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View Full Version : Undermountain? World's Largest Dungeon? Child's play.



hiryuu
2009-01-06, 03:36 PM
Genesis.

It makes a new plane that reaches 180 feet in radius and then grows 1 foot per week, for 52 feet per year. Prime material planes have lifespans, and some have had sentients on them for millions of years. So we can assume that at least one of these prime material planes had a level 17 psion (or a wizard with the aptitude to make it into a spell).

So a genesis power created with "underground" terrain and stocked with golems and stoneworking constructs and so on 200,000,000 years in the past has a radius of 10,400,000,000 feet or about 2 million miles; that's about 505 Earths end to end in radius. That's about twelve and half trillion (~12,560,000,000,000, actually) square miles of space and 4 and a half billion floors. It will be a long time before anyone runs out of room.

In fact, as far as the inhabitants are concerned, The Tower extends forever and they have no idea where it came from. Golems work tirelessly to make new stairs, doors, halls, and rooms in areas that are not inhabited (people stay away from them; they build without thought to people), leading to nonsense stairs that go to nowhere, doors in bathroom walls, and so on. Mindless undead told to defend The Tower from intruders are now anathema to all other things in The Tower, seeing them as intruders. Intelligent undead living near such floors or regions could even exploit this, extorting villages for the flesh of their dead in exchange for protecting them from the hordes. Whole empires, nations, and kingdoms crop up in the halls, some of which are massive enough to have their own weather patterns while being inundated with strange lights, or with fake sunlight drawn from gates to the positive energy plane such that one can see massive tiles just past the clouds, and traps crowd the halls in the regions where no one has trod in centuries or even millenia.

sigurd
2009-01-06, 04:17 PM
Concepts are one thing but development is another. Bigger plans make bigger promises.

How bout a map or two hundred :).

Sigurd

hiryuu
2009-01-06, 04:33 PM
Concepts are one thing but development is another. Bigger plans make bigger promises.

How bout a map or two hundred :).

Sigurd

I'm in the developing process at the moment. Really I'm just going to pick a region and develop it, but everything starts at a concept. I'm not ready to start mapping at this point. I'm really looking for ways to fit in the races and monsters.

Unintelligent undead are directed in the single minded pursuit to purge The Tower from intruders. This usually means any living creatures on any floor. On floors that the dead control, any living are ruthlessly exterminated and turned into more dead, ruled over by intelligent nodes whose original purpose was to oversee much smaller undead numbers; driven mad, they assume anything and everything in The Tower that isn't them an enemy, and this includes other undead nodes. A node, in turn, is a pile of rotten flesh, bile, and bones conglomerated into an immobile creature whose swollen belly contains a mixture of negative energy, sludge, and tiny planar gateways. Corpses stuffed into a node become either skeletons or zombies and are regurgitated through a long tube into a pile on the floor, where they are given their orders to protect The Tower.

Not all undead are multicellular. The sludge and mildew that sometimes grows in places around The Tower is sometimes exposed to regions where nodes hold sway, creating undead parasitic fungi and bacteria. Humans living in the nearby regions once learned to apply it to their bodies to go unnoticed by the dead, and now they have formed a society and race all their own, dedicated to trekking into regions and floors where the unintelligent undead rule and recovering any sort of supplies, food, or gear that might be there and selling it to other civilizations. I'm going to call them "Necronians" for now.

Necronian gear is mostly clusters of undead bacteria, slime molds, and fungi directed to the collective purpose of its master. They fuse with living shells and resemble black sheaths the seem to squirm or scintillate. The price of any necronian weapon or armor is double the masterwork cost (the cost for making a magic item into a slotless item is double the cost. This seems fair for making it into a "graft-like" item); removing or attaching a necronian weapon, armor, or piece of equipment deals 1d3 points of Constitution damage (Charisma for undead creatures). Extruding a necronian weapon causes the suit as a whole to bubble or bend (for example, extruding a longsword takes the same action as sheathing or removing it, but causes it to form out of the black material of the suit). Anyone wearing a necronian suit of armor with the hood up is ignored by unintelligent undead unless they attempt to attack or move it. Removing a hood is a free action; extending a hood is a move action.

Life tends to cluster around areas that lead to places where The Tower extends tiny portals to other planes, bringing in water, light, heat, and, by association, food.

Dwarves dwell in the darker, tighter rooms and halls, following builder constructs or carving their own cities out of the halls.

Halflings are uniquely suited to the environment, as are gnomes, since both races are small and require little in the way of resources.

Half-elves and half-orcs... well, elves wander a lot, so it's not surprising you end up with half-elves. Haven't figured out orcs yet. Perhaps they raid for everything as normal, but dwell in the pitch black places that resemble mazes.

Humans as a whole are like humans anywhere else; they build kingdoms, towns, and cities, and can survive in the weirdest places.

Elves keep to more "open" rooms where they can move around and make great guides, often wandering far by themselves (due to their natural secret door finding abilities).

hiryuu
2009-01-06, 05:14 PM
Orcs are hairy, brutish creatures with thick and sloping heads that live in the darkest parts of the mazes. In pitch-black tunnels and floors they teem and swarm, the scent of their offal wafting up through warm gratings to mingle with the cool air of the halls. Overly large canines and bristling stiff hairs almost like spines punctuate their heavy appearance, and the move with a loping motion, at least three limbs used for locomotion at any one time. Their presence signals a change to the floor, as when they persist in any one region for too long, darkness follows with them and children born more and more resemble their terrible forms until the settlements are swallowed up by the things in the dark.

An orc tribe is in turn ruled by a "silverback," a slightly bigger, hairier, smellier orc that doesn't carry weapons, can't rise up on its hind legs, and is typically naked and covered with waste... all except for its face, which resembles a normal sized bald, attractive human face with no pupils and has near perfect diction in common, carried with a child's voice.