Interesting Fantasy Cultures

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 7:24 pm

I started working on sky islands a few years ago. I'll dig that back out later tonight.

What's the timescale on (say) coal metamorphosis? Can you drop a bunch of shit coal in a hole, leave it for a thousand years, and come back to have anthracite?

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 7:42 pm

What's the timescale on (say) coal metamorphosis? Can you drop a bunch of shit coal in a hole, leave it for a thousand years, and come back to have anthracite?

We don't actually know. Nobody's ever managed to run a lab test on it. Much of the anthracite comes from the Cretacious period (145 to 66 million years ago), but only a small amount of that time was probably spent at metamorphic depths. Still, I would guess that a few thousand years wouldn't be long enough.

(If there's a real geologist in the house who can contradict me and tell me that we do know, please do so!)

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 8:41 pm

Geology has only existed as a science since the 1700s, with Hutton, Lyell and co. Science itself only predates that by about a century at the best. Nobody has never run any sort of experiment that consists of "put X in a hole in the ground, wait 1000 years and see what happens" because the concept of experimentation didn't exist 1000 years ago. So while we're pretty sure that it takes longer than that for anthracite to form naturally, Laertes is correct to say that no geologist has put some coal in the ground and watched it transform over thousands of years into better coal. Because there weren't any geologists back then to try it.

That said, modern manufacturers do know how to turn peat into synthetic coal using a machine. They don't do it (because it is much more expensive than mining coal) but it has been proven to work and several of the methods to do so have been patented. And those methods mostly involve crushing the peat in giant presses and then heating it to very hot temperatures under very high pressure with very little oxygen - sort of like how they make artificial diamonds. As far as geology can tell, the main reason coal takes so long to form naturally is the time it takes for the coal to get buried under tonnes of rock, not the time it takes for the peat to solidify once it's there.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 9:02 pm

So, does that mean dumping it in a hot hole and dropping a kilometers-tall plug on top works?

Edit: or rather, does that mean it's plausible? If so, what's a plausible time frame?

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 9:15 pm

Plausible? Well, potentially. I can't say it wouldn't happen. We really don't know much about what goes on down there. It I were GMming it I would say yes, but I'm not the GM of real life.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 9:22 pm

I think you're really underestimating how heavy a "kilometers-tall plug" would be, how hard it would be to lift and how much damage it would do when it hit the ground. Assuming the plug has a radius of just 10 meters and is just 2km tall and it falls just one meter, it would still hit with 1.712 giganewtons. You wouldn't get anthracite. You'd get an explosion on par with 150 space shuttles launching at once in the middle of your mineshaft.

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 9:28 pm

Thank you Grek, you made me giggle. Your science-fu is strong.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 9:32 pm

Grek: you're assuming it stops instantly, and that gravity is the only force acting on it. If it accelerates and decelerates slowly, that's not at all true.

...actually, wait. That's still not true, but you cited force, not energy, so its untrue in a different way.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 9:49 pm

I'm assuming that by "drop" you mean "lift it up and then let go so that the plug will fall via gravity and then hit the bottom of the shaft". If you instead lower it very very slowly using a winch or something, it will be less destructive, but then you need a winch that can lift two metric kilotons.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 10:01 pm

Oh. I thought it was gonna be something much more boring, like giving it a duration earth-phase ability on the brown coal and dropping it. And assuming the GM didn't rule that at the end, when two items are in the same place at the same time, one of them got converted into energy.

Because that would be even more game-breaking.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 10:20 pm

Echoes wrote:If you're taking requests for more notes, I would love to hear about the War of Flesh and the participants therein.

First, citing my sources.

Created Monsters: Forged and Bred
"It's alive! Or at least animate… it's not an object anymore, that's my point."

There are three entire types of creatures in D&D that are to one degree or another created. The obvious one of course is the Construct. It's a creature which was never alive and created by sorcery. Well, most of them are like that. The Flesh Golem is kind of hard to explain actually, but whatever. The point is that every Construct is constructed. That's the whole point. And of course there are a lot of Undead that are pretty much the same thing except that they are animated with Negative Energy channeled into them. There's a lot you can say about those guys, and we actually did that in the Tome of Necromancy. So we aren't touching that one here. The other one of course, is the Vermin. In D&D land, "Vermin" doesn't mean anything vaguely approaching its meaning in natural English. Rats and cockroaches are vermin because they live in your pantry and poop on your food stores, but they aren't Vermin because they aren't enormous biological constructs that mindlessly follow the programming planted in them by an ancient race of long departed mage kings. Really. That's what the Vermin type means in D&D land. Actual giant insects are just animals in the same way that dire toads and weasels are animals.

Vermin: Remnants of a Fallen Empire
" Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice. Things have learnt to walk which ought to crawl..."

Ants track by smell and follow trails left by other ants and bees see deep into the ultraviolet spectrum and perceive a beautiful tapestry of gorgeous colors that escape the eye of the man and the mouse. And when dealing with Vermin type creatures that all means precisely nothing, because Vermin in D&D don't do any of that. It's not because the scent ability was "left off" the Monstrous Ant description, it's because the Ant described in the Monster Manual genuinely doesn't have a good sense of smell. It does have Darkvision out to 60 feet like an outsider or a Construct, and that's not an accident either despite the fact that Earthly ants really demonstrably don't do that regardless of size.

The Monstrous Scorpion isn't a super sized scorpion at all. It has a set of abilities which are on the face of it completely bizarre from the context of what actual scorpions do, because it's actually a living construct created by a long fallen empire for use in war. That's why it's immune to hallucinatory poisons and can see in perfect darkness. It's actually created from biomass by powerful magic and not by the interaction of natural and magical mutation across a thousand generations and a harsh selection process hastened by unpredictable climate and predation by manticores. The Vermin have a couple of neat things going for them which is why they were created as war machines in the first place:
Mindless – unlike actual or even giant spiders, the monstrous spider has no mind at all. It cannot be influenced with magic or confused with poisons. It can't even be detected with detect thoughts.

Brainless – Vermin are subject to critical hits because they have segments and organs, but they don't have any brains. That means that they can be blinded, but not killed, by decapitation.

Darkvision – Vermin can see even in complete darkness, making them quite useful in cave fighting.

Aggressive – The vast majority of predators will retreat from battles where they are presented with even a chance at serious injury. Yet Vermin fight until they are dead. That's a really bad plan for an individual or even a species, but it's great for a battle platform.

Who made the Vermin?
"They did not know that steal marks flesh, and they did not know that flesh does not mark steal. In their ignorance they continued to do one task after another in the old ways. They did not know what we know."

Vermin come from the before time. The time when metals were not made and words were not written down. It's quite a feat of construction talent and a testimony to the power and ingenuity of these ancient flesh crafters that these devices are still running, still attempting to fulfill their programming to this day. The answer is not known in the days that D&D is normally set. They are a product of a bygone age and their origin is a mystery to all but the Aboleth and the memory fish are being extremely quiet on this subject. And yet, their conspicuous silence is probably more telling than anything they could possibly say. The Vermin were constructed during the days when aberrations ruled the world, and they were quite obviously designed to fight against aberrations.

The War of Flesh

The humanoid races of the generic DnD setting have access to all sorts metals. If you want to stab scaly critters with a sharpened piece of steel, you can very well do that. But what about the time before iron was worked? Before copper and tin where turned to bronze? How do you drive away the monsters, great and terrible beasts of inhuman strength and overpowering magic? How do you save your people from the horrors from the lightless depths, the aberrations, when all you have is stone and wood and bone and flesh?

Sometime during what, for everyone except the dwarves, is considered the Stone Age, the aberration population in the Underdark spiked. Also, a chain of other events (an earthquake here, a major cavern flooding there, a new disease destroying certain critical subterranean food species, and so on) forced a lot of those nasty critters upward into the shallower parts of the Underdark. Furthermore, the dwarves and the kobolds, the two races who most frequently buffer the surface from the denizens of the Underdark, didn't have the reach they would attain in later ages, and so few obstacles stood between the gibbering horde and the sunlit lands above. For the underground civilizations, this meant a prolonged siege, which living in fortified underground habitat is well suited to. But that doesn't work so well on the surface, and so things got really bad really quick for everyone living in an ever-widening area around the great openings in the earth.

The only magical traditions of this time were those of sorcery and druidism; clerics existed but they were rare, as the deific encroachment on the Prime was in its infancy, and the codified tradition of wizardry was a long, long way from existing. A tribal confederation ruled by Sorcerer-Kings happened to live near a desolate salt flat which, unknown to all at the time, contained one of the most active openings into the abyss. That area would later be known as The Abominable Flats. Bit by bit the tribesmen began losing ground to the aberrations, and neither warriors nor arcane fire seemed capable of halting the advancing horrors. The most loathed tribe of this confederacy, the Sheaim, had long practiced flesh-weaving; channeling their magic into flesh, twisting it, strengthening it, re-purposing it to better serve their ambitions and delights. The Sheaim held their ground better than all others by pitting monsters against monsters; barely controlled hybrids and magically enlarged animals such as the owlbear, bulette, manticore, and dire wolf fought fang to fang, claw to claw, with the aberrations. That some of these creations escaped and bred in the wild was a little cared about side effect that would make life that much more difficult for future generations. Though the creations of the Sheaim were able to successfully fend off invasions, they were far to unwieldy to use on the offensive. And so the maws of the earth remained open, spewing forth ever more monstrosities.

Over time the Sheaim were able to consolidate more and more power until what remained of the confederation was theirs in all but name. With the authority to override some of the more deep set taboos and restrictions, they began to craft great breeding pits into which biomass of questionable origin was cast and from which wholly new creatures would spawn: not hybrids nor giants, but wholly new and terrible creations, some mindless, some enormous, all designed to take the fight past the tribal fortifications, to the great openings, and then below. Giant insect-like creations mindlessly obeyed their masters, autonomously hunting down and destroying whatever their in-born instructions designated as "the enemy". Beings that burrowed, crawled, oozed, flew, and skittered emerged from the pits to fight the... beings that burrowed, oozed, crawled, flew, and skittered that had emerged from the suspiciously similar pits located deep, deep below. Greatest of all was the Tarrasque; an unstoppable force (at least, during its periods of activity) which was used as the spearhead for the counter-invasion.

Of course, whatever malign force was at work below seemed determined to match the Sheaim in a twisted arms race. Great beasts with corrosive emulsions began boring new, gaping holes through the earth. Those opposing the aberrations, above and below ground, would find themselves flanked as the enemy would pour in from previously secure areas. To grab another example from the hat, waterways were made deadly and polluted by things such as the chuul. Back and forth the war raged, as flesh tore flesh and bodies littered the caves and fields and fortresses of the Prime.

The Flesh War has never truly ended since the aberrations don't know (and in many cases, are incapable of knowing) that they have lost. The Sheaim, their allies, their slaves, and their creations failed to find and destroy all the underground breeding sites. Furthermore, some of the horrors that had spawned were able to breed true on their own and had formed stable populations in various out-of-the-way places above and below ground. The war was a global one, but a disorganized one. Others above and below the surface fought and won, still others fought and lost, and still others hid, all without knowing how the war started or why the great outpouring of aberrations was slowed to the trickle it is today. Swaths of the planet were overrun and a thousand thousand independent tales of horror and bravery and death and ruin followed.

The result of the war seemed to be that the world, above and below, was made way more dangerous. There are simply more things that go bump in the the night than before. Another effect was the rapid decline in humanoid populations and the rapid advancement in humanoid magic and technology. There's nothing like teetering on the brink of a Boschian Hellscape to spur R&D. What is known is that the pits below were created, that a chain of events led to the upward drive of the aberrations, and that some force created newer subterranean monstrosities to help match the advances of the surface sorcerers. Was it part of some failed plan to conquer the surface? Was it some sort of experiment that went wrong to an unimaginable degree? Or was it part of some stupidly long-range Xanatos Gambit?

As of the Iron Age, the Sheaim are still extant, though a bit backwards. The flesh weavers have largely died out or defected to the ranks of the Druids (capital D to distinguish the militant order from the lowercase-d hermits and hippies), but since Druids are ageless AND serially reincarnate, more than a few remember first-hand the Flesh Wars. The Khanate and it's human cat's paw, the Borgeous clan, have been pushing on the Sheaim pretty hard for generations, and so more and more sleeping war machines from a previous age are being woke back up. So far they haven't woken up "the big one" despite some nasty territorial losses. Some speculate that the elders fear it would escalate what is currently only a minor conflict for the immense Khanate. Others speculate that the fleshweavers who actually knew how to control the damn thing took that information with them to the grave...

In closing, the Sheaim were the most instrumental in, well not exactly ending the war so much as dialing down the invasion from "Armageddon" to "Constant but low-level threat". However, nearly every race and society that existed that far back was involved in the War of Flesh; few remember it and even fewer remember it with anything approaching accuracy. It altered the course of the planet in innumerable ways and yet the particulars about it are largely unknown. Only the aboleths know for sure, and even that doesn't necessarily implicate them because, as a race, they know damn near everything. However, on the rare occasions when they've been questioned about it (and the questioner hasn't been immediately enslaved/eaten), the foul things won't say, but they do so in a particularly smug way... the bastards.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 10:25 pm

Or I could cut a plug at a 45° angle, using passwall to get to it and polish it to the friction constant I want, leaving plugs to support it, then sever the plugs one by one until the remainder fracture and the plug slowly settles into the top of a deep shaft. Obviously I'll have carefully polished the first few dozen meters of the plug, and beveled, polished, and tightly fit the top dozen meters of shaft. I'll have thickly greased the bottom of the plug and the top of the shaft, so it's initially air-tight, raising the temperature and braking the plug. I'll also have stacked my coal-to-be angled to bisect the shaft angle with horizontal, so it also provides gradual deceleration.
Later, I obviously use passwall to go back and polish the plug and plug shaft to a mirror finish, as well as greasing them with silicon grease.

Ultimately though, the elaborate version of this question has the same effect as the fast version, which is ???

Edit:DYAC

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 10:54 pm

With a plan that elaborate, just use Polymorph Any Object to turn Peat into Coal. Same Kingdom, Same Size, Related, it'd be permanent.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 11:06 pm

...really?

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Tue Jul 08, 2014 11:37 pm

Yes, have you not read the spell? http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/polymorphAnyObject.htm

It is an 8th level spell, so not really something you can industrialize on a mass scale, but each casting can affect 100 cubic feet per caster level worth of non-magic material. In the case of things you're going to build out of, it's probably an extremely bad idea to have it potentially be subject to Dispel Magic at some point you don't expect. However, if you're just turning peat into coal so that you can burn it in a forge, then whatever.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Wed Jul 09, 2014 12:07 am

You're really going with first criticizing my shorthand version of "is manufacturing good coal plausible," then also deliberately ignoring the longhand version?

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Wed Jul 09, 2014 12:11 am

Fectin: Manufacturing coal is possible, but not probably economical. Especially if you elect to use giant stone plugs dropped down mine shafts instead of squeezing the coal in steel vises.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Wed Jul 09, 2014 12:17 am

Cool. Good to know.
Thanks.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Wed Jul 09, 2014 1:19 am

Sometime during what, for everyone except the dwarves, is considered the Stone Age, the aberration population in the Underdark spiked. Also, a chain of other events (an earthquake here, a major cavern flooding there, a new disease destroying certain critical subterranean food species, and so on) forced a lot of those nasty critters upward into the shallower parts of the Underdark.

This, I feel, bears some elaboration. What would cause a spike in the aberration population? What cavern flood could be so great that a flood would drive out aberrations for miles around? What species do aberrations eat, anyways? So, let's elaborate. And let's start with an in depth look into the history of...

Illithid Agriculture

An illithid, as I am sure you are aware, is a telepathic, humanoid-shaped aberration with a constitutional need to eat the brains of sentients. While each and every illithid is capable of a number of psionic abilities, it is their constant hunger for the taste of thinking minds that defines illithid society. The most (in)famous form of illithid brain-harvesting is, of course, the classical slave raid. A lone illithoid, or perhaps a small band, emerges from the tunnels into an underground settlement, subverts the guards, rounds up as many civilians as possible and then herds them back to the mind flayer colony for an unholy feast. It is, for obvious reasons, also the least common. The illithid's charm monster ability works on a single target per attempt and is weakened exceptionally if the victim has been attacked by the mind-flayer. Even if the mind-flayer instead elected to murder the guards, hide among the tunnels and assail single targets from ambush, these sorts of heavy-tendriled dealings draw retribution against the illithid and its kin.

That isn't to say that illithids don't hunt, of course. The vast majority of brains eaten by mind flayers are ones ripped from the skulls of kidnapped victims. They simply avoid hunting near their homes. Each and every illithid is capable of plane shift at will and the majority of illithid brain-hunters make heavy use of this ability to scour the multiverse for game. While some certainly plane shift onto surface settlements of the prime material plane and eat their fill before returning home, most prefer the dark brooding of fiends to the taste of dull mortal grey matter. The elemental planes are less common hunting grounds, as elementals lack true brains and genies are often too powerful for an illithid to overcome, leaving only mephits as possible prey. Still rarer are the upper planes: though the musings of Angels and meditations of Archons are literally heavenly to taste, both are protected against charms and compulsions, making attempts to bring down such prey unusually difficult.

Of course, not all illithid are content living a nomadic existence of weekly multiplanar raids full of murder and violence far from the elder brain that spawned them. Hunters do occasionally die on these raids, and those who are sick, pregnant or simply too busy to go hunting would very much like not to have to leave their homes for the distant, sun-blighted surface every time they get hungry, much less venture off to some infernal realm full of fiends. Fortunately for these illithid, ranching exists as an alternative. Simply maintain a breeding stock of (mostly female) slaves, keep them constantly birthing and then eat any excess males produced. If humans are used, only a hundred or so "hens" are required, plus a small number of "roosters" and a selection of tutors to fatten up the minds of those being raised for eating rather than breeding. Of course, all of these slaves still need fed, and most illithids will simply elect to maintain a population two to three times the minimum breeding size, so that they'll have slaves to do all of the tedious maintenance that their livestock require. Using orcs, hobgoblins or other races with larger litters and shorter gestation periods can reduce the number of slaves required, but regardless of what species are used, even a small mind flayer colony is looking at at least a few thousand slaves for true self-sufficiency.

This artificial division of labour naturally leads into distinct social castes for the slaves in a mind flayer colony: Amazonian breeders, selected for strength, fortitude and fertility and often found fighting as athletes or even gladiators for the amusement of their masters; gloomy philosophers vying for the few tutor positions and the accompanying stay of execution; and the hard-working, ever-toiling helots who grow the food, cobble the shoes and provide for the other two castes. Regardless of a slave's role in the colony, each living specimen is kept controlled using charm monster, monitored for dissent using detect thoughts and suggestion and encouraged with food and other rewards to report on any fellow slaves plotting rebellion. Those found, or even suspected, of plotting against their masters are swiftly and publicly devoured as an example to the others.

Of course, to some illithids, even a luxurious manorial lifestyle seems like far too much effort. While in modern times, these indolent few resign themselves to masquerading as gods and accepting sacrifices from ignorant surface-dwellers, in the distant past there was a push among the wisest and most learned illithid fleshcrafters to create a new species, domesticated yet intelligent, which could satisfy their race's constant hunger for brains with a minimum of illithid involvement. To this end, a number of illithid viligers were permitted to grow into huge neothelids and then mutated into six thousand pound, amphibious worms with four tentacles around their slime-dripping mouths, brains that extend the entire way through their twenty foot long, segmented bodies, a perfect racial memory and the ability to obtain memories by devouring the minds of others. If that sounds suspiciously like an aboleth to you, you're not wrong. The oldest racial recollection of the first Memory Fish is awakening into sentience after devouring the memories of an Elder Brain, then enslaving a sept of illithid experimenters with its new-found psionic abilities. The war between creator and creation has been raging ever since.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Wed Jul 09, 2014 1:30 am

Point of order, I don't think that Plane Shift lets you shift onto the plane that you're already on.

Not sure if I like this version of the Illithid backstory compared to the "Weird space dudes from the future that had to go back in time" version that the Abberation Book had.

No description of Illithids has ever really covered what it is that Illithids do with all their time. Just "stuff like a high level wizard would do"?

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Wed Jul 09, 2014 1:42 am

Even if you read Plane Shift as not letting you shift to the same plane as the caster is on, you can still Plane Shift from Prime to Astral and then from Astral to Prime. It adds a step, but you can still do it.

This one is 100% compatible with the Gith storyline. There's a lot of time and a lot of illithids for crazy experiments to happen in.

I'm willing to write up stuff about Illithid culture, if you like.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Wed Jul 09, 2014 1:50 am

Grek wrote:Even if you read Plane Shift as not letting you shift to the same plane as the caster is on, you can still Plane Shift from Prime to Astral and then from Astral to Prime. It adds a step, but you can still do it.

This one is 100% compatible with the Gith storyline. There's a lot of time and a lot of illithids for crazy experiments to happen in.

I'm willing to write up stuff about Illithid culture, if you like.

Yeah, my understanding is the Illithids shift to an intermediary plane (such as the Astral) and then shift to a remote part of the Prime to do their hunting, though as you point out (and as I never really considered), they can go hunting on other planes entirely.

You can go hog wild on the Illithid stuff, if you want. And you won't have me elbowing you for space; in the lengthy campaigns I ran that gave rise to the material I'm sharing, I never did anything with Mind Flayers. Aboleths? Sure. Sahagin? Absolutely. Kuo Toa? You bet your Innsmouth Look I did. But never Illithids.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Wed Jul 09, 2014 12:58 pm

I always figured that any Prime mind flayers would hunt exclusively on other planes, and that only mind flayers from other planes would hunt on the prime.

As to the backstory, I should have said that it's in-compatible because the Aboleths were supposed to be from the beginning of time and they remember everything, and the mind flayers were from the future, which is why the aboleths are freaked out by them (because the aboleths don't recall the mind flayer race ever forming, since they just popped in from the future one day). Also the thing the Abberation Book had about mind flayers converting other humanoids into mind flayers by sticking a parasite into your brain that takes over your body and mutates you.

Anyway, yeah, musings on what the non-human cultures are doing with all their time is probably always good.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Wed Jul 09, 2014 1:42 pm

Both can happen in the same timeline:

Year Zero: The world is created. Animals are also created, including dinosaurs and whatnot.
Same time: The other planes are also created, including astral, ethereal, elemental and the outer planes.
Later: Illithids show up from the distant future, start eating brains of proto-demons and stealing their powers.
Later: Illithids get sick of demon brains and attempt to create something more delicious to eat. Aboleths happen.
For a Long Long Time After: Aboleth-Illithid War rages on, resulting in lots of deaths on both sides.
Meanwhile: The Gods start creating the world, to including humans, elves, orcs, goblins and later dwarves.
Later: All of recorded history so far, and then a bunch of the future.
Still Later: A bunch of Illithid get the bright idea of turning some of their slaves into psionic soldiers.
One War Later: The psionic soldiers, led by Gith, rebel against their masters and establish the Githyanki Empire.
Shortly After: A bunch of Illithids travel back in time to escape the Githyanki and also possibly the end of time.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Wed Jul 09, 2014 3:21 pm

Stepping back from the coal production issue for the moment, I wanted to pick back up the thread on Underdark architecture. Since you can't have a world with Earth-like geology and Earth-like rock distribution also have enormous, deep cavern complexes, we need to invent something that's not Earth-like while retaining as much Earthy-ness as possible.

So, let's say we had some sort of scaffolding, if you will, running through the planet that handled the pressure issues so you COULD have big-ass caves that run down to the bottom of the mantle. What would that scaffolding need to be made out of? What shape would that scaffolding have to have?

Fictional materials, if necessary, are an acceptable answer. If the Underdark requires titan bones of arbitrary strength and hardness riddling the earth, so be it.