Underground Isolate Society (Occluded Sun stay out)

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm currently thinking of river fish as the prestige food of the society, since it'll have a very limited supply, but is the only fresh meat available. Salt deposits would be cool, because the general drying effect contributes to preservation in general.

Apparently, if kept dry, white rice can be stored for a very long time. So that's probably going to be a thing they have.

[Laertes]

If it's simply a matter of getting underground and staying there, then the complex could have been built far more easily in a "dig a hole, build a building inside it, cover it up again" manner. It would still be vast and would all be on the same level, but it would have been plausible with only a few years of the labour of thousands of peasant conscripts. On the other hand if you need it to be deep down to act as a fallout shelter, then angelfromanotherpin's comparison to the Great Pyramid of Giza becomes apt.

There's no reason that it can't be both, thinking about it: if such a complex is built by a society determined to save its royal and most senior nobles, and is quite willing to sacrifice the entirety of its peasant caste doing so (because the apocalypse is coming and they're going to die anyway, although naturally you don't tell them that) then it will probably be built in stages and with increasing haste as the years go on. Little bits of old tombs, mines, quarries and prisons would have been pressed into use and linked together in a sprawling complex.

Just doing some more maths here: based on my earlier numbers, we need 10^6 square feet of floor space. That doesn't mean a single layer 1000 feet on a side, unless you want everyone to die in a cave in. More reasonable underground construction might take up a quarter of the overall footprint, meaning that you need 4x10^6 square feet of underground real estate to put this in. So if it's a single-floor complex, it would fit onto a map 2000 feet on a side. If we give it four floors, each of them would fit on a map 1000 feet on a side. That's assuming it was built densely: if it took advantage of existing underground spaces then it's more likely that it would consist of dense areas around them, linked together with long corridors.

That's downright Gygaxian.

This actually gives us an excuse for having both hot springs and a cave river in the same area: if the complex is built on a place where a limestone geology meets a basalt one, then you could totally have a cluster of chambers near the hot springs and a cluster of chambers near the cave river (or possibly several clusters at various points along the river) linked together by literally miles of "corridor with both walls lined with food storage shelves" style tunnels.

[TiaC]

Remember, the more possible food sources you add, the less storage space you need.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Link to a previous thing about subterranean food sources.

[Chamomile]

Remember, the more possible food sources you add, the less storage space you need.

And assuming we keep the scale of the construction the same, that in turn means more survivors.

[erik]

There's no reason a pre-existing cavern system could not be the site. It was converted into being habitable but the branching tunnels that extend further were unknown until recently. Then you have unexplored tunnels possibly leading to other exits and other shelters. Tunnels that go so deep or far that nobody has ventured to their end.

Upsides: You can hand-wave anything, and have whatever you want for purposes of the story.

Downsides: Nope.

[Occluded Sun]

How 'fantasy' is the setting? Because while a truly realistic scenario is possible, if very harsh, just a little bit of the right kind of magic can make the survival of an entire society easier to manage.

'Magic items' like a bowl that can create a small amount of flavorless gruel, which provides calories but few other nutrients, could make it possible to maintain life while still making preserved food incredibly valuable.

It's not nearly as hard-core as a realistic alternate history, I grant you.

[kzt]

If you use a natural cave system as the base it could be crazy huge. For example, Carlsbad has 30+ miles of corridors. Some are large enough that you could drive a semi around, some require you belly crawl through mud. Some of the individual rooms are absurdly huge. Last year the rangers found another significant room (100 feet across), so the total extent is still unknown despite the fact that the NPS has running around and exploring for ~80 years.

[angelfromanotherpin]

There's no reason a pre-existing cavern system could not be the site. It was converted into being habitable but the branching tunnels that extend further were unknown until recently. Then you have unexplored tunnels possibly leading to other exits and other shelters. Tunnels that go so deep or far that nobody has ventured to their end.

I'm totally down with converting a pre-existing tunnel system, but the whole 'unexplored tunnels' thing is a no go, because the downside is that people would probably start exploring those tunnels rather than opening the do-not-open-ever door to the overworld. Fluff-wise, they would probably want to make very sure there are no unsecured possible entrances for apocalypse beasties.

How 'fantasy' is the setting? Because while a truly realistic scenario is possible, if very harsh, just a little bit of the right kind of magic can make the survival of an entire society easier to manage.

As I mentioned, I would like to keep the magic involved in the survival strategy to a minimum. Partly because I think keeping it as naturalistic as possible will lend it more credibility and weight, and partly because I think it's going to be a theme that the more magic that was used for the various bunker-settlements, the more likely it was to go wrong.

I would be totally okay with a very limited magical supplemental food source that reduced the strain on preserved supplies but is simply incapable of sustaining the population once the reserves run out. But I can get the same effect with troglofish and cave fungus farming, so I'm going to do that instead because it's more interesting than 'a wizard did it.'

[kzt]

I'm totally down with converting a pre-existing tunnel system, but the whole 'unexplored tunnels' thing is a no go, because the downside is that people would probably start exploring those tunnels rather than opening the do-not-open-ever door to the overworld. Fluff-wise, they would probably want to make very sure there are no unsecured possible entrances for apocalypse beasties.

Cave systems can have sections very difficult to get into. The one at Carlsbad called the spirit world requires that you vertically climb 255 feet into the top of one of the big rooms. Which is hard because it's in empty space, so it required floating a balloon supported rig with a string into place and then pulling up increasingly larger ropes until you get one that will support a person.

With torches and candles you will never see the ceiling of a room that tall, much less be able to explore it.

[Shatner]

The following bit of fluff from the Civ IV Fall From Heaven 2 mod seems relevant to this discussion. Context: godwar magical apocalypse causes a monster haunted ice age to happen. The dwarves have their underground fallout kingdom. A dude went to explore the surface and hasn't returned, his cousin is wanting to find out his fate. Ultimately, this is a story about the leadership in the fallout shelter trying to KEEP everyone in the fallout shelter even though the apocalypse has ended. Good stuff. Good game too.

Arturus found his friend by candlelight. Torches were forbidden in this hallowed chamber, deep in the Underhome. The soot and smoke they gave off obscured the runes carved into the rows of pillars, covering the names and deeds of the honored Dwarven ancestors. The ancient dwarves who kept these sites, carving new stories and teaching others to read them, were called Runewardens officially but 'Hand Seers' more commonly. Squinting in the candlelight so much invariably robbed them of their sight, so they learned every word and letter by hand. Kandros Fir was at the end of his Clan's section of the Rune Hall, chisel in hand.

"I knew I'd find you here," Arturus said, kneeling next to him.

"I was his closest kin. I must add his name and deeds to our story."

"Of course, old friend. But that isn't all you are planning, is it?" Kandros bowed his head.

"I am loyal to our king, by my bones, I am loyal."

"But?"

"I can no sooner abandon family than fall on my own axe! Suppose your cousin Grunnos was missing. What would you do?"

Arturus snorted. "Speak not of that wastrel, but be glad he has many older brothers to be king before him should good Kanlore pass."

"But?"

"But... were his fate that of Luach, I should dig to Mammon's hell if it would find him. But not if my king forbid it! I know the bonds of kinship, but what of kith? Do you abandon your duty and your friends for a mad search? The winter will take you too, and what will that accomplish?"

Kandros rose, placing the hammer and chisel back on the altar as he turned to leave. "My duty has others to attend it, and my friends as well, dear Arturus. But Luach Fir is alone. If our friendship has meaning to you, you will not hinder me."

It had not been easy getting to the surface. No one had been allowed to leave since Kandros' cousin Luach had gone to study the surface. Winter still raged, as it had for more than six generations, but young Luach was undaunted, and had petitioned Kanlore for leave to explore the harsh surface regardless of the danger. Supplies were slim in the Underhome. Their stores of black powder had been exhausted so long ago that the last Dwarves who would even recognize it had passed away, and expansion of the Underhome was tedious work with pick and hammer. Spices had run out early in Kandros youth, and the pork and tubers his children fed on left eating a chore. So Luach had at last been allowed to take another appraisal of the state of the bleak surface, but Kanlore's hesitancy had been proven right when Luach did not return for months. No one was permitted to leave now, meaning

Kandros had to sneak past guards in the dark, and would be ill regarded if he returned at all.

The exit to the Dwarven home was sealed with a massive stone door, and Kandros exhausted himself prying it open, even using his pick as a lever. He bravely stepped from the familiar darkness of his home into the unknown darkness of the Age of Ice. He emerged from the hillside, setting foot on grass. Not snow, and the night air was crisp but lacked the biting chill he had been warned of all his life. He stretched out his arms, marveling at the open space all around, and broke into a run down the hillside. Running was foolhardy in the Underhome. Low ceilings, sharp turns, and sudden drops presented challenges that demanded a careful step, but here there was freedom.

And danger. Kandros found himself surrounded by large, grey dogs. He realized he had nearly charged into the den of these animals, and they cared little for his reason for being there. His hand axe was out barely before the first leapt for his throat. It was his blade that found the wolves throat first. And the skull of the next wolf to charge him. He became a whirl of axe and torch until the last beast lay dead or dying.

So many animals... how could there be prey enough for a pack of this size in the wasteland he had been lead to believe the surface was? Then he noticed something half buried in the wolves' den. He walked over slowly, pulling the body from the debris, his breath held tight. Unmistakably the body of a dwarf, though it was a gruesome sight to see after the wolves had fed on its flesh. The pattern of the clothing marked it as a clansman of his, and Kandros knew he had found his cousin. He rent his beard and wept over the body. After a time he gathered the gathered up the body, intending to bury it within sight of the Underhome. Then he noticed ... the left shoulder blade was shorn in two. Not broken, but split with a clean cut. He examined it carefully. Luach had been hit from behind by a battle axe, almost certainly by someone of his height.

"Murder..." he whispered to the night.

He was answered, not by the night, but by a cloaked dwarf holding a Mithril axe directly behind him. "He, like you, wouldn't leave well enough alone, Fir." The dwarf swung his axe for the kill, but then dropped it clumsily and gurgled blood.

"Kandros!" Arturus shouted from the entrance of the wolf den, his axe embedded in the neck of the cloaked dwarf. The two friends embraced.

"I found Luach, and his killer I think," Kandros informed his friend.

Arturus Thorne went pale. "And I found my cousin as well." The dwarf he had killed was the prince Grunnos.

The last time Kandros had been in the King's Hall, he had petitioned for permission to search out his cousin. Now, it was with accusation that the King's own son had killed his kin. Were it not for the well respected Arturus beside him, he would have been called a murderer, and worse, a name-killer for making accusations against Grunnos. Kanlore stood from his throne and faced the two Dwarves, his beard reaching nearly his full height. His eldest son and his honor guard flanked him; otherwise the chamber was empty. "You defied the laws of your people, Kandros Fir. The surface world is a harsh land ruled by a dread god and his legion of giants. It was treason to leave."

Kandros did not interrupt his king, but rebuked him when he had finished. "The ice is long gone, my liege, and Winter has passed. Your laws made my people's home a prison, and it was based on lies!"

"Tis true, uncle," spoke Arturus. "Your scouts have surely misled you for years!"

"Not years, foolish Arturus. The ravages of Winter were real enough 10 months ago."

"You knew?" gasped Kandros.

"Yes, but your cousin had to die to keep this secret. Even with the Winter King gone, the surface world is a vicious realm. Elves and humans wield magic that can destroy any warrior. Greed makes warfare or subjugation unending. Here my people are safe, and here they shall remain."

"We are not your children, to be locked away for our own protection. Let the Khazad go forth and prove our worth, not cower in stone chambers like men already dead! You have stolen our spirit, and I name you coward, Kanlore, be it treason or no!"

"Enough! Guards, kill them!" The honor guard readied their axes, but looked around, uncertain.

"Are you insane, father? These men did no wrong. You did, and you shamed yourself and your kin." Prince Toril sliced off his braided beard and threw it in the king's face. "You shall have no allegiance when word of this perfidy reaches beyond this hall. Nor shall any of your line." The guards heeded his words, and lowered their weapons.

"So you too turn. My son, hear this--when the last dwarf is hunted down, felled by lance or wand, be it your name that they curse with their last breath!" Kanlore staggered from the royal hall, towards the surface that he so feared and into exile.

The prince turned to Arturus. "Cousin, you are my closest living kin not of my father. It is you the people shall follow." Arturus turned to his old friend. "Kandros, could you not have left this alone as I so asked? Because of you I have become kin-slayer and usurper."

"What? This foul scene was Kanlore's doing!"

"What I say now I say with heavy heart but the weight of the crown. You sought the surface world, and there you must go, banished from the Underhome. Take provisions, take your clan, take all who would seek their fortune above. This is not justice, but there will not be order in the Underhome while a traitor walks its halls, and you did break the royal decree when you left." Arturus sighed. "As did I, when I followed you. Toril, if you will not be king, then be my viceroy, and I shall take the crown to the surface as punishment for my own disobedience, with whoever will follow me."

And so the King of the Dwarves left the Underhome for the first time in over 300 years, and at the same time the Fir clan and their allies parted with their allies to forge their own Khazad nation. The two men who had been closest of friends grew to be the fiercest of rivals for much of the last Age.

[Shatner]

Also, I second using minor magical stuff to ease the logistics of sustaining your fallout shelter. Having a couple of sustaining spoons would help and keep that "life sucks down here" atmosphere going because no one likes gruel that tastes like wet cardboard. You could even have the precipitating incident for the PCs to leave be the destruction of some such item. After all, Fallout, one of the OP's explicit inspirations for this thread, had the water reclaiming chip break and that's just a Clark's Law removed from being a Decanter of Endless Water.

[Laertes]

After all, Fallout, one of the OP's explicit inspirations for this thread, had the water reclaiming chip break and that's just a Clark's Law removed from being a Decanter of Endless Water.

I love this line. However, the existence of sustaining spoons as a Thing That People Can Have massively influences the society which created it. If they have magic which can permanently create something from nothing, then they can also make everburning torches, air scrubbers and decanters of endless water. They might not even have such things as farms and mines to begin with. The number of survivors would be an appreciable fraction of society, which might not be what the intention was.

[Shatner]

Well, sure they had Everburning Torches and Bottles of Air at first but then The Primarch came to power on top of the bodies of the Magus Council and moved most of the council's magical creations into his custody. His lieutenants and he damaged or destroyed many of those items during the rebellion that ended his tyranny, and the people of the Hold have been forced to scrape by one what remains ever since.

EDIT:
Or something like that. It ain't hard to have magic or tech build a shelter and then have internal strife or a nasty disaster (cave in, disease, what-have-you) render the people thereof dependent on things they can no longer recreate.

[Laertes]

...and so with all their magitech broken and no knowledge remaining of how to repair it, they were forced to open the doors and reemerge into the World. I like it.

I once ran a zombie survival game in which the players had a large stable of secondary characters which they could use for particular jobs if those jobs required their particular skillset. It was a lot of fun. You could do something similar with this if you got a system which worked well with tiny men.

[Shatner]

For added character, you could have the original design for the shelter assume magic as the primary provider of some staples, with the actual source of those staples after The Decline being the result of a lesser sub-system or the result of some clever reconfiguration.

Example 1: Magic can make water easily, but booze... not so much. So an area was created to allow the growing of crops with the intention that those crops would go straight into stills which would keep the booze flowing. After the shit hit the fan, the growing area was heavily expanded and the potatoes were used as food instead of as the precursor to vodka.

Example 2: The delving was supposed to be done by the golems, but The Primarch used the stolen Amulet of Command to turn them into his loyal enforcers. To bring him down, the golems were destroyed. What few tools there were for excavation were quickly used up and ruined. However, each and every Magus that had ever sat on the council possessed an enchanted dagger that was the symbol of their office. And naturally the Council brought the entire collection into the Hold because those blades were central to a ritual of ancestor worship the Council was big on. It turns out that while mundane iron and steel wears out, enchanted bronze does not. Using daggers lashed to a rod makes for a pretty shitty pick, but it's what the people of the Hold use because it's what the people of the Hold have.

[Occluded Sun]

I would be totally okay with a very limited magical supplemental food source that reduced the strain on preserved supplies but is simply incapable of sustaining the population once the reserves run out. But I can get the same effect with troglofish and cave fungus farming, so I'm going to do that instead because it's more interesting than 'a wizard did it.'

I ask only because those nutriments are technically dependent on external energy sources - so their prominence naturally puts limits on the type of disaster that your civilization could have been fleeing from. A nuclear war or its magical equivalent would probably end up with all of the cave fish dying, and there's a very limited amount of energy that can be extracted with fungi. It's the problem from The Matrix all over again.

What if the population has been in there for a long time - more than a hundred years - and while there were originally some magical sources of food, they slowly failed - through decay of the magics, destruction during power struggles, and so on - and cannot be repaired?

So there are occasional 'magic light sources' that have either darkened or dwindled to mere glimmering, 'magic food sources' that have lost their virtue and either produce nothing, scraps of material, or poisons...

Or they could be technological devices whose nature has been forgotten and are merely considered magic. You're likely going to need some such explanation for the civilization that originally existed on the surface if they've been in there for a long time. Radium lights that dimmed and so forth.

If you don't want to go any of these routes, I think your society could only plausibly remain Below for a generation or two. Perhaps enough time for everyone who was even a little child Above to die off... but not much more than that.

[deaddmwalking]

If we knew of an impending apocalypse, rather than building new shelters in the deep earth, we would most likely convert existing mines.

In Dr. Strangelove it talks about the 'mine-shaft gap' to determine whether the Americans or Soviets would re-emerge into the post-apocalyptic world as the dominant power.

A salt mine would be an interesting choice for a civilization. It would likely be large already - making it habitable would not require additional excavation. Figuring out what they did in the time they had would be interesting.

If they DIDN'T have a reliable water source, then using up the supply could force them out.

[Laertes]

A salt mine would be an interesting choice for a civilization. It would likely be large already - making it habitable would not require additional excavation. Figuring out what they did in the time they had would be interesting.

The largest salt mines in Europe are in Hallein near Salzburg. They've been worked for 7000 years, and were heavily used by the Celts who had vast forces of slaves hewing out rock salt. However, the mines aren't very deep - some tunnels go as far as 200m into the hillsides but generally people preferred to dig a new tunnel once they got too far in, because the costs and risks involved in digging a tunnel too deep were greater than those of starting a new one.

Quick history lesson, everyone - in preindustrial times the main constraint on mining was the price of timber. Soft rock mines (such as coal or salt) require tremendous amounts of timber to shore them up, and the further in you go the more timber you need. Since timber is expensive before industrial forestry, you quickly hit a point where the timber costs are higher than the value of whatever you're extracting. This is why tunnel mines in pre-modern times are a rarity except in hard rock, where the extract was more valuable and the tunnel was more stable.

The largest salt extraction operation in the world is in Zigong in Sichuan, but there they traditionally drilled for brine and then rendered it down to make salt, rather than mining rock salt. (As they drilled deeper they struck natural gas, which now brings in more money than the traditional salt business, but the city is still famous for its salt working.)

The entire UK has approximately 225km of salt mine tunnels, but those are divided between many different areas and the overwhelming majority of that distance is modern.

If they DIDN'T have a reliable water source, then using up the supply could force them out.

Rock salt is commonly found in the same sorts of geology as you get aquifers and natural caves in, so it's eminently believable that you can have an underground river nearby to a salt mine. (If you're going to google it, the technical term for rock salt is halite and the technical term for this sort of geology is a karst.)

Underground rivers, however, can frequently change their course. This is especially true in karst geology because slight shifts in the ground can open cracks and then the water will all flow down the crack, leaving its old course barren. Alternatively, watercourses can get clogged with debris and flood their previous courses until they find another way out. In either case, it's no longer useful as a habitation. An event like that could easily be the defining reason for people to escape.

[kzt]

Mines are much less stable and much more likely to kill you than natural caves. The normal limestone type cave is very old and has survived multiple earthquakes and other such events. Old mines that have been abandoned are often extremely dangerous and unstable.

[Username17]

Historical food preservation techniques are truly unlikely to keep a century's worth of food edible for a century. On the other hand, magical preservation techniques can do whatever you want them to.

The people could literally be required to chant over the remaining beans every day to keep them from going moldy.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Making the honey a magically more effective preservative would be my first choice, I think. It's subtle enough to not be obtrusive.

[Username17]

Making the honey a magically more effective preservative would be my first choice, I think. It's subtle enough to not be obtrusive.

You're asking food to be preserved for a century. Even salt cod and wine doesn't really last for a century. By the end of a hundred years, your wine is going to be vinegar, and even your honey is going to have turned into mead and then into vinegar. The only things that will last that long are distilled spirits and salt.

So really you need to have the people be doing something magical to keep their food from going to crap in the last couple decades of their entombment. But you also need to have the people have things to do to fill their days. So complicated, time consuming rituals of stasis to keep the food from rotting kills two birds with one stone. You don't have to explain how everything they eat is shit that could be preserved for five or ten decades, and you don't have to declare that people don't have anything to do for years at a time.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Kept dry, honey doesn't seem to ever go bad. Like, actual millennia-old jars of the stuff have apparently been found, still perfectly good.

Now, canned food seems like it can also potentially last for at least a century - because it has. And the actual can isn't necessary, issues of transportation aside, glass with a wax seal seems like it would do fine. Sterilize with heat, maybe pour in some honey as insurance. Plausible enough, and no particularly advanced paradigm required.

The 'magic' answers are simple and easy, but also kind of boring. I might have them engage in ritual time-killing anyway, for religious reasons as Laertes suggested, or to maintain the cloak/ward that helps keep anything from coming down the ventilation shafts (or both), but I'm sure things to do can be come up with even if that doesn't work out.

[erik]

The 'magic' answers are simple and easy, but also kind of boring.

This was for an rpg campaign right? I think if you are spending more than half a paragraph on food preservation then you have already gone deep into the abyss of Logistics & Canning and way beyond boring. Is this something the players will care about? If not then handwaving is functionally much less boring since you get back to investigating and slaying and looting.

In Earthdawn when we play occasionally we may refer back to life in our cairn and it is like "Billy you are so lazy this is like when you refused to help gather mushrooms in the caern!"

Other than random inquiries and tangents it just doesn't come up much. And we are playing a similar campaign where we are an expedition team venturing out to see if it is safe in the world.