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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9037141" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 140: February 2000part 4/5Underdark Campaign Journal: Continuing the underdark theme, we talk some more about the outpost Raven’s Bluff was establishing in the metaplot before they ended the Trumpeter. A good 10 days spelunking away from the surface, they managed to capture a large cave previously occupied by Duergar and decided it would be a good place to dig in and fortify. A year later, Raven’s Deep is still alive and growing, comprised of a mix of soldiers, adventurers willingly using it as a staging ground and criminals given the offer of much shorter sentences if they work them off down here. (and survive) They’re still dependent on regular contact with the surface for supplies, but getting better at the fungus farming underdark natives use for their staples. Plenty of stuff is still ruined, and of course there’s plenty of duergar technology they haven’t figured out yet either, (most important being the aqueduct, which everyone is strictly forbidden from touching as long as it keeps working, because if you don’t have a water supply you’re in big trouble pretty quickly. ) Another interesting bit of setting expansion full of useful worldbuilding details, but it’s obvious they’re working in a much more gritty genre than the Drow and Aboleth, where they still have to worry about the logistics of air, water supply, darkness and all the other realistic challenges humans face when exploring caves. So this isn’t as long or spectacular as the previous article, nor is the artwork as good, but it’s one much more accessible to the kind of levels most groups reach and more likely to be used in actual play. The nature of a Living Campaign forces things to remain more grounded in general, even if some of the most hardcore players manage to reach high levels, limiting things so they never become truly world-shaking no matter how high their numbers get.Internet 101: This column has a mix of stuff fitting the underdark theme and miscellaneous reader-submitted stuff. Yahoo.com is still alive, even if it's been replaced as the default search engine several times over. saudicaves.com is also still alive, albeit looking very dated now, as is cavedive.com. However, <a href="http://www.rpg.host" target="_blank">www.rpg.host</a> is obviously not the same website it linked to back in the day, and the other 8 are long dead, giving us a hit rate of only 3 or 4 out of 12, depending how you count it. All that elaborate home campaign stuff stored on fortunecity, lost to the ages. As usual, this column mainly winds up filling me with vague sadness for all the things on the early internet that were never preserved. Sure a lot of it was pretty primitive, but it had more character than modern social media sites that all seem to be copying each other's features instead of trying something new.</blockquote>

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