Your entertaining rules / hazards for the Darklands

[wheatleymr]

This is a question primarily for the players, either directly, or what DMs have noticed about their players:
What specific attributes of playing in the Darklands made it more entertaining, from a player's perspective?
And, conversely, what reduced the entertainment value?
Or perhaps there was something that nearly worked, as a game concept, but failed in execution?

And I'm particularly asking about things specific to the Darklands:
- Not so much "mega dungeons" in general. (But please do mention significant play experiences.)
- Not so much overland travel or exploration mode in general. (Again, please do mention significant play experiences.)

Off the top of my head, this could be a location to add OSR style concerns to a campaign that doesn't normally care about such things. ...
...But what have you actually experienced in actual play?

[Ascalaphus]

Interesting question. My Sky King's Tomb campaign will soon be heading deeper into book 2 so I'm curious too :)

One point that is interesting to note is where all these tunnels from from. Of course there's some geological processes and dwarves digging deep and all that. But a significant amount of it may actually be due to various cave worms leaving tunnels behind. Which has some implications:

- a tendency for tunnels to be about 4-6 squares wide.
- new tunnels can "just appear" which can suddenly change local dynamics. Local kingdoms aren't necessarily in a position to do anything about it if a cave worm decides to give them new neighbors.
- if a worm tunnels into an underground lake, someone's lake may suddenly flow away and someone else may experience a sudden flood

[Claxon]

That actually leads me to think that any sizeable community would probably do something to control or kill off worms in the area. Suddenly losing your water source would be a big problem. And it would likely be something that enemy communities would try to weaponize.

I imagine communities would have developed some technique of generally keeping cave worms away. But mind controlling one to go rip holes in your enemy's reservoir lake could be a big concern.

[Ascalaphus]

I suppose bigger powerful communities would yeah, but the classic cave worm is level 13, so for a lot of smaller settlements it's basically a natural disaster they don't have any say over. Also, it could just come tunneling up from out of nowhere. Even at really high levels you generally can't do much to block out creatures that can burrow through miles of solid rock.

Now, if we're talking about using cave worms against your enemies, well people have thought of that...