Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[jt]

Power law distributions are nice for that sort of arbitrarily spiky distribution. 5 out of 6 underground hexes can support 100 families on cave agriculture, 5 out of 6 of the remainder can support 5x that, 5 out of 6 of the remainder of those have 5x as many as that, etc etc.

That is, start with 100, then keep rolling 1d6 and multiplying by 5 until you stop coming up with 6s.

So the underside of a large, 36-hex county has, typically:
30 hexes with max 100 families (equivalent to fetid swamp, tundra)
5 hexes with max 500 families (equivalent to forest, rocky soil)
1 hex with max 2500 families (2.5x as good as good farmland)

But it's a power law, so it's fairly likely that you or your neighbor have a single hex with a massive cave formation under it that's worth a dozen hexes of farmland. And it's entirely plausible that some of these are right next to each other, because these things are super swingy.

And note that I pulled these numbers out of my ass based on the assumption that it's D&D so we need caves full of monsters everywhere. If you don't want a typical large county to have a notable underground population, start with 20 families base.

[Username17]

(...) The bottom line is that the Underdark is like fighting in the desert, where individual oases of decent food output are a really big deal that people are willing to do big military campaigns to acquire.

This all makes sense, thank you! But it's not great for me because "pretty much arbitrary" is my Kryptonite, and if the total population of the region and their food supply are both arbitrary, then I don't have any starting point.

Is there some heuristic I could use to come at it from a different angle, if I really want to know how many people to put in the Underdark equivalent of a County so I can start assigning them arbitrarily to towns, villages and points of interest?

As Grek said, different fantastical food sources create very different "logical" results. As such, the ones you should choose would be based on what you wanted to end up with. And it's important to note that the Underdark as portrayed in Greyhawk is very different from the Underdark in Forgotten Realms.

In Greyhawk, the centers of civilization are small and scattered. Most areas are like a Kuo-Toa settlement around some feeding pools or some Svirfneblin settlement around some fungal growths and either have like 500 people in them. The typical inhabitable farmable hex has room then for about 50 farms. The largest Drow city of Greyhawk is Erelhei-Cinlu, and it has 8000 permanent residents. It has a lot of soldiers and some monsters, so it's probably running on like 20,000 Koku, but it also has an advanced priesthood using plant growth on the farms - so it only needs 750 farms to exist. We aren't sure how far flung the farms of Erelhei-Cinlu are from the city core, but even assuming that it only controls its immediately adjacent hexes the farming capacity only has to be 100-200 in its best hexes.

The Forgotten Realms Underdark has cities with tens of thousands of people that are consuming a hundred thousand Koku or more. That implies four thousand or more farms or farm equivalents. By Greyhawk standards that's massive, and would have to take up a lot of Greyhawk hexes. In Greyhawk, a food source worth settling has a capacity of 50 and a very good food source has a capacity of 150. In the Forgotten Realms, you clearly have hexes with a capacity of five hundred or more.

-Username17

[Schleiermacher]

Right, thank you all.

It's definitely more of a "Greyhawk" Underdark. That gives me a lot to go on.

[Username17]

Right, thank you all.

It's definitely more of a "Greyhawk" Underdark. That gives me a lot to go on.

As mentioned, the typical Greyhawk settlement in the Underdark is five hundred or less people with attached hunting animals like giant weasels or something. A hex with a food source then has a typical capacity of 50 farms, and most hexes support 5-10 hunting families. Particularly rich areas are 2 or 3 times that.

Thus, when you go into the territory of the Orcs there might be a village of 40-400 like in the AD&D Monster Manual. And the Underdark around that will only have a few hunting parties or stragglers.

Your next question is how far apart these areas are. It's not honestly terribly clear, but I would expect to go for 3 or 4 hexes of basically darkened desert before running into another food source. But that's a personal preference on my part. I don't think Greyhawk ever really made an attempt to hammer down the distance between the caverns that the Dark Ones live in and the caverns that the Derro live in. The literal distance isn't necessarily that far as the crow flies because it's the frickin Underdark and crows don't actually fly. But Greyhawk seems to think that these villages have often been in close contact with periodic skirmishes for hundreds if not thousands of years, so you'd think there'd be at least a day or two worth of cavern crawling through deserts between them.

Anyway, another issue in the Underdark that doesn't come up much on the surface is metal use and lack thereof. The Grimlocks, Troglodytes, Quaggoths, and Mindflayers are stone age people. They do not have iron axes, they do not have copper axes. They use bone and stone as tools and building materials. It isn't because they aren't in contact with metal working people, it's that they can't develop metal forges because they do not have fuel. Metal working requires access to a lava forge (which is a hex resource that may or may not come with any farming capacity) or the techniques of dark forging. Despite the incredible importance of dark forging to the Underdark economy, I can't recall any Greyhawk books talking much about it. The Dark Creepers specifically do make tools out of metal in some way that doesn't involve any light, but I don't know any more about it than that (my personal head canon is that they can work steel with shadow forges but cannot smelt iron ore, so they need to buy or steal iron ingots).

Similarly, mining ore and refining ore into metal are things that might take place several hexes away, because the lava forge you use to get silver or iron out of ore probably isn't particularly close to the mines the ore comes from.

-Username17

[maglag]

Anyway, another issue in the Underdark that doesn't come up much on the surface is metal use and lack thereof. The Grimlocks, Troglodytes, Quaggoths, and Mindflayers are stone age people. They do not have iron axes, they do not have copper axes. They use bone and stone as tools and building materials. It isn't because they aren't in contact with metal working people, it's that they can't develop metal forges because they do not have fuel. Metal working requires access to a lava forge (which is a hex resource that may or may not come with any farming capacity) or the techniques of dark forging. Despite the incredible importance of dark forging to the Underdark economy, I can't recall any Greyhawk books talking much about it. The Dark Creepers specifically do make tools out of metal in some way that doesn't involve any light, but I don't know any more about it than that (my personal head canon is that they can work steel with shadow forges but cannot smelt iron ore, so they need to buy or steal iron ingots).

Wait, whot?

Drow and dwarves of different kinds don't have any trouble producing all kinds of metal stuff while living underground.

There is official D&D art of Mind Flayers clad in metal armor. They just don't bother with metal weapons like they don't bother with any other manufactured weapons because they can just blast minds.

Grimlocks/troglodytes are meant as primitive barbarians that are indeed still in the stone age tech-wise, just like regular trolls and whatnot in the surface. Contrast with the mind flayers who don't bother with manufactured weapons but do dress up in fancy clothing while grimlocks and troglodytes go around with rags if that. No proper mind flayer would get themselves caught not dressed up fabulous (and if they can get dresses, surely they can get fuel if they wanted like drow and dwarves).

[Username17]

Whether Mindflayers use metal or not varies depending on which source you are going by. here isn't a one true canon about Mind Flayers because many books and editions just ignore other writings and rant. The Illithiad (1998) is particularly bad and makes many insane declarations that are wholly incompatible with anything that came before or since.

Personally, I go with the Scripture of Steel from Planescape Torment:

The *illithids*were powerful. Zerthimon had believed that there was nothing that they did not *know.* Yet the *illithids* never carried tools of steel. Theyonly used flesh as tools. Everything was done through flesh, for the tentacled ones were made of flesh and they *knew* flesh. Yet steel was superior to flesh. When the blade had killed the husk, it was the flesh that had been weaker than the steel.

It was then that Zerthimon came to *know* that flesh yielded to steel. In *knowing*that, he came to *know* that steel was stronger than the *illithids.*

Steel becamethe scripture of the People. *Know* that steel is the scripture by which the People came to *know* freedom.

There are of course other sources that contradict this, but I have to choose between Planescape Torment and something lame as hell, I don't even know why that people would *ask* which one I would choose.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

If you've got giant mushroom forests to grow food, why can't you have giant mushroom forests to grow fuel?

Having said that, underground civilisations like that just don't work, so you're going to have to play with a lot of things for your setting, and if you're making up your own underground rules, no reason not to have rules that restrict metalwork.

[maglag]

Two reasons at least that underground metalworking needs to be viable: drow and dwarves.

Dwarves don't go around with bone plate, drow don't go around with stone rapiers. They both figured out how to equip their troops, and the dwarves are actually renowed for their great metalworking.

Plus you know, coal is also underground and a better fuel for a blacksmith than anything on the surface.

Mind Flayers can still keep their flesh fetish if that's your thing, but everybody else underground that doesn't have said flesh fetish and isn't a bunch of primitive barbarians can still make metal stuff just fine if not better than the surface (again: dwarves). If the Mind Flayers go around unarmored, it's their own culture's fault, not a technological limitation.

[Username17]

Coal furnaces require tremendous amounts of air that are not available in much of the Underdark. It's one of the reasons that no one puts furnaces deep underground in the real world.

I'm definitely not saying that Dwarves don't work metal. It's that working metal requires a hex resource in a way that working metal above ground does not. You'd need some kind of wind tunnel to do coal, or a source of lava to do a magma furnace, or whatever the actual fuck shadow forges need because they are purely fantasy creations. Probably some Greyhawk equivalent of Faerzress (I don't think the Greyhawk radiation was ever named, save that Gygax claimed it was Ultraviolet somehow).

I regard this as an overall good thing. If you want to have a fantasy civilization you need to secure access to several different resources. You need areas of food production and areas you can do industry. Because neither of those things can just be plopped down on any piece of flattish ground like you'd be able to do topside.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

One posited source of Underdark foodstuffs was radiosynthetic life that grew on or around natural uranium deposits. In a similar vein, you might be able to harness a natural nuclear reactor to power an induction forge?

[Thaluikhain]

On the topic of coal fires requiring air, ordinary people breathing in and out do as well, which is something I don't remember seeing adequately dealt with in fiction dealing with underground civilisations. Presumably you could have some naturally occurring well ventilated places, but you're likely to want to walk from one to the other, and also visit uncivilised places where you don't have people working to keep the air flowing.

Not seeing a good way to deal with that beyond "a really super wizard did it" or not thinking too hard. Either way would make coal fires less of a problem, though.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

A salamander did it? There are plenty of monsters that totally live in fire, I assume that comes with some degree of smoke protection. Depending on the species and its degree of magic, I imagine a lot of conventional problems can be handwaived away. Do underwater civilizations have similar issues to underdark civilizations? What about cities of people living up in the sky, does that count as part of the hex, or does it have its own deal if there are a bunch of floating sky islands and shit?
I know the basics need to be pinned down first, but how far can we push these domain rules?

[Username17]

Greyhawk's underwater regions are pretty similar to the Underdark except that there are some shallow waters that seem like they can support 50 families hunting. The Locathah seem to do that, making eel castles but still living as hunter gatherers.

But in terms of needing a special resource such as wind tunnels or magma jets in order to work metal and having a generally pretty shit farming capacity for hexes, it's pretty much just the Underdark but blue. Sahuagin cities in Greyhawk have six to ten thousand Sahuagin in them, but they also have their cities at least 100 miles apart because every Sahuagin city claims an area 50 miles in every direction as its hunting territory. So you're feeding 10,000 Sahuagin and some sharks and shit on one hundred and sixty nine hexes. Which means that Sahuagin cities function with most of their hexes having a hunting capacity of like 5 families per hex.

Anyway, I went back and looked at the map between the Vault of the Drow and the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa on the banks of the Sunless Sea. That map has a scale, and it's 36 miles across the short way East-West. That area is supposed to be crowded and has what passes for a giant city by Greyhawk Underdark standards, and it's about 6 hexes between settlements.

-Username17

[Prak]

I mean, as far as the Underdark goes, weird crystals and mushrooms seem to be the standard for explaining stuff. You can also posit underdark forests that get the light they need from glowing crystals for the oxygen issue. Or even massive populations of, like, weird non-aquatic plankton?

[maglag]

But in terms of needing a special resource such as wind tunnels or magma jets in order to work metal and having a generally pretty shit farming capacity for hexes, it's pretty much just the Underdark but blue.

That means your domain rules make it kinda impossible to represent the typical dwarf city-mine.

Dwarves don't worry about wind tunnels or magma jets. They worry about if there's a nice mineral vein. Gold, diamonds, mythril, adamantine, find one and the dwarves will build an underground city right on top of it.

Really, it's silly to complain about lack of oxygen in the underdark when everybody down there has zero trouble breathing. Maybe it's magic, maybe some special kind of fungus, but nobody ever heard of "and then dwarf-mine city of Khaz Goldam died because they ran out of oxygen".

What's the alternative again? A poorly ventilated underdark would mean that air, not food or anything else is the #1 survival priority, and any underground fortification is just a fancy grave because you can just smoke the defenders to death.

[Dean]

I'm gonna argue that Dwarves most famous locations are not in the underdark. They live under the earth I grant you but they are most famous for living in rocky environs immediately adjacent to the outside world. The Lonely Mountain has tons of access to fuel and air from the region all around it. Even the deeper "mines" could delegate their upper spaces to manufacturing space and their lower spaces to more residential usage that would require less venting.

Dwarves kind of seem like their whole strategy in the domain game is to control a small number of hexes and to make all of them terribly hard to take. In this way they make the risk vs reward of fighting them so low that no one does it. Getting troops through mountains to eventually fight well trained, deeply entrenched dwarven forces through layers of fortifications sounds like something no one would do when any diplomatic solution was on the table. Dwarves facilitate this further by being famously non-expansionist. They set up somewhere, live there for generations, and dig down to extract wealth. So whatever distant king claims the lands around them wouldn't even be threatened by them. A given hold of dwarves would probably end up existing through the conquests of many leaders who have claimed the lands all around them and told them they are now a part of the Griffon Empire or whatever and the dwarves are probably happy to trade and send representatives to the Griffon Emperor for the 70 years until they nominally become a part of the new Sun Alliance that took over the Griffon Empire. The dwarves having a long and broad view of history is exactly how they're represented and that's exactly how that would end up working. The dwarves aren't xenophobic but they just don't really seem to care about the outside world because the rises and falls of the outside world crash upon their rocky walls like waves, ceaseless but unimportant.

All of that to say I don't give a shit about svfirneblin or how their world works. The Dwarves that matter aren't bothered by a need for air and fuel because they famously have tons of access to both. Dwarves live meters under the earth, not miles.

[Username17]

Dean nails it on the typical Dwarves, There are of course also Deep Dwarves and Duergar who live deep in the Underdark, but I have no problem whatsoever with those cities being located next to magma flows so that they can do their industry dramatically on cliffs illuminated by bubbling pools of lava. Because that sounds bad ass.

Why wouldn't you want the Duergar ruins to look like this?

You've also got Derro, but I've always been confused as to why we have Derro when we already have Duergar and Drow. But having them use the same shadow forges as the Dark Creepers instead of magma forges would make them feel more different from the Duergar than the current "bluish white skin instead of gray skin" that they currently have going on.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

How about an inner world with an inner sun and australian gravity, like those lost world of dinosaur 1900's stories

[maglag]

Dwarves live meters under the earth, not miles.

Tolkien didn't give hard numbers for Khazad-dûm, but considering they took multiple days to cross it, and Gandalf mentions needing to climb up thousands of steps to get out after falling in the chasm, it's not just some meters.

And yet there's no magma. At the bottom of Moria mines there's only water. Cold water at that, enough to smoother even a Balor's fire.

And fresh air enough to sustain endless hordes of goblins and trolls and whatnot.

Magma mines are cool and that, but there's plenty of dwarf fortresses that don't have that are still pretty deep in the rock. Magma mines may be an option, but they should not be the one and only true answer. If your domains rules can't represent Khazad-dûm of all things, they've failed.

[deaddmwalking]

Magma mines are cool and that, but there's plenty of dwarf fortresses that don't have that are still pretty deep in the rock. Magma mines may be an option, but they should not be the one and only true answer. If your domains rules can't represent Khazad-dûm of all things, they've failed.

Khazad-dum is not as you portray it. The Lonely mountain included above ground fortifications. Khazad-dum had actual windows opening up to the outside world.

Deep Dwarves need a source of heat for forging; magma chambers are appropriate the way a bellows-forge is not. Usually you don't have to worry too much about the quality of air in the underdark because you're not using it intensively as you would with a blast furnace. Old-school gamers are used to being concerned about torches ruining the air in a chamber after you've bolted the door behind you.

[Thaluikhain]

The Dwarves that matter aren't bothered by a need for air and fuel because they famously have tons of access to both. Dwarves live meters under the earth, not miles.

Being even slightly underground still gives you a massive ventilation problem, though. Not insoluble, though, but historically it took steam engines or more advanced to have really impressive ventilation systems, and whatever systems they use, they need to have had that for as long as they've been underground, which is probably at least as long as whatever millenia old grudge they have with the elves.

[Whatever]

The Dwarves that matter aren't bothered by a need for air and fuel because they famously have tons of access to both. Dwarves live meters under the earth, not miles.

Being even slightly underground still gives you a massive ventilation problem, though. Not insoluble, though, but historically it took steam engines or more advanced to have really impressive ventilation systems, and whatever systems they use, they need to have had that for as long as they've been underground, which is probably at least as long as whatever millenia old grudge they have with the elves.

Couldn't we use this to explain why Dwarves build underneath mountains specifically? Termites solved the same ventilation problem with sunlight, wind, and soil as their only ingredients--by building termite mounds that use daily temperature fluctuations to push air through ventilation shafts.

If the Dwarves use mountains to ventilate, they could push air pretty deep down inside the earth, as long as they have surface exits near the mountaintops. Which lets you tell some good stories about sneaking in, too.

[Trill]

How would you guys make mentor spirits more useful for Adepts in 4e?
Because aside from the Roleplay potential they maybe get an advantage and definitely get a disadvantage, while mages get both

[Username17]

How would you guys make mentor spirits more useful for Adepts in 4e?
Because aside from the Roleplay potential they maybe get an advantage and definitely get a disadvantage, while mages get both

Including expansion material, there are a few Mentor Spirits that make sense for Adepts. A number have drawbacks that literally don't matter if you don't have any spellcasting ability, and some of them give bonuses you can use when you don't have any spellcasting.

In general, I'm not super sympathetic. Adepts are "great accounting for great power" anyway, and if you aren't willing to do deep dives into min maxing to get massive pornomancy dicepools or whatever, you probably shouldn't be an Adept at all.

-Username17

[Trill]

and if you aren't willing to do deep dives into min maxing to get massive pornomancy dicepools or whatever, you probably shouldn't be an Adept at all.

-Username17

So in your opinion every Adept player should be a dirty Min-Maxxer? that's an opinion I just can't support.
Adepts are the magical equivalent of Street Sammies, focussing on augmenting their bodies to achieve incredible things. Things the Sammies can't replicate, just as they can't replicate the more tech based abilities.
And adepts aren't nearly as powerful compared to mages, so there's no reason why mages should get the boni of Mentor Spirits and Adepts shouldn't.