Interesting Fantasy Cultures

[Laertes]

fectin:
From what I've been writing and thinking about dwarf mining, I really don't think labour-saving devices are the limiting factor. The main things are going to be heat and ventilation (which I've been assuming exist anyway; in actual fact all the plutonic rock would be wayyyyyy too hot to inhabit without it) food production and toolmaking.

The two factors that would utterly change it beyond all recognition and render everything that I've written obsolete, would be a) a cheap and easy Create Nothing spell, and b) a cheap and easy Find Mineral spell.

Shatner:
I try to stay away from the Rule of Cool because I find it very player disempowering. If you don't know how things work or why then you're always utterly at the mercy of the GM to tell you what's allowed and what isn't. A well thought out internally consistent world is much more interesting as a playground because players can start to understand what does what. As such, I'm going to try to use as little handwavium as possible and apply it as consistently as possible.

Lokathor:
I thought it was decided earlier in this thread that dwarves eat metal? In fact, it was specifically the discussion of a balanced mineral diet that started me on this little project. I don't feel it's especially necessary, but it is a cute little idea.

The dwarven word for stone would be pretty vague; it would be like our words "objects", "stuff" and "things." After all, stone is the default state of everything down below.

Fossil fuels in real life are fairly rare for exactly that reason: there are loads of carrion eaters. (That is to say, they're rare in comparison to the total number of things that have died over millions of years.) Real life fossil fuels tend to come from waterlogged places, either from aquatic dead things (oil) or acidic bogs (coal) which prevent the corpse from being eaten as easily.

Frustratingly you can't actually use magma to smelt iron. Even the most ultramafic magma out there doesn't get above 1500 C at the best of times, and the melting point of iron is 1538 C. The iron would get hot and start to get soft enough to hammer at, but you couldn't make industrial quantities of metallic iron out of ore like that. You'd have to hammer the ore until it separated and then work it while it's solid, a process which is misleadingly called "cold forging" and which can only really be done in peasant-blacksmith quantities.

Stuff like bulettes and oozes - I assume they move through soil rather than through bedrock? Stone is notoriously hard stuff, and even something like limestone is going to be an uncomfortable thing to burrow in.

[Chamomile]

I try to stay away from the Rule of Cool because I find it very player disempowering. If you don't know how things work or why then you're always utterly at the mercy of the GM to tell you what's allowed and what isn't.

This is kind of tangential, but this is a very important point that I think should be more widely understood than it is. Something that runs on the Rule of Cool is something the players cannot meaningfully interact with. Even with a cooperative GM, a game that runs principally off of the Rule of Cool restricts player control over the world to whatever people and objects happen to be in the current scene. Even if the king is in the scene, persuading him or killing him could have any result or none at all if the politics are undefined or do not make sense.

[Lokathor]

Lokathor:
I thought it was decided earlier in this thread that dwarves eat metal? In fact, it was specifically the discussion of a balanced mineral diet that started me on this little project. I don't feel it's especially necessary, but it is a cute little idea.

Oh, quite possibly, I was a little exhausted as I read a lot of this, and planned to go back later and re-read it >_<

Stuff like bulettes and oozes - I assume they move through soil rather than through bedrock? Stone is notoriously hard stuff, and even something like limestone is going to be an uncomfortable thing to burrow in.

Oozes are literal blobs of ooze that can just hold together and have an animal-like intelligence to go towards moving things and try to suck them up. They can get through anything you'd imagine water getting through really. They're like a deadly puddle. There are sevearal kinds of ooze, and they eat slightly different things and so on, but "biomatter" in general is always on their list (among the most common ones some can also eat metal, but not stone).

Bulettes are like giant rhino-sized things that can move through solid earth (though not stone or metal) at about 1mph, and they attack from below like a shark rising up to eat a small boat or something. They're just one example of the many burrowing predators. Your other guess was correct: in general, a burrowing ability on a creature doesn't function in stone or metal unless the creature's entry says that it can.

The other problem for fossil fuels is that usually the planet of a DnD setting hasn't existed for billions of years or even millions of years. Sometimes they're as little as a few thousand years old.

[GnomeWorks]

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.

Hmm... perhaps the geological formation of the world is more similar to spongy bone? Using dacite as a stand-in for actual bone.

[name_here]

Stuff like bulettes and oozes - I assume they move through soil rather than through bedrock? Stone is notoriously hard stuff, and even something like limestone is going to be an uncomfortable thing to burrow in.

For those, probably, but there are other monsters that more explicitly go through stone. Specifically, the Delver corrodes stone away with acid for a burrow speed of 10' per round. In this particular setting, they were probably employed to cut tunnels through bedrock to enemy strongholds in the War Of Flesh.

[Shatner]

I mention Rule of Cool not to praise it, but to bury it. It was the answer to Laertes question of "How does DnD explain the Underdark?", which is to say



Now, DnD takes the conclusion of the Underdark and explains it with nothing compelling because, as has been said, Handwavium is lame and lazy. We can do better and so we should.

Stuff like bulettes and oozes - I assume they move through soil rather than through bedrock? Stone is notoriously hard stuff, and even something like limestone is going to be an uncomfortable thing to burrow in.

Just as DnD doesn't differentiate between the hardness of different types of stone, it doesn't really differentiate between burrowing speeds between different mediums. There are a few cases where it'll say "X speed for soil, Y speed for stone, and Z speed for metal" but those instances are rare and usually constrained to player-accessible stuff like transmutation spells. When it comes to the monsters, it's usually just "Burrow Speed: X". Now, landsharks (bulettes) are explicitly supposed to be soil burrowers, but Umberhulks and Purple Worms are supposed to be like the Cool Aid Man and smash through stone walls like it ain't no thang. No it doesn't make much sense, but that's the RAW.

Again, if we're interested enough, I'm sure we can suss something out to explain how things move through limestone as though it were topsoil.

[Shatner]

For those, probably, but there are other monsters that more explicitly go through stone. Specifically, the Delver corrodes stone away with acid for a burrow speed of 10' per round. In this particular setting, they were probably employed to cut tunnels through bedrock to enemy strongholds in the War Of Flesh.

Yes. That. Even if that wasn't a thing, it is now a thing. Thing, prepare to be fired out of the Canon Cannon!

[Chamomile]

Again, if we're interested enough, I'm sure we can suss something out to explain how things move through limestone as though it were topsoil.

My assumption upon reading this is "they are supernaturally mega-strong" would not be explanation enough, but I don't know why that is. Granted, I don't really know how burrowing works in detail to begin with.

[darkmaster]

Shatner:
I try to stay away from the Rule of Cool because I find it very player disempowering. If you don't know how things work or why then you're always utterly at the mercy of the GM to tell you what's allowed and what isn't. A well thought out internally consistent world is much more interesting as a playground because players can start to understand what does what. As such, I'm going to try to use as little handwavium as possible and apply it as consistently as possible.

Point of order, you can know how something work without knowing why something works. It is fine to have the rules of the world your characters live in be unknown to them, so long as the results are consistent. I know how jets work, the air goes out the back of the engines and they fly, every time. But I don't know why that works, and that's okay. People have always known how gravity works on a basic, instinctual, level, when you jump you land again, but for a long time people didn't know why that happened, just that it did. So saying that these enormous caverns exist and people don't know why is fine as long as those caverns continue to exist.

[Lokathor]

Anything with a burrow speed can't go through stone unless the the creature's description specifically says it can. So, you can figure out how it goes through stone on a per-creature basis. Sometimes it's really strong, and sometimes it has acid skin, and sometimes it's made of earth energy and it just slides along without disturbing anything and re-forms out of the local earth wherever it next comes out of the ground. Whatever the monster would do based on the rest of its description.

[Echoes]

For those, probably, but there are other monsters that more explicitly go through stone. Specifically, the Delver corrodes stone away with acid for a burrow speed of 10' per round. In this particular setting, they were probably employed to cut tunnels through bedrock to enemy strongholds in the War Of Flesh.

Yes. That. Even if that wasn't a thing, it is now a thing. Thing, prepare to be fired out of the Canon Cannon!

This thread is awesome and I will absolutely be stealing the Sino-Roman ATLA Hobgoblins and Lithovore-Pacemaker Corporate Theocratic Dwarves for future campaign ideas.

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

[Grek]

I'll totally write up some stuff for the War of Flesh.

[Shatner]

For those, probably, but there are other monsters that more explicitly go through stone. Specifically, the Delver corrodes stone away with acid for a burrow speed of 10' per round. In this particular setting, they were probably employed to cut tunnels through bedrock to enemy strongholds in the War Of Flesh.

Yes. That. Even if that wasn't a thing, it is now a thing. Thing, prepare to be fired out of the Canon Cannon!

This thread is awesome and I will absolutely be stealing the Sino-Roman ATLA Hobgoblins and Lithovore-Pacemaker Corporate Theocratic Dwarves for future campaign ideas.

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

Glad to hear it. I'll post my notes on the War of Flesh tomorrow.

Edit: And so will Grek. Cool. If you post first, I promise to totally rip off your best stuff and claim they were part of my original draft all along.

[Laertes]

Honestly, I go to sleep for eight hours and what happens? People post stuff. It's reprehensible.

The other problem for fossil fuels is that usually the planet of a DnD setting hasn't existed for billions of years or even millions of years. Sometimes they're as little as a few thousand years old.

...but when it was created, was it created with the fossil fuels already there? If you're requiring all the stone to be as little as a few thousand years old then you're going to have an all-igneous, all-the-time planet, which means no caves and no steel production. If the planet is created with chalk already there - and chalk is old - then there's no stretch to say that it was created with coal too.

Point of order, you can know how something work without knowing why something works. It is fine to have the rules of the world your characters live in be unknown to them, so long as the results are consistent. I know how jets work, the air goes out the back of the engines and they fly, every time. But I don't know why that works, and that's okay. People have always known how gravity works on a basic, instinctual, level, when you jump you land again, but for a long time people didn't know why that happened, just that it did. So saying that these enormous caverns exist and people don't know why is fine as long as those caverns continue to exist.

I agree - for players. A GM needs to know a little about why it works so that when the players do something ingenious, he understands the potential consequences of that action. To use your example, jet engines have air passing through them and they make a plane fly. What happens when instead of air passing through them, you have a highly chromed up Ork street samurai passing through? Will the engine fly then? (Hint: No.)

My assumption upon reading this is "they are supernaturally mega-strong" would not be explanation enough, but I don't know why that is. Granted, I don't really know how burrowing works in detail to begin with.

When you burrow, you push upwards everything above you to create space, which then desires to return to its position. As a result, "supernaturally mega-strong" would work *if* that turns out to be strong enough to lift all the stone directly above you at this moment. You'd also have to be supernaturally mega-damage resistant in order to not care that said stone is pushing back down against you.

Limestone has a density of 2.7 tonnes per cubic metre. If you're two metres long, one metre wide, one metre tall and at a depth of 1 kilometre in limestone, then you have a column of 5,400 tonnes of rock pressing down on you. If you're enough of a badass to move 5,400 tonnes of rock anew with each step and not care that it's trying to return to its position by crushing you, then you are probably too badass to be a CR-appropriate challenge for the PCs.

Just as DnD doesn't differentiate between the hardness of different types of stone, it doesn't really differentiate between burrowing speeds between different mediums. There are a few cases where it'll say "X speed for soil, Y speed for stone, and Z speed for metal" but those instances are rare and usually constrained to player-accessible stuff like transmutation spells. When it comes to the monsters, it's usually just "Burrow Speed: X". Now, landsharks (bulettes) are explicitly supposed to be soil burrowers, but Umberhulks and Purple Worms are supposed to be like the Cool Aid Man and smash through stone walls like it ain't no thang. No it doesn't make much sense, but that's the RAW.

Hmmmm. Are Umberhulks and Purple Worms supposed to do it through sheer muscle power or do they explicitly use magic?

Hmm... perhaps the geological formation of the world is more similar to spongy bone? Using dacite as a stand-in for actual bone.

Let me slip into character here for a moment:

If there was one word I could think of to describe dacite, one word, "spongy" would not be it. It would be pretty far from the word I thought of. Dacite is many things, but "spongy" is not among them. Dacite is yet another way that magma shows that it hates you.

You're thinking like a human anyway. Humans have like cows and sheep and trees and other things all scattered around in a general way everywhere. You go to one farm and there'll be a few of each standing around doing whatever the fuck it is they do. You go to the next farm and they'll also have one of each or two of each or whatever. This is not how intrusive igneous rocks work. They're created by magma, and whatever the local magma is like - or was like at the time the rock was formed - that's what the rock is. If you're in an area with mafic magma, all your intrusive stone is going to be gabbro. If you're in a felsic area, it's all going to be granite. You do not get a nice characterful blend of a bit of one and a bit of the other. It'd be like living somewhere where all the farms only have sheep, and the next door farms only have sheep, and in fact nobody who lives there has ever seen anything but sheep because that's all they have in this country, so if you want to go off and eat a chicken or something then you can't because there's no chickens here. Try chicken country next door, they don't even know what a sheep is but they're getting pretty sick of chickens by now.

Dacite is an all or nothing proposition, which is good because then you can live somewhere that doesn't have fucking dacite in it. A better metaphor might be climate; you know, that weather stuff you have up here on the surface. Some places are cold, some places are hot, some places have trees and some also have trees except they're different trees. Yeah, that works. Your plutonic rock is like your climate. It's not like a skeleton in any way unless your idea of a skeleton is having your feet made of solid bone and the rest of you being a formless meat-mass.

[GnomeWorks]

Hmm... perhaps the geological formation of the world is more similar to spongy bone? Using dacite as a stand-in for actual bone.

Let me slip into character here for a moment:

While your in-character response was funny, I think you might not quite understand what I meant by "spongy bone."

Basically, it seems to me that if this dacite stuff is as ridiculous as you make it sound, having that kind of structure - instead of it forming in sheets and such - would allow for the kind of giant-ass underground caverns that you see in fiction. The idea being that the dacite framework provides the support and such necessary to avoid the areas in-between getting crushed by pressure. Similar to how your various flat bones can withstand a significant amount of pressure without being crushed, despite having hollow spaces inside.

Now, how it would form into that kind of formation is another question entirely.

[darkmaster]

The world is formed of the body of the titan gae, everyone knows that.

[Laertes]

Basically, it seems to me that if this dacite stuff is as ridiculous as you make it sound, having that kind of structure - instead of it forming in sheets and such - would allow for the kind of giant-ass underground caverns that you see in fiction. The idea being that the dacite framework provides the support and such necessary to avoid the areas in-between getting crushed by pressure. Similar to how your various flat bones can withstand a significant amount of pressure without being crushed, despite having hollow spaces inside.

Now, how it would form into that kind of formation is another question entirely.

Dacite isn't actually particularly strong when it comes to compressive strength. It's just hard. The two are distinct concepts. I invite you to try it by taking a diamond and hitting it with a hammer (do not actually do this unless you hate the person whose diamond it is and they will never find out that it was you.) Diamonds are hard but crush easily.

This isn't to say that dacite isn't hard. The ancient Egyptians used dacite tools to cut the sandstone blocks they built the pyramids out of, because it's much harder than bronze. However, it is not handwavium: it can't stand up to millions of tonnes of pressure any better than anything else can.

However, that's an interesting idea you've got there because it suggests that if we had something which had arbitrarily high compressive strength, then your spongy-bone analogy would hold. Writing such a substance into existence might allow an Underdark to exist.

[GnomeWorks]

Dacite isn't actually particularly strong when it comes to compressive strength. It's just hard. The two are distinct concepts.

Ah, okay. Yeah, I get the Mohs hardness and such, I guess I just inferred from your description that dacite was ridiculous both in hardness and... durability? Crush-resistance?

However, that's an interesting idea you've got there because it suggests that if we had something which had arbitrarily high compressive strength, then your spongy-bone analogy would hold. Writing such a substance into existence might allow an Underdark to exist.

Well... there is, I imagine, a difference between compression over time and sudden compression. So while diamonds might shatter under the impact of a hammer, if you put that much compression force onto a diamond, it might not break? I will fully admit I don't know nearly as much about this stuff as you do.

How would such a compression-resistant material form? Hypothetically-speaking, since it sounds like - from your thoughts here - no such substance exists, naturally at least.

[Laertes]

So for the next Dwarf Monologue, would people prefer me to witter on about what it's like to live in Sedimentary and Metamorphic rock, or would you prefer some musings on the Underdark?

[Avoraciopoctules]

The former, please. Extrapolating from real geology has been really interesting so far.

[Lokathor]

I also vote for the former, because we don't seem to have sussed out how the full implications of the Underdark and monstrous burrowing and some of that works yet.

The other problem for fossil fuels is that usually the planet of a DnD setting hasn't existed for billions of years or even millions of years. Sometimes they're as little as a few thousand years old.

...but when it was created, was it created with the fossil fuels already there? If you're requiring all the stone to be as little as a few thousand years old then you're going to have an all-igneous, all-the-time planet, which means no caves and no steel production. If the planet is created with chalk already there - and chalk is old - then there's no stretch to say that it was created with coal too.

Yes, but I'm saying more like... Well as much as the underdark would never naturally form on earth, but once it's formed people will react to it in a "realistic" way (given their tech level, including the magic available) there could also be regions, or possibly entire planets, where the geologic composition is totally alien based on some creative god's whims, but that from there people would still have to stick to normal mining processes, so they might end up with a very different culture than we might expect.

Particularly, even within DnD there's the Prime Material Plane, but there's various Outer Planes (which are... kinda like metaplanes from shadowrun, since you seemed to make a shadowrun reference) and there's also the various Inner Planes (which are all formed primarily of one element or another, with small blobs of off-element stuff here and there, such as pockets of air in the Earth plane, or floating blobs of water in the Air plane. These sorts of places would be more than likely to end up with totally weird geologies. Like a 100m radius ball of almost pure Limestone just floating in the Air plane that people start building stuff on and then carve out the inside of as they go, and then the middle 50m is just made of sand or something. Or whatever.

[darkmaster]

Welp, Since I’m human we’re doing humans next, don’t worry I do my best to do somewhat unexpected things with all these races and I like to think I do a pretty good job so humans aren’t the “baseline” average race. The sound track for this entry is the Radiata Stories OST espeically Hopping Sun. Because Ratdiata Stories is very much a game about humanity winning civilization and also the idea that things will get better if we just give it our best which are both themes deeply ingrained in the Human culture of Sarindor.

Carin & Hari: The Walker of Chaos and Soothing Hand

Lo and did Hari look upon her brother's prostrate form and laugh at his misfortune.

And did Carin look upon his sister and say.

“Thou art so arrogant that thou wouldst make me a fool?”

Then did the Soothing Hand’s face twist with righteous fury and she said onto her brother.

“Thou didst make thyself the fool and twice the fool for blaming thine sister for thine own folly"

It is somewhat inaccurate to call Carin and Hari brother and sister, though they are. To call them lovers would be an equally shaky claim, though they are lovers also. It would be true to call them the oldest and youngest of the gods. To understand Carin and Hari you have to go back, way back, before humans, before dwarves, before the world. Long before the gods existed there were other divine personages. These elder gods ruled over a great void from which they wrought the world as their personal playground. The names of most of these gods have been lost to time immemorial but one is still spoken of even in modern times. This is the elder god Extos. Extos was not the most powerful or accomplished of the old gods but he was the most feared of them. He was both the cleaverist of his peers and the least predictable constantly at war with himself, always of two minds. At the time that the new gods rose up and threw off the old Extos had a falling out with his peers and betrayed them, leading to the ultimate success of the rebellion. But, fearing a similar betrayal the new gods lured him into a trap, splitting his mind and power into two aspects, creating the twin gods Carina and Hari.

If you’ve ever met a couple that seems to be made to disagree and fight constantly, but understand each other more deeply than anyone else you’ve ever known. That sums up Carin and Hari’s relationship quite well. They are insuperable, if you find one the other will be close by and though they argue incessantly they would each gladly die to protect the other. It is unclear if they remember their former life, or if they do whether or not they’re inclined to return to it, they certainly don’t say one way or the other.

Humans

It is pretty good to be a human on the continent of Sarindor. If you are human and living on the continent then the odds are good you are currently experiencing a great golden age. There are several reasons for this but perhaps most important is the fact that, after the war, the human race collectively said, “you see those fertile, resource rich, lands that just happen to be next to lands infested by terrifying hellspawn that only exist to destroy and consume? Dibs!” Humans succeed because they can, will, and do, live anywhere and everywhere. They aren’t like the dwarves who hold up in their stone halls and focus single mindedly on defense, or the elves so, perfectly suited to life in the wilds that they simply don’t need room to build, humans move into an area, any area, and if it happens to not be suited to them they change that. Not enough water? pump it out of the ground. The land isn’t fertile? bring in manure. The neighbors are slathering monsters created or twisted by demonic energies? build a wall. As far as humans are concerned if you can’t make it somewhere then you must be too lazy to make it work because human culture is founded on the idea that if you do your best then tomorrow will be better than today. According to human historians this willingness to try to make it anywhere started at the tail end of the demon wars when the patron gods of the humans, Carin and Hari, issued to their children the imperative to ensure the safety of the world. The truth of this account is debated by other races but true or not humans take the charge very seriously, likely because they suffered the greatest losses during the wars. The dwarves and gnomes could hold up in their caves, the elves always excelled at running as much as they fought, and though the Orcs stood shoulder to shoulder with the armies of man, a fact both races still remember even many centuries removed from the conflict, Orcs are simply better, tougher, fighters than humans and thus suffered fewer casualties. So humans settled aggressively, carving a place out wherever happened to be free while other races were still too shell shocked or simply disinterested in expanding. The process took many hundreds of years, and much blood was spilled and toil spent, but it worked, and now humans dominate the world’s culture and economy. So there is a strong sense among humanity that with enough work and determination no obstacle is insurmountable and any challenge can be met. In short, the humans have won civilization because their kung fu is very strong.

The largest of the human nations is Farcil, which acts as a buffer between the hellspawn and the rest of the world, and sits as more or less the heartland of human culture. According to the histories the first king of Farcil was tasked by the gods to guide humanity into the future, and there is a not insignificant amount of evidence to support that claim. Still, it is rare humans will agree upon any one thing for long and soon a great diaspora began, humans moving into any uninhabited lands available and then into lands that were inhabited so that in modern times there is no part of the known world where humans do not live, they inhabit the islands, they travel with the elven nomads, they sit on top of the gnomish tunnels, they dig in the mines with Dwarves, and they hunt the deserts alongside the Orcs. To an extent, all races live in human lands. Indeed most human kingdoms will, to some degree, welcome any individual who is willing to work to improve the world. Farcil is the most welcoming, though gaining citizenship means spending a stint atop the wall, defending the land from the horrors that creep beyond. But even the comparatively isolationist island nation of Ramnal cannot deny the usefulness of dwarven craftsmen or ann elvish wind source.

Because of their simultaneously welcoming and expansive mind set human nations tend to have rather complicated relationships with other races and each other. On the one hand, humans tend to have the most advanced technology and other races don’t want give those technologies up, nor do they mind their people being allowed free passage though most human lands. But on the other, a large, aggressive, human empire is a difficult neighbor to live with as it is hard to know what might provoke an attack from humans. Individual human immigrants are also problematic, as often they will simply integrate into whatever society they happen to be living with. But sometimes they can’t, or won’t, do so. For instance gnomes want nothing more than for everyone to stay off their lawn, a sentiment a number of humans simply refuse to acknowledge. So sometimes human nations have friendly relations with their neighbors, and sometimes they fight wars with them and that is simply how things are. The only races humans usually have consistently friendly relations with are those which lack a homeland of their own, like the goblins or halflings, and the orcs who see humans as their brothers in arms.

Humans are extremely resilient, they are capable of sustaining exertion for far longer periods than other races, eating foods that would be poisonous to other creatures, and recovering from injuries that would kill or cripple most others. These are the traits that allow humans to adapt to almost any environ and spread to places that other races would hesitate to settle, and build structures far faster and larger than the other races. So while the dwarves labor for thousands upon thousands of years to build their cities beneath the mountains human towers race toward the sky at a comparatively breakneck pace.

Human sensibilities are very much representative of their gods. Carin is a god of war, often arrogant or cruel, while Hari is a goddess of grace and healing, gentle and kind. As these gods walk hand in hand and and each had a hand in creating humanity and shaping the race and its world view humans very much have a duel nature, capable of both greatest kindness and compassion, as well as otherwise unknown heights of brutality. Other races have trouble understanding how humans think and gauging how humans will react. Making them quite wary when interacting with humans especially when the humans have the upper hand.

[Laertes]

My commute was short today so here is sedimentary rock. Also beer.

On Beer

Ah, beer, excellent. My thirst is quenched once more.

Let's examine this beer for a second. By "this beer" I mean "your beer" because I'm drinking my beer. Stop whining. I'm trying to make a point here. See at the bottom where all the stuff is gradually settling into a sludge? No, don't mix it. I know that makes it taste nicer but I'm trying to make a point here. That sludge is called, as you know, sediment. When this same thing happens with surface water, whether it be a swamp or an ocean, you get a thick buildup of stuff at the bottom of it. Over time, it solidifies into stone, and we call that a sedimentary rock. Now you may drink your beer. And stir it up, you savage, it's separated out entirely. Did your mother never teach you to drink beer?

So sedimentary rock can be separated into three main types; but that doesn't matter that much because sedimentary rock is really really rare. It only exists on the surface and a short way below it. You can basically think of it as being raw metamorphic rock. Humans think it's common but it's really just a veneer over the real stuff that's further below.

Some sedimentary rock is clastic, which means that it's made up mainly of mud and sand and gravel and stuff. If the buildup is mainly mud, it makes mudstone. If it's mainly sand, it makes sandstone. If it's mainly gravel, it makes - no, not gravelstone, conglomerate. Regardless of which it is, mud and gravel and sand are all just the same thing, which is to say bits of other rocks. Therefore clastic rock is going to have whatever minerals the parent rock had in it. If that parent rock is granite, you'll get lead and tin and silver. If that parent rock is andesite, you'll get fuck all.

Other sedimentary rocks are made of organic matter; or more commonly, the bits of organic matter that nobody ate. See, it's tempting to think of lions and stuff as being the predators out there, but the real predators are microbes. They will eat every fucking thing they can find. So the most common types of biochemical sedimentary rock are chert, which is made of the silicon skeletons of microbes, and limestone and chalk, which are made of the calcium carbonate skeletons of microbes. Those little things are totally the top predators. When they don't eat stuff that's usually because the water has too little oxygen in it to support life, and that's where you get coal. Coal in sedimentary layers is usually lignite, which humans call "brown coal" and dwarves call "take that shitty surface-dwelling shit out of my forge."

The third type is chemical sedimentary rocks and the most common of those are limestone once again, and rock salt. Yeah, limestone, only it's not from skeletons. I don't fucking know, ask a mermaid or something.

There's three things to remember about sedimentary rocks. The first thing is that they are very mixed. You will find layers of one and then layers of another like it isn't even a thing. It's all untidy, but it's predictable. If a region has chalk over limestone over banded chert over regular chert over coal over chalk over basalt, then if you dig up in any place and meet the basalt, you know that by breaking through that and some chalk, you're into coal. Predictability is nice and profitable.

The second thing you need to remember is that they are made up of whatever was lying around and settled out. Much like your beer earlier, this means they have bits in, and they settle out into layers. This means you will frequently find other minerals here, and they'll be all conveniently sorted for you. Iron, for example, is common in sedimentary rock, and it's often found in bands so pure that you don't have to roast the ore before smelting. Copper too. Sedimentary rock is fairly rich stuff for this reason. It might only have as much metal as the parent igneous rock, but instead of an evenly distributed 1% trace throughout which is worth nobody's time to extract, you'll have a layer one-tenth of the total thickness which has 10% purity, and that makes all the difference because you can ignore the other ninety percent.

The third thing is the spoiler. Sedimentary rock has lots of water in it. Cold water, because it's way up there near the surface, but water nonetheless. And unlike deep down water which forms limited pockets, surface water is attached to these things called aquifers and rivers and oceans, which mean that if you get a leak it will not stop leaking. I'm making it sound trivial but it's actually a real problem, because mines flood and people die, and more importantly water keeps going downwards until it reaches more important places like the metamorphic which is where I'm from. There are entire regions of the below which are flooded because some asshole twenty kilometres above couldn't be bothered to exercise basic engineering.

Where water meets limestone, it dissolves it and forms caves. You're an adventurer so you know what caves are. To us, though, they're shortcuts. You can walk through them and check out all the layers and find good seams and it's all very easy. In theory you could use them as nothing mines, but they're so close to the surface that it's hardly worth it: up there nothing is cheap.

Sedimentary rock is easy mode. If you're okay with water then it's comfortable living territory. It's just a shame that it's all up at the top where no fucker wants to live because of how unsafe it is. This is why we love humans as much as we do: you come along and civilise the surface, and this means we can inhabit the sedimentary layers without orcs and lizardmen and dragons and stuff deciding to attack us.

[Shatner]

Great stuff.

[Laertes]

Yay done with rock types!

Where All The Cool Kids Live

So the last type of stone we need to discuss is metamorphic, and this is where the good stuff is. As you no doubt imagine by now, there is more than one type of metamorphic stone. Stop whining. I had to learn the difference between a hill and a valley, which I thought was pretty academic since they only exist right at the top of the world. Metamorphic stone exists all the way down throughout the world.

The clue is in the name: it's stone that has been metamorphosed from something else. People often make the mistake of thinking that it's just sedimentary rocks that do this, but all three types do it. In fact, down in the below most metamorphic stuff is metamorphic in origin. Every time it undergoes metamorphosis it loses a little of its original character, until it becomes the real thing, neither sedimentary nor igneous, neither mud nor magma, but true stone. If I sound religious about it, that's because I am. You would be too. Moradin (may His beard be blessed) I can take or leave, but gneiss? That's something sacred.

Deep down, the temperature is high and the pressure is unbelievable. Tens of kilometres of stone pressing down on something will crush it so thoroughly that it changes its nature. Shale becomes slate, limestone becomes marble, lignite coal becomes anthracite coal, and so on. These are generally harder but more importantly the process will often cause metal ore within them to separate out into the cracks, which become seams. This is why the best place to find metal is in the join between a metamorphic rock and it's neighbour. This is called a discontinuity and we love them. The best ones have iron, gold and copper in them all mixed up together.

Deeper still, these metamorphic rocks get crushed again and again, and entirely forget their old nature. Even the difference between something that was once igneous or sedimentary vanishes. They become stone itself, the true stone which is the flesh of the earth, which we separate into gneiss and mica and schist except you don't care about the differences and it's pretty technical and theological anyway. Gneiss is slightly harder and mica is slightly holier, but other than that it's pretty similar. They can be made of anything and you can find intermediate stages, so you can speak about dacite that's turning into gneiss but still partially remembers being dacite, and next to it you might find marble that's also turning into gneiss.

We don't take outsiders to such places as a rule. Partly it's because it's the stone, but also partly because religion aside there's not much there. The ores have long since left, it's not near magma so you don't get gems, and so metamorphic clans tend to be pretty fucking poor. The pilgrims bring some cash and that pays for food and nothing, but you get a constant stream of young dwarves leaving to seek a better life elsewhere. Most settlers, surface dwarves and adventurers are from the metamorphic. Like me.

So. That's one type of metamorphic. The other type is caused by our old friend magma. Magma melts what it touches, but things further away from it just get heated until they lose their essential nature and turn into what we call hornfels. Again, you get intermediate grades of it, where something has half-metamorphosed; and again, you can get hornfels from igneous or sedimentary or metamorphic stone. It makes the ore separate out too, so the discontinuities here can be lucrative. You will sometimes find a place where a bubble of magma has cooled and turned into a lump of plutonic rock like granite or gabbro, and the heat has turned everything nearby into hornfels. We call the lump itself a “laccolith” and the hornfels around it an “aureole.” Yes, like a nipple. Stop giggling. Laccoliths are often used as fortresses because while they’re a bastard to hollow out, nobody can get in. Plutonic stone is the hardest stuff you can get. You can’t break it with tools, you need to blast it, and that means that nobody can tunnel in to get us. With a good supply house it’s perfect. Laccoliths can often get huge; tens of metres thick and hundreds wide, and the aureole around it can stretch for kilometres in every direction.

Metamorphic rock is where you get most of your coal and oil reserves. The coal is mainly anthracite, “black coal”, the good stuff. Unfortunately the oil is normally found in rocks along with natural gas, and it can be under a fair amount of pressure. It’s not unknown for oil strikes to gush to the point where entire tunnels are flooded with oil mud. Despite what you may think, it’s generally too dilute to burn, which is good I suppose. You might drown but at least your torch will only ignite the gas, not the oil. It’s a silver lining.

Metamorphic might be poorer than the other two, but it’s a comfortable place to live. It’s not as waterlogged as the sedimentary, not as magma-filled as the igneous, and is neither too hard nor too soft. It’s home.

So that's kind of the limit of my real-world geology as far as D&D applications go. I can tackle the underdark if people are interested but from what I've heard there isn't actually any consensus within D&D about what it is, so it might be a curio but not that useful.

Alternatively, there's other types of geography out there that are interesting. I would like to do something about Sky Islands, for example.