As I'm moving towards underground part of the setting I'm building I realized I don't have many original and/or interesting ideas of what to put underground.
As such, let's have a thread about all things underground. Not merely dusty cellars and bear caves, but serious underground realms.
Suggest books, RPG modules/sourcebooks, games, movies, heck, even music.
Oh and artworks. Post artworks.
Crystal caverns.
Lava.
Previous metals, so all kinds of gold and silver.
Ice caverns for arctic or mountains.
Various spiders, and insects that are upsized.
Mushrooms, bioluminescent and otherwise.
Roots.
Underwater rivers, lakes and aquifers.
So deep the dark is alive (or something to that effect).
Albino wildlife.
Obligatory Dwarves using any of the above.
Cultist ruins.
Precursor ruins.
An impenetrable endlayer.
And finally lost world pockets of cavemen and dragon-dinosaurs.
An underground city is always fun. A bunch of people found a huge cave system and just decided to set up shop, living off the fungus they can grow down there.
It'll probably fall apart if you try to think about the logistics too hard honestly, but if you can find some way to make it work it gives a little bright spot of civilisation.
Levels. There isn’t just one underground, there’s several undergrounds, and just like ours you can only access the deeper parts by digging or finding one of a small number of entrances. Naturally, things get spookier, weirder, and/or more hellish the further down you go.
You can come up with underground crops and the like.
Also glowing crystals for additional light sources. Bonus points for magic or alchemy that lets you make them brighter or dimmer.
Advanced steampunk cities are always fun. Gaslight, machines, the constant threat of a cave in, all that goodness.
Tunnels was weird as fuck - and I stopped reading before I got really weird, apparently, but it had multiple layers of underground world
The underworld is real, and you can tunnel to it.
The Underdark is alive, and it is hungry. More than mere caves and tunnels, it is a growing nothingness eating away at the inner earth. It even eats away at the borders between worlds, and so moves through them; this is not the first world it has consumed, nor will it be the last.
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Read Veins of the Earth. Would recommend buying the pdf too.
It's brilliantly-written, and it has an absolute TON of content (350+ pages) for any truly underground world where a light source is more valuable than its weight in gold.
You could rip ideas from Sunless Sea.
Down in the depths is a massive underground lake, with all kinds of things that don't make sense - demons who are discovering industrialisation, parasitic mushrooms slowly growing on all things, spiders who are rapidly breeding and expanding across the Neath - and ancient statues reaching up from below the waters. Living clay, cannibalistic religions and ancient gates of snow-covered underground, the stone cold to the touch, and leading to a place that is nowhere.
If you do rip anything from there, feel free to use the music for ambience as well, it's a pretty good OST.
As life thrives around volcanic vents so could trive around sources of magic. It makes crystals glow, which gives light for crops, such things. Maybe some ancient artefact keeps it all running. They can be some magical outcasts - but what did they do? The story writes itself.
You could go for a kind of inverse bee's nest thing with some sort of large volcanic flow through the middle of an enormous main chamber and many caves/dwellings lining the edges appearing as nearly patterned indents or holes lining the walls of the chamber.
We Are The Dwarves. I will now commence the dump.
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Is that meant to be a river of sulphur?
Possible. I haven't finished the game, and all this is concept art.
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>Read Veins of the Earth. Would recommend buying the pdf too.
Seconded. The book is THICC
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The literal pillars of the earth.
In my setting, they're enormous petrified trees, covered over by a layer of stone. That stone is actually the fossilized skeleton of God that fell from heaven after the age of creation, which the entire known world takes place atop.
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Similar to , Dark Souls has an enormous lake with huge trees stretching up to the sky and, presumably, supporting the world above them. The Everlasting Dragon, one of the last dragons, has a nest within one of the trees. It always freaked me out just a little to wonder whether there was another world on top of each of those trees... and what lay below the lake on which I currently stood.
The entire place has this really eerie feel to it, and is one of the few places in the game that has music outside of a boss fight.
The path to the celestial plane lies not in the heavens, but deep within the bowels of Earth amidst long forgotten ruins of whatever civilization was fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to commune with the gods.
i've toyed with the idea of doing a sort of hollow earth concept, where gravity is the result of a cosmic being slowly sucking in all of creation. still nothing more than a vague idea in the back of my imagination, but one day i may get around to fleshing it out so it actually makes sense
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That is some seriously creepy and awesome imagery. I too recommend Veins of the Earth, and Deep Carbon Observatory as well, the second half.
Out of the Abyss also had some great umderground ideas, particularly the flora.
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Put not!Skaven as the dominant civilization there. If your players were expecting drow, they will be in for a fun ride.
Children of the Great Horned Rat is a good sourcebook that goes into detail on skaven society.
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Check out Veins of the Earth
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elven style... Nargotrond?
I want some of the atmosphere of a great underground cavern in my floating islands setting. The lower you go, the darker and colder it gets because you move away from the sun, until you hit the deep sea-like area.
What kind of structures could you have floating in the sky that deliver a similar feeling to these places below the Earth? I'm thinking of islands that are far larger than anything higher up, either in the abyss or the twilight zone, that are warm because of magma rivers inside them and filled with tunnels and holes, but nothing on the top.
clouds of dust that hang in the air in certain shapes because of reasons
you can pass through them rather easily, but light reflects off them giving the illusion of ceiling, stalactites, etc.
Here's an idea: huge macro-sized magic neutrinos fly through space and occasionally pass the planet. Being neutrinos, they obviously do not interact with ordinary matter, but they do with that primordial mana-rich mineral. Interaction causes nuclear cascade-like reactions that leave incredibly huge underground caverns in crust. Some do collapse, some not. Because of exposure to high-energy magic reactions, even the ordinary matter can get weird and acquire strange properties.
Heck, you can have a whole parallel magic table of chemical elements and have, say, gold and magigold sometimes interact under right conditions giving rise to yet weirder half-states.
Will magisilicon have semi-conductor properties? Magic computers possible? Fuck yeah.
check out Moria in Lord of the Rings Online
There’s as much as three times water between Earth’s mantle and crust as in all the oceans on the surface. Most of it is trapped in ringwoodite, a kind of minerals formed in the high pressure.
Are you a geologist?
Also, the entire earth is up to 90% oxygen in volume. Pretty wild to think about
30% of Earth is made of Iron (mostly the core), 30% of oxygen (oxygen is the third most common atom in the universe and can form a lot of molecules), with the rest being different % of elements.
Congratulations for removing everything magical from magic.
that's why I said by volume and not by atom %. Oxygen has a comparatively large diameter
Here's the thing: you can put literally anything you want underground, so long as you can also think of a reason why it's there. Sometimes thinking of that second part is what creates the whole setting/area.
You could but a massive skyscape underground, bright and blue and shining. Why is it there? Because the colony of wizards down there got depressed being down in the dark all day so they cast an illusory sky to make it seem more like home. However, an illusory sky is just that, an illusion, so they're still just as pallid and pale as any other cave-dwelling creature. The illusory sky also doesn't help with the temperature at all.
And why are those wizards down there in the first place? Maybe they're protecting something ancient. Maybe they STOLE something ancient and are hiding out with it down here, protecting it not for its own sake but just so no one else takes it from them. Maybe they committed some kind of crime or conspiracy and had to flee. Maybe the magic they practice is, uh, "frowned upon" on the surface world. Maybe they're the most reclusive academy of wizards of all time, simply researching where NO ONE will or could ever bother them. Maybe all the wizards are lead by a Charles Manson-esque archmage who has led them underground so that he may enjoy their cultish reverence without others interfering to break the illusion.
Maybe the illusory sky was cast a long time ago and there's people down there who don't even know they're underground.
Do the Forgotten Realms routine: Dark Elves, psionic abominations, absolute terror.
Read the Descent:
amazon.com
-Telluric storms are deadly. Lightning can come from any direction.
-Hot methane pockets are even deadlier if it drifts into a flame.
>You can come up with underground crops and the like.
No him but
>Radiotrophic fungus harvested off glowing ore.
>Thermotrophic plants fed by the vapors and heat from lavaducts.
No magic necessary.
It's inspired by depictions of Helheim.
Because asspulling and black boxes are so magical and interesting, yeah.
My current idea is for larger underworld to be created by something, with some recognizable features all over it (first thought was texture and facture of walls, but that's silly, those things change) and very recognizable entraces (think underworld gates in HoMM3).
Regular man-/goblin-/dwarf-dug tunnels and paths made by water and earthquakes would then merge into this underground system.
But I can't think of either features or design of the entrance. Any ideas?
>But I can't think of either features or design of the entrance. Any ideas?
incunabuli.com
>implying dichotomy
Seriously, man, you're fighting with a nice strawman.
Whatever source of buoyancy decreases the lower you go. It might be cool to have whatever vehicle the party are using need to bail things off of it, or having to pry off some huge enemy tentacle dragging it downwards. The idea of an infinite, unexplored, and unknown below is great.
It also adds the effect of buoyancy increasing as you go up, which would be really cool: at some point, upwards becomes unexplored too, due to the buoyancy of even mundane objects and people causing it to rocket up.
Just a thin, tiny sliver of habitable area, with doom unknown, unknowable doom at any other altitude, where matter is constantly being lost. Gives a sense of desperation to the whole thing too, that one day nothing will be left in the habitable area that hasn't rocketed upwards or fell downwards into the ocean of air.
>what is alchemy
>what is a single paradigm
>what is things still being exciting despite being understood
>core of the planet is a prison for ultimate evil
what could the underground of such a world hold? besides minions of evil gnawing at the earth, and huge mountain-sized iron chains stretching through enormous tunnels?
Caverns extend beneath the surface of the floating islands far deeper than they should, eventually connecting to those of other islands. It's the Underdark, it doesn't have to follow the rules.
cults of misguided worshipers, naturally
Post pdf?
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interesting cave entrance?
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bump
Would there normally be ice and cold underground? Or its all heated from below?
Unless you have some in universe explanation for it being cold I assume it would be getting quite hot the lower you go. Even in mines from this century it gets really warm.
I always run a type of Myconid called The Root when my players go underground. The Root's basically a real chill hivemind made out of fungal spores that just want everyone to join, add their knowledge to the collective, and chill out on weed. They usually end up being a good support system for the PCs, keeping them alive during long sojourns into the underdark, and they let me throw in a lot of weird 60's and 70's sci-fantasy stuff, like drugs that let PCs see through time or living bioform ships to cross underground oceans.
That skull the Grey Seer is holding has very protruding manidbles, making it a negro skull.
Where in the Old World can you find melanin enriched friends?
On average, with increasing depth, water temperature increases by around 3°C per 100m.
So yeah, it's warm.
>steampunk cities
i actually have thought of using this but i came with the problem of what would they do with all the steam and smoke from their machines? it would stay in the cave with them and the people would eventually suffocate