Veins of the Earth - A Review

The Underdark

I was reading and reviewing Wizard of the Coast’s Out of the Abyss, which is fundamentally a decent campaign book about the Underdark.  It’s likely the best that Wizard’s has produced for 5E, but that means that compared to the recently, long rumored and carefully produced Veins of the Earth by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess (with production by Jez Gordon) published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess it’s 255 pages of flabby, dead writing, dull illustration and unimaginative dross.  This isn’t to say Out of the Abyss is bad, it’s got some great bits, and tries hard to bring the weird and evocatively wonderful to 5th edition D&D, it’s just that it’s written by a committee of people with worse vocabularies, weaker minds, lesser imaginations and far far less love for their creation then the author and artist of Veins of the Earth.  Out of the Abyss isn’t a waste, but it won’t make you think, feel and want to run an Underdark game the way Veins of the Earth will.

This just seems appropriate

I am unsure about the quality of the physical book, though knowing the work that Lamentations of the Flame Princess puts into its physical products I suspect it’s very good.  The PDF is serviceable, though displaying as a double page spread and using a clear, but somewhat degraded typeface means one has to enlarge it a fair bit to read, scrolling about in a 350 plus page PDF.  I appreciate that unlike many DIY projects Veins of the Earth doesn’t use giant lettering and a few paragraphs per page and even though it's dense, Veins' layout is clear and breaks the text up into nice manageable chunks.  The real hero here appears to be Jez Gordon, who has consistently provided both excellent art (he is not the artist for Veins) and stellar layout on everything he’s been involved in.  Scrap Princess’ art in Veins of the Earth is also excellent, and it’s consistency and volume is a fine compliment to the text, with gestural, primal boldness that conceals details of Veins’ dark underworld while inspiring the reader with shapes and an overall sense of frenzied, jagged, contrast.

Underdark Musings - Company Game Trait Generator

At the very bottom of everything, the well stretching skyward, with the surface as distant as the radiant heavens of the Bother Gods, and for us equally unobtainable we took stock of who had survived slaughter by the maggot skinned beasts.  We sat around a meager fire making biscuits from the weevil rich flour  whose sacks had been torn in the combat.  Our only protection was a low roof of stone held by a myriad of pillars, an edifice much like a pier, but rising from the smooth dry stone of the cave.  As we sat, men and woman first tried to find those of their own country, or those who had made up the cliques and gangs in the camps above. 

The grim descent and the fight afterward had scattered and broken these chains of the past.  Amid the abattoir of our fellows, torn by the deep beasts, the past seemed less important then before, a rebirth from a womb of light and space into a place where darkness has twelve distinct varieties.  I found myself using the blade of the ax I had grabbed up in desperation to help the man next to me heat his doughy biscuits as well as my own. He was a lean and ageless man, and from his ragged robes I knew him to once have been a noble from the distant islands across the spotted sea.  From the scars of torture and the brands on his hands I also knew him to have been a sorcerer, who had somehow survived the special attentions of the Crusaders. He called me "Ax" from that day, and we became friends there. I for my part always called him as "Titter" from his strange laugh - in our own lands we would have clung to our proud traditions and he insisted on his title and honorifics while I demanded he respect the honors I once won in the City of Glass. 

- Testimony of fallen redeemer No. 34 at the Inquisitional inquest regarding the White Fortress massacres.

I was thinking again about running a 'company style' game, where the player select from a large pool of potential characters, but do not each 'own' a specific character. Obviously generating PCs quickly is essential in such a game, and as mentioned in previous posts on the subject the goal is to have a varied party of 'adventurers' each session with a trade off between leaving the best company members in camp or using them as characters in a specific session.  While stat lines can be generated quickly, and equipment becomes more a function of company stores then individual record sheets, I wanted to add a bit more to character generation so that the company members, most who will be little more then replacements or NPCs could be a bit more memorable.

To this end, below is a table of 100 Nicknames and Traits, many of which also adjust statistics so that a player will have something to go on when starting with a new PC.

Underdark Musings - Equipment Generation

“First the slow maneuvering of the supply pallet over the whistling maw, hot air buffeting its considerable bulk.  “Everything we redeemers will need” the Inquisitor Paladin laughed: old rusted armaments, recovered from battlefields or the depleted armories of crushed empires, sacks of weevil ravaged flour, tuns of sour wine, sides of rancid meat, cheap picks, battered shovels, innumerable casks of lamp oil and bundles of poorly tarred rush torches.  After the supplies descended on the end of the clanking iron chain, with a crew of several trustees and missionaries to mind them, Inquisitorial Guards wheeled a rickety bridge out. A prisoners' band played hymns to the Light on ill repaired instruments, and two by two we redeemers, thin from weeks of labor on poor rations, marched to the dangling chain where each secured him or herself to an arm thick link with a crude metal hook.  Those with foresight lashed themselves securely to the chain, and with the capstans above straining the chain continued its descent.  Vanishing into the earth’s hot throat one saw the final circle of the sky’s light vanishing slowly above the next man’s rotted boots.  The descent dragged slow and endless, hours down clutching the rocking chain, the heat from below growing.  After a few hours flaming bales of pitch soaked straw, heaved from above came down the shaft, comets designed to light our way at the bottom.  Thrown from the shaft’s lip, most passed roaring in the darkness, but one bounced from the walls and exploded against the chain, burning one man and sending three more redeemers screaming down the shaft.  They weren’t the first to go, as the hours holding to swaying took a toll.  Fingers crushed by a sudden movement, a woman screamed down into the blackness.  Weak arms or badly healed wounds betray and another man plummeted.  Some saw the sky vanish and the gloom welled up in them.  With a cheery wave I saw a former boy cadet from the young kingdoms step free from the chain, his tattered red uniform orange and then grey as he seemed to float down into the reaching dark.

When we finally saw the bottom of the shaft where the burning bundles shed a flickering light, and we had our first inkling of the real terrors that exile to the deeps entail.  Pale beasts, muscled like bears, with wrinkled heads, bone breaking jaws and thin translucent skin covered in scars were already among the fallen dead, gorging themselves.  They may have been startled by the light, but the bounty of meat we represented seemed to call more of the things from the dark by the minute.  Afterwards I only remember snatching a rusted axe from the hands of a dying redeemer who stumbled back with his belly torn open from a huge claw and fighting against the beasts.  I remember the man who’s death saved me was from the North, a scarred tattooed savage a with cleanly shaved head and filthy beard tied in a great knot.  In the end we killed two, and lost half of our number to the pale tigers, as they became known. The survivors camped in a hollow of an ancient stone structure, a square pier for trade from above and ate the tigers as a paltry revenge for our unknown fellows who had been dragged screaming into the darkness and devoured.” – Testimony of fallen redeemers No. 34 at the Inquisitional inquest regarding the White Fortress massacres.

Supplies given to those “Redeemers” sent into the darkness of the underworld are poor.  Most armaments consist of plunder from the great crusade, though all markings and symbols have been crudely hammered off or replaced with symbols of the Light, sometimes damaging the equipment in the process.  Each player rolls below on the list and receives both a personal kit for the officer or specialist they play in the initial session and a selection of useful dungeoneering supplies and armaments.  If the number of players is less than the total number of officers in the ‘company’ the GM should consider additional rolls for those remaining unused. In addition to these items the company will have 2 resource points of supplies (a minimum of 4 sessions before exhaustion) and this includes such basic items as food, water, clothing, torches and sacks in amounts great enough to outfit many adventuring parties.

Dungeon of Signs Underdark Musings - Intital Area - Gloomlight Quay

“We are not the first here and I do not mean the previous expeditions.  Scouts did find some supplies from previous drafts of prisoners, and a few graves – some worryingly lacking the marks of the Light, but they also discovered a village of sorts.  Abandoned, twisting up the Northern wall of the shaft, we are encamped in the ruins of what may have been a mill or a factor at the foot of the long stairs that make the cliff hanging villages gates. The stairs are flanked by galleries for spear men and archers, and beyond a squat crenelated fortress looms.  The apostate are exploring the ruins, and while some vermin have been chased off or slain no real creatures of darkness rise up to redeem their souls. The pueblo is abandoned, and there are only vague signs.  The lowest reaches of the pueblo’s fortress, and the mill are cracked and scarred by fire, but beyond there is no sign of violence except bones, covered in rust colored moss and laying in drifts in low spots.  Despite these omens, the village is well protected, and the pale cougars which proved such a menace on are initial arrival are easy to keep at bay with the old fortresses’ narrow stairs and battered walls.  A broken arch, has been recently discovered, leading to a grand building barely visible in the gloom, tomorrow a group of prisoners seeks to cross with a rope apparatus, and I fear that we will learn secrets there that will bring many to the Light of redemption. ”   

-          3^rd and last dispatch of Brother Martyr Benediction Truth from beneath fortress White Coulair

The Underdark will be split into nodes on a larger map, with geomorphs and randomly generated content to fill in the spaces between these nodes as necessary. This is an old method, the one used in the Descent series back in the 1970’s, but it seems functional for a strange ½ dungeon, ½ wilderness like the Underdark.  I both like and have some misgivings about procedurally generated Table Top adventure locales, but I think in an exploration game, with a basic map of key locations (mapped as dungeons or individual locales) and factions in place it’ll be effective.  Certainly HMS Apollyon has taught me the virtue of vague nodes scattered around a larger map with ‘highways’ between them.  One cannot map the whole of the Underdark, it is not a megadungeon.

The map above is for the initial Node, ‘The Dusklight Quay’.  The Dusklight Quay is a huge chimney that terminates thousands of feet above in with the monumental grate in Fortress White's courtyard.  Prisoners are lowered into The Dusklight Quay by means of long, rusted chains, either individually shackled to the chain or in rough cages of brittle wood.  Note that it contains several locales requiring small maps of their own.  These important areas are keyed.  With brief descriptions below.

Further Underdark Musings - Running a Company Style D&D Campaign

We are alone, a host of nations, but a few dozen men.  It is strange who has come to the fore, men and women that I would not have expected much of when I was a proud bravo of the House of Glass, 3^rd in the hierarchy of the divided city.  Foreigners, barbarians, sorcerers, and even non-human fey from the high places.  Our leader is the Lady of Thorns, who claims she was once a younger sword wife of the high king of the Crags, a rude tribe of dirt clad Westerners that not even the most audacious of traders of the House of Glass would bother to sell trinkets to.  The Lady is fierce in battle, and in the first days was a pillar of steel to rally around so she rules.  Beside myself her principle supporters, the hard men who bully or cajole to spread the Lady’s decrees, are equally polygot and strange.  Nine of the Red Thirty, a warrior eunuch of the alabaster tomb, Madigan, once a gang boss of the Grey City and High Place of Light, a death haunted fey sword leaper.  Besides these captains there are others useful in battle or without. Tender the Green Skull, a necromancer nobleman scoured of magic by the adepts and maimed by the inquisitors, but still capable of mouthing a cantrip, the feared but humble Chaplain, Brother Thom of the Distant Light, Gom a Southern blacksmith, and Lazar, a skilled hunter from some nameless fen village. The rest are dispirited and broken men – soldiers, rebels, savages and criminals - men who were tough enough in the camps, and thought themselves above the gullible Paladins of the Light.  Before the vast, cruel shade here, below a mile of black stone, they are as children, begging for guidance, and I pity them, good and bad, for they have only us.

- Inscription on stone plinth at the bottom of White Coulair, believed carved by prisoners

 

Landsknechte - because this system might work for playing them to.

In the past I have discussed running a “Company Game”, with the Black Company from the books of Glenn Cook as a model. The idea here is to reienforce the idea of party over character, and do so in a way that epands party to include far more than simply a group of 4-10 adventurous wanderers. The players in my (yet unnamed) Underdark game would be members of a forced community of prisoners, volunteers and literal losers in the war against ‘good’, tossed together to struggle as a community or die as individuals going mad in the dark. The dark brings insanity and death, and without light and companionship humans trapped in the Underdark lack the psychological tools to survive for more then a few week, even if they have the luck to find a grove of edible mushroom trees,/a pool of cave fish and remain unnoticed by the numerous hungry predators.

More Underdark Thoughts - Town Building Simplifications

“Our homes burned burned, our cities, our towns, and our tribes.  We fought do not doubt that, and all lost, professional armies, proud fyrds and the warbands of great heroes.  Light is supreme on the face of the World, the twins triumphant – Retribution and Beneficence, though for the defeated only the first.  We thought at first that the Light might have some measure of mercy for us, the earnest promises of the paladins, made to us wounded and defeated in the disease wracked death crawling prisoner camps seemed to offer life and maybe some shred of honor.  The Fortress at Coulair White taught a different lesson.  The Paladins left us to the Arbiters of the Inquisition.  We are chum upon the abyss, our lives of no value because we shall be reborn in the light, even as we suffer and perish in the black deeps.” – Archaic Inscription Carved on the rear of the altar screen of the Chapel of the Abyss/Prisoner’s Chapel at White Chasm Monastery

Another post about the idea of running an Underdark campaign – the keystones of which are scarcity and town building.

Dungeon of Signs Muses About the Underdark

“The Brother Lords of the Faith of Light are great, and through their will they brought the lands of man to the Light at the end of the Age of Awakening.  All corruption was cast down, all false idols toppled and all brought forward to bask in the sun.  Those men and women that had served dark gods and false masters were given choice, all wise and all just, as the Brother Lords are great.  Many the of the unbeliever were wroth with these generous choices, and had to be forced to kneel.  The armies of the Light committed no wrongs though they were firm in leading the unbeliever from sin.  The choices given were as always the righteous three: repent and be cleansed to rise again in the Light,  Take the mark of service and the mark of the unbeliever to rise again in the Light after a life of instruction and repentance, take up the arms of the Light to live and die in the Brother Lords service, finding repentance as a warrior against the evil.  Because the soul of humanity shines with bravery and Light, even that of the unbeliever, many chose the last, yet at the end of the age there were no dark empires remaining unhumbled in error, and the armies of the Light were swollen with glory.

Bruegel - Underworld or Triumph of Death or Something

The blessing of bravery and the gift of the Brother Lords was not wasted, so wise were the pontiffs, and so wise their decrees.  Those newly grasping the arms of Light were sent into the deepest darkness of the underworld to bring Light there, so that the world could be cleansed from the heavens to the root.  There was much struggle in the deeps and many were given to rise again in Light.” – From the Chronicle of the 356^th child of the Light, a work of commentary on the scriptures of the Brother Lords, published in the final years of the Age of Awakening.


So I just reviewed D3-Vault of the Drow, and as a result was asked by Brendan at Necropraxis what an underdark campaign would look like these days. Over at False Machine much work has already been perfected (really it’s amazing stuff) on what procedurally generating an Underdark would look like, so I’m not going into that. The above bit of mock serious doggerel would be the player handout for my Underdark campaign.