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Treskri - an underground world
- Thread starter Zireael
- Start date
SnowleopardVK
First Post
Your friends don't know much about warm weather do they?
Natural temperatures in places like California can sometimes reach as high as in the hundreds in degrees Fahrenheit, which is well above 30C (100F = about 37C just for reference).
If a child of Canadian winters like me can survive a trip to California at that temperature (which I have done in the past), then I think you can rather easily say that the elves and fey who've lived their whole lives in this setting aren't going to burst into flames at 30C.
I think it would likely take Celsius temperatures in the 40s to be dangerous to the average person, and it would probably take even higher temperatures than that to be dangerous to someone who was especially used to the heat. According to a quick Google sweep it looks as though it would take air at around 250C for someone to actually combust just from the environment.
I am currently gearing up to start my second such kind of campaign and have to say the world does revolve around the map. I found from my player's perspective without a huge map to draw from they felt it was more like just jumping from one dungeon to the next without any interaction with the world around them. This time I am actually drawing the map out so the players can get a feel for the underground world, currently on map panel #17. I do release them freely each week if you want to use them. Links are in my signature.
Underground campaigns are fun I found and allow for a lot of new and interesting challenges, trees just don't fall on people but caves collapsing does happen.
Underground campaigns are fun I found and allow for a lot of new and interesting challenges, trees just don't fall on people but caves collapsing does happen.
AdmundfortGeographer
Getting lost in fantasy maps
This sounds like a very interesting world. In my homebrew, I had a cosmology where there was a plane with no surface, it was what folks from the material world would recognize as "subterranean".
Except I had small-continent-sized caverns, not just large rooms, or arena-sized chambers. Large enough to get circulation of air and maybe even something like a weather system for these immense caverns. There would still be standard caves.
I hand waved things like air pressure at elevations, or water pressure at depths. Said it was all the same pressure regardless of height or depth.
At a certain base elevation, all the water had seemed to pool up. Call it a standard sea level, but water will cycle into the atmosphere, mostly by evapotranspiration, but thermal activity in certain geologic hot spots warm up the water into gas where it cycled back to the air, rising up through the cracks in the earth as high as it could and then come back down.
I imagined miles tall stalactites, stalagmites, and columns with settlements clinging to the sides above the miles deep sea below in some of the continent-caverns. Use of aerial travel between place to place, except when exploring deep into a side or ceiling tunnel or rift.
Cyclical phosphorescent plant life clinging to cavern walls could offer a circadian rhythm to life below.
I never got to run adventures in it, but all the maps I sketched out years ago are still in my shelf waiting to sea use someday!
Except I had small-continent-sized caverns, not just large rooms, or arena-sized chambers. Large enough to get circulation of air and maybe even something like a weather system for these immense caverns. There would still be standard caves.
I hand waved things like air pressure at elevations, or water pressure at depths. Said it was all the same pressure regardless of height or depth.
At a certain base elevation, all the water had seemed to pool up. Call it a standard sea level, but water will cycle into the atmosphere, mostly by evapotranspiration, but thermal activity in certain geologic hot spots warm up the water into gas where it cycled back to the air, rising up through the cracks in the earth as high as it could and then come back down.
I imagined miles tall stalactites, stalagmites, and columns with settlements clinging to the sides above the miles deep sea below in some of the continent-caverns. Use of aerial travel between place to place, except when exploring deep into a side or ceiling tunnel or rift.
Cyclical phosphorescent plant life clinging to cavern walls could offer a circadian rhythm to life below.
I never got to run adventures in it, but all the maps I sketched out years ago are still in my shelf waiting to sea use someday!
Dice4Hire
First Post
Interesting idea, and sounds like you should go with it.
As for naysayers and real-world physics type, well, ignore them, but I would try to have some kind of flow of essentials like air, water and the like in the world.
As for plants getting sustenance from rock, why not have them actually eating at the world, making spaces slowly bigger, and prone to collapse.
Sounds like an interesting sub-theme to me.
I would try to have the world be alive in as many ways as possible as life equals out to change.
As for naysayers and real-world physics type, well, ignore them, but I would try to have some kind of flow of essentials like air, water and the like in the world.
As for plants getting sustenance from rock, why not have them actually eating at the world, making spaces slowly bigger, and prone to collapse.
Sounds like an interesting sub-theme to me.
I would try to have the world be alive in as many ways as possible as life equals out to change.
I had a campagin seed where there was no surface but it was soil rather than rock. There was huge roots and chunks of metal that people lived on/in. Everything settled (sank) so the different sized objects moved at different speeds. No two communities ever met after the first time (which could last for a few decades) unless magic portals were constructed.
Some very good advice on food webs in an underground setting: Underground food-chains?
Some very good advice on food webs in an underground setting: Underground food-chains?
May want to look into making it a plane, see Manual of the Planes for notes.
AdmundfortGeographer
Getting lost in fantasy maps
you aren't saying Planescape was an unimportant setting are you?
you aren't saying Planescape was an unimportant setting are you?
No, but Planescape was an exception and I don't want to make a second Planescape.
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