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May 27, 2023

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

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