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The Gardens Below
This is my attempt at a sort of supernatural underdark, for the ongoing
game of The Nightmares Underneath that I am running. Some of the things
on my mind in the process of writing this are The Great God Pan,
Roadside Picnic, and Evan Dahm’s The Harrowing of Hell comic. Writing
the entries for these hexes will be an ongoing project and the subject
of future posts.
You must descend to reach The Gardens, and you must descend to leave
them. How this is done varies, but you must always go downwards to pass
in or out.
The Gardens are named such because they are cultivated, though for some
incorrectly treat them as a wilderness. The textured spaces, such as
0403, have consistent features and are attended to in some fashion by an
entity or entities. The entities and the contents of the hexes will be
detailed in future posts as I write them, and will be added to a fuller
reference document. I plan for there to be satyrs — I like the idea of
satyrs living underground, it’s an idea I’ve returned to repeatedly
throughout various games I’ve been involved in.
The fully black spaces on the map above, such as 0101, are inconsistent
– you might pass through one multiple times and find wholly different
features each time, the cast aside detritus of caretakers missing or
gone, wide empty caverns or narrow winding tunnels. A variety of these
features will be detailed in a future post. They are nearly always
traversable, but not always in a convenient or accurate way — travel
that does not take some extraordinary precaution has a 50% chance of
being off course.
EDIT AS OF 8-24-2023: Contents of
Abandoned Gardens
Light works strangely in The Gardens. Fire, electrical light, and light
produced by magic illuminates a world in greyscale, though an observer
feels strangely sure they know what color the things they are observing
are (even if they usually could not, due to for example colorblindness
or viewing through a sense such as echolocation). Bioluminescence
reveals the world in all its colors, and in many parts of the gardens
glow worms are cultivated as the ideal light source.
A dedicated being or group might exert themselves to cultivate a new
section of the gardens. I also plan to write a process for players to do
this eventually, especially if it turns out to be something any of my
players decide they want to do.
The extremely good hex kit assets I used for this map can be found
at:
https://johnbattle.itch.io/batts-analog-hex-kit-tileset
https://johnbattle.itch.io/batts-digital-hex-kit-tileset