VotE:Redux – Agriculture

Big lie – agriculture is impossible underground. But of course that makes the whole setting a lie, which it is. Since VotE was originally a ‘more-pseudo-naturalistic’ view of an underground world, accepting and systematising that pseudo-reality just takes me closer and closer to the point of; “this wouldn’t actually work”. 

You could never have enough rope. Never carry enough light. Never find enough to eat. Never stay warm enough. Likewise, you couldn’t grow things underground. In a way it would be more honourable to accept a more highly fictionalised Underverse with lots of light giving mushrooms, flat-floored caves and convenient cities harvesting something or other. 

Still, we have come this far and perhaps it might be interesting to consider possibilities, even just for their own sake. So; 

 

Who Needs to Eat? 

Largely mortals, and those who feed upon them. 

‘Mortal Feeder’ in these terms includes anything broadly like a man which feeds on the kinds of food men need, and also those who feed upon such men. 

Omnivores like Humans, Cambrimen, Chaos Goblins, Dvargir, Knotsmen, Funginids (usually), Olm (though they are Uncivilised), RayMen, and Trilobite Knights. 

Rare obligate civilised predators like Opal-Winged Chiropterae, Soft-Heads, and Vampires. In particular there will usually only be one Soft-Head or Vampire in even a large city. 

‘Non-Mortal’ in this sense means less ‘immortals’, but those who are not part of an easily comprehensible food chain, or who simply require no sustenance, like Golems (many Vizier of Deep Janeen), Aelf-Adal, Archeans, Silichominids, Substratals and the Dead. Though each or all of these may require abstruse or specialised sustenance, for which a complex mortal population is usually a boon. 

Populations 

This is the most made-up part of everything. Cities definitely couldn’t exist underground but we must build an illusory scaffolding to make it feel as if they could. I base my estimations on a very shallow understanding of desert-cities during the vague-medieval world and ancient world. If I want to come up with figures about how many of such and such there should be, then I begin with the idea of places in a vast desert, and with a culture like that of a desert people.  

 

Proportionate Food Needs 

High – 20,000+ mortal feeders 

This many mortal feeders with attract, sustain and be sustained by, complex systems of power which will almost guarantee a substantial non-mortal population. The functional population could be 40 or 50 thousand. 

Likely the seat of an Aelf-Adal Terror-Lord, or a Capital for some more-mortal power, such as Knotsmen or Dvargir. Should be the centrepiece of a Campaign and/or the only or dominating major polity in a large Volume. 

·        Roll two, three or four times on three or four time on ‘Common Systems’

·        Roll once or twice on ‘Rare or Singular’ list. 

 

Medium – 7,000+ mortal feeders 

A small town with a 100% mortal population.

A medium-sized City (10k to 12k) with a large majority-mortal population.

A large city(20k or more with a majority non-mortal population.

 

·        Roll once on ‘Rare & Singular’

·        Roll twice on ‘Common Systems’

·        Or; ignore ‘Rare & Singular’ and three times on ‘Common Systems’

 

 

Low – 500 to 5,000 mortal feeders 

A 100% mortal village or small town.

A large Town (5k to 10k) with a low, (10 to 30%) mortal population.

A City (up to 50k) with a very low (1% to 3%) mortal population. 

·        Roll twice on ‘Common Systems’ 

 

Experimental Agriculture Table 

 

Common Systems (d10) 

1: Natural boon, Vulcanism

2: Natural Boon, Radiation

3: Natural Boon, Migration Route

4: Immaterial Exchange, Gheistoculture

5: Immaterial Exchange, Mnemoculture

6: Immaterial Exchange, Psychoculture

7: Immaterial Exchange, Umbraculture

8: Immaterial Exchange, Somnoculture

9: Dumping Ground

10: Food-Malmukes 

 

Rare & Singular Systems (d8) 

1: Autophagic Urbanism, Heads = Ourouboros, Tails = Looper City

2: Elemental Citizens

3: False Sun

4: Inwardly-Infinite Ontological Harvest

5: Kaiju-Mine

6: ‘Kite’ Nation

7: Predatory Urbanism, Heads = Fisher-City, Tails = Psychic Projecton

8: Stable Gateway, 1 in 6 chance of Sky Hunters 

 

 

Common Systems  

Natural Boons

(Or quasi-natural. At least these are not specifically supernatural systems and are usually related to the environment.) 

 

Vulcanism 

May be no more common in the Veins than on the surface, and much more dangerous, as the gasses produced will have nowhere to go. 

Nevertheless the HEAT would be incredibly useful, feeding all kinds of life, fungal forests indeed. If the runoff could be managed some how (elemental or magical aid?) it might form the base of a valuable nitrate source. 

 

Radiation 

Plutos realm. A long-standing eruption of radioactive basalt, or some strange and complex xenolith still humming with radioactivity. This could even be an Archean or Substratal Keep or Embassy, forming a kind of culture-within-a-culture, or a quarter, while also generating energy for the rest of the settlement. 

Citizens farm black radiation-eating fungi like the mass inside the Chernobyl reactor.  

 

Migration Route 

A huge and regular migration of flying beasts like Lamenters, Micro-Bats, Mega-Moths or some other stranger species that may live largely on the surface, or even exist between realities, but which passes through this chokepoint at predictable and regular intervals. 

Could be something as simple as airborne spores or floating plankton from some higher realm. 

 

Immaterial Exchange Environments 

Rare Energy Exchanges can be the basis of an Underworld food chain; entities that can convert something usually inaccessible to our reality into real and consumable flesh. 

(This helps get rid of all the ghosts and dreams from those endlessly compacted worlds, of which there are simply too many, too much. See Design Commentary below.) 

 

Gheistoculture 

Bee-sized bats with lucent wings, small enough to feast on the ghosts of insects. Perhaps these bats themselves are ‘harvested’ by subtle nets, or perhaps the exploitation of their guano is a saner long-term policy. 

This City then, must lie at some crossroads between afterlives, or be present at the vortex point of some long, slow, maelstrom of souls. 

 

Mnemoculture 

Snails which eat memory. Difficult to harvest or feed, but in theory, a renewable resource. 

Harvesting directly via the individual would be difficult, instead let each pay a memory tax, one teased from their skulls in the manner of Severus Snape, then decanted and mixed into fertiliser and spread into the terraced gardens of Snails, which sustain in their turn, true gardens of fungi. 

 

Psychoculture 

From Above 

City feeds on literalised psychic emanations from above - depends on angst and trouble of surface cultures and works to ensure continuity of supply. May instrumentalise abandoned dErO tech, or similar, to produce crude psycho-slop for the masses and gardens. 

From Below 

City feeds on literalised psychic emanations from below - likely eating the dreams of a mad god or chthulu-esque entity. Reliable supply but drives everyone even more insane than usual. 

(Rare) Autophagy 

City feeds on own literalised psychic emanations. Own culture tuned for maximum sensation & experience to ensure continuity of supply but they must feel or starve and jadedness-famine is an inevitable consequence of high-intensity feeling. 

 

Umbraculture 

Darkness moves through the underworld like semi-sentient weather, harvested by wind-traps woven by hyperdimensional limbs, condensing, perhaps to lucent black mana, scraped and harvested from traps by guilds or bloodlines. 

The pollutant in this case would be Eigengrau. Not the predatory Caterpillar thing, but the colourless ‘back ground grey’ hanging over the city like smog. (Though likely nearby volumes are infested with Eigengrau-the-monster, drawn by the Un-Smog). 

 

Somnoculture 

The devouring of dreams sounds almost too-gentle a method. But of course we don’t even know what dreams do, and so cannot understand their loss. Need the dreams come right from the head? Or could they be harvested from ambient air in the manner of Gheists? 

Passive Somnoculture 

An Aelf-Adal Terror-Lord, (Tyranofictor? Tyranosomnia?), being composed party of dreams, might have a clear idea on the weather of such dreams and where they might go, and might locate their Coagulation-City in just such a place. 

The method might be via fields of pale gape-mouthed orchids like unreal pitcher plants. Harvested they deliver only a queer poisonous sap which must be treated before it becomes a waxy tofu. Another might be the construction of ‘Dream Traps’ in the classical hippy style, but woven by intelligent spiders imbued with a dangerous magical sentience, and employed on an industrial scale. 

Active Somnoculture 

Psycho-Serf Agriculture; City farms in dreams - or forces others to do so - usually children as they have the most fertile dreams and are easy to terrify and control. Generations of surface children secretly made slaves in their own unconscious until they fear to sleep 

Mass Pscho-Raiding; City simply steals food from peoples dreams. If you dream of having a feast, suddenly someone with negative-image black skin or some hideous dwarf/gnome things are stealing your food and won't let you have any. 

 

Dumping Grounds 

Something dumps food, or nitrates, onto the city, either as a direct trade for worship or just by accident. 

Sewage End Point; either hyperdimensionally, or through very long term ad careful engineering, the City has located itself at the outflow for one or more surface-level cultures. Or at the end point for a ‘magical disposal’ mouth, or inescapable maelstrom of some kind. This stuff may wash up in vast beaches of rubbish and shit, along with disposed-of people, to be harvested and picked over by the City Below. 

Offal-God; A divinity of some kind gains worship above, , for ‘consuming’ and disposing of such unpleasantness, and another form of worship below, for delivering mana. 

 

Food-Malmuke Class 

Slave Clerics; raised without eyes, sometimes without tongues or even fingers. Brought up in total ignorance of everything except the one thing they are meant to believe. Ignorant, lobotomised mass-produced holy fools. Cast Food and Water spells en-masse. Like parasites on the love of a merciful God. 

Indentured Mages; created like slave clerics, though more difficult to manage as some intellectual capacity is required. Drug use and superficially high status can be more effective means of soft control. They cast 'Create Light' and Summon creatures regularly, to be eaten. May be depopulating ecologies of some unknown plane like bodiless buffalo hunters, before invisibly moving their attention elsewhere.  

 

Rare, Singular Systems 

Things where, there really shouldn’t be more than one in any particular setting, or it will get boring. 

 

Autophagic Urbanism 

Ouroboros City 

City  feed off their own past, sending forces back along their own loop to take resources and slaves. 

They must keep growing more powerful so they can defeat their own past but the cultural and physical destruction of their own history forms unstable paradoxes and cripples them in many ways. They live in fear as they never know when their own future will arrive to consume them. 

'Looper' city 

Sends forces into their own distant future to do the same. They practice forced cultural decline, creating their own 'Dark Age' so their future selves are not strong enough to defeat their current-selves. Result is more stable and predictable as fewer paradoxes result, but the cities future raiding-point and its current-self are continually creeping closer and closer to each other until inevitable moment of mutual annihilation. 

 

Elemental Citizens 

Elemental citizens create energy just by living there. Like a resort feeding off a high-status 'Tourist' class. Could be Archeans, Silichominids, Substratals or others. 

Stone-eating bacteria or Archea common here, farmed over cycles of millennia with herds of nomadic sonic pigs and cave crickets guided through the volume of the cities agriculture. 

 

False Sun 

A favourite of Aelf-Adal Terror-Lords 

Usually based around a large, open central area with agriculture of some kind taking place on every surface, floor, walls and roof. Golems or slave spider-castes farming the upside-down area above the city. The False Sun held in suspensions of mighty chain in the centre. 

1-3. A 'Ghost Sun' made from the dead souls of deceased citizens. Pale light and you can see the individual souls trapped inside. All citizens must give their soul to the Ghost Sun on death. 

4-5. Imprisoned being - chained light elemental, fire elemental, angel or devil. Held in spiderworks of eternal iron. 

6. Mechanical Sun - rare, often using hyper-dimensional mechanics. Gnonmen Capital has a Futurist Clockwork Uranium Sun fed by rare heavy metals. 

 

Inwardly-infinite Ontological Harvest 

City is inwardly ontologically shattered like a schizophrenics dream. Golems and child slaves sent into its fractured core to scavenge food appearing from 'nowhere' i.e. dropped or created by people who don't exist. 

This has a substantial effect on the cities layout, making it in, effect a ‘ring’ around an infinite inner core, which is treated as a private reaving and pillaging area. (Although, being infinite, may also be supremely dangerous). 

May be related, connected to, or built upon a foundation taken from, the ‘City of Infinite Ruin’, or the ‘Incoherent Isles’. 

 

Kaiju-Mine 

The City is build on, over, under or inside some Hyper-Being, either its corpse, or one somehow still-living. 

This might be some ancient Titan, Arch-Angel or God, or a more prosaic Kaiju. Could even be an Elder-God equivalent. 

The nature of the ‘substrate’ will likely have a significant effect on the character of the city. If people are eating Angel-Jerky, or God-Stew, or gnawing on Shub-Nigguraths bones, it will effect the psyche, culture, rituals, even the religion and behaviour of the citizens. 

This is also a massive singular source of food and will likely be carefully and relentlessly defended from the many raiders and scavengers who would also feed upon it. 

 

'Kite' Nation 

Far, far, up above, a polity which exists purely in order to service the City. 

This polity may drop down food directly, send it by river or via more abstruse magical means. They may send tribute, and/or even their sewage and cast-offs. 

A common method is a culture hidden in high valleys or inaccessible mountaintops, almost impossible to reach from the outside world and live in either terror and/or worship of their underground rulers. They may see the City Below as the afterlife, Dreamland, or simply a source of frightening and/or magical power and authority. 

In essence this would be a little exo-national interruption of the culture of the Veins into the surface world. It would be secret. Its defences would be strange and dangerous; the City Below, would take a deep interest in maintaining their ‘Kite’. Though they could not send large amounts of troops or material ‘Up’, and whatever they did send would function likely only at night, their forces would be potent, magical, unearthly and strange. A good origin for a Lovecraftian story or an entry-point to the Underworld. 

 

Fisher-City 

The City controls a ‘Bermuda Triangle’ type zone of Disappearances. Perhaps related to a storm, a strange moving forest of shadows or similar. Ships, armies, pilgrimages, small towns, caravans and more are know to irregularly disappear in relation to this phenomena, which may be bounded partially or totally by area or circumstance, (only beneath certain stars, or when the moon is thus, or once a decade between the mountains or so-on). 

These things or people may be transported by magic, or even charmed or mind-controlled into feeding themselves into something like the Deep Carbon Observatory. 

(Another Dero favourite as their mind control machines allow them to create powerful giga-conspiracies on the surface.) 

This might be another good entry to a VotE Campaign. 

 

Samaris Economy 

The Lords of the City either project, or have actually built, (i.e. ‘Samaris’), another city above ground. 

Goods consumed by the ‘Samaris’ are simply dropped or transported down to the ‘real’ city. 

Though expensive, and rarely enough for survival on its own, this is actually a relatively fair and sane method of sustainment. The Under-City isn’t supressing, subverting or dominating anyone, their economic exchange is quite real, simply executed through a ‘front’. 

 

Stable Gateway Light Well 

(Another favourite of Aelf-Adal; they like ‘light’ above their dreamlike towers.) 

Often above the city like a false sky, or a moon shining down, this is your classic stable large-scale warp gate to some other plane or dimension. Of course it might be a portal to somewhere no-one wants to go, like one of the Hells. However, many Hells have quite a lot of Firey energy and some light, as well as interesting sulphurous weather that can come through. It could also be to some Realm of Chaos, casting a warping light over the City. 

In most cases the ‘end point’ of the Gateway is either inaccessible or carefully hidden in the other Realm. Sometimes somewhere fortified or simply hanging high up in the air. 

The culture of the City will likely have some kind of exo-settlement in the other realm, and may even have diplomatic relations there. 

 

(Rare) Sky-Hunters 

The City goes full Whale-Hunter via its stable gateway, using complex airships, they rove the skies of the Other Realm, (probably at night, if they have night wherever ‘there’ is), and hunt whatever Megafauna they find. 

These may be asuras, angels, devas, devils or demons. They drag back the corpses and feast. 

 

 

Design Commentary 

 

Multidimensional 'Compacting' 

The ontological compost heap of all realties, where dreams and depth interweave. There are many worlds but one deep dark beneath them all, all Veins of the Earth being an expression of that fundamental darkness. 

Increasingly I have turned to the concept of the Veins being, in a dim and wavy way, multidimensional. Not in a cool sharp-edged warp-portal way, but in a soft, dreamy and edgeless manner, in that PCs might walk between the underworld of one particular world, and into another, without ever realising. For, everything being so strange, alien and beyond understanding

and the mentality of the veins being timeless, dreamlike; how would you know or understand that what you were seeing derived from some utterly Other world? 

It makes sense that things combine, merge and overlay, the deeper and the darker you get. Maybe on level one things derive almost entirely from the world you know and understand, but as you go deeper and deeper in, you descend not just into physical depth but an eternal metaphysical darkness, and it makes sense that the darkness is larger than the light, or seems so, that the Veins just goes on and on and on more than should be physically possible for a series of tunnels held in the non-basalt continental crust of an ordinary sized standard-physical planet, where really, once you get five or ten miles down, it’s just too hot for anything to really do anything. 

Yet in the Veins we find oceans, literal hells, fallen super-scientific mega-races, time travel, dream engineering, creatures from in the psychoverse ruling over mortal, and once-mortal, souls; for there is too much 'stuff' in reality, in all the realities, too many ideas, too many paradigms and dreams, too many heavens and hells. It overlays itself, it piles upon itself in shimmering argosies. It is overwhelming, confusing, even corruptive of itself. 

Too many things, too much. Things must fade, must sink and pale away, not just to death, where everything goes, but further, deeper, sinking out of memory, out even of conception, or of conception-of-conception, beyond the boundary of unimaginability.

Where then, can they go? To a place that is not a place. 

Like compost they accumulate, moulder, and transform into new life, rich and compacted; thus the Veins, a place that is the inexorable end point of all places, a gathered and unifying darkness, a place of transformation. 

And this helps with the physical imagination of the agricultural organisation of the Veins. For here cities can feed on layers of reality, on ghosts and dreams from many lands, and so become 'viable'. 

 

Concepts for Further Development 

Construction Materials -  carving everything from raw stone is not enough, boring and will be pretty cold in many cases. 

Security – for villages and small settlements, stealth and secrecy might be viable methods, for cities it will be based more on the power structure of the city itself. 

Light Control – more important for small settlements who will be careful about guarding their presence. 

Warmth-to-Water – I have a whole chart of ‘water sources’ in development, likewise sources of warmth. 

Wind & Weather – less central to settlement development but should be considered. 

Pollutants – important, but boring, but very important for campaign play as it embodies cities into their environment and gives them complex knock-on effects, (also explains why the Olm keep raiding), Veins Settlements and cultures will tend to be obsessive recyclers; it’s a closed system after all.

FALSE MACHINE NEWS

The Price Drop is is still on!

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• A Night at the Golden Duck = £5

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LEICESTER 17TH MAY - ANOTHER 3D APPEARANCE!!

Dying Earth Catalogue, the people behind my recent adventure to Nottingham, have invited me to another thing

Called Campaign, the day-long event consisting of talks, live game play sessions and stalls will run from 11am - 9pm at Leicester Gallery and Leicester Castle, on Saturday 17th May 2025, with 250 people expected to attend.

I will be there, running a False Machine stall, selling signing and singing, until 6pm at least.