Cool. It looks like I'm going to have fun answering these.
Spoil is "everything in a mine that you don't want." Normally it comes out the consistency of sand, and forms great heaps outside the mine. Removing spoil is an incredibly expensive operation, especially in very deep mines, and is one of the real limiting factors when it comes to excavation. If there was a simple or magical way to simply vanish the spoil entirely then it would make excavation so much easier; if not then it puts a soft cap on how deep they can dig and how big they can make the shaft. After a while the spoil removal starts being a larger operation than the actual digging, and that's the point at which you start considering whether you want to continue chasing this seam, even if there's still metal left.
Interesting Fantasy Cultures
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3E DnD comes with several options for that: you can move material, especially dimensionless material very easily (e.g. bags of holding paired with regular bags on a pulley loop: at the top, empty the bags of holding and fill the regular bags; vice versa at the bottom). You can also just disintegrate material to make it gone. There are also the usual industrialized magic suspects to provide free labor (undead, constructs, etc.), or melt it, pump it, and dump it like slag (fire elemental, thoqqua, etc. again).
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
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darkmaster
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Such magical quick fixes are not readily available on Sarindor, but while dwarves can't change the hardness of rock what they can do is compress lose material into stone of varying hardness which they use in their freight elevators, either making more of them or making the existing ones bigger.
Kaelik wrote:Fuck you Haruhi is clearly the best moe anime, and we will argue about how Haruhi and Nagato are OP and um... that girl with blond hair? is for shitters.darkmaster wrote:Tgdmb.moe, like the gaming den, but we all yell at eachother about wich lucky star character is the cutest.
If you like Lucky Star then I will explain in great detail why Lucky Star is the a shitty shitty anime for shitty shitty people, and how the characters have no interesting abilities at all, and everything is poorly designed especially the skill challenges.
D&D completely ignores industrializing magic. In many cases that makes sense, but in a large and already magic-invested industrial community its a little harder. No idea what the answer is for the specific posters, but generally, each major magical infrastructure is roughly comparable in cost to seagoing ships: a lot for one person, but not a lot for a community. Also, key parts are extraordinarily cheap and easy.
But the Great Leap Forward and Water Purification threads have covered a bunch of that already.
But the Great Leap Forward and Water Purification threads have covered a bunch of that already.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
Yeah I kinda just wrote a lot off the cuff, so I even edited in some more stuff after I was done. Let me know if you want more details on any part and I can probably try to nail down a few more facts. Originally, Earthdawn was set in ancient ukraine geologically, plus one of the oceans was eternally on fire and there were jungles everywhere. I think for my version I might copy more like the map of the western US, since that's where I live, or maybe just sketch an entirely new map because it was a little silly using a reskinned earth's map like that.
In terms of the cost of the magic, well an Elementalist needs to be of moderate training to actually summon an elemental. They can each have one unbound elemental summoned at a time, so there's population based restraints there. They can have additional bound elementals if they pay for magical reagents, but we'll say that that's not really practical for day to day life. Even lower skilled Elementalists can still purify air and adjust the hardness of earth. Plus they can also be a laborer of course if they really have to, same as anyone else. Most of the day to day spellcasting is "free" in the sense that it doesn't use up components or anything, but it is as physically taxing as actually swinging a pick around, sometimes more. They often need to eat excessively or take additional rest days to keep up their health.
Other forms of magic exist (such as the levitating platforms I mentioned), but none that I'm thinking of at the moment have as much direct applicability to mining. Necromancers can make zombie miners or whatever, but zombies wouldn't be skilled at all so I imagine that's probably more dangerous than it's worth, even if you can get away with not feeding them and having them work 24 hour shifts instead of 8 hour shifts. Though, I guess zombies would be immune to the toxic effects of the deadlier kinds of mines, so they could work those. Uhm, there's charms that you can wear that work basically like modern gas masks, filtering any toxic fumes out of the air that gets to your face that you're breathing. You'd obviously use that any time you're near a magma vent or other toxic gas vent. Let's say that those are as safe as a modern breathing system for a modern miner is, however safe that is (I imagine that they're pretty safe but fail sometimes). And of course they are not entirely cheap to produce, so that can limit the number of workers a site.
In terms of the cost of the magic, well an Elementalist needs to be of moderate training to actually summon an elemental. They can each have one unbound elemental summoned at a time, so there's population based restraints there. They can have additional bound elementals if they pay for magical reagents, but we'll say that that's not really practical for day to day life. Even lower skilled Elementalists can still purify air and adjust the hardness of earth. Plus they can also be a laborer of course if they really have to, same as anyone else. Most of the day to day spellcasting is "free" in the sense that it doesn't use up components or anything, but it is as physically taxing as actually swinging a pick around, sometimes more. They often need to eat excessively or take additional rest days to keep up their health.
Other forms of magic exist (such as the levitating platforms I mentioned), but none that I'm thinking of at the moment have as much direct applicability to mining. Necromancers can make zombie miners or whatever, but zombies wouldn't be skilled at all so I imagine that's probably more dangerous than it's worth, even if you can get away with not feeding them and having them work 24 hour shifts instead of 8 hour shifts. Though, I guess zombies would be immune to the toxic effects of the deadlier kinds of mines, so they could work those. Uhm, there's charms that you can wear that work basically like modern gas masks, filtering any toxic fumes out of the air that gets to your face that you're breathing. You'd obviously use that any time you're near a magma vent or other toxic gas vent. Let's say that those are as safe as a modern breathing system for a modern miner is, however safe that is (I imagine that they're pretty safe but fail sometimes). And of course they are not entirely cheap to produce, so that can limit the number of workers a site.
Last edited by Lokathor on Mon Jul 07, 2014 5:07 am, edited 2 times in total.
So I decided to do this first part as a monologue from a dwarf in order to make it less dry. Let me know if this is a difficult way to read it.
Disclaimer: I am neither a mining engineer nor a geologist. In a way, my field of study is the diametrical opposite of this one, since astrophysicists study up, not down. I am, however, a colossal geek; and that will have to suffice.
Lokathor: the geology of Ukraine is really cool. However, the bits that are most interesting from a mining point of view are the east and the northeast, rather than the southwest where Earthdawn is set. Northeast Ukraine has the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, which is one of the biggest magnetite deposits in the world and is something my Ars Magica players would drool over if they found. There is so much magnetised iron ore there that you can find it simply by mapping the magnetic fields. In a magical world that would clearly mean something. Eastern Ukraine is the Donbas region, which is a massive sedimentary region full of DSO iron deposits right next to large coal beds. The Soviets crash industrialised the whole region because iron and coal make steel, which means it's full of industrial cities containing ethnic Russians and contributing to the current tensions.
Disclaimer: I am neither a mining engineer nor a geologist. In a way, my field of study is the diametrical opposite of this one, since astrophysicists study up, not down. I am, however, a colossal geek; and that will have to suffice.
The Great Below
The first thing humans need to realise when it comes to dealing with dwarf settlements is to understand that the whole "dwarves live in mountains" thing is so much bullshit. I mean, yes some dwarves do live in mountains, and since mountains generally have lower populations of elves and humans and halflings we're probably a statistically larger proportion of their population, but mountains are hardly our native habitats. The reason people think they are is because they're stupid. They see mountains and go, "check out all that stone. Hey, you guys like stone, right? You must love those." Listen dumbass, stone is everywhere. It's below your feet. The continental crust goes down 40km in places. The highest mountains aren't even 9km tall. A mountain is like... what do humans like? Cows? Well, a mountain is like a cow which has an extra twenty percent beef in it, except that's a bullshit analogy because nobody ever uses all that vertical space anyway. So it's more like a cow which you're only going to eat maybe five percent of, and then some indescribable moron of a magician comes along and adds another twenty percent to the cow. Thanks a lot, dumbass! I'll make sure to throw away all that extra beef along with the stuff I was going throw away anyway. It's not as if I needed it.
It's a stupid analogy, but you get what I'm saying. The point is, think three dimensionally. Surface dwellers don't live in the world, they live on the extreme top edge of it.
Now, when Moradin (blessed be His beard) designed dwarves, He neglected to give us the power of flight, and that's a pretty big oversight from where I'm standing but then I'm not the Father of Stone so what the fuck do I know. Because we can't fly, we need to use elevator systems to go up or down the big shafts, and those things are expensive and they break all the time. Yeah, all the time. It's a thing with moving parts which get worn down, and anything with moving parts is just waiting until one of those moving parts moves the wrong way and then you need to rebuild it. So vertical movement is doable but needs enough guys there to maintain it, which means the main shafts between settlements are kept running but verticals are still a pain in the ass. I can walk twenty kilometres in a day, easy, but I'd be lucky to get more than four or five vertical kilometres between sunup and sundown.
Right now at this very moment, you may think we're in an inn in a forest. And in a sense you're right. But you'd also be wrong because where we actually are is right at the top of maybe 20 habitable kilometres of stone before it gets too hot and hydrocarbonish to be worth fucking with. That 20km would be pronounced "five days' travel" if someone sank a direct shaft, only nobody has so you'd need to travel from shaft to shaft via the flat tunnels, which would take you maybe two or three times as long. So in the same way that you might expect villages every day's travel in case you want to go somewhere in order to, I dunno, stare at a particularly big cow or whatever it is that humans do, down below you'll have villages every four or so kilometres along the shafts and every twenty or so along the flats.
Now don't think of a shaft as being a single deep hole down into the darkness. See, elevators need cables, and cables have weight, and the more cable they need to lift the less other things they can lift. So most of what we call shafts will actually be a vertical series of either straight wells a hundred or so metres deep, or a steeply gradiented slope where carts are hauled up a track by a cable, which can be two or three times as long. These might have some space between the stages; it's not uncommon for a shaft to have a kilometre of flat tunnel between stages. And yeah, these things are not cheap to run and the clans who run them expect to get paid. If you don't like it, sink a shaft of your own.
This leads me to the next thing that people get wrong when they think about the below. See, surface dwellers have this thing that's really neat. It's called "nothing." As in, there's nothing currently on that table so I can put my beer on it. Down below, we don't have nothing, we have stone instead. You can't put your beer there or anywhere else, because there's stone there. If you take the stone away, you have to put it somewhere else. You're not increasing the amount of free space you have, you're just rearranging it. In order to have more free space, you need to excavate. Now, excavation can be seen as a process of taking stone up to the surface, which it is; but I prefer to think of it as a process of strip mining the surface of all of its nothing and bringing all that nothing down below where some fucker needs it in order to put down his beer. If you go to the really deep settlements, every tiny bit of space they have was laboriously imported from the surface and that stuff is not cheap. You know how humans use gold and marble to make their palaces look good? Down below, they use space, because everybody understands how pricey that is. Nothing is the commodity everyone needs.
Compress the spoil? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Spoil may be crushed stone, but it's still stone. The minimum amount of space it can occupy is the amount of space it occupied when it was stone. You can't create space by rearranging things, you need to create it by taking some things away. Preferably to the surface where you can just exchange them for all this lovely nothing that's just lying around for anyone to take.
No, you can't dump it in magma either. I take it back, that last thing is now the second dumbest thing I've heard. Why? We'll get to that.
So. When you surface dwellers talk about mining, what you mean is scraping away at exposed deposits. When we talk about mining, what we mean is importing large amounts of nothing and putting it in the stone where ore currently is, in the expectation that the metal in that ore is more valuable than the nothing you're filling the tunnel with. Depending on the current market value of the metals and the market value of the nothing, this means that any given seam may be profitable or not from one day to the next. This means that you can spend all your time breaking your back hacking at the seam and be constantly losing money. It's not like the surface where you can just walk around picking up plants and putting them in your mouths: the only way to do well is to keep an eye on the market prices. People accuse dwarves of being merchantile little bastards, which we are, but they miss that it's because you would be too if you lived below.
Tunnels are tight places too. Most are crawl spaces, because why import more nothing than you have to? Surface dwellers think of mines as being places where you can comfortably walk. Yeah, sorry, no. I'm half your height and I have to stoop. We're neither of us millionaires, so down below we wear helmets and kneepads because the ceiling and floor are close together and they're made of hewn stone which means sharp and uneven.
This is why you'll see a lot of filled in tunnels. People ask why, and they're missing the point. It isn't that we don't want that tunnel, it's that we want to use that nothing somewhere else. Compared to moving the spoil all the way to the surface, moving it from one tunnel to another is nothing. It's the difference between moving your clothes off the bed onto the chair when you want to sleep as opposed to buying a new house to put those clothes in. If the filled in tunnel becomes profitable again, we'll clear it out and use it.
This is also why surface dwellers think that dwarves have close family ties. We really don't. I hate my brother, for example, and if you knew him you'd hate him too. But I don't have the luxury of just moving to the next valley and starting up my own mine there. We're stuck together, so we might as well grin and be passive aggressive about it.
The first thing humans need to realise when it comes to dealing with dwarf settlements is to understand that the whole "dwarves live in mountains" thing is so much bullshit. I mean, yes some dwarves do live in mountains, and since mountains generally have lower populations of elves and humans and halflings we're probably a statistically larger proportion of their population, but mountains are hardly our native habitats. The reason people think they are is because they're stupid. They see mountains and go, "check out all that stone. Hey, you guys like stone, right? You must love those." Listen dumbass, stone is everywhere. It's below your feet. The continental crust goes down 40km in places. The highest mountains aren't even 9km tall. A mountain is like... what do humans like? Cows? Well, a mountain is like a cow which has an extra twenty percent beef in it, except that's a bullshit analogy because nobody ever uses all that vertical space anyway. So it's more like a cow which you're only going to eat maybe five percent of, and then some indescribable moron of a magician comes along and adds another twenty percent to the cow. Thanks a lot, dumbass! I'll make sure to throw away all that extra beef along with the stuff I was going throw away anyway. It's not as if I needed it.
It's a stupid analogy, but you get what I'm saying. The point is, think three dimensionally. Surface dwellers don't live in the world, they live on the extreme top edge of it.
Now, when Moradin (blessed be His beard) designed dwarves, He neglected to give us the power of flight, and that's a pretty big oversight from where I'm standing but then I'm not the Father of Stone so what the fuck do I know. Because we can't fly, we need to use elevator systems to go up or down the big shafts, and those things are expensive and they break all the time. Yeah, all the time. It's a thing with moving parts which get worn down, and anything with moving parts is just waiting until one of those moving parts moves the wrong way and then you need to rebuild it. So vertical movement is doable but needs enough guys there to maintain it, which means the main shafts between settlements are kept running but verticals are still a pain in the ass. I can walk twenty kilometres in a day, easy, but I'd be lucky to get more than four or five vertical kilometres between sunup and sundown.
Right now at this very moment, you may think we're in an inn in a forest. And in a sense you're right. But you'd also be wrong because where we actually are is right at the top of maybe 20 habitable kilometres of stone before it gets too hot and hydrocarbonish to be worth fucking with. That 20km would be pronounced "five days' travel" if someone sank a direct shaft, only nobody has so you'd need to travel from shaft to shaft via the flat tunnels, which would take you maybe two or three times as long. So in the same way that you might expect villages every day's travel in case you want to go somewhere in order to, I dunno, stare at a particularly big cow or whatever it is that humans do, down below you'll have villages every four or so kilometres along the shafts and every twenty or so along the flats.
Now don't think of a shaft as being a single deep hole down into the darkness. See, elevators need cables, and cables have weight, and the more cable they need to lift the less other things they can lift. So most of what we call shafts will actually be a vertical series of either straight wells a hundred or so metres deep, or a steeply gradiented slope where carts are hauled up a track by a cable, which can be two or three times as long. These might have some space between the stages; it's not uncommon for a shaft to have a kilometre of flat tunnel between stages. And yeah, these things are not cheap to run and the clans who run them expect to get paid. If you don't like it, sink a shaft of your own.
This leads me to the next thing that people get wrong when they think about the below. See, surface dwellers have this thing that's really neat. It's called "nothing." As in, there's nothing currently on that table so I can put my beer on it. Down below, we don't have nothing, we have stone instead. You can't put your beer there or anywhere else, because there's stone there. If you take the stone away, you have to put it somewhere else. You're not increasing the amount of free space you have, you're just rearranging it. In order to have more free space, you need to excavate. Now, excavation can be seen as a process of taking stone up to the surface, which it is; but I prefer to think of it as a process of strip mining the surface of all of its nothing and bringing all that nothing down below where some fucker needs it in order to put down his beer. If you go to the really deep settlements, every tiny bit of space they have was laboriously imported from the surface and that stuff is not cheap. You know how humans use gold and marble to make their palaces look good? Down below, they use space, because everybody understands how pricey that is. Nothing is the commodity everyone needs.
Compress the spoil? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Spoil may be crushed stone, but it's still stone. The minimum amount of space it can occupy is the amount of space it occupied when it was stone. You can't create space by rearranging things, you need to create it by taking some things away. Preferably to the surface where you can just exchange them for all this lovely nothing that's just lying around for anyone to take.
No, you can't dump it in magma either. I take it back, that last thing is now the second dumbest thing I've heard. Why? We'll get to that.
So. When you surface dwellers talk about mining, what you mean is scraping away at exposed deposits. When we talk about mining, what we mean is importing large amounts of nothing and putting it in the stone where ore currently is, in the expectation that the metal in that ore is more valuable than the nothing you're filling the tunnel with. Depending on the current market value of the metals and the market value of the nothing, this means that any given seam may be profitable or not from one day to the next. This means that you can spend all your time breaking your back hacking at the seam and be constantly losing money. It's not like the surface where you can just walk around picking up plants and putting them in your mouths: the only way to do well is to keep an eye on the market prices. People accuse dwarves of being merchantile little bastards, which we are, but they miss that it's because you would be too if you lived below.
Tunnels are tight places too. Most are crawl spaces, because why import more nothing than you have to? Surface dwellers think of mines as being places where you can comfortably walk. Yeah, sorry, no. I'm half your height and I have to stoop. We're neither of us millionaires, so down below we wear helmets and kneepads because the ceiling and floor are close together and they're made of hewn stone which means sharp and uneven.
This is why you'll see a lot of filled in tunnels. People ask why, and they're missing the point. It isn't that we don't want that tunnel, it's that we want to use that nothing somewhere else. Compared to moving the spoil all the way to the surface, moving it from one tunnel to another is nothing. It's the difference between moving your clothes off the bed onto the chair when you want to sleep as opposed to buying a new house to put those clothes in. If the filled in tunnel becomes profitable again, we'll clear it out and use it.
This is also why surface dwellers think that dwarves have close family ties. We really don't. I hate my brother, for example, and if you knew him you'd hate him too. But I don't have the luxury of just moving to the next valley and starting up my own mine there. We're stuck together, so we might as well grin and be passive aggressive about it.
Last edited by Laertes on Mon Jul 07, 2014 9:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
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deaddmwalking
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I loved that monologue. I liked that the dwarf was just a little confused about the particulars of cows, that felt authentic to me.
You mentioned that you'd "get back to that" with the magma, but you never did, which is twice now that you've made magma dumping out to be a bad idea, but not been too clear on why. Mysterious.
Oh, I should perhaps say that the Dwarves of my setting do have important divine figures, but they're not assumed to be the gods of creation. As to the actual creation, well that is often considered to have been more like the accidental/unintentional "and then a thing happened and the race of dwarves just unexpectedly appeared" type of creation that you see a lot in Greek/Norse myths, not the highly intentional creation that's more of a Judeo-christian thing. Of course, some think that there were gods that did intentionally craft things the way they are and so on, but that's not the dominant belief. Either way, unlike in DnD, it's not like people can just go and use magic to ask the gods what happened at the beginning of time, so it's a lot more vague overall.
You mentioned that you'd "get back to that" with the magma, but you never did, which is twice now that you've made magma dumping out to be a bad idea, but not been too clear on why. Mysterious.
Oh, I should perhaps say that the Dwarves of my setting do have important divine figures, but they're not assumed to be the gods of creation. As to the actual creation, well that is often considered to have been more like the accidental/unintentional "and then a thing happened and the race of dwarves just unexpectedly appeared" type of creation that you see a lot in Greek/Norse myths, not the highly intentional creation that's more of a Judeo-christian thing. Of course, some think that there were gods that did intentionally craft things the way they are and so on, but that's not the dominant belief. Either way, unlike in DnD, it's not like people can just go and use magic to ask the gods what happened at the beginning of time, so it's a lot more vague overall.
Love the monologue Laertes. I'll second deaddmwalking in saying the concepts of importing nothing and space as a valuable commodity are really compelling. Thanks for writing that up.
One thing I feel is important to note, however, is just how large the Underdark (the planet-riddling cavern complex of the default DnD setting) is. It's pretty much a rip-off of Jules Verne or Lovecraft, where you have tunnel systems that are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles long and large enough throughout to allow for dire bats to fly around inside (they are the same size category as a horse and they have a 15 foot wingspan). We're talking "Grand Canyon with a ceiling" large. The DnD setting simply assumes more Nothing underground than is realistic. Which is good for the dwarves because it means they have a lot more space with which to move stuff around, or straight up dump stuff.
One thing I feel is important to note, however, is just how large the Underdark (the planet-riddling cavern complex of the default DnD setting) is. It's pretty much a rip-off of Jules Verne or Lovecraft, where you have tunnel systems that are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles long and large enough throughout to allow for dire bats to fly around inside (they are the same size category as a horse and they have a 15 foot wingspan). We're talking "Grand Canyon with a ceiling" large. The DnD setting simply assumes more Nothing underground than is realistic. Which is good for the dwarves because it means they have a lot more space with which to move stuff around, or straight up dump stuff.
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momothefiddler
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I'm obviously nowhere near as knowledgeable as Laertes about rocks, nor as amusing, but my understanding is that you're not exactly likely to find something like in Minecraft where there's a cavern with plenty of empty space and a pool of unpressurized magma bubbling away merrily. Even if you did, though, and I'm a lot more sure about this part, magma doesn't make rock go away. It just melts it. And that doesn't make that rock have any less volume, so you just end up with more magma (maybe it's cooler on average; I don't understand the setup that gives you that cavern+pool anyway. I think there'd be a heat source though.) This means you're (to use Laertes' fantastic terminology) carving nothing out of the cavern just as much as if it didn't have a magma pool in the first place.Lokathor wrote:You mentioned that you'd "get back to that" with the magma, but you never did, which is twice now that you've made magma dumping out to be a bad idea, but not been too clear on why. Mysterious.
If you had an unpressurized magma river that flowed past your place, though, you could probably dump a fair amount of rock in it without problems. I don't know that those exist under natural geologic conditions, though.
Oh, and while I was writing this it appears Laertes has promised to explain more about the magma anyway, so never mind!
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deaddmwalking
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I'd guess it's like throwing ice cubes in water - all you're going to do is overflow the glass.
And overflowing magma is probably worse than overflowing icewater...
I could see how dumping massive amounts of loose rock would lower the temperature very quickly, possibly causing it to harden quickly - but if the heat source is continuous, it would eventually melt all the additional material as well. It would just come back, even larger than before....
And overflowing magma is probably worse than overflowing icewater...
I could see how dumping massive amounts of loose rock would lower the temperature very quickly, possibly causing it to harden quickly - but if the heat source is continuous, it would eventually melt all the additional material as well. It would just come back, even larger than before....
A lot of the time when you find magma it's in little pools without a heat source, where it's migrated and is in the process of cooling. momothefiddler and deaddmwalking are spot on the money about why you can't use it as a rock disposal system though. Magma is, on average, very slightly less dense than most rock, but not enough to make a volume difference.
The next section will be about igneous rocks and magma, since those seem to be of interest.
Re the underdark - I have no idea how the geology of that would work. Obviously it's not a cave, since caves tend to be very shallow - the large ones are almost without exception found in limestone, and limestone isn't found more than a kilometre or two below the surface. Stone deep down is under enormous pressure; it's one of the things that makes the creation of Nothing so exciting.
It's also not an empty magma tube because those don't exist. Magma isn't like its calm and gentle surface cousin lava, it doesn't play nice.
How does D&D explain the existence of the underdark? Does it even try? My knowledge of it starts and ends at having played through the second expansion pack for the original Neverwinter Nights a few times, so any infodumps people can give me about it would be gratefully appreciated.
Edit: In particular, is there any D&D source which gives us a reference for just how deep the Underdark is? Or if it's up to the individual GM, then how deep is it in your campaign?
For reference, most tunnel mines are less than a kilometre deep. The ocean floor is mostly between 3km and 6km deep. The deepest oil wells go down to about 10km. The Kola Borehole, an attempt by the Soviet Union to drill down into the mantle, got called off after 12km. The mantle begins at about 40-75km down, but that's a fuzzy boundary (we think - the Kola Borehole was supposed to investigate this.)
The next section will be about igneous rocks and magma, since those seem to be of interest.
Re the underdark - I have no idea how the geology of that would work. Obviously it's not a cave, since caves tend to be very shallow - the large ones are almost without exception found in limestone, and limestone isn't found more than a kilometre or two below the surface. Stone deep down is under enormous pressure; it's one of the things that makes the creation of Nothing so exciting.
It's also not an empty magma tube because those don't exist. Magma isn't like its calm and gentle surface cousin lava, it doesn't play nice.
How does D&D explain the existence of the underdark? Does it even try? My knowledge of it starts and ends at having played through the second expansion pack for the original Neverwinter Nights a few times, so any infodumps people can give me about it would be gratefully appreciated.
Edit: In particular, is there any D&D source which gives us a reference for just how deep the Underdark is? Or if it's up to the individual GM, then how deep is it in your campaign?
For reference, most tunnel mines are less than a kilometre deep. The ocean floor is mostly between 3km and 6km deep. The deepest oil wells go down to about 10km. The Kola Borehole, an attempt by the Soviet Union to drill down into the mantle, got called off after 12km. The mantle begins at about 40-75km down, but that's a fuzzy boundary (we think - the Kola Borehole was supposed to investigate this.)
Last edited by Laertes on Mon Jul 07, 2014 4:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I don't think DnD tries particularly hard to explain the Underdark; it might even have been created in that form via divine intervention for all I know. Also, DnD has a ton of tunneling magic around as well as monsters that dissolve and/or eat stone and in some cases are sufficiently explicitly magical that their violation of conservation of mass isn't necessarily a gameplay abstraction, which probably has something to do with it
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
So here's part 2. The tale has, I'm afraid, grown somewhat in the telling.
Why I hate magma (and why you should too)
Earlier you used the word "biome." I'm not an elf, but I am dimly aware that "biome" refers to the climate and water and all that stuff that tells you whether a place is a forest or a desert, and what sort of plants you can grow there. However, down below we don't have biome, we have stone; and stone does not care whether there's a jungle or a glacier or an ocean above it. Once you're a kilometre or so down, you won't care either. The only thing stopping us from tunnelling under the seabed is that it's a really, really long way to take the spoil. Once you're below you do not care what's above except in rare cases when it insists on coming down to meet you.
If you asked an elf what sort of plant that thing there is, they'd say it was a - hey you, dandelion eater, what's the species name of that tree over there - a Cappadocian Oak. If you asked a human, they'd probably say it was a tree. Most dwarves would just look at it and say "it's a plant." It's not that we can't see the difference between it and the grass, it's that we don't care. It's all just green stuff clinging to the top of the world. In the same way, I am using the word "stone" for convenience when talking to you, but dwarves don't have such a general word. That inn, for example. What's it made of?
Slate, you savage. It's made of slate. It's a metamorphic rocks which you find in coal country like this. Metamorphic stone is one of the four types of stone which you need to understand about. Each one is subdivided, in the same way that trees are subdivided into oaks and elms, which in turn have all their species that neither of us care about. But for now, let's look at the most important types, because you'll find a lot of them down there.
My grandfather once told me that it pleased Moradin (blessed be His beard) to create the world from magma. Because my grandfather was a blasphemous old bastard, he added that magma spends it time trying to stop being magma because the gods are assholes and even inanimate objects are better off disobeying them. While his theology might have been suspect, his geology was good: magma loves to turn into other things. When magma cools underground, it turns into intrusive igneous rock, also called plutonic rock. When magma reaches the surface it turns into lava, which is much colder and less pressurised, and that lava then turns into extrusive igneous rock, which is also called volcanic rock. These are named after a pair of gods, Pluto and Vulcan, who went around below and above respectively. You can use that as a mnemonic, if you like.
Magma is horrible stuff and you should never go within a kilometre of it. However, if you do, you may care to know that it can be graded according to its relative quantities of silicon and iron. There are three main types: felsic magma is extremely liquid and brightly coloured; mafic magma is very viscous, glows much dimmer but is vastly hotter; and intermediate magma is, well, intermediate. You might now be wondering which of the three is the nice happy fun kind of magma, the sort you can safely use. The answer is none of them. Magma is the blood of the earth and if you want to live you will leave it in the earth.
When magma cools underground it turns into plutonic rock. Pluto, underworld god, remember? It normally does this in big thick bulges called laccoliths, but sometimes it'll form broad flat sheets called batholiths that can be up to hundreds of kilometres across and tens of metres thick - and those are fuckers to get through because plutonic rock is hard. Now, the sort of plutonic rock you get depends on the sort of magma that Moradin (blessed be His beard) decided to shaft you with. If your magma is felsic, you get granite. Granite is too hard to break with an iron pickaxe, you need explosives or magic. However, granite does contain galena and cassiterite and gems. Galena, remember, is where you get silver and lead; and cassiterite is where you get tin. Delicious. Can't beat a little tin on your mushrooms.
On the other hand, if the magma you have is mafic, then the plutonic rock you will have is called gabbro and is also miserable hard ironbreaking stuff. However, it has one virtue: since mafic magma contains iron, gabbro does too. It's usually found in an ore called magnetite which forms clusters here and there in the rock. You can find them with a - wait for it - a magnet, hence the name. Actually, I tell a lie. Gabbro has one more slight virtue: diamonds. Every diamond that has ever been found has been found in a kimberlite seam, and kimberlite is only ever found in gabbro. Which is a nice perk, I guess, but there is no way to tell if there's kimberlite inside the rock. There could be a king's ransom metres from you and you'd never know it. This is also where you find platinum, if you have a taste for it.
If you have a middling grade of magma then it will produce a plutonic rock called dacite, and this is where we get pissed off because there is nothing whatsoever that's good about dacite. Do you remember how hard I said granite is? Well dacite is so hard that you can use dacite tools to break granite. Except you can't because you can't make the tools out of dacite because you have no way to work it. Dacite has lots of gems and some iron and some other weird cool trace elements, but that doesn't matter because they're encased in fucking dacite. Honestly, it's miserable stuff. If you happen to find yourself in a dacite region, my advice to you is to emigrate.
The scary thing about plutonic rock - that's intrusive igneous rock if you prefer - is that it's so deep that it's under constant pressure. Everything is, down there. This means that the rock shifts slightly all the time. We're not talking metres a day, but we are talking cracks appearing overnight and then deepening constantly. Now cracks are bad for two reasons. Firstly, they weaken the walls and bring cave ins, and cave ins are bad. However, more importantly they often propagate very widely, and that means you never know where they lead.
Kobolds? No, they aren't the problem. The problem is liquids. Specifically two liquids: water and magma.
Up here on the surface, water is cold. Which is weird because down there, and especially among the gabbro and granite, water is really fucking hot. We're talking horrible scalds which if you're lucky you might possibly survive hot. We're talking steam which will burn your lungs. Yeah, unpleasant. But the real issue is the magma. See, magma fucking adores its little capillary cracks. It will happily wander for kilometres in those things, and as it does so it heats the rock and that causes even more deformation and more cracks. Felsic magma is as runny as oil and can get almost anywhere. Yeah, it's the colder sort of magma, but by colder I mean up to a mere nine hundred degrees C. If you wake up to find that stuff dripping from the cracks in your ceiling, things have gone horribly wrong and you should consider asking your brother if he'll switch rooms with you.
Liquids don't like being pressurised. But everything that far below is pressurised. This means that if they see a chance to expand into nothing - your precious and expensive nothing - they will take it. By "take it" I mean they will knock down walls that are metres thick because there's massive fluid pressure on one side and none at all on the other. And by "knock down" I mean you sometimes get the walls suddenly exploding hard enough that the rock fragments can kill. And then the water or magma comes through afterwards as if that wasn't enough. Fuck magma.
Magma also gives off poisonous gases, did I mention that? Horrible horrible poisonous gases. And it's extremely radioactive. And the poisonous gases are also radioactive. Seriously, fuck magma.
Anyway. The other sort of igneous rock is called extrusive igneous, also known as volcanic - Vulcan, remember? It comes from lava. Now, lava is magma's retarded surface cousin. It still gets classified as mafic or intermediate or felsic, but it's a lot cooler and calmer because there's plenty of nothing for it to expand into and it can vent its gases. This makes it cool down a lot. The places where these things happen are called volcanoes, after Vulc - oh, you've heard of volcanoes? I thought they were pretty obscure. I mean, it's right up on the surface where nobody cares. Except the humans, obviously. Ah. Yes. Sorry, my mistake. I can see how that one bit of geology might be of interest to you.
Mafic lava makes basalt, which is useless but looks pretty. That's about it. It just gets in the way, really. It spreads slowly and cools slowly so you get these broad, flat layers of it that cool like pancakes on a hot plate. Basalt is about the hardest thing you're going to find among the extrusive igneous rocks. It's a cousin to gabbro - they come from the same mafic source, after all - but doesn't quite have it's deep down cousin's mean-spiritedness when it comes to breaking your tools.
Felsic lava makes rhyolite. Felsic lava cools extremely quickly and produces loads of ash, so rhyolite tends to build up a cone around the site of the eruption and those cones can get pretty tall, in some cases becoming an instant mountain. Rhyolite is terrible stone to build anything with because the ash in it forms layers which weaken it. Digging through it is ridiculously easy, if you're okay living that close to the surface and that close to a magma plume. Rhyolite does contain gems, which are if nothing else a nice trade good. There are some pretty decent folk living in extinct volcanos up on the Sawtooth and Barrier mountains. It's metal poor stone though, so they have to import in order to eat.
Intermediate lava makes andesite, which combines the mineral paucity of basalt with the structural weakness of rhyolite. If you ever meet a dwarf who lives in andesite, laugh at him. Anyone doing that is dumb enough to fall for anything, but you can't even rob them because they have nothing worth stealing because they live in andesite. It's a joke rock is what it is. Anyone sensible has a nice cosy bit of nothing in a solid piece of intrusive igneous rock if they're a deep-downer, or in metamorphic or sedimentary rock if they're more about the shallows.
Metamorphic and sedimentary? We'll get to those soon enough. For now, it's your round. Yes, I know it was your round last round. It's happening again.
Earlier you used the word "biome." I'm not an elf, but I am dimly aware that "biome" refers to the climate and water and all that stuff that tells you whether a place is a forest or a desert, and what sort of plants you can grow there. However, down below we don't have biome, we have stone; and stone does not care whether there's a jungle or a glacier or an ocean above it. Once you're a kilometre or so down, you won't care either. The only thing stopping us from tunnelling under the seabed is that it's a really, really long way to take the spoil. Once you're below you do not care what's above except in rare cases when it insists on coming down to meet you.
If you asked an elf what sort of plant that thing there is, they'd say it was a - hey you, dandelion eater, what's the species name of that tree over there - a Cappadocian Oak. If you asked a human, they'd probably say it was a tree. Most dwarves would just look at it and say "it's a plant." It's not that we can't see the difference between it and the grass, it's that we don't care. It's all just green stuff clinging to the top of the world. In the same way, I am using the word "stone" for convenience when talking to you, but dwarves don't have such a general word. That inn, for example. What's it made of?
Slate, you savage. It's made of slate. It's a metamorphic rocks which you find in coal country like this. Metamorphic stone is one of the four types of stone which you need to understand about. Each one is subdivided, in the same way that trees are subdivided into oaks and elms, which in turn have all their species that neither of us care about. But for now, let's look at the most important types, because you'll find a lot of them down there.
My grandfather once told me that it pleased Moradin (blessed be His beard) to create the world from magma. Because my grandfather was a blasphemous old bastard, he added that magma spends it time trying to stop being magma because the gods are assholes and even inanimate objects are better off disobeying them. While his theology might have been suspect, his geology was good: magma loves to turn into other things. When magma cools underground, it turns into intrusive igneous rock, also called plutonic rock. When magma reaches the surface it turns into lava, which is much colder and less pressurised, and that lava then turns into extrusive igneous rock, which is also called volcanic rock. These are named after a pair of gods, Pluto and Vulcan, who went around below and above respectively. You can use that as a mnemonic, if you like.
Magma is horrible stuff and you should never go within a kilometre of it. However, if you do, you may care to know that it can be graded according to its relative quantities of silicon and iron. There are three main types: felsic magma is extremely liquid and brightly coloured; mafic magma is very viscous, glows much dimmer but is vastly hotter; and intermediate magma is, well, intermediate. You might now be wondering which of the three is the nice happy fun kind of magma, the sort you can safely use. The answer is none of them. Magma is the blood of the earth and if you want to live you will leave it in the earth.
When magma cools underground it turns into plutonic rock. Pluto, underworld god, remember? It normally does this in big thick bulges called laccoliths, but sometimes it'll form broad flat sheets called batholiths that can be up to hundreds of kilometres across and tens of metres thick - and those are fuckers to get through because plutonic rock is hard. Now, the sort of plutonic rock you get depends on the sort of magma that Moradin (blessed be His beard) decided to shaft you with. If your magma is felsic, you get granite. Granite is too hard to break with an iron pickaxe, you need explosives or magic. However, granite does contain galena and cassiterite and gems. Galena, remember, is where you get silver and lead; and cassiterite is where you get tin. Delicious. Can't beat a little tin on your mushrooms.
On the other hand, if the magma you have is mafic, then the plutonic rock you will have is called gabbro and is also miserable hard ironbreaking stuff. However, it has one virtue: since mafic magma contains iron, gabbro does too. It's usually found in an ore called magnetite which forms clusters here and there in the rock. You can find them with a - wait for it - a magnet, hence the name. Actually, I tell a lie. Gabbro has one more slight virtue: diamonds. Every diamond that has ever been found has been found in a kimberlite seam, and kimberlite is only ever found in gabbro. Which is a nice perk, I guess, but there is no way to tell if there's kimberlite inside the rock. There could be a king's ransom metres from you and you'd never know it. This is also where you find platinum, if you have a taste for it.
If you have a middling grade of magma then it will produce a plutonic rock called dacite, and this is where we get pissed off because there is nothing whatsoever that's good about dacite. Do you remember how hard I said granite is? Well dacite is so hard that you can use dacite tools to break granite. Except you can't because you can't make the tools out of dacite because you have no way to work it. Dacite has lots of gems and some iron and some other weird cool trace elements, but that doesn't matter because they're encased in fucking dacite. Honestly, it's miserable stuff. If you happen to find yourself in a dacite region, my advice to you is to emigrate.
The scary thing about plutonic rock - that's intrusive igneous rock if you prefer - is that it's so deep that it's under constant pressure. Everything is, down there. This means that the rock shifts slightly all the time. We're not talking metres a day, but we are talking cracks appearing overnight and then deepening constantly. Now cracks are bad for two reasons. Firstly, they weaken the walls and bring cave ins, and cave ins are bad. However, more importantly they often propagate very widely, and that means you never know where they lead.
Kobolds? No, they aren't the problem. The problem is liquids. Specifically two liquids: water and magma.
Up here on the surface, water is cold. Which is weird because down there, and especially among the gabbro and granite, water is really fucking hot. We're talking horrible scalds which if you're lucky you might possibly survive hot. We're talking steam which will burn your lungs. Yeah, unpleasant. But the real issue is the magma. See, magma fucking adores its little capillary cracks. It will happily wander for kilometres in those things, and as it does so it heats the rock and that causes even more deformation and more cracks. Felsic magma is as runny as oil and can get almost anywhere. Yeah, it's the colder sort of magma, but by colder I mean up to a mere nine hundred degrees C. If you wake up to find that stuff dripping from the cracks in your ceiling, things have gone horribly wrong and you should consider asking your brother if he'll switch rooms with you.
Liquids don't like being pressurised. But everything that far below is pressurised. This means that if they see a chance to expand into nothing - your precious and expensive nothing - they will take it. By "take it" I mean they will knock down walls that are metres thick because there's massive fluid pressure on one side and none at all on the other. And by "knock down" I mean you sometimes get the walls suddenly exploding hard enough that the rock fragments can kill. And then the water or magma comes through afterwards as if that wasn't enough. Fuck magma.
Magma also gives off poisonous gases, did I mention that? Horrible horrible poisonous gases. And it's extremely radioactive. And the poisonous gases are also radioactive. Seriously, fuck magma.
Anyway. The other sort of igneous rock is called extrusive igneous, also known as volcanic - Vulcan, remember? It comes from lava. Now, lava is magma's retarded surface cousin. It still gets classified as mafic or intermediate or felsic, but it's a lot cooler and calmer because there's plenty of nothing for it to expand into and it can vent its gases. This makes it cool down a lot. The places where these things happen are called volcanoes, after Vulc - oh, you've heard of volcanoes? I thought they were pretty obscure. I mean, it's right up on the surface where nobody cares. Except the humans, obviously. Ah. Yes. Sorry, my mistake. I can see how that one bit of geology might be of interest to you.
Mafic lava makes basalt, which is useless but looks pretty. That's about it. It just gets in the way, really. It spreads slowly and cools slowly so you get these broad, flat layers of it that cool like pancakes on a hot plate. Basalt is about the hardest thing you're going to find among the extrusive igneous rocks. It's a cousin to gabbro - they come from the same mafic source, after all - but doesn't quite have it's deep down cousin's mean-spiritedness when it comes to breaking your tools.
Felsic lava makes rhyolite. Felsic lava cools extremely quickly and produces loads of ash, so rhyolite tends to build up a cone around the site of the eruption and those cones can get pretty tall, in some cases becoming an instant mountain. Rhyolite is terrible stone to build anything with because the ash in it forms layers which weaken it. Digging through it is ridiculously easy, if you're okay living that close to the surface and that close to a magma plume. Rhyolite does contain gems, which are if nothing else a nice trade good. There are some pretty decent folk living in extinct volcanos up on the Sawtooth and Barrier mountains. It's metal poor stone though, so they have to import in order to eat.
Intermediate lava makes andesite, which combines the mineral paucity of basalt with the structural weakness of rhyolite. If you ever meet a dwarf who lives in andesite, laugh at him. Anyone doing that is dumb enough to fall for anything, but you can't even rob them because they have nothing worth stealing because they live in andesite. It's a joke rock is what it is. Anyone sensible has a nice cosy bit of nothing in a solid piece of intrusive igneous rock if they're a deep-downer, or in metamorphic or sedimentary rock if they're more about the shallows.
Metamorphic and sedimentary? We'll get to those soon enough. For now, it's your round. Yes, I know it was your round last round. It's happening again.
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Night Goat
- Journeyman
- Posts: 120
- Joined: Tue May 13, 2014 7:53 pm
According to the 3e Forgotten Realms Underdark book, the lowest level "extends from 10 miles below the surface to unfathomable depths." I just glanced briefly through the site descriptions, and the lowest one I saw was 26 miles underground. There's also an abyss rumored to be 40 miles deep.Laertes wrote:Edit: In particular, is there any D&D source which gives us a reference for just how deep the Underdark is?
Fantastic.
Incidentally, if you have zombie laborers, you don't set them to mining. You stick them in enclosed treadmills, and clutch those together to run mining equipment that you actually care about.
Incidentally, if you have zombie laborers, you don't set them to mining. You stick them in enclosed treadmills, and clutch those together to run mining equipment that you actually care about.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
Oops, I see I missed a question from a few pages back.
During the Golden Age, when the dwarves were expanding above and below without meaningful rivals, dwarven culture was pretty free-wheeling and individual holds varied pretty wildly from theocracies to dictatorships to communist utopias to cults of personality. The dwarves simply had a huge tech lead over everything else and could pretty much do as they pleased. It didn't really matter where you lived or how; you were a dwarf and that meant you were in tight with big M and therefore on the winning team. And no one was considered on Moradin's good side more than the Futhark clan.
If you can judge how important a priest is by the size of their hat (skullcap up to big ass pope-hat), the Futhark clan wore the biggest hats of all the dwarves. Their Primarch's descendants literally wrote the book on dwarven worship and their main fortress contained the site of the dwarven genesis. And the Futhark were obsessed with this initial act of creation. Relics were recovered from other, less-pious clans. Elders across all of dwarfdom where questioned about what they remembered from their 7th or 8th generation parents, who themselves remembered the Primarchs (the Primarchs and their Moradin-animated families lived a long time even by dwarven standards). And massive Divinations, arcane and divine, were cast to find out more. Curiously, though the divine spells were mute on the subject, the arcane divinations spoke of another Genesis; a site similar and older to the site contained in the Futhark capital. Instead of dwarves it containing lots and lots of statues... and a few dwarven skeletons scattered about.
Moradin wouldn't answer any questions about the other site. Whenever a cleric of Moradin tried to cast a spell on anything from that site, it'd fizzle. It was only the sorcerers who could get their magic to work. After their creation, the Primarchs had carved statues which Moradin animated to create the first families. The statues of this site were the same but untouched; each one a vessel primed for animation, tied to Moradin's essence explicitly to allow his direct involvement across the planar divide. The only difference was that they lacked a heartstone and seemed not to need one. Since the clerics were unable to do anything divine to these statues, the spark of animation was an arcane one. The moment the first batch of statues were tampered with, every Ollam of the Futhark clan staggered; their god had abandoned them and in so doing he condemned their entire clan to death once their heartstones were exhausted.
The majority of the clan died in the days and weeks to come. A minority survived by using necromancy to keep their dead hearts beating. Confused, angered, and surrounded by their dead kinsmen, the sorcerers of the Futhark turned the other genesis site into their sanctuary. Study revealed the bones to belong to a dead generation of Primarchs, animated by Moradin but, like the dwarves of the Futhark, seemingly left to die amidst the lifeless statues of their would-be families. The statues, when animated to flesh and blood, were physically flawless but mindless, soulless. Eventually a sorcerer tried entering one of these bodies with a Magic Jar spell and found the new body accepted his soul permanently. Furthermore, the body contained a direct connection to Moradin, allowing the sorcerer to extract divine spells from the deity without petitioning him first. From the body of this ur-dwarf, without the heartstone Moradin created in the dwarves of the second Genesis, with an unseverable tie to Moradin's power itself, was the first Urllami Necromancer created.
Moradin is many things, but he is not a deity prone to getting involved. For the most part he will refuse to act, trusting that any twisted branches on the dwarven tree will wither and die on their own in a few short centuries. When it gets especially egregious he'll use his kill switch, cutting off the clerics and letting the heretics' heartstones peter out. But the Futhark remnants had blasphemed so greatly and managed to escape Moradin's controls so thoroughly that for the only recorded time ever, Moradin intervened. For a full week, only combat spells and divinations were granted to the Ollami. No healing, no benedictions to restore heartstones, nothing except the spells needed to ask Moradin what he wanted and the means to enact it. The Ollami took the hint and called for the Futhark to be found and utterly destroyed. Why? Moradin wasn't saying. How? Moradin didn't care. But it seemed like Moradin was willing to cut off any who didn't answer his call to arms; with a divine gun held to their collective heads, the dwarves marched to war on the blasphemers.
The Urllami were greatly empowered in their new bodies, and legions of the dead were raised to defend them from the instruments of their spiteful creator. A long and painful war was waged, made all the more so because the revelations of the Urllami caused schisms and defections among the faithful. Eventually though the orthodox dwarves were able to put down the heretics, destroy all records of their creed, and obscure the nature of their rebellion. Eventually the last few dwarves who knew the truth died and the lie that the Futhark were nothing more than a rabble of necromancers who sought to live on as undead was believed. Necromancy was banned and arcane magic itself was viewed with suspicion.
The first dwarves defied their creator before they even left their Eden. Moradin saw to it that the birthplace of the heretical ur-dwarves was also their tomb. A new site was chosen and a new dwarf was made with a stronger means of control in place. The dwarves of this second genesis no longer know how close their race came to being once more scrapped by Moradin as a failed experiment. Moradin is very selective with his wrath and so can be construed by some as kindly or lenient. This is far from the truth, but that truth is buried very deeply indeed.
Omegonthesane wrote:Shatner - what exactly did the Futhark dwarves do?
The Blasphemy of the Futhark
During the Golden Age, when the dwarves were expanding above and below without meaningful rivals, dwarven culture was pretty free-wheeling and individual holds varied pretty wildly from theocracies to dictatorships to communist utopias to cults of personality. The dwarves simply had a huge tech lead over everything else and could pretty much do as they pleased. It didn't really matter where you lived or how; you were a dwarf and that meant you were in tight with big M and therefore on the winning team. And no one was considered on Moradin's good side more than the Futhark clan.
If you can judge how important a priest is by the size of their hat (skullcap up to big ass pope-hat), the Futhark clan wore the biggest hats of all the dwarves. Their Primarch's descendants literally wrote the book on dwarven worship and their main fortress contained the site of the dwarven genesis. And the Futhark were obsessed with this initial act of creation. Relics were recovered from other, less-pious clans. Elders across all of dwarfdom where questioned about what they remembered from their 7th or 8th generation parents, who themselves remembered the Primarchs (the Primarchs and their Moradin-animated families lived a long time even by dwarven standards). And massive Divinations, arcane and divine, were cast to find out more. Curiously, though the divine spells were mute on the subject, the arcane divinations spoke of another Genesis; a site similar and older to the site contained in the Futhark capital. Instead of dwarves it containing lots and lots of statues... and a few dwarven skeletons scattered about.
Moradin wouldn't answer any questions about the other site. Whenever a cleric of Moradin tried to cast a spell on anything from that site, it'd fizzle. It was only the sorcerers who could get their magic to work. After their creation, the Primarchs had carved statues which Moradin animated to create the first families. The statues of this site were the same but untouched; each one a vessel primed for animation, tied to Moradin's essence explicitly to allow his direct involvement across the planar divide. The only difference was that they lacked a heartstone and seemed not to need one. Since the clerics were unable to do anything divine to these statues, the spark of animation was an arcane one. The moment the first batch of statues were tampered with, every Ollam of the Futhark clan staggered; their god had abandoned them and in so doing he condemned their entire clan to death once their heartstones were exhausted.
The majority of the clan died in the days and weeks to come. A minority survived by using necromancy to keep their dead hearts beating. Confused, angered, and surrounded by their dead kinsmen, the sorcerers of the Futhark turned the other genesis site into their sanctuary. Study revealed the bones to belong to a dead generation of Primarchs, animated by Moradin but, like the dwarves of the Futhark, seemingly left to die amidst the lifeless statues of their would-be families. The statues, when animated to flesh and blood, were physically flawless but mindless, soulless. Eventually a sorcerer tried entering one of these bodies with a Magic Jar spell and found the new body accepted his soul permanently. Furthermore, the body contained a direct connection to Moradin, allowing the sorcerer to extract divine spells from the deity without petitioning him first. From the body of this ur-dwarf, without the heartstone Moradin created in the dwarves of the second Genesis, with an unseverable tie to Moradin's power itself, was the first Urllami Necromancer created.
Moradin is many things, but he is not a deity prone to getting involved. For the most part he will refuse to act, trusting that any twisted branches on the dwarven tree will wither and die on their own in a few short centuries. When it gets especially egregious he'll use his kill switch, cutting off the clerics and letting the heretics' heartstones peter out. But the Futhark remnants had blasphemed so greatly and managed to escape Moradin's controls so thoroughly that for the only recorded time ever, Moradin intervened. For a full week, only combat spells and divinations were granted to the Ollami. No healing, no benedictions to restore heartstones, nothing except the spells needed to ask Moradin what he wanted and the means to enact it. The Ollami took the hint and called for the Futhark to be found and utterly destroyed. Why? Moradin wasn't saying. How? Moradin didn't care. But it seemed like Moradin was willing to cut off any who didn't answer his call to arms; with a divine gun held to their collective heads, the dwarves marched to war on the blasphemers.
The Urllami were greatly empowered in their new bodies, and legions of the dead were raised to defend them from the instruments of their spiteful creator. A long and painful war was waged, made all the more so because the revelations of the Urllami caused schisms and defections among the faithful. Eventually though the orthodox dwarves were able to put down the heretics, destroy all records of their creed, and obscure the nature of their rebellion. Eventually the last few dwarves who knew the truth died and the lie that the Futhark were nothing more than a rabble of necromancers who sought to live on as undead was believed. Necromancy was banned and arcane magic itself was viewed with suspicion.
The first dwarves defied their creator before they even left their Eden. Moradin saw to it that the birthplace of the heretical ur-dwarves was also their tomb. A new site was chosen and a new dwarf was made with a stronger means of control in place. The dwarves of this second genesis no longer know how close their race came to being once more scrapped by Moradin as a failed experiment. Moradin is very selective with his wrath and so can be construed by some as kindly or lenient. This is far from the truth, but that truth is buried very deeply indeed.
Shatner:
If you do not use that background as a piece of deliberate temple propaganda, intended to smokescreen the existence of ancient ur-dwarf liches craving vengeance on their replacement species, then I am disappointed. It's a magnificent endgame and very well foreshadowed in that piece of myth.
fectin:
I understood that dwarves are very picky about their dead and dislike the corpses being mistreated; however they might use goblin dead instead for zombie labour. I imagine that there's various magitech ways to do it.
I've been thinking about the Nothing Economy a little more. Two ideas popped into my head: Firstly, that "disintegrate" is basically a "Fabricate" spell for Nothing; and secondly, that the natural way to charge for a shaft that your clan runs is to take a cut of the Nothing that's being brought in. What this actually means in non-dwarf speak is that the clan that run the shaft heap some of their slag onto your wheelbarrows and goat carts, but putting it in terms of Nothing allows you to have dwarf NPCs grumbling about the cost of it and threatening to go to a different shaft operator and what have you.
Night Goat:
Thanks, that's very welcome and helpful. That puts it pretty squarely into the plutonic rock zone; you can get metamorphic rock 16km deep but it's rare. It's much easier to conceptualise now; it requires less WSOD than it did before. I'll sleep on it and try to work out some handwavium that can be used.
I did a quick Google on the formation of the Underdark and found some stuff about Torog, the King Who Crawls. Is that canon for most people or is that 4E only and "we don't speak of that in polite company" sort of stuff?
If you do not use that background as a piece of deliberate temple propaganda, intended to smokescreen the existence of ancient ur-dwarf liches craving vengeance on their replacement species, then I am disappointed. It's a magnificent endgame and very well foreshadowed in that piece of myth.
fectin:
I understood that dwarves are very picky about their dead and dislike the corpses being mistreated; however they might use goblin dead instead for zombie labour. I imagine that there's various magitech ways to do it.
I've been thinking about the Nothing Economy a little more. Two ideas popped into my head: Firstly, that "disintegrate" is basically a "Fabricate" spell for Nothing; and secondly, that the natural way to charge for a shaft that your clan runs is to take a cut of the Nothing that's being brought in. What this actually means in non-dwarf speak is that the clan that run the shaft heap some of their slag onto your wheelbarrows and goat carts, but putting it in terms of Nothing allows you to have dwarf NPCs grumbling about the cost of it and threatening to go to a different shaft operator and what have you.
Night Goat:
Thanks, that's very welcome and helpful. That puts it pretty squarely into the plutonic rock zone; you can get metamorphic rock 16km deep but it's rare. It's much easier to conceptualise now; it requires less WSOD than it did before. I'll sleep on it and try to work out some handwavium that can be used.
I did a quick Google on the formation of the Underdark and found some stuff about Torog, the King Who Crawls. Is that canon for most people or is that 4E only and "we don't speak of that in polite company" sort of stuff?
DnD has been shaped by a whole lot of sources over it's life. Tolkien is an obvious one, but lots of other bits of literature were ripped off to make the kitchen sink setting that DnD calls home. And because folks like Lovecraft didn't know or care about realistic geology, they just thought it'd be cool to have caves that just. kept. going. And then they populated these impossibly deep and implausibly huge caverns with all manner of monstrous stuff. My point is, the sources that DnD used to create the Underdark all operate on the Rule of Cool (i.e. science-defying caverns of doom exist because they are awesome). And it is up to nerds like us to pick up these poorly assembled but neat looking pieces and try and reconcile what inconsistencies we have the knowledge and give-a-damn to correct.Laertes wrote:Re the underdark - I have no idea how the geology of that would work. Obviously it's not a cave, since caves tend to be very shallow - the large ones are almost without exception found in limestone, and limestone isn't found more than a kilometre or two below the surface. Stone deep down is under enormous pressure; it's one of the things that makes the creation of Nothing so exciting.
It's also not an empty magma tube because those don't exist. Magma isn't like its calm and gentle surface cousin lava, it doesn't play nice.
How does D&D explain the existence of the underdark? Does it even try?
Therefore, explaining the Underdark is more like having your conclusion and working backwards to create your experiment. You know you're going to have stupendously large subterranean areas that are, somehow, capable of supporting a dizzying array of life which is both active and sometimes stupidly large (I'm looking at you, purple worm). If that means you have a world with giant pillars and planes of dacite forming an elaborate matrix of structural support inside which you can have caves 20 miles deep and whatnot, so be it.
Fortunately, we don't actually have to explain how the world is a giant super-stone lattice filled with stone, gold, dwarves, and magma. It can always be said to be "a mystery not even the gods can answer"; heck plot hooks have been made from worse sources. A fantasy world is going to be inexplicable at some level; the goal is just to put that level 1 metaphorical layer deeper than most players are going to bother digging.
Oh yeah, having a progenitor or prehistoric sister species craving vengeance is certainly something I'd roll with if my campaigns were still running (after four and a half years I had to take a break). It should be understood that everything I post here has the asterisk of *this is how it is unless something changed to make something cooler.Laertes wrote:Shatner:
If you do not use that background as a piece of deliberate temple propaganda, intended to smokescreen the existence of ancient ur-dwarf liches craving vengeance on their replacement species, then I am disappointed. It's a magnificent endgame and very well foreshadowed in that piece of myth.
fectin:
I understood that dwarves are very picky about their dead and dislike the corpses being mistreated; however they might use goblin dead instead for zombie labour. I imagine that there's various magitech ways to do it.
I've been thinking about the Nothing Economy a little more. Two ideas popped into my head: Firstly, that "disintegrate" is basically a "Fabricate" spell for Nothing; and secondly, that the natural way to charge for a shaft that your clan runs is to take a cut of the Nothing that's being brought in. What this actually means in non-dwarf speak is that the clan that run the shaft heap some of their slag onto your wheelbarrows and goat carts, but putting it in terms of Nothing allows you to have dwarf NPCs grumbling about the cost of it and threatening to go to a different shaft operator and what have you.
Night Goat:
Thanks, that's very welcome and helpful. That puts it pretty squarely into the plutonic rock zone; you can get metamorphic rock 16km deep but it's rare. It's much easier to conceptualise now; it requires less WSOD than it did before. I'll sleep on it and try to work out some handwavium that can be used.
I did a quick Google on the formation of the Underdark and found some stuff about Torog, the King Who Crawls. Is that canon for most people or is that 4E only and "we don't speak of that in polite company" sort of stuff?
I agree that necromancy is the easiest, most low-level way to get your industrializing, nigh-perpetual motion energy sources running, and I've had a lot of fun with highly organized necropolises in past campaigns. I intentionally made necromancy a no-no in my dwarven setting to prevent that easy road from being taken. Shatner Moradin wants his dwarves to toil and toil they shall.
I know nothing about Torog, the King who Crawls. All of my material was used in 3rd Ed campaigns, and my knowledge of 4th Ed. is shaky at best. Still, you have purple worms, delvers, xorn, and a dozen varieties of earth/magma elementals, all of which create tunnels and/or displace rock as they go. I'm not necessarily saying that "a monster did it" is the answer we want to go with, but that IS in our toolbox of handwavings should we choose to employ it.
That is completely fine, and I don't want to hijack this quality thread (if you want another about how D&D magic might aid mining, I can chip in there). I did want to answer Lokathar's point about zombies being of limited use as miners, but it's not worth continuing here.
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Last edited by fectin on Mon Jul 07, 2014 10:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
I love it.
Well, except for the fact that, linguistically speaking, dwarves would almost assuredly still have a general word for "rock" just like we do, the exact same as we have the word "plant", the more specific "tree", the more specific "oak", and even the very exacting "Quercus rubra" when you really need it.
Also, this version of dwarves seems to eat metal.
EDIT:
There's probably still some though, it was probably created into the world when the world was first created. Or, potentially, there's no Crude Oil and there's no Coal anywhere, though that ends up with a very low tech world when there's no coal to be had. As far as I know you need coal fires to work the stronger metals, you can't do it with wood fire because it doesn't burn hot enough. ...Maybe magma would become useful again? Red Dragons and Azers and other Fire Immune creatures might be the primary source of forged metals. You could probably go interesting places with that.
Well, except for the fact that, linguistically speaking, dwarves would almost assuredly still have a general word for "rock" just like we do, the exact same as we have the word "plant", the more specific "tree", the more specific "oak", and even the very exacting "Quercus rubra" when you really need it.
Also, this version of dwarves seems to eat metal.
EDIT:
As has been noted before, there's probably much less coal and oil in DnD-land than there would be on earth, simply because when things died in the past their bodies didn't sink down and then turn into stuff, they sank down a bit and then got eaten by weird monsters passing by (Bulettes, Oozes, Ghouls, things like that).Laertes wrote:Night Goat:
Thanks, that's very welcome and helpful. That puts it pretty squarely into the plutonic rock zone; you can get metamorphic rock 16km deep but it's rare. It's much easier to conceptualise now; it requires less WSOD than it did before. I'll sleep on it and try to work out some handwavium that can be used.
I did a quick Google on the formation of the Underdark and found some stuff about Torog, the King Who Crawls. Is that canon for most people or is that 4E only and "we don't speak of that in polite company" sort of stuff?
There's probably still some though, it was probably created into the world when the world was first created. Or, potentially, there's no Crude Oil and there's no Coal anywhere, though that ends up with a very low tech world when there's no coal to be had. As far as I know you need coal fires to work the stronger metals, you can't do it with wood fire because it doesn't burn hot enough. ...Maybe magma would become useful again? Red Dragons and Azers and other Fire Immune creatures might be the primary source of forged metals. You could probably go interesting places with that.
Last edited by Lokathor on Mon Jul 07, 2014 10:55 pm, edited 2 times in total.