects that feed off their dung for protein, predatory insects that feed off of the scavenger insects like scorpions and tarantulas(cockroaches and mealworms taste pretty good if you gut load them for a day or so on the right foods before cooking them. Also, check out coconut grubs, taste best if you grill them!)
>maybe MAGIC plants that can survive without sun?

Oh, I also forgot fish! There are tons of species of fish and salamander that live in underground caverns with no sunlight. One species of salamander is completely blind due to evolving in such an environment. They literally have no eyes!

Maybe if there was a freshwater equivalent to those hot water geysers on the ocean floor, with the tube worms, and ocean floor crabs and such?

You could probably cram a shit ton of deliciously edible algae and animals into a freshwater version of that kind of environment. Not to mention crayfish/lobster, muscles, freshwater sea slugs/sea snails, shrimp, the whole kebab!

>>maybe MAGIC plants that can survive without sun?
If you wanna go full science fantasy I recall reading about theoretical life that could survive off of radiation, or even cosmic rays that penetrate into the ground. Maybe could even make it bio-luminescent for fun.

which then leads to the question: are such plants edible, and what side effects if any will they have on the person who eats it?

> Not to mention crayfish/lobster, muscles, freshwater sea slugs/sea snails, shrimp, the whole kebab!

I want shrimp kebabs now.

I have a pet theory in my daydreams about a drow who dabbles in both magic and alchemy (he mastered magic and then started in on alchemy cause he/she grew bored) and they steal plants from the surface, then mutate them so they can use symbiotic bacteria that feed off of warmth instead of chlorophyll that feeds off of sunlight.

So the plants all wind of turning albino, but they are nutritionally/genetically the same as their surface cousins.

The drow, being a drow, takes it one step further and creates special strains of bacteria to poison their enemies.

Imagine all of your stomach and intestines abscessing and rotting away inside of you, and nothing can make it stop because the bacteria was genetically engineered to be resistant to both magical and alchemical means of healing.

You and me both, user! :D

Some species of freshwater shrimp get HUGE. Google vampire and bamboo shrimp. People keep them as pets in their aquariums all the time. It's like having a mini lobster, only without all of the pure IMMA FUCK YOUR SHIT UP, so you don't have to worry about your pet fish being ripped to shreds whenever you're not home.

Shrimp people who are inspired by the culture of the ottoman empire?

Your little tidbit about the drow leads to the thought of underground civilizations fighting wars purely over who controls the food supplies, since everything down in the dark has to be strictly regulated and controlled to prevent everyone from starving to death.

You could probably support rather large fungus farms on bat guano (or any sort of biomatter that gets moved into the caves from the outside eco system)

With rivers that go from above ground to underground there's gotta be nutriants and stuff washing down that fish (as already mentioned can survive on).

But yea, food is probably even scarcer than it's been on the surface, and it's been pretty scarce for much of human history. Well, at least living in a cave you don't suffer the seasons so much, no harsh winters to ruin the crops.

>If they had something approximating the same light as the sun and steady sources of water, it would be possible to bring surface crops down into the depths and grow them there instead.
That's a cool idea - my setting is leaning towards magitech, so perhaps there is a powerful lamp/greenhouse powered by crystals that can only be obtained in the dangerous wild mana leylines that you mentioned - hence a reason for existence of adventurers/plot hook for players.

>only on rare occasions meat (celebrations, major events, things of that nature)
>snakes, bats, and the insects
Also a great hook for low level adventures - hunting some predators/giant insect for their high-protein meat, highly in demand among nobility. I already have giant snails as a beast of burden, but as i just googled, their meat is mostly water and pretty low on protein.
>coconut grubs
I thought that you misspelled "crabs", but this looks absolutely delicious - i remember markets in Thailand being full of similar stuff.
Mixing in some underwater life also sounds super cool, there's are a lot of interesting deep water shrimps who are accustomed to live without any sort of light.
Also, since there are cleaning shrimps in nature, maybe there could be a domesticated fantasy variant that provides some sort of medical cleaning/care even to humanoids (like medical leeches)

Yeah, the underdark is basically a sunless desert. Almost everything is pure fucking stone. Almost no soil, so therefor almost no food. Let alone the animals that eat that food.

That's why I came up with the concept of eating insects and other dung scavenging species hereI can totally see starving drow within the lowest of the low castes in society hunting through garbage heaps hoping to catch a bug or two. Or, if they are lucky, a predatory insect like a scorpion. All so they can have a bite or two before they sleep.

With lack of proper air circulation though, the risk of humidity rising could cause some seriously nasty molds and stuff to grow on food crops. Look up ergot, it's a parasitic blight that grows on wheat. To the naked eye it is indistinguishable from it's host. But it causes some seriously weird hallucinations. In fact, I do believe it's what led to the invention of modern day Acid.

However, some molds are also beneficial, I can't see why people who can use magic can't figure out how to extract penicillin from certain mold species. And there's even a type of special corn recipe in Latino cultures that requires the corn be well cultured in a certain kind of mold. I can't remember the name, though. But it's logical to take that one step further and have entire farms dedicated solely to growing specific strains of mold.

TL;DR mold can either be your worst nightmare in an underground society, or your best friend.

>You could probably support rather large fungus farms on bat guano (or any sort of biomatter that gets moved into the caves from the outside eco system)
Well, i'm thinking more along the lines of a sealed cave/cavern deep underground (at least half a mile), where life if any is extremely scarce.
>Well, at least living in a cave you don't suffer the seasons so much, no harsh winters to ruin the crops.
True, if a large enough cavern to farm in is carved out and lit well the only things that would need to be worried about mainly are a source of nutrients for the plants and a source of water (both of which could be handled with the underwater rivers you have mentioned.). That could fail a bit though if the surface has experienced significant contamination/extinction level events, and the water is either contaminated and requires difficult processing to purify it, or doesnt contain the necessary nutrients for establishing an underground farm.

>Food grubs bit
You'd still have to hunt down and find the suitable bugs and grubs and the like for that, then there's the whole farming and managing them so they become a proper viable food source.

>Molds bad and good bit
Well, thats certainly another idea for a food source of an underground society, and a problem for anything brought down from the surface after the exodus. Growing molds and other decomposers would certainly be easier vs growing more conventional crops, but then this leads us to the ever useful shrooms that show up in pretty much any fantasy setting involving people living underground.

True, I personally like the thought of farming bugs and grubs because they proportionately pack way more protein per bite than most mammalian meat does. Plus, they can live off of leftovers that you were going to throw away anyways.

And that leads me to something I am trying to figure out, how do you deal with garbage, rotting plants, meat, raw sewage, in an underground society? It's not like you can dig trenches of gravel downhill that the sewage can drain into. and then cover up those trenches with ten feet of topsoil. How do you manage to get all of that stuff away from society? Even if you simply dump it all in a nearby cavern the methane and other gasses from decomposition can't escape. The fumes could become a genuine biohazard if they build up. Or even become flammable!

I would figure such an underground society would place pretty significant emphasis on recycling biomass and materials in general.

Methane and other outgassing can be harvested and processed into fuels. The biomass can be either composted for the shrooms, mold, or plant farms, or can be fed directly to the scavenger farm as a feedstock.

Sewage would require some processing to split the solid and liquid waste, each of which would have to be further processed for re-use. Solids would likely end up going to the farms, the liquid would have their water component processed out for re-cycling, with the leftover being further processed into either an inert form for disposal, or into useful substances.

If you're willing to go through it, there's quite a bit of useful material that can be returned out of the waste of society.

Hmmmm, yeah, I was thinking of that. Specifically, connecting giant sewage septic tanks to blacksmith forges. They collect all of the methane and other flammable gasses, and use it to fuel their forges. Due to the fact that wood is damn rare. This allows equally rare coal and other flammable inert objects (could mushrooms be burned the same as wood, if dried out properly?) to be used by the average person.

I was even thinking of recycling the coal and stuff. Basically, since they are underground and the smoke would spread through out the cavern, anything that creates smoke has vent pipes with multiple layers of screen made from either special cave dwelling silk worms, or spiders. These screens collect the smoke and creosote. Which is VERY flammable. Houses burn down if the owner doesn't sweep the chimney on a regular basis. The people then remove these screens when they get full and lay them out flat. Then they layer whatever they have on hand at the moment that also burns well. Such as ground up coal, dried lichens. dried moss, dried inedible mushrooms, etc. Then they roll it up, and basically create their own artificial fire logs.

>could mushrooms be burned the same as wood, if dried out properly
In theory yes, but the mushrooms would have to be fairly massive to get suitable burn times out of it.

Coal is actually fairly common underground depending on the type and where you get it. IRL, the United States alone has significant and absolutely enormous coal reserves (something like ~240 gigatons of coal), and the rest of the world has another 500GT or so.

Applied in-world at even a twentieth of that amount would provide a pre-industrial society that just experienced the apocalypse all of the fuel they could ever possibly need. With that much coal, they'd have much bigger issues, like managing available oxygen so the people dont fucking asphyxiate, or dealing with the coal waste products (which you seem to have some idea on how to handle).

And speaking of the coal waste recycling, while possible it will have its limits as well. There's only so much energy that can be extracted from a kilo of coal and once its spent thats it no matter what you do (unless you throw in some bullshit magic to deal with that to some degree).

Wow, I did not know coal was that common. And yes, now that you mention it, lack of oxygen would probably be a huge hindrance when trying to cook food or blacksmith. Or heck, even without any kind of open flames fresh air would still be a major issue.

Unless there was some kind of underground lichen/moss/mushroom that's completely useless in every way, but it recycles the air fairly well? Do mushrooms even do that? Or can only plants and trees do that?

Fucking nice thread guys. Sorry I got no pics to contribute but please keep it up.

Need shit like this for my space rock people I got going on in my story. Really appreciate it.

>Unless there was some kind of underground lichen/moss/mushroom that's completely useless in every way, but it recycles the air fairly well? Do mushrooms even do that? Or can only plants and trees do that?
So far as quick internet check tells, shrooms consume oxygen.

Your underground society would likely have to consider constructing oxygen farms, or piping it down from the surface through a large number of filters and purifiers, both mundane and magical.

The former has the issue that really the only things that I know of that can process CO2 into oxygen on a large enough scale is either algae or trees, both of which require large amounts of light and plenty of space.

The latter has the issue that if a filter fails, the populace is exposed to the surface atmosphere which has who knows what kind of contaminants in it from the disaster.

This is however a fantasy setting and I do see it to be possible, with some effort, to create some form of life or magical construct that does that.

They're negative.

Glad to help user, I'm just surprised no one has told me my ideas are shit tier yet, lol.

Yeah, when in doubt, magic Mcguyver it!

Now the question is: what is your society going to do with all that energy? General home heating and cooking wont require that much energy deep underground, and there's only so much blacksmithing you can do.

>there's only so much blacksmithing you can do.

Lies! Lies and heresy!

EVERYTHING MUST BE MADE OF METAL!

and after you've rebuilt your entire society to use metal in pretty much all construction and equipment?

You send them to war to conquer other underground civilizations.

Well, that certainly is an option. Sorta imagining a steampunk (with that much coal and metal its an inevitability) technomagic underground society wrecking shop amongst other underground societies for fuel and resources.

How do you justify Dwarves having massive beards in the underground, which is full of dirt and dust and bugs and shit?

whey you finally leave it and see sunlight again, that's my favorite part!

I've heard the idea that a dwarf's whiskers are used to sense airflow and such while moving underground,

I don't feel the need to justify it.

Good luck leaving without at least one of these.
>Casadastraphobia
>Anablephobia
>Hylophobia
>Agrizoophobia
>Heliophobia
>Aeroacrophobia
>Ancraophobia

What does Veeky Forums think about the sunless sea setting?

I like it, even if I couldn't really get into Fallen London.

D&D traditionally had cave reptiles called rothe that served as the "cows of the Underdark".

bump

All these problems are mentioned and explained in all the D&D Underdark setting books for 1st, 3rd and 4th editions.

The most important things making underworld life possible are PORTALS to elemental planes and other dimensions, through which many necessary components (fire, metals, air, fresh water, waste) can enter and exit. The drow are sufficiently masterful at magic to be able to incorporate dozens of portals into each of their cities.

Without magic, life underground really is nearly impossible at any kind of large civilizational scale.

I think me and him were looking for a more hard solution to life underground, mix things up a bit vs open a portal and dump what you dont want through it.

>Aside from your standard mushrooms, what food could sustain a whole underground city in a fantasy setting?
Crickets, silk worms, maybe ants. High in protein, vitamins, low in fat: fast to breed and mature, low imput for the return. All round good food. Crickets are pretty neutral flavour.

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>What's your favorite part about adventuring in the Underdark?
The barbecues.

>black-skinned elves (shouldn't they be white?)

You do KNOW what a DROW is right?

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