By Bruce R.Cordell, Gewndolyn F.M. Kestrel and Jeff Quick. Art direction by Robert Raper. Graphic Design by Robert Raper and Robert Campbell, Cartography by Robert Lazzaretti. First printing 2003.
--------------------
This book has some notable slop and a semi-regular patterning of some supremely boring ideas, which gradually frets like cloud to reveal increasingly good work in exploration, before dawning blackly into seventy pages (nearly half the book) of geographic information about the Underdark of the Forgotten Realms and in particular, of the period right in the middle of R.A. Salvatore’s ‘War of the Spider Queen’ novel series.
 |
honestly, these covers are almost selling me |
Prestige Classes, ‘Regions, Feats
These things are like dirty nasty crack to me, or cheap sweets I can’t help eating more of. With my heart and my soul they disgust me, yet like a low enslaved desire, some abandoned part of me yearns for them; what exactly would it be like to be a ‘Cavelord’ (a kind of Underdark ranger), and exactly how does that differ from a ‘Prime Underdark Guide’ (someone who helps others range under the dark). Perhaps these crystalline imagined alter-selves occupy something like the fragmentary dreams of other ordinary lives which sleet through our minds in quiet moments of the vaguest ennui; “What would my life be like if had Prestige Classed up to ‘Arachnomancer’? Sure there’s a lot of stuff I wouldn’t be able to do, but think of the spiders. At least then I would know who I was = an Arachnomancer.” O to be the guy who has a ‘thing’, and for everyone to know it.
A standout for its pleasurable ridiculousness is the ‘Illithid Body Tamer’ - for those who, not only want to play a brain-eating psychic octopus from a hyper-villainous made-for-crime cephalopod race, but want to play the buff , hand to hand focused version of that race.
These strong squid come with a range of whirling tentacle attacks; (Tentacle of Fate, Reaching Tentacle, Whirlwind Tentacle and Tentacle of Destiny) spiked tentacle attachments and a promise not to use their innate, deadly, and very easy murderous psychic powers. A promise which they will break if they feel like it;
“An illithid body tame is not slavishly devoted to its code. If using plane shift or mind blast is clearly in its best interest, then it does so, preferring to lose access to the benefits of abstinence than lose its life.”
This surely takes the already hypertrophied art of Prestige Classing close to the limits of its own absurdity. But perhaps its that very insane hyper-specifity that helps to cast the strange spell such thing have over a living game. The others in this book are more boring and lack the ‘tang’ of 3.5 hyper-absurdity. (The vision of a 3.5 influenced game where only the most deranged Prestige Classes are allowed; Cancer Mage, Candle Caster, Halfling Outrider and Fochlucan Lyrist anyone?)
Nothing in the ‘Races’ section is as good as these images of them;
which are amongst the best art in the book.
You are not (at least here), actually allowed to be a ‘Derro’, which is disappointing for the book that introduced the Mind-Flayer Body-Tamer. Perhaps even amidst these often somewhat-villainous races, they were simply too Chaotic Evil.
‘Feats’ are as you would imagine them, apart from a few sparks of fun; ‘Elfhunter’ only available to Drow? Very sad. ‘Graft Illithid Flesh’ lets you play Squid Frankenstein, which has at least one very boutique use we will discover later on.
Magic and Spells
Spends an alarming amount of time describing the for-this-book ‘Node Magic’, a system of magic and advantage built around dicking around with ‘Earth Nodes’. This is the kind of deeply embedded rules system that, once you know someone is planning on interacting with it, you have to integrate it into your whole campaign, placing various NODES of varying level here and there; and what NODES you place where will have a big effect on play.
If anyone has ever used this, leave a comment or a link. Its hard for me to believe anyone could be as into something called ‘Node Magic’ as is required to actually simulate and use it for a campaign.
I did find a handful of spells I enjoyed, all of which do what they say on the tin; Amorphous Form, Contagious Fog, Drown, Rushing Waters, Viscid Glob and my favourite; Stone Sphere, which creates a five-foot diameter sphere of polished stone which moves under your control at a speed of 30ft. The Stone has Armour Class 5 and 500 hit points. One round per level and its a Level 5 spell. After casting, directing its movement requires a move action, so you can still presumably cast more bullshit so long as you stay in place, rolling your bid deadly marble about. A wonderful alternative to ‘Fireball’.
Equipment and Magic Items
Things improve a little more with ‘Equipment and Magic Items’, almost all of these are very or slightly impractical outside of a handful of uses, but isn’t that the pleasure of a tool? And of having this particular tool? Perhaps this granular imagining is the true spirit of 3.5.
It also has a pleasing image.
Various odd or conditionally useful weapons, some bizzarro additions to armour. ‘Blackwater’ which cripples water breathing creatures in a certain volume of water, (there have been occasions where I wished I had some), the Caveharp, (less interesting than it sounds), the blessedly-specific ‘Darkvision Invisible Paint’, wonderful SHRIEK PASTE, a ‘Spelunkers Kit’ which should be standard issue for all characters anyway.
Then a range of poisons and chemicals, including ‘Virile Madness’, which is PCP, and another curious obsession of this book; templates. Here templates for magical weapons made of this thing and that, including ‘Morphing’ weapons, which I feel like would be much more insanely useful irl than in game, where the physical/kinetic problems such things are made to solve are rarely imagined with the depth, fluency and regularity to make their use worthwhile.
Armours of ‘halfweight’, ‘Drowcraft’, ‘Illithidwrought’ and ‘Xorn’. Cortical mucusy armour that blanks your mind to foes, psychic armour and Drow Death Armour that makes you invisible, gives you ‘disguise’ and ‘spider climb’, for if you want to fantasise about being the coolest most cracked ultra-high-fantasy protagonist EVAR - these are dreams and aspirations I think, more than tools, and its curious how much ultra-mega-high-fantasy begins to intersect with post-singularity science-fiction tropes. We will see this later in city design.
Rings, of which the most fun is ‘Antivenom’ (60,000gp), and just below it ‘Antivenom, Frugal’ (10,000gp), just for the image of a world that contrast creates. RODS always feel under-noetic, and Staffs (no room underground surely?). A Figurine of Wonderous Power that transforms into a giant spider you can ride around on, and I have always wanted to own one of these in D&D, the less romantic and perhaps more old-school ‘Figurines of Illusory Escort’ which cast an illusion of guards around you when you sleep. Some very boring Neutral-Themed items. Last; a magic tome so powerful its like carrying around a semi-divine limited-use A.I. (you must speak to it in a specific dead language or it eats your soul and makes you one of its pages), and the Illithid Grafts, finally, but they are mainly just sticking tentacles on things, apart from ‘Humanoid Skin’ which involves sealing up something (or someone, presumably horrific), inside;
“If the humanoid skin hides monstrous features below its surface (such as extra arms, tentacles or antennae), using those features requires thrusting them through the skins surface as a standard action. This act showers all nearby cretures with blood and deals 1d4 damage to the graft recipient.”
Monsters are not a high point, there are rules for crossing things with Illithid (add tentacles), crossing them with spiders (add legs), crossing them with Chameleons, filling them with ‘Faerzress’, rules to mineralise anything; none make anything more interesting, producing largely globs. Multiple creatures that ‘swim through earth’ for various reasons and in various ways. A minotaur with demon blood? The ‘Lith’ has a good silhouette;
The ‘Maur’ as a hunched underground giant has a pleasing mechanic in which, if it can find room, it laboriously and horrifically stands full upright, “an agonizing, joint-popping experience for the Maur, though it relishes the change” and takes on a little of the noble potency of its forebears. The ‘Ineffable Horror’ which I can only assume got its name as an Underdark joke, since it is the most ‘effable’ thing ever.
The only really very-good monster is still only half-good and that is the ‘Annihilator’, a kind of Abberant solo Rust Monster with extra tentacles which can disintegrate anything. “The annihilator seems to derive sustenance and pleasure from destroying things, especially living things.” It has no ecology, background, sanity or reason for being, and likely would not benefit from them, it just likes Annihilating things and that is all it wants to do. A twist in the tapestry of the world and a gleaming contextless ambulatory disaster. Not bad.
 |
| just once in my life I want to say ‘call forth.. the ANNIHILATOR’ |
Exploring the Underdark
Things take an uptick here and its surprising, or unsurprising, how parallel to my own thought much of this is. We begin with a tour of underground features; Abysses, Caves, Dungeons, Gorges, Lakes, Rifts, Rivers, Seas, Shafts, Tunnels, Vaults and Volcanoes, which in this last section, does nothing to elucidate the Magma/Lava differentiation; what is lava encountered underground, but magma? What is Magma encountered in an open cave, but lava? Precisely when does water count as having left the tap?
From there into rocks and rock formations, including the classic trifecta of Sedimentary, Igneous and Metamorphic, to which we add MAGIMORPHIC rock formations - much could be done with the consequences of alternative geology and tectonics in a fantasy world, one far older than ours, and thus with a different arrangement of stone, or with magical warfare etc happening on the regular, with semi-regular portals to the Plane of this and that, D&D type Gods popping down to fundamentally alter reality for a certain place or time, and of the more Abrahamic, Tolkien-level God fundamentally changing the substance, history and nature of reality if, for instance, you sail too far West. (Discovering America is a sin.)
Then the Environment, climate, ecologies, plants and fungi, animal life. In almost every version of the Underdark the environment is still seperate from the solar cycle, as with ours, but is much higher in energy than our own cave systems. The answer is magic. The conception of the Underdark being ‘magically compressed’ appears in many tomes. This book imagines trees which feed on magic the way others do on sunlight. I can’t help but imagine what the leaf and branch shapes would be? Would the leaves have subtle dimensionally warped Escher shapes? The branches bend in directions you can’t go?
My own conception for this hyper-compression is that of the unification, compression and composting of multiple causal paths, the deeper in you go.
So for instance, if you go a mile down, civilisation is about 5,000 years old and modern humanity has only expanded since the last glacial maximum roughly 10,000 years ago.
But if you go two or three miles down, then there may have been 10,000 years of civilisation, perhaps even mutually-contradicting civilisational paths, either combined from alternate worlds or perhaps those paths wiped from ontology by divine hands, cannot be wiped down here, so if the world is ‘re-set’, this deepest layer of it cannot be re-set, and retains all the old programming and tombs and remnants of old dreams and old ideas, things which could never have happened, but did, but which are only remembered here.
Then if you go down four to six miles, you walk amongst the compressed relics of 20,000 years of civilisation, or 5,000 years X four, each semi-sperate yet interacting, interlaced and overlapping. This combined weight of time, experience and record, more than the surface could bear, is what creates the overwhelming magical compression of the Underworld. There is more down here than could be here, and more and more the deeper you go. Till if you go deep enough, perhaps the depths of all possible worlds combine into one vast realm of night.
That, at least, is my conception. We get ‘Underdark Hazards’, a limited but ok climbing and spelunking section, a bit on getting lost and then a long section on Encounter tables. I will be advising people make their own for Veins of the Earth
Finally for this ‘exploration’ section, we get into the once-again parallel conceptions of a somewhat ‘mythic’ underworld and the differences between this and the real-life underworld that inspired it.
A pseudo-natural aspect of the Forgotten Realms Underdark is that it is not contiguous, that is; it comes in patches and bounds, like islands, and its hard, sometimes impossible, to get from zone to zone. There are big areas of interconnection, but these are seperate to each other. Interesting and curious.
A classic situation for the ‘semi-mythic underworld’ is that its deeper than it should be, and the magma, water, caves and tectonics are much more spread out and interwoven than they ever should be. You can imagine our world like a densely layered cake, or lasagne, with interesting, but limited, layers of interaction. You have limestone caves, which were usually below, or on, the water table, but are now above it, then you have the water table, and its hard to explore beneath that underground, and then you have massively increasing pressure and heat, and then molten rock. Head to tail there is not that much actual depth to work with.
In the Forgotten Realms, and in VotE, there is way more depth and things are more spread out and intermingled, even at the cost of perhaps making less sense. Can you have a huge cavern beneath an ocean, with another (navigable) ocean in it? In our world, no, but in Fantasy, yes. Can you have navigable caves above, around, even below a magma flow? Not really, but in Fantasy, yes.
Geography - Faerun’s Underdark
A really nice piece of cartography and a slightly-frustratingly organised alphabetical section finish off the book, and much of it is this section. We are moving slightly more into a ‘Hasbro’s Invisible Cities’ vibe here; a list you can read like fiction, purely for the enjoyment of it. And its here that the propensity of the Forbidden Realms to build upon some very normative base concepts, but to keep building on them, to keep iterating and developing, and to bury the results of those developments deep in hidden corners of its world, helps it reach ramparts of innovative high fantasy you probably weren’t expecting going on. A lot of this is normative, some more interesting than you thought, and bits of it are very good.
Araaumycos - an entire kingdom-sized section of the Underdark is one fungal organism. It seems to be maybe possibly sentient, some of the time, and broadly neutral, or at least not expansionist. “On rare occasions enormous patches of Araumycos die, revealing ancient civilisations ripe for plunder beneath.” Even better, there is another, smaller, but aberrant and expansionist Fungal kingdom/entity/person.
Blingdenstone - A collapsed Deep Gnome city, but one of the ‘factions’ currently occupying it is ‘Ogremoch’s Bane’ a sentient cloud of magic dust. Its motivations are unclear but “In the back of the city, dozens of planar creatures of earth stand inert as the cloud swirls around them, whispering promises of victory and glory in Terran. Earth Elementals, mephits, Xorns, thoqquas, end even stranger creatures wait, still as statues.”
Cairnheim, Demense of the Dodkong - a lava tube village of giants ruled by a crafty 1,500 year old Stone Giant Liche with a magical crown, ruthless, but being very old, he still clings to an ancient Giant custom of hospitality, (limited, three days of safety). Of course you need historical knowledge to even guess this custom still exists and he’s not going to tell you.
Chaulssin; a ruined city, half within the plane of shadow, on a precipice above an abyss, now occupied by a House of Assassins. An Illithid city ruled by a council of Vampire Illithids who took over when their Elder Brain died - but they are all going slightly crazy from absorbing the thoughts and memories of so many other Illithids. Also home to the twisted Illithid philosopher Nurr’Korzahg who, after a moment of clarity, has started developing the notion that consistently trying to subvert and dominate all other forms of life might actually be not a great long-term strategy (several cultures and locations in this Map are made up of Illithid-hating ex-slaves, and they have at least two ‘Slave Races’ (Gythanki and Duergar) who ended up escaping and turning into absolute 100% Illithid HATERS, could our own policy of literally making enemies be at fault here?)
Deep Imaskar is a really neat addition to the legendarium; an ancient city of Wizards which hid beneath the earth after a major slave revolt. Now a self-sustaining pocket-kingdom with buildings growing from its gravatically-warped walls.
Imaskar is so secret that the glowing ‘sky’ of its cavern is a gigantic seal made specifically to keep it hidden, a seal so complex that studying and repairing it is equivalent to stargazing, a seal that affects reality so much that, wherever anyone is outside Imaskar, if they imagine Imaskar itself, the seal subtly and invisibly tugs at their thoughts, suggesting to them that the city is long-gone, if it was ever real, nothing but a rumour or fantasy. Imaskar is so secret that if people are chosen to leave, to complete some mission or for other reasons, they have the very memory of Imaskar erased from their minds, and are dropped in some random place far from the city; a true Wolfian hero, (or an RPG hero), who literally does not know where they are from, has a general sense that they have a mission, and at some point, will face a deeply buried command to return... somewhere, somehow. An interesting literary experiment.
Drik Hargunen; a city overwritten on every surface with the testament of a Duergar god, with complex runes of warding and subtle interlaced command phrases for the cities self-defence system interwoven in the ever-flowing words. To live here you must know how to read, know what to read and know deeply what not to read, which is why the Duergar allow no sighted slaves into the city-proper, instead they bring in blind Grimlocks, their hands tied to the handles of carts, so they can’t touch anything they shouldn’t.
Dupapen; a village of Aboleth slaves who, in the mental absence of their masters, have set up a thriving commercial concern. Some time ago the Aboleths ate a bunch of Gityanki and absorbed their minds and memories of intra-planar life. These memories are so vivid and intense that the Aboleths have been sitting around, blissed out and vibing for a decade. They tried breeding new Aboleths to manage the slaves but since each new Aboleth is born with the perfect memories of its parent, they had the same problem.
A near-extraplanar city made up of portals and spherical spaces in solid stone. If you can’t naturally swim through stone, don’t bother turning up.
Llurth Drier; Drow but poor and covered in mud.
Looblishar; a Kua Toa settlement overtaken by devotees of the Goddess of Darkness. Utterly lightless, only those with perfect Darkvision need even try to enter, though small this is the Axial point for a range of portals which reach to oceanic and above ground exit points all over the world. Creepy cultists of the Dark Goddess use Looblishar to move things and people and to engage their no-doubt whacky schemes. The kind of place you drop a patriot missile on as soon as you find out where it is.
Ooltul; a Beholder city forced into a surprising level of cosmopolitan toleration by an infestation of planar parasites who control the head Beholders; “Considering that Ooltrul is a city of evil geniuses dominated by monstrously unhuman aberrations, it is reasonably welcoming of outsiders.”
Oryndoll; an Illithid city dominated by a cult who’s modus-operandi is not only to acquire knowledge, but to specifically acquire knowledge that can then be removed from all other records or minds world-wide, so that this thing once known, now only they may know.
Reeshov; a Grimlock fortress town of former Illithid slaves who surround their settlement with complex traps, free slaves but trust no-one (the Illithids consistently probe their defences with mind-altered thralls and they know this).
Rringlor Noroth; “a city in only the most liberal sense of the word”, a city of Cloakers built into a gigantic bridge, part sculpted from shadow, crossing an immeasurable abyss. “The cloakers of Rringlor Nortoth spend much of their time continuously moaning and flying in great swooping orbits around a bridge of shadowstone”
 |
| I love these guys, they manage to be effortlessly more alien than either Kua Toa (cringe and flanderised) or Mind Flayers |
“The entrance is a series of cracks and flat passages no more than 4 inches wide within the Shadowspan. Cloakers peel away from the circling mass at random intervals and wedge their bodies into the cracks to crawl into the city.”
“Sometimes, cloakers just lie on the ceiling and stare at the floor for hours;” - same.
One human sage ‘inhabits’ this ‘city’; “Saibh is not insane, but he is immersed so deeply into the cloaker mindset that he cannot easily return and carry on coherent conversations in Common...”
Undrek’Thoz; a Drow mega-city, a bunch of very different Drow cities connected by hidden portals and unified by a general government, though outsiders won’t necessarily know about the portals. The gates between different sections of the mega-city are set to allow no metal to pass through, (to limit the craze for assassinations), this has lead to a sophisticated arms-race in pets and poisons. Economically, the city is unified by vellum scrip. In a high fantasy setting, things like this portal-linked mega-city would be way more common; such settings, if allowed to run, would inevitably develop into something a little like high-energy science fiction.
Final Analysis; Adventure Locations, Infinity Engine, Nostalgic Emotions
A last section on ‘Dungeons’ lets the book down again; single entry, mono-path micro-maps with complex ‘trick’ enemies and substantial treasure. Nothing really like ‘dungeons’ and the section is not large, but it does have an entry for ‘Citadel of the Fiendish Slayer’ which is a great title if nothing else.
Of the differences I have with ‘Underdark’ at least some can be put down to preference in design. I am not of the Kind whom suffers for the Prestige Class, or who enjoys the ‘build’, let alone picking an absurdly specific Prestige Class and playing specifically towards that for god knows how many sessions. A ‘biography expressed through mechanics’ has no interest for me, I am not amongst the elect, yet, I cannot despise them. We are cousins if not kin and I have enough of the hyper-specificity autism tingle to refuse a wholesale rejection. Neither will I live in, or near their, ghetto of stats.
Of the monster section; it is simply bad. Of Underdark exploration and transit; parallel, and respectable.
The best part of the book is where it enters into the beautiful twilight dream of the Forgotten Realms, a place so normative in fantasy that it gets interesting again, there are lots of odd ideas buried here and there in this ‘eventide of gems’ (which I can never believe to be ‘lightless’, the conception of a true devouring dark and of adventuring for weeks within a fragile bubble of light is something this Underdark book, and perhaps every book of this type, fails at), and I see this dream, strangely, through the medium of the Infinity Engine and isometric RPGs like Baldurs Gate and Planescape: Torment.
Perhaps this is because such games were my only actual active interaction with 3.5 and its culture. Perhaps the physical design language of this engine seeped through into the worldbuilding for the entire setting. Wouldn’t be the first time there was conceptual counterflow. Deep Imaskar in particular seems set up for an ‘amnesiac protagonist’ RPG. The careful and quite charming visual design, including pseudo-crumpled ‘parchment’ edges, a boutique, or at least, rare, internal title font, and a handful of other things, speak of the fading edge of correct and comfortable warm and basking 1990’s page design. Summer.
Perhaps it is the sad, strange, isolated summer vibe I get from all these things and which seems to unify them. Of dreams engaged in darkened rooms while concrete bakes outside. Of a slight interior sadness and loneliness mixed with the deep possession of a fantastic land.
‘Stone Sphere’ is great.
(There is a side bar of ‘graffiti left around a portal’ so cringe it nearly made me want to kill myself.)
