The dungeons one by one

Most dungeons follow the rules on Dungeons and danger. The ones here have something of their own: Grundlēas never ends, Fennmynster and Fyrdelf hide their ways in until a quest names them, Ūtgang is found only from below, Ælfhām lies in the fey’s own country, Dēopgang ends in a town, Meyn Bew opens only for a quest, and the four lairs each hold a criminal the Gilde wants dead. Hellegeat, the fiends’ own dungeon that a miscast tears open, has a page of its own: Hellegeat, the Pits.

Grundlēas

Grundlēas, the groundless, has no last floor, and it forgets. Anyone may walk there and go down. Every staircase, up or down, leads to a floor that has never been there before. Whatever you left on the floor behind you is gone for good: every creature, pile, and chest, and your memory of it too. Going down and straight back up brings you to a different floor, standing on a staircase down. Twenty floors down is twenty new floors back up. Up from the first floor you come out on the overworld.

Each floor’s danger is its depth. Nothing lives here of its own: every draw is a stray, so anything that may stray in the Ascmearc comes at its danger. No creature stands higher than the top of that roster, so from the floor in the table on, the draws stay as they are while the floors go on. Items stop improving where the item level ends. The locks and the hidden things get harder with every floor down, without end.

Its traps are arrows, spears, pits, and alarms. It is cold (6 °C), and it has no shops.

A floor pays experience for arriving only if it is deeper than any you have reached here.

Your allies come with you as anywhere else. Those too far away stay behind, and that is the last of them. Your companion or familiar is never left behind, wherever it stands. A named creature on a floor you leave has not met its end, and may turn up again.

The keepers of the layers

Every tenth floor of Grundlēas is kept by a named creature of its own, in its lair. That floor has only one stair down, in the lair, and it opens only when the keeper dies, at your hand or any other. The stairs up are where they always are, so you may always leave.

If you leave with the keeper alive, the next floor of that depth holds it and its lair again, as often as you come. It never follows you up or down the stairs. Once it is dead it never comes back, and that depth’s floors are ordinary from then on. A tenth floor deeper than the last keeper is ordinary too.

Every keeper leaves a corpse that never rots. Eating it changes your body for good: its own gift, gifts drawn at random, and a hard pull toward evil (see Profane gifts).

Fennmynster

Fennmynster, the fen minster, is what is left of a minster that sank into the marsh of Micelfenn: eight floors of its cellars and crypts, at 6 °C. No road leads there, and its way in cannot be found by looking. Sister Hild marks it on your map as you take up her quest The fen minster, the one after she has her chalice back.

The fen seeps into its rooms. One room in four is out of the ordinary (most floors have one or two): flooded ankle-deep, slow and loud to wade, hushed, or shadowed. Its traps are pits, frost, alarms, and teleports. The monks hid their stores well: more of its doors are secret than in the other dungeons. No one trades down there; Fennmynster has no shops.

Who lives there:

• The marsh’s beasts: leeches, frogs, crocodiles, wisps, mud golems, and trolls, with the lesser water elementals the rain and the fen water make.
• The minster’s dead: the drowned, the peat-dark bog bodies, and ghasts and fen ghouls, whose claws hold fast. Pale drinkers and mummies keep its crypts.
• Restless spirits that pass through its walls: corpse candles, poltergeists, ghosts, the shadows that drink your strength, and the wraiths that drink your life. Stone haunts drift through the minster’s walls.
• The cult that came to the ruin: cultists and their priests. Somewhere in the dark is the bog hag, whom you meet once in your life.
• Fey of the damp haunt the cellars: pixies, sprites, boggles, quicklings, satyrs, and darklings.
• The cold water stirs with water and frost motes and lesser ice elementals.

At the very bottom lies the sunken crypt: a nave of shallow water between the monks’ tombs, where two of the drowned still stand guard. At its far end a dry dais holds an altar with the minster reliquary on it, which Sister Hild’s last quest asks for. The crypt is on the eighth floor and nowhere else.

Fyrdelf

Fyrdelf, the fire delving, is the duergar’s mine under the hills of Ascdūn, below the volcano. No road leads there, and its way in cannot be found by looking. Factor Wulfrun marks it on your map as you take up her quest The lost shaft. She offers it once you have been four floors down into Cealdhlāw for the reeve, and gives it to you only once you have reached level 5.

Its first four floors are the galleries: rooms and passages at 10 °C. The eight below are the deep workings: wide caves that grow hotter toward the volcano’s heart, 16 °C, then 20 °C, and 24 °C at the bottom. Its traps are arrows, spears, fireballs, lightning, and alarms. Few of its doors are hidden, and its locks are the hardest to pick of the three dungeons.

Who lives there:

• The duergar dig here: miners, warriors, and smiths.
• Creatures of fire and rock: ember beetles, salamanders, magma crawlers, lesser fire elementals, cinder elementals, earth elementals that move through the rock, ash wraiths, and basilisks.
• Down from the hills above: ogres, trolls, and hill trolls.
• The dead the delf’s fires left: ogre zombies and grave hounds, burning skulls, the charred dead, duergar skeletons still in their helms, rotting trolls, and the spirits of the miners that pass through the rock, knockers and spectres.
• The deep workings’ dead are many: draugr, barghests, hands of glory, vampire spawn, and the gallows dead. Hell hounds, fiends at home in the fires, run the deep workings too.
• The upper galleries belong mostly to kobolds, centipedes, and bats.
• Hobgoblin war bands come down to raid the duergar: soldiers, archers, legionnaires with spear and shield, warcasters, and sergeants.
• Orc war bands raid the mine too: raiders, shamans, berserkers, veterans, bowmen, and their wargs, with goblin wizards who call up more of their kin. Their captains and war chiefs, like the duergar’s priests, live deeper than the delf goes.
• Motes and elementals: the motes of stone, fire, and air drift through the upper galleries; spark motes, lesser earth, air, and lightning elementals, and water elementals through the workings.
• Others: the demons’ fires draw up lemures and imps, and meenlocks lurk in the dark.

Every gallery floor holds a foreman’s cabin: a timber-floored lodging where a duergar miner keeps watch. Behind a plank wall it keeps a spare pick-axe, his lamp, and a brass key to the delf’s locked rooms. Duergar traders keep general stores in the galleries, where a room is fit for one (about one gallery floor in four).

On the eleventh floor, in a small chamber off a cave passage, stands a hunter’s statue: a worn statue of a hooded figure on a raised floor between two torches, and nothing else. Coming beside it reads its plinth: “Letters are cut deep into the plinth, in the old tongue: LĪF ÆR DĒAÞE. Below, in a later hand: ‘Life before death. So the hunters swore, to the one who waited for them on the road; and the road gave them each a blade.’”

At the very bottom lies the drake’s hoard: a hall ringed with lava where the fire drake sleeps on its gold, with a rare treasure and a magic one. The drake lives nowhere else. Near the hoard, a second stair climbs from the drake’s floor into Ūtgang, the way out.

Ūtgang

Ūtgang, the way out, is the duergar’s old air-shaft workings: three floors of hewn rooms and passages, with no caves, cut from the drake’s deep up through the volcano’s flank. Its bottom floor’s stairs down lead to the bottom of Fyrdelf, beside the drake’s hoard. Its top floor’s stairs up lead out onto the overworld.

That way in is hidden, and no quest tells of it. You find it by climbing out, and from then on it is on your map: a quick way back down to the drake. Its floors are as dangerous as the deep workings just above Fyrdelf’s bottom (see the tables on Dungeons and danger). They are warmer the deeper they go, 14 °C, then 18 °C, and 22 °C at the bottom, with Fyrdelf’s traps and locks, the deep workings’ folk, and no shops.

Dēopgang

Dēopgang, the deep way, goes down from the foot of Grægweall in the south-west corner. It is the deepest danger of the march, 14 on its first floor to 24 on its eleventh. Floors 1 to 4 are the deep gnomes’ old cut galleries, where deep-gnome traders sometimes keep a general store; floors 5 to 11 are the wild deep, wide caves. Duergar, drow, trolls, elementals of stone and water, and the dead of old cave-ins live there. Secret doors and chests are commoner than elsewhere, and its rock gives only silver and gold for ore, so a miner finds gems more often. The eleventh floor’s stairs down lead to Gimmwīc, the deep gnomes’ town.

Meyn Bew

Meyn Bew, “the living stones” in the deep gnomes’ tongue, is a pocket of the elemental plane of earth under Gimmwīc. Its way in is a ring of crystal light in the rock of the town’s garden, beside Ysella the Binder. It is not there at all until she gives you her quest: then she sings it open, and it stays open. Its first floor’s stairs up lead back out through it.

Inside are four floors of rooms and passages at 12 °C, cut by no one. A faint violet light glows from the crystal in the rock everywhere, and a room of each of the first three floors is grown over with glowing crystal. Its danger runs from 22 on the first floor to 25 on the fourth, and only the earth’s own live there: earth elementals and greater earth elementals, basilisks, stone giants, and stone trolls. It has traps (pits, lightning, and frost), no shops, and no ore.

At the bottom, the fourth floor holds the crystal hollow, where the crystal guardian waits for you to lure it home.

Ælfhām

Ælfhām, the elves’ home, is the hall of the Unseelie court, the dark one of the fey courts. It lies behind a fairy mound in the holly wood near Holtwīc. Its way in is hidden: the mound looks like any other stretch of the wood.

Behind it is not the inside of a hill but the fey’s own country: three floors of twisting caves at 4 °C, with no sun or moon. A dim violet light comes from nowhere, and everywhere is just bright enough to see by, dimly.

Its danger runs from 4 to 6, and only fey live there: sprites and pixies, quicklings on the last floor, and boggles, darklings, and redcaps out of depth. No stray finds the way in, but now and then a fey of the bright court wanders the halls; it leaves you alone and fights its hosts. Ælfhām is thinly peopled. Its traps are pits and alarms, and it has no shops and no special rooms.

On its third floor there is always the moss bower: a ring of glowing fungus with a bed of moss in its middle, kept by a quickling and a boggle of the dark court. On the first floor, somewhere far off, pipes are playing.

The lairs of the wanted

Four more dungeons are the lairs of the criminals the Weyfarers’ Gilde wants dead. Each is four floors deep, of danger 6 on the first floor and 9 on the fourth. Each is hidden until Wat One-Eye names its criminal and marks it on your map; the other three stay hidden for the rest of your life. No one trades in any of them. At the bottom of each, and nowhere else, the criminal waits in a room of their own:

• Wyrtholm, the herb islet, is the caves under an islet out in Micelfenn (9 °C). Mother Sallow brews there among the fen’s leeches, frogs, crocodiles, wisps, mud golems, and marsh trolls, with footpads in her pay. Its traps are pits and alarms. Her still-room at the bottom holds her pots, her jars of potions, and angelica root.
• Wulfeshol, the wolf’s hole, is a cave under Deorcholt. Black Wystan‘s footpads and their archers keep watch there, with goblin bowmen he hires, and bats, centipedes, and barrow spiders in the dark. Its traps are pits, arrows, and alarms. At the bottom is the robbers’ hoard: the coin of the Fennhām road with a rare thing among it, two footpads at the door, and him.
• Bānfeld, the bone field, is the grave passages under a barrow field on Hlāwdūn (8 °C). Brother Osrick keeps the dead he raised there: skeletons, zombies, ghouls, the drowned, ghosts, and the worms and spiders that feed where the dead are. One room in four is shadowed or hushed. Its traps are arrows, spears, pits, and alarms, and rusty keys open its locked rooms. At the bottom is the unhallowed chapel: bones heaped along the walls, two zombies in the aisle, and Osrick at an altar he defiled.
• Brocenburg, the broken fort, is the cellars under the ruined tower in Holegnwudu. Sergeant Herrick sells his axe to the goblins there. With him are goblins with their archers and chiefs, footpads who ran with him, bats in the broken roof, and now and then an ogre he hired, far stronger than the floor. Its traps are arrows, spears, and alarms, and iron keys open its locked rooms. At the bottom is the captain’s hall: the old table broken up, the captain he killed under a cairn in the corner, and Herrick in the captain’s place, with two goblins at the door.

See also: Dungeons and danger, Hellegeat, and Quests.