A Review of 4th Edition Underdark

I was broadly demoralised by this damnn book, but to make it bearable to get through, I will make a list, from back to front, of everything I actually liked.

TOROG - The King Who Crawls

The Level 34 Solo Lurker Himself! (“Huge Immortal Humanoid, XP 195,000")

God of Torture, Imprisonment and the Underdark. A few concepts in here govery hard indeed and Torog is the best. Entered the Underdark to fight some primordial horror in the Dawntimes and was cursed even as he killed it. He cannot heal, cannot leave, and as a God, cannot die.

Trying to escape the Underdark, Torog crazily crawled his way through the whole of the planet. He was cursed to never reach the surface, but he could madly smash his way into other planes, so long as it was into the Underdark of those planes. His crazed crawl created a permanently bloodstained Godroad which curls and spirals madly through the Underdark, and even breaches the walls between realities.

Now his palace is the hewn corpse of the Titan he killed to get here and Torogs servants have to constantly chew and cut away at it to stop it re-growing. Bitter, wrathful and in constant pain, Torog tortures and imprisons people, turning them into wracks. Unlike other Gods, he does not share his power or trust his angels. If he wants to communicate he will either send some horrid low level servant with his words sliced into its back, or the big guy is coming himself, in person. He likes to take cities of people who piss him off, and pull them down into the Underdark. I imagine this happening like two mountain-sized hands rumble up from the earth on each side of the city, fingers like arcologies, curling over, then down, down down.

Torog is so depressed he may actually want to die, which would form a neat apex to a long campaign. The guy was just messing with you because he wants to commit suicide-by-adventurer.

If he does die, he horrible presence is the only thing keeping the Abberant Outer Realms from infiltrating and merging with the Underdark, which will end up with Mind Flayers, Beholders and Grell turning everyone into pâté, which is a neat piece of setting-sustaining divine engineering.

Torog is novel, functional, has a cool picture and really holds the book together. Its not surprising they made the whole thing about him.

The Incunabulum

Vecna-Worshipping sort-of humans defined by Mum-Ra Drip. Obsessed with discovering and recording secret knowledge of all kinds, they have “the grisly ritual of the Unveiling” which strips every piece of memory from a (dead?) subject. This involves the questioner eating the subjects brain, which gives them access to their entire experience. BUT, the interrogator has only 12 hours to write down parts before the memories fade. They keep these secrets on parchment, (which is probably made from the victims).

The Incunabulum are culturally defined by their wrappings. When they come of age they are given a set of wrappings derived from dead Incunabulum. These contain knowledge and memories, and once they go on, they don’t come off till death.

The lore says elements of these memories date back to the first Incunabulum. The nature of replication and dispersal means that, while there must be continuity, I’m sure there will be a lot of alteration, adaptation, splitting and drift in what feels like a ‘written genetic signature’, each Incunabulum having access to a kind of edited, pathed together palimpsest of memories, dating first to one or two predecessors, and from them, back and back and back, all the way to the first. The patterns created by the memories no doubt being stronger than the details of the memories themselves, each Incunabulum being a kind of evolved book of memories, as well as a person.

I’m already interpolating too much into a very sparse 4e text. These guys look largely human, they hang out in a Cavern-Venice City called Glimmer in the Shadowdark, worship Vecna exclusively, make a lot of use of (dry, never wet) Undead, and generally love secrets and being evil. Good villains with some unexplored Borgesian depths.

Blood Ooze

A bad Ooze monster with fragments of interesting elements. One - its made from Torogs blood. Two - if it manages to Ooze you it gets inside you and puppets you. Three - “A blood ooze has no allies.” A koan to place alongside “Giant Oysters are never surprised.”

Lathan, River of Souls

“The lathan forms where streams of souls join together in a crevasse known as the Vale of Sighs. Here the moaning torrent becomes a true flow as spirits funnel through the narrowest part of the canyon ... its surface and depths are made of a rushing press of intertwined and glowing spirits.”

“Devils frequently sail the Lathan to the Soul Slough to find souls that had been promised to them. They float atop the spirits in iron-keeled boats and fish spirits out with ghost catching nets.”

“Only at one place along the Latham does a permanent crossing exist: the Worm Bridge. .. Its master, Bragarra the Bridge Witch, controls it constantly to keep it from being dashed to pieces by the tormoil of the Lathan.

The bridge is crafted from the corpse of a purple worm whose long body forms a tunnel through the water to reach the other side. On either end stand a pair of nightmares chained to the dead beast, and dark stalkers lurk nearby, ready to obey their masters commands. Nearly frozen and unable to move more than its head, the purple worm must be pulled up and down the river to compensate for the water’s movement. The dark stalkers drive the nightmares to draw the worm taught for crossing, and sin its coils deep to avoid floating dangers.”

Bragarra the Bridge Witch is very Chris Avellone-coded.

Esaham, Graveyard of Demons

This is actually a pretty bad section, but the very idea of a graveyard for Demons, a place of binding and repose for what are meant to be sempiternal, extra-causal entities, is provocative.

Icegloom Chart

Bad name, good concept. A fat shard of ice. “Barely visible channels and bubbles in the ice constantly reshape themselves to resemble a map,”

Fire Pit

One very good fragment from an overall tiring 4e ‘Encounter’.

“This magic fire pit burns only meat and leaves wood untouched.” From an encounter in the Feydark. Excellent Druidic/Ent horror concept.

Deadtrees

“These four titans shed dappled shadows over thier realm while gods and primordials still warred.”

Four primeval and long-fallen Tolkienesque super-trees. Their roots though, still exist, and now form tunnel systems. Very fey concept for the Feywild, but interesting.

Sick Gnomes

The GNOMES are wilding the fuck out.

“King Finutar’s court magicians assure the people of Drochdan that the haze is a hostile sending from a rival kingdom - perhaps the formorians. In private,some gnomes whisper that it is a curse ...”

“In reality, this magical ailment is spread by contamination of the Drochdan’s food supply by fungal spores. This fact explains why entire gnome hunting bands are stricken by it at the same time - they’ve all eaten the same rations.”

Look, even mildly interesting GNOME CONTENT is rare.

Inbharann

A Formorian Kingdom that has learned how to mass-produce Sauron-Eyes and uses them as searchlights.

They also have a neat succession system; anyone can be adopted into the Royal Family based on competence. When the Monarch dies they all have to fight it out. The war is over when one is left standing, however, if everyone dies, a tribunal decides which one fought with the “greatest cleverness”, and orders his or her resurrection.

Resurrecting the leader from a dynastic bloodbath is fun, and having a commission to decide which was ‘cleverest’ feels very loony-tune-talmudic.

Primal Mud

4e combat chess idea with mud which you can use to heal yourself. Stated in the text, this dries out when you call on its power. Unstated is that, if this is a pool of mud, you just healed yourself and then likely trapped yourself by drying the it out, which makes for a nice combat decision. Even better, in a combat situation with multiple liquid pools, drying them out here or there could make the place more or less navigable for allies or enemies depending on circumstance.

Mherkrull

“Just as Asmodeus rebelled against the god that commanded him to relinquish his power, so too do devils and angels alike occasionally challenge their lords. Those wise enough to recognise their error before being destroyed have no hope of mercy. Their only succour is to escape divine notice for a time, and those who succeed most often do so by coming to the cavernous godless realm known as Mherkrul.”

That’s nearly all we get.

Xarcorr - Realm of the Aboleths

Some reasonably funky environments are sketched out;

“The area around Xarcorr tumbles and twits as if in pain ... stone shifts and mutates without warning ... Thoughts drift through the passages like smoke, choking the minds of the unwary with the nightmare imaginings of abhorrent creatures..”

These roiling rocks have islands of relative stability.

The Dripping Jungle; ”abuzz with glimmering creatures that make their own light. Ghostly insects glow in gemstone colours through transparent shells. leechlike rodents leave luminous slime trails behind their slithering bodies. Great behemoths stand on legs as tall as ship masts that shine with radiant blood, stretching their ruddy necks to reach ceiling vegetation”

The Stone Gyre; “the rock becomes fluid - the stone of the caverns ripples and moves while remaining in a cave shape ... Up is whatever direction air can be found.”

The Toothy Plains; “vast, flat expanses of ceiling and floor roughly 200 feet apart. .... massive crystal monoliths that resemble jagged fangs jutting from the ceiling and floor ... “glide along the surface from which they project..”

Then, once you enter Xarcorr itself; “a strange, still point, disorientating both in its contrast to the surrounding chaos and in the alien nature of the realm. ... Xarcorr overlays the place in the world that its area covers. it is both in the world and not, and what was in the world before its coming remains behind the unreachable barrier of Xarcorr’s existence. No mortal knows what lies in the world beneath where Xarcorr now rests.”

Within; Dreaming Vaults “in these long chambers the aboleths keep captives of many races alive in a shared dream state. ... Their captors observe the effects aboleth plans might have on the real world by looking at the reactions the captives have and how the sleepers imagine others would behave.”

The Warp Web; “rivers of slimy water from all over Xarcorr ... float out into the open air and split into a latticework of waterways that dangle down into the canyon.”

The Preserve, where the aboleths “modify the environment in extreme ways, hoping to scrape open a hole in the weave of existance and find a conduit to the Far Realm behind the flow”

Grell Colony Politics

We have a nice page here digging into the varying philosophies amongst a colony of Grells. I feel like these my have been written by a very angry, very cynical vegitarian;

The Byoll (”Opportunity for Use”) “Their philosophy permits captured prey to avoid being eaten by performing a dangerous mission of the grells devising.”

The Glatt “Equanimity of Harm”) “The Grell philosophy Glatt holds that harm to prey animals is a necessary part of life, but that the moral grell parcels out this unavoidable hurt so that no piece of potential food suffers more than other members of its litter, tribe or group.”

The Jrall (”Feasting in Knowledge”) “Jrall philosophy argues that it is acceptable to torment and kill sentient beings as long as they are ennobled by knowledge first. Thralls are kept in clean pens and taught the simplest rudiments of Jrall belief in anticipation of the day when they will be slowly devoured alive.”

The Kragg (”Consume the Willing”). “Like the Byoll - from whom they broke in a murderous conflict years ago - the Kragg send captured prey to perform hunting missions or other quests for them. The Kragg do this as part of a braoder exercise in bending future prey to their will. They use their psychic powers to make their victims want to be eaten. Philosopher Kragg asserts that this is the only ethical way to devour sentient species.”

Hraak Azul

A massive living multiple-fungus fortress/environment colony, slowly moving through the Underdark, going who knows where. Pretty similar to the Fungal Environment in ‘Forgotten Realms: Underdark’, but now mobile and with a nice image and some extra details.

Dark Lake Ziggurat

Its a big black Ziggurat on a dark lake. Neat element is that it is multi-planar, and perhaps multi-causal. The same ziggurat, built by different races and cultures, in different planes, in exactly the same place, and perhaps with multiple histories even within one plane.

Kind of basic Lovecraft tbh but a big black ziggurat standing alone above a dark lake, miles beneath the earth, is still a banger image. Its also mildly funny/das that the Lovecraft inspired Kua Toa have a colony nearby and keep sending Fishmen into the Ziggurat to perform what they think is ‘sacred work’ (they are being randomly hurled through other dimensions and driven totally mad.).

Maelbrathyr

Maybe the only part of 4e Underdark that keeps some of the old ‘Infinity Engine Location’ energy from Forbidden Realms: Underdark. Maelbrathyr feels very much like a city laid out in isometric graphics, with a dark and edgy backstory and a series of personally dramatic bossfights with Chris Avellone-style tormented bad-guys.

Story is that an Underdark City put together a team of heroes to rescue someone from Torogs Torture clutches. This they did, but the King Who Crawls was annoyed enough by this that he reached up and dragged the entire city down into the earth, leaving it a tiered collapsed city of ruins and levels.

He also cursed the heroes who ‘stole’ his prisoner, even the ones who didn’t survive. Now they are immortal horrors, mad and evil. One a half fire half ice slug centaur in undying agony, one given mega-schizophrenias by being inhabited by the souls of the comrades he let down, who don’t like each other or him, and who change his body when they take over, and one guy trapped in an eternal hamster-wheel/orrery torture device who can only roll around forever. Hilarious. Good one Torog.

This Image

Is this “4th Edition” in the room with you now?

Reading this was like suffering a flashback to an old, dull, war. 4e truly is a depressing system, with a kind of brutal, nasty, cognitive weight. Going thorough the text I kept wanting to argue with someone who wasn’t there, and who hasn’t been there for fifteen years.

Building your entire reality around a series of boutique grid-pattern ‘balanced’ combat encounters (which the PCs can’t actually lose without fucking things up), drags the imaginative potential of the human soul into a pit of mediocrity and tortures it - glistering pools of blood torn from a god who can never heal and never die and which still stain the passage of the King Who Crawls, give a +5 to fucking a fucking evoking surge but disadvantage on heals or some shit, its just the most depressing stuff. Torog would approve.

Even the really good ideas, like the Incunabulum, which have potentially fascinating concepts behind them, are all designed to be communicated via big dumb stat blocks, which are all built around combat-as-sport grid combat, its like watching fine French cheese be squeezed through a sieve onto the dirtiest burger.

Foaree Underdark also provides splatters of gaming advice, not so much wrong within itself, as the horrid product of post-apocalyptic mutational pressures producing something that approximates a previously health organism, but only through limb-splintering mutilations of an already horribly warped concept;

“One way to impress upon the players the dangers of the Underdark is tot talk about the deadly monsters that live there. But talk is cheap. I find that most players assume the DM will pit them only against foes they can defeat. They imagine difficult fights, but they also imagine winning all of them.

That’s great. D&D is at its best when its collaborative and everyone at the table has fun. Still, I like to put fear in the players and let them know that their decisions have real meaning in the game. If every choice has the same victorious result, the game gets dull.

I find the best way to do this is to call the players’ bluff. I’ll talk about some dangerous foe in a particular location, and if the players go there, they meet the danger. In effect, I put up a sign that says, “Here there be dragons!” If the players go past the sign, they meet a dragon - and not some wyrmling either.

The key to making this approach work is letting the characters get away. Some players might want their characters to run, but one or two often stick around to see if you mean it. (”Maybe that Mind Flayer is a doppelganger. He wouldn’t really have us face a Mind Flayer.”) This inevitably draws the others back to hep out, but after a few potent attacks from the monster, everyone should be looking for the exit. When they do, let them go. if you need a reason for the monster not to pursue, perhaps some other threat attacks it (the big fish being eaten by the bigger fish). If you do something like this in the Underdark, the players will give each other worried looks the next time they need to delve into the deep, dark caverns.

Using this technique has the additional benefit of teaching players that it’s ok to run from a fight. I’ve seen many campaigns come to an abrupt end or have to be saved by some deus ex machina because the players didn’t see a way out of a fight that went south. letting them run away shows them that their decisions have consequences, but that you’re still collaborating to make a fun game.”

Not a good book but there were at least some good things in it.