PLAYING IN UNDERMOUNTAIN #2 (Patreon)

We hope you enjoy this public follow up to our earlier post, Playing In Undermountain #1. 

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Some ideas for Dungeon Masters to think about, for Undermountain…

Towns inside the dungeon itself

• Thundenstone, a holy place of the gnomes (a cavern strong with natural radiations, used by gnomes to charge magic items in a manner very similar to the Earth Nodes detailed in the 3e Underdark sourcebook), where about forty gnomes dwelt, keeping very quiet so as not to be noticed by other Underdark denizens. This policy had failed, and after several bloody battles against drow, the gnomes provide shelter to all non-drow in return for aid in battle, payments, needed goods, and promises of future aid.
  
  Thundenstone was “deep in the Underdark,” where Halaster’s wards start to fade, and gnomes who know how can ‘tap the node’ (exhausting it for a day or so) to use it as a one-way portal (outbound).
• Durlnezhrad, a way-stop for the drow (east of, and “below,” Undermountain proper, on the long and torturous caravan-route between Skullport and the Deep Realms (wider Underdark). Durlnezhrad was a barter and resupply community of four linked caverns around a drinkable lake, the “last stop” for caravans before entering perilous Undermountain, where pack lizards and goods could be stored, armed escorts hired, and so on. It’s a “Star Wars cantina” sort of place of about eighty inhabitants (and any number of transients) where an uneasy peace prevails, drow of all faiths and cities and trading houses get along and even tolerate non-drow, equipment can be bought and sold, healing can be had, and so on. I had postulated that this peace was kept because the place was ruled by some law-imposing creatures too formidable for even haughty drow priestesses to dare tackle, but (as the PCs in the original “home” Realms campaign, running characters in the Company of Crazed Venturers, turned back before ever reaching Durlnezhrad) never specified who these kingpins were. They did promise (and deliver!) grisly retribution on anyone who lurked near Durlnezhrad and ambushed arriving and departing traveling parties.

Healing Sites

Undermountain is home to several magical pools (not fountains, just self-filling pools; these always had monsters lurking nearby to “prey on the waterhole traffic”) and one of the thrones in the Hall of Sleeping Kings healed and revitalized anyone who sat in it, with increasing-with-each-time-the-same-creature-used-it chances of acquiring undead characteristics (step by step “becoming undead”).

Deeper in the dungeon, there were several other healing sites, including the Revenance, an area “guarded” by many whispering, spectral undead, where dying or dead PCs were brought back to full life and health by eerie, drifting spells—but at the same time charged with a mission (usually to slay someone or that someone’s descendant, back up in Waterdeep, but sometimes to rescue someone or something trapped deep in Undermountain) that they were magically driven to accomplish. A mission that would make them enemies in Waterdeep or Undermountain or both, of course.

Another healing “site” was a large chamber filled with the hacked, long-ago-pillaged bones of men, dwarves, elves, and orcs who’d died fighting there. PCs who entered got “ridden” by undead who faded into their heads and “rode” them, guiding them to hidden healing potions all over Undermountain—so long as, again, they accomplished this or that “little task” in the dungeon that the now-undead had “left undone” at undeath. These I ran as far more “tit for that” than the Revenance: go here, drink this potion, okay you can walk properly now, so go there and do that for me before I tell you where the next potion is. Some of these spirits were quite honorable (okay, you’re healed and you’ve done all I wanted, so we part in peace), and others had to be mind-wrestled and defeated by a PC who wanted to be free of them (some had minor powers, such as infravision [darkvision in 3e], feather fall, and various detection senses, that benefited PCs, so many PCs didn’t want to “get free”).

Little Nasties

Encounters in the original Undermountain almost always had opportunistic, lurking “little monsters” waiting to swoop on wounded or scattering PCs reeling from, fleeing from, or just busily engaged in fighting, stronger primary monsters. From stirges to spiders to jermlaine, boggles, and kobolds, I ran these “little nasties” as foraging and adventuring bands who knew the territory they were operating in, took note of arriving adventurers, stalked and sometimes misdirected them—and then swooped in when said adventurers were wounded, exhausted, spell-drained, and so on. If you were able to barricade yourself into a room (spiking stone doors shut), you could recover to fight them; if not, they often wore you down, one at a time, until one or two staggering survivors were left, just trying to get to the Yawning Portal and out.

The “Older Mythal”

I postulated that the mythal that preceded Halaster incorporated “renewal” magic, so cave-ins and rifts, by all means, Waterdeep and Mount Waterdeep can never “wholesale collapse” and fall into Undermountain, crushing and filling it: Undermountain itself can change markedly, but somehow the city above will “stay up there,” and raw, flowing magical energies (that have helped preserve Waterdeep down the centuries, even with gods tramping around its streets during the Time of Troubles) will be at work holding it up and “repairing themselves” (rebuilding the framework of interlocking “buttresses of force” that support everything). These energies could well “flood through” PCs traversing Undermountain (who step into the right [or wrong, depending on how one views it] place), healing, altering, or harming them.

The Teleportation Ban

I always used to play this as follows:

• Nobody teleports in from the surface Realms. Ever.
• Nobody teleports into Undermountain from the “wider” Underdark. Ever.
• Nobody reliably teleports out of Undermountain EXCEPT WITH THE DUNGEON’S AID (in other words, there are certain portals, items, and situations in Undermountain, where a character who “does the right thing” can be whisked out; usually this will be a surprise to them, rather than anything reliable, though of course the Yawning Portal and other adventurers’ taverns have their oft-told tales of individuals who did get out in such a manner, with usually-fanciful “hows” and “wheres” attached).

There are, of course, plenty of “jump-gates” (invisible teleports, from one set place to another, that always operate unless a PC happens to be carrying some sort of control key) operating within Undermountain, whisking unwitting intruders from one in-dungeon locale to another (the “lockout” mechanisms mentioned at the top of p2). Halaster has always used these to steer intruders away from rooms he keeps magic in, and the like; where they snatch adventurers away, he (carrying a key) walks right through them, unaffected. We could easily create encounters with monsters who are carrying keys and have discovered what they are—and so can strike at PCs and then flee through a door or down a corridor; PCs who try to follow will be whisked away, and the monster can then turn and deal with wounded or dead PCs who were left behind.

If characters are near death and fighting foes, and as a last resort try some sort of translocation magic to literally save their skins, I always allowed that magic to work. Just not to wherever they intended to go (i.e. the surface), and not outside Undermountain. Instead, they ended up somewhere (usually an “unknown” and apparently random locale) else in Undermountain. I would let them find healing and fragmentary maps (usually by slaying some evil adventurers, who were carrying such items, and attacked our desperate adventurers on sight), and then try to find their ways back to a known part of Undermountain.

This may offend against the “not get caught up in random exploration” (bulleted point on p2), but then again can force PCs into exploring an adventure area they might otherwise try to avoid (the “places we want to detail” mentioned on p4). It also adds that delicious spice of fear: when PCs are lost and don’t know the way out.

Architecture

I created Undermountain to have one distinguishing characteristic above all else: very intriguing construction.

Most rooms that have pillars also have concealed doors into storage niches in those pillars, and almost every room has at least a loose flagstone in the floor or block in the wall that can be shifted (usually by inserting a bladed weapon into a slightly-wider-than-the-rest-of-the-crack spot around its edges, to release a catch that “thrusts” the stone a little “out” or “up,” to expose fingerhold-hollows on its edges, so it can be dragged all the way out) to reveal a stone-lined (or hewn from solid stone) storage cavity behind.

Most of these cavities contain nothing of special value, but many of them hold “dungeon dressing” that reminds players that many, many creatures have been here before their characters: crumbling old fragmentary maps (often wrong, or to places levels away in the dungeon); rusty spikes and daggers; the rotten (or dry-mummified) remnants of long-ago extinguished and cached torches; purses with a few coins in them and some lucky dice, lockpicks, and occasionally something more interesting (like keys to doors in the dungeon or noble villas up in Waterdeep, the latter being accompanied by precise directions to reach the back stable door they fit). This is how I used to “feed” PCs with magic swords when they needed a magic weapon just to hit a monster that was waiting around the next corner, and magic items with only one or two charges left, and the occasional nick-of-time healing potion (often with an apprehension-causing side-effect, like making the imbiber glow as if with a faerie fire spell, for hours). All basic, old-school stuff (hey, it was new back then!), but I have repeatedly found that THIS is what makes Undermountain seem real rather than “artificially constructed.”

Most of the cavities can be empty; players who map or remember their locations and have their characters use them to stash stuff or even hide in build a personal sense of “ownership” of the dungeon, and this in turn makes it memorable and a setting for repeated “return play.”

Major Factions

A root feature of my original Undermountain. Aside from the powerful “deeper down” factions, cultists (Shar-worshippers, et al: anyone from the city who wanted to practice rituals that would be frowned-upon in Waterdeep) always lurked in the uppermost main level (the one those reaching the bottom of the Yawning Portal’s shaft find themselves in), trying to keep exploring adventurers away from “their” temples and doings (smuggling, kidnappings, dealings in drugs and poisons, storage of too-hot-to-fence stolen goods like nobles’ precious personal stuff they were ransoming back to the nobles, and so on) and often capturing adventurers for use in sacrifices or ritual bloodlettings, or just “shaking down” adventurers for coin (remember, there was a Waterdhavian tradition of younger noble sons going down into Undermountain to seek glorious adventure; the unfortunate fates of many of them can provide lots of PC missions to “find the resting place of poor Esdron, and bring me back his skull and the medallion you’ll know him by—it looks just like this one!” or “Resmer was wearing the Sword of the Roaringhorns when he disappeared; restore it to us, and you shall have [magic item, or the best tutor of X one could desire, or...]”).

I had a “colony” of cloakers that flew patrols, and coerced or commanded lurkers above and the 2e monsters known as executioners’ hoods, setting them as traps. I established them as the chief reason orcs, goblins, and kobolds hadn’t taken Waterdeep by storm (up through the cellars, sewers, and gloryholes) centuries ago, and the reason why more recently the drow (or anyone else evil and powerful, who wound up in Skullport) didn’t do the same thing: the cloakers and the creatures they commanded or coerced preyed heavily on any numerous and organized incursions. (The Company of Crazed Venturers, who explored the upper two levels of Undermountain extensively, kept blundering into tentative meetings between cloakers and greater doppelgangers, trying to establish an alliance that would have moved to covertly control much of Waterdeep, and wrecking said moots. However, there’s nothing to stop cloakers working with individual doppelgangers—or those meetings to start up again.)

The Shafts

A feature I had in the “original” Undermountain: “shafts” (vertical cylinders) of glowing pale white light that were stasis fields: intruders caught in them “floated” endlessly in them, feebleminded until they were towed out of them—whereupon some of these freed folk were found to be people from Waterdeep who’d been “lost” for centuries, and others were found to have lost their memories entirely. In other words, the “shafts” functioned as traps that caught and held intruders (that would be a reason no one had returned to spread word, and nothing was known of the level). I usually postulate that individuals seek lichdom because they hunger to stick around and either complete some great task or master more and more magic (hence, continued experimentation). Both experiments and attempts to replace or augment an increasingly brittle lichnee body could make use of trapped living creatures, so it would follow that a lich might establish or find and use these stasis fields to trap a supply of spare parts and guinea-pig creatures (including, if they don’t make the right saves, PCs playing through the adventures we present).

Deepspawn

I created Deepspawn years ago to have some explanation for why adventurer-scoured underground labyrinths sprouted new monsters so quickly, and they quickly became “deployable DM favorites” (in-game, evil wizards and the like would deliberately place them so as to pump out screens of low-level critters to discourage anyone reaching secret or cherished areas). Undermountain’s second level had a lot of them, and I always wanted to do more with the wizard Arbane (the Company of Crazed Venturers killed him off several times, too quickly and too soon to have the fun I wanted): he’d found or crafted spells to teleport deepspawn from place to place, and so could “replace” deepspawn slain by PCs, or even surround PCs with monster-spewing deepspawn. I postulated that Halaster found this all very amusing, and didn’t hamper Arbane’s activities (after all, it was providing him with the equivalent of daily “what will the hapless adventurers do next?” movies to watch).