Lands of Tyranny
Day 1 of The Philosopher, Year 414
Underworld
(The Depths)
The Underworld, also called "The Depths" by its inhabitants, or "Underdark" is an enormous complex of tunnels and caves that is said to span most of the Continent, although many claim it extends for its entirety, if not even further and under the oceans. Some of its grottos are so large that they can contain entire cities, lakes, or even landscapes vaguely reminiscent of its surface counterparts of hills and mountains.
Most of these complexes though have indeed been excavated by water through the millennia, as it is still suggested by the abundance of the precious resource, which is also in most cases drinkable.
The presence of huge caves, often connected by smaller ones or by tunnels, sometimes very long and narrow, also creates the premises for many separated and varied ecosystems, and micro-ecosystems, sometimes varying greatly even from one cave to the next.
Given the complete absence of the main, if not only source of energy for life on the surface -the sun-, life in the depths of earth evolved very differently, mostly thanks to energy of the planet itself, brought forth in the form of intense heat, minerals and nutrients by the presence of volcanoes, gas blow holes, geysers, or heat points situated even kilometers under the bedrock. The flora is of course not made of any of the plants that would survive on the surface, but instead is made of mushrooms of the most odd variants.
Some of these also evolved to produce some form of bioluminescence, either as a simple consequence of their internal processes, or to attract insects that would carry their spores even further than what they would normally reach with the underground winds, often constant, and often very stale in certain regions.
It is under this form of bioluminescence that other smaller forms of mushrooms, molds and lichens often live, being completely dependent on their living source of dim light, yet, able to grow something akin to what inhabitants of the surface would call a forest. Still, geothermal energy is the only source of energy available for plants in the Depths, with the effects of creating vast areas of very fertile, rich and lively areas around the most active or volcanic points, while life would stagnate or be completely absent for other even vaster lands, often called deadlands or darkness / rock deserts.
Inhabitants of the Depths are many and varied, between them, ilthir, ogroids (Goblins), and some beastkins or even some faefolk, usually all of them having some form of Darkvision, or other very developed senses, such as hearing and echolocation. All of them however settling mostly around these pockets of geothermal activity, contending them as the most important available resource, and especially in the case of the advanced Dark Elves, aiming to build a network of tunnels, roads and canals to connect between these fertile and livable areas.
The rivers and water filtering in the tunnels filled the Underworld with precious metals, but even richer of gems and ores are the areas around the volcanos themselves, so much that the Underdark has for a long time been a supplier of ores even for other areas on the surface, where the profits were good enough to be worth the risks.
Accesses to the Underworld could be located anywhere, but mostly in areas where either the water would create karstic formations, or from cavities formed in the millennia by volcanic eruptions.
The area of the Black Dome Peninsula is in particular full of these, especially of volcanoes and underground lakes. However, the presence of the two close to each other could make things dangerous, in case a strong earthquake or eruption would have the water enter in contact with the magma, producing an incredible amount of extremely vapors at very high temperature that would be catastrophic for every life form around. This is actually why several places have been abandoned, at least temporarily, after the Edict that destroyed Meridia on the surface: a precautionary measure, before the situation could be evaluated.
Author: Rashan