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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 6116545" data-attributes="member: 8863">Some good ideas there.  Anyway, been doing some fact checking on this topic.  I took a look over at the FR wiki and read up on the Underdark for that world.  As I thought, the FR Underdark is divided into three sections: the Upperdark, Middledark, and Lowerdark.  The Middledark is apparently supposed to be between 3 and 10 miles below the surface, with the Upperdark above it, and the Lowerdark below it.However, I remembered that temperature slowly rises the deeper ones goes into the earth from pressure and heat radiated from within the earth's core.  Doing some fact checking on Wikipedia, I found that the deepest point in the wrold with human activity is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TauTona_Mine" target="_blank">a gold mine in South Africa that goes down 2.4 miles</a>, and the ambient temperature within is about 130 F (55 C).  The idea that FR's Underdark is at least 4 times deeper than that is IMO patently ridiculous, just from how damn hot it would get down there.  Then there's this sentence I found <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave" target="_blank">reading up about caves on Wikipedia</a>:3,000m is about 10,000 feet, so I'll assume natural Underdark caverns don't extend much beyond that (making FR's Uberdark even more ridiculous).  Of course that doesn't mean illithids, beholders, <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AWizardDidIt" target="_blank">wizards</a>, dwarves, and the like haven't delved deeper.  But of course not too much deeper because of the heat.  The link grodog listed above includes a page that has a cross-section of Greyhawk's Underdark that assumes a depth that only goes down 8000 feet (roughly a mile and a half) with most of the stuff less than a mile below the surface, which seems far more reasonable.  Still, given the heat deep within the earth, I think it might be interesting to have an extreme part of the deepest Underdark to take the heat into account.  Below the deepest, darkest, areas of the Underdark where the illithids, aboleths, and even more frightening horrors that make the most cold-blooded drow assassins soil themseves with fear dwell, there are remote reaches of the Underdark which grow hellishly hot.  In these areas, it's not uncommon to find extraplanar creatures such as fire elementals, salamanders, azer, efreet, thoqquas, heat-loving fiends and the like.  There may even be portals and gates to relevant planes, like the Plane of Fire, the Plane of Magma, various fire and brimstone Lower Planes, etc.  Also, for the evil DM, in an older edition of the game that uses infavision, all that ambient heat makes infravision utterly useless.</blockquote>

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