DM Material for underground ruins / cities / tunnels and such!


Advice


What's up!
A campaign I'm running has had a major shift and now I'm in need
of a new area.

I actually randomed the city and its properties with some tables and the results are interesting:
a merchant-lead city on top of a hill built around existing (and big, the previous owners were at least large) ruins of a long-gone civilization.
Also the city is cursed.
Even worse it's populated almost entirely by Dwarves.(jk i love dwarves)

Erhh, anywho.The idea is this : the ruins extends far beneath the city
and forms a maze-like web of tunnels,
dwarven quarries, shrines, monster lairs and such.

As you might imagine this is quite a lot of work.
Sooo, anyone got some juicy manuals (even 3.5 is fine) that could help me?Or anything really, I might even settle for some good advice.

pls help


My first question - how to they get water? Atop a hill is tricky. Not that no city ever has been built atop one, but it merits investigation. I love the stepwells of south Asia, but that's perhaps beside the point.

I imagine massive, underground shafts leading down to ground water table way beneath the city. A 30-40m drop at least. Maybe these old wells where equipped with massive wheels and screwed to lift water up in the old days, maybe todays dwarfs maintain or even constructed them.

The ruined city around the hill (did I get that right?) might, at least in part, be flooded and effectively a swamp now. That's what happened to Rome after the fall of the empire. Medieval Rome was much smaller than in ancient times, situated around sunken, 1000 year old ruins.

Encounters in urban areas is tricky, especially if you want something powerful yet something that shouldn’t have already wiped out the city. I have some nice monsters for you though.

Striges are bloodsucking bats. Just CR 1/2, but they come in CR 6 swarms. Unusual conditions might force them to swarm, making for a potent enemy.

Rat Swarm. How urban can it get? And Wererats.

Various spiders probably dwell in the sewers and tunnels. I like Dream Spiders.

Violet Fungi. Flesh-eating mushrooms. Particular likes sewage.

Will-o’-wisp and their younger counterpart, Boggarts. High CR. Very weird and fickle "monster", which could explain why such a powerful creature still is only a nuisance to the city as a whole.

Otyugh. Smarter than they look. Stalks the tunnels, picking of a dwarf a month.

Flue Hag is the hag most likely to be found in cities.


Blymurkla wrote:

My first question - how to they get water? Atop a hill is tricky. Not that no city ever has been built atop one, but it merits investigation. I love the stepwells of south Asia, but that's perhaps beside the point.

I imagine massive, underground shafts leading down to ground water table way beneath the city. A 30-40m drop at least. Maybe these old wells where equipped with massive wheels and screwed to lift water up in the old days, maybe todays dwarfs maintain or even constructed them.

The ruined city around the hill (did I get that right?) might, at least in part, be flooded and effectively a swamp now. That's what happened to Rome after the fall of the empire. Medieval Rome was much smaller than in ancient times, situated around sunken, 1000 year old ruins.

Encounters in urban areas is tricky, especially if you want something powerful yet something that shouldn’t have already wiped out the city. I have some nice monsters for you though.

Striges are bloodsucking bats. Just CR 1/2, but they come in CR 6 swarms. Unusual conditions might force them to swarm, making for a potent enemy.

Rat Swarm. How urban can it get? And Wererats.

Various spiders probably dwell in the sewers and tunnels. I like Dream Spiders.

Violet Fungi. Flesh-eating mushrooms. Particular likes sewage.

Will-o’-wisp and their younger counterpart, Boggarts. High CR. Very weird and fickle "monster", which could explain why such a powerful creature still is only a nuisance to the city as a whole.

Otyugh. Smarter than they look. Stalks the tunnels, picking of a dwarf a month.

Flue Hag is the hag most likely to be found in cities.

Thank you for the suggestions!Mhhm -yes- I think the wheels are beginning to turn *insert evil GM laugh*.

Welp, about the water bit;
I am secretly arse at creating a feasible/plausible environment, but I just checked the wiki article and I love it.
Definitively putting that one in.

Back to the main topic, you know, I originally thought the overground city would be mostly peaceful,
however the way you put it it makes me realize it wouldn't make much sense (so, again, plausibility is not my forte).
So maybe ,every now and again, certain parts of the city need to be evacuated
because something nasty just emerged from some ancient tunnel-or even a well- and is wreaking havoc.
There are plenty of guards and blockades of course,even golems, but sometimes something slips through, and rarely something just smashes through.

I'm thinking of a city with this weird balance where there's both a great risk from living there
but also a lot to be gained from the ruins (knowledge,magical items,riches) so much that people decide to stick around nonetheless.
Now that feels ripe with possibilities.

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