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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Yakk's Avatar

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    Nov 2006

    Default Doors to the Underground

    To start with, I'm inspired by The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

    So my world is going to have Doors in it; physical portals that cross between realms. Doors are how planar travel mostly works.

    A past civilization has used Doors to demiplanes regularly. Instead of building something in our world, they would build a Door, and construct it on the other side. This makes a location that is has construction advantages (as the Demiplanes can be shaped by magic easier, especially when first created) and have security features (you cannot teleport into one, for example, and much divination stops working).

    Dungeons are generally Doors into such ancient demiplanes. Finding ancient Doors and splunking through them is a source of much of the modern knowledge of how magic works. Archeologists are the scientists of this world. The way you find spells and magical objects is you mine them out of a Door.

    (Some upstarts have tried doing original magical research, which gives us some fun politics.)

    Not all Doors have great stuff behind them, and many are very dangerous. Their magical demiplanes have decayed. The best Doors to mine are also the best defended - they where literally vaults with security systems, and those security systems have evolved.

    ...

    So now, the Underground.

    One of the plot points is that the surface's largest naval power (trading and not) has pissed off Atlantis, who in turn have shut off a major ocean route with an eternal storm.

    The Underground is an attempt to get around this. You take two Doors that are not too far apart from each other, and you weave a physical link between them in the prime material. Originally this was done by string, but a stronger link is done by a runed chain.

    Then you pull it tight in just the right way, and build a tunnel connecting the two Doors outside of the prime material.

    The result is a route you can take by entering one Door and exiting the other - an "Underground Route" along a string-path.

    The Doors have to be compatible and sufficiently close and physically linked by a loop of enchanted material, and a ritual has to be performed to convert the loop into a path. But once complete, you now have a road between two places that goes through a door.

    ...

    I want a dangerous surface world. This makes travel an adventure. Roads are only safe if they are well maintained both physically and with magical wards against monsters.

    So an Underground between two spots makes for a safer and possibly quicker route.

    ...

    I'm also thinking that when you expand a demiplane even correctly, you get more than what you intended. So you either have to adapt those unintended regions, or (more conservatively) build walls to cut them off from what you want.

    When you make the underground travel path, you get side branches -- the standard is to go through and brick them up (and then put wards on the wall) to make a simple, strait and safe path.

    ...

    Prospecting for a series of Doors to make underground routes bypassing the storm has high value here. While ocean travel is still much cheaper, an underground bypass could be extremely useful.

    Oh; and maybe we can flood these routes, allowing boats to travel instead of having to use wagons. Propulsion becomes interesting.

  2. - Top - End - #2
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    Laserlight's Avatar

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    Default Re: Doors to the Underground

    I can see these Underground door-to-door routes replacing bridges, which were expensive to build and could be damaged or destroyed by floods or ice. But I don't see how you'd make it work for any kind of long distance travel.
    Junior, half orc paladin of the Order of St Dale the Intimidator: "Ah cain't abide no murderin' scoundrel."

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  3. - Top - End - #3
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Yakk's Avatar

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    Nov 2006

    Default Re: Doors to the Underground

    Quote Originally Posted by Laserlight View Post
    I can see these Underground door-to-door routes replacing bridges, which were expensive to build and could be damaged or destroyed by floods or ice. But I don't see how you'd make it work for any kind of long distance travel.
    Well, I'm going for a very dangerous world.

    City-based civilizations hide behind warded city walls and warded farm houses and use magic to boost crop yields. Land routes go along ley lines with regular shrines that are used to "pay off" local spirits and make the trip safer.

    "Better than the alternative". And I don't want it used everywhere. Possibly one civilization is better at it? Also, possibly you'd be able to find a previous civilization's underground-equivalents.

    ...

    The first use of Underground would be relatively short. A major project might have generated an Underground tunnel between an island nation and the nearby continent, sort of like the Chunnel.

    For longer trips, the existence of an Underground is a major project. It would be akin to a modern day tunnel through a mountain - doable, but expensive.

    ...

    In the plot I'm thinking of, a possible Underground route is found over a relatively short piece of land between two seas. PCs are sent to survey the route to confirm it, and maybe negotiate with some of the peoples and the like it passes by.

    Sort of a mountain-tunnel thing.

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    Firbolg in the Playground
     
    Bohandas's Avatar

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    Default Re: Doors to the Underground

    Does the chain have to stay connected after the magic is worked? Do they need a transatlantic cable to cross the ocean that was the inciting incident for this technology?
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  5. - Top - End - #5
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Yakk's Avatar

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    Default Re: Doors to the Underground

    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    Does the chain have to stay connected after the magic is worked? Do they need a transatlantic cable to cross the ocean that was the inciting incident for this technology?
    No; the chain is subsubmed into the underground.

    The idea of the real-world link is to require *some* effort to connect the two ends of the underground. Crossing rivers is easy, oceans is hard, and crossing dangerous mountain range requires you to end intrepid explorers to negotiate temporary right of way and the like while the "chain crew" follows behind (maybe even months later) laying chain.

    Limiting how far apart the linked doors can be ensures this isn't a freebie either; as the art of making doors is lost, finding doors you can link up is another part of this. Stretching the length between doors might be an area of active research.

    The discovery of a sunken door might have permitted a channel crossing, for example. The connection would require stretching a chain to that door, and then a chain from that door to the far coast.

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