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Monday, June 4, 2012

Underworld Cities

Over at the Hill Cantons blog, there's a couple posts about constructing something resembling the Jakállan underworld (from the Tékumel/Empire of the Petal Throne setting.) I only paid half-attention to it, because I was thinking of it as a Tékumel-centric process. But really, the basic idea has some appeal. In real-world history, cities often get built on top of cities on top of cities, and later excavations may turn these into sprawling underworlds. Traditional D&D underworld design has moved towards small excavations (micro-dungeons) or constructions in large natural caverns (the underdark.) The megadungeon has resurfaced, but we tend to conceive of these as just a bigger version of the micro-dungeon.

I have the inkling of a thought: what about applying the exact same rules used for on-the-fly city adventures to ruined undercities? Maybe with some rules for creating connecting zones?

I'll have to think of this more.

2 comments:

  1. something like vornheim city generation?

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    1. Something like that, yes. I posted before about how I would combine some of Zak's ideas with some other tools to create towns and cities. What I'm thinking of is taking a couple of those techniques to do the basic layout, but adding some other tools to essentially replace above-ground wilderness generation, to connect underworld pockets.

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