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| Source: my friend's "spooky images folder." |
Why Are There Dungeons Anyways?
Understand this: the Hex is not new. Nobody knows how old it is. This is not an expanding universe, it is one with well-defined dimensionality. They cannot measure the age of the rocks when alchemy can birth fresh rocks anew. Maybe the hexagonal ice-walls were installed at some point—there are, in fact, sects that exalt the idea of that prelapsarian planar eon. The power of the occult further complicates the matter—civilizations can fall, not into decay or ruin but into secrecy, into secluded retreat; to the scholars (but not Scholars) of the modern Hex, these unimaginable swathes of history are elided into a single time period: Antediluvity.
This should not be take to mean that the Hex is a “Dying Earth,” however. The Hex is a Living Earth—the cultures and sentiences upon it are not all pale, nostalgic echoes of a faded lost age. They are new buds, vigorous new forms of life, new ideas and passions and arts and hatreds. Eons past are not detritus but soil in which the seeds are planted. And healthy plants have deep roots—the Hex’s down is far more navigable than our own, and there has long been a continuum of cultural mingling and exchange between surface downers and dwellers of the upper mesocosm, for good and for ill.
The Interdark is a traditional refugium for peoples, ideas, and practices that have been scoured from the surfaces by force or by time. History runs deep there, and the rigid progression of historical stages breaks down into a murky mosaic—the complex technical civilizations of Dwarves, the analytical silklooms and tensegrity structures of the Drow, the slow, deep rhythms of the technology-averse but incredibly long-lived Olm, and others incalculable. There is something that drags immortals down here, a hidden urge - some desire to be in synch with the passage of hexalogical time.
Also, there are Illithids, commonly called Mind Flayers by all around the world in proud defiance of any sort of hubristic claims to ‘copyright’ or ‘product identity.’ Hex legal scholars have long since determined that nobody can copyright a funny squid-faced freak and besides I’m not even selling this, get fucked losers. I don’t actually know what’s up with them but I just remembered that I had resolved to not care at all about the normal euphemisms and placeholders.
Why Are They Called Dungeons?
Because kings used to throw prisoners down there to starve to death or get tortured and eaten by horrible monsters, duh.
Demi-Dungeons
These refer to above sea-level archaeological sites that are still (or have recently been made) “active” in a raiding and salvaging—tombs, labyrinths, etc…
On the top, these are usually of Late Antediluvian provenance and are inside mountains, fortified barrow-bunkers, and other such flood-resistant constructions. The underside has more and older surviving sites, which makes it such a magnet for topside adventurers (in the Cortés, Napoleon, looted antiquities kind of way).
They’re “demi” because there’s a lot of overlap in skillset, training, and hazard, but expeditions to these tend to draw in a more varied set, since they tend to be (on average) less vertical, more technically and semiotically consistent, better-studied and characterized, and easier to just pummel with explosives from outside and then sort through the wreckage.
Cleared Dungeons
Some dungeons are naturally vacant, or about as inhabited as a common cave. Others have been rendered devoid of their native inhabitants by some catastrophe, or by intelligent action. Exploring these is about as dangerous as caving in a creepypasta world, which is to say, you’ll statistically be fine but you could get got really badly so it’s a bit of an extreme thing to do for sport.
Organized dungeon clearance is an extremely lucrative and controversial practice that is a common target for symbionist and teratophile protest and actionism. It’s also a common source of jobs for those willing to serve as indiscriminate exterminators. Sometimes, this boils down to a routine pest control job of a sort not all that different from what’s required in modern residences (“pests” in the Hex are a little more varied and a little more dangerous than ours, requiring a more hardened and cunning breed of exterminator) and you can go home with a mostly clean conscience.
Other times, you will find flyers openly advertising jobs for genocidaires; while this kind of work is illegal in much of the world, there is rampant criminal collusion with “deep development” enterprises that results in unreported massacres, forced evictions, use of terror campaigns against dungeon-dwellers. These activities are concentrated in certain countries with controversial teratocidal politics, but were widespread as recently as the 9960s and still crop up in lurid news scandals every once in a new moon.
Neon Dungeons
A euphemistic insider term amongst professionals for a modern site like a bunker, office, subsextanean facility, or other kind of active dwelling that has been identified as a potential target for an illegal or grey-legal raid. It refers to both the halogen lighting common to this kind of place and to the modern, the chic, the now; neon as a metonym for the 9980s zeitgeist.
Many dungeon-crawling skills are cross-applicable, and crawlers who are both reputable and morally-flexible can find a fortune in doing deniable sabotage, theft, corporate espionage, and other Shadowrunful pursuits. Many more find a prison cell, a one-way ferry to Carcerii, or an early grave.
I Hear Ya, Bub, But What’s In It For Me???
Apart from all the various ways you can get paid to go do it, there’s a lot to be made in commodities extraction. Speculative dungeon purchases can often result in boomtown dynamics, especially in regions with weaker law and higher rates of privation. If you spend long enough as a hireling, maybe one day you’ll make enough to buy your own chunk of crawlspace and become the site boss—the ‘dungeon master,’ one might even say :dmthink:. These site bosses can get spectacularly rich or go spectacularly broke; they are a peculiar breed of business-person and are often loved for their grit and eccentricity or hated for their graft, idleness, insensitivity to loss of life, and zealous combination-busting. Get the UDW in, though, and they’ll clear up their act right quick.
The treasure-chest full of gold pieces is a symbol of the dungeoneering scene in the same way it represents a pirate or tomb-raider or something. Gold, both in deposit and artefact form, is an important strategic resource for both its numismatic and noctilucent properties; those who do not have magmatic, chemical or spirit lakes to tap for fuel, fertilizer and agriculture are totally reliant on the four fuels to generate the energetic conditions for growth. We have yet to discover a self-growing plant—at least, not one that doesn’t require dabbling in draconism. Naturally, magic in all forms is able to create exceptional cases, as is its general purpose.
All these forgotten eons, compressed into mulch, packing the spaces between those pipes and corridors that stay standing, the pillars that held strong. A complex layering of forms, hexological strata that outnumber ours by an immense margin, old wonders gradually digested by their own energies until all that remains are sumps of self-luminous unrefined azoth. Filtering this stuff into white mercury (AKA the regular kind, quicksilver, element Hg, hydrargyrum, etc…) and trace red mercury (the stuff that costs millions of gp per barrel) is well beyond the means of all but the most technologically advanced and well-capitalized, but any number of speculation firms are willing to fund expeditions and buy finds for a pretty copper piece. If you hit a reservoir above your transportation capacity, you can still get a hefty paycheck via finder’s fee; how big a cut you can expect is largely a function of where your name can get you through the door.
You can of course find all sorts of artefacts, meet strange people, encounter daimons both eu- and kako-, kill rare and endangered beaſts and strip them for their various libido-enhancing bits, and do all sorts of other creative profit-seeking arrangements.
What is a Dungeoneer Like?
The dungeoneer is a profession about as old as the miner—the two trades go hand-in-hand, to the point that in the industrial up they are traditionally organized under a single labor combination, the United Deep Workers.
They are a little bit like spelunkers, insofar as they are trained in speleology, and a little bit like commercial divers, in that they are getting paid, and a little bit like mountaineers, in that they are by necessity experienced in the techniques of descent and ascent, and a little bit like soldiers of fortune, in that there is an undeniable stink of ‘this should be illegal’ hanging over the whole affair.
There is a transnational character to the dungeon-crawler because there is a transnational character to the dungeon—these labyrinthine tunnels routinely defy borders and laws. But this is also an intensely local subculture, one that spawns entirely disconnected ecosystems of jargon, technique, etiquette, ritual, superstition, etc... that can be so finely grained as to vary from dungeon to dungeon. Nonetheless, there is a general distinction between the cultures of descent in the Hexagonal Up and Hexagonal Down:
The Up
Within the context of topside cultures, the aesthetics of dungeon crawling and soldiery are reversed. The soldier is a swaggering landsknecht or a loyal person-at-arms; the dungeon-crawler is a long-suffering peon or a cool operator. The soldier is bound by all sorts of rules of lawful combat; in the chaos of the dungeon, anything goes.
The crawler is a 3.5 dungeonpunk filtered through the lens of a Metal Gear Solid; the belts get replaced by actual harnesses, sensible carabiners and D-rings for climbing, MREs and tinned plums. They’re some of the only people who you’ll ever see carrying slaughter weapons openly. They eschew the massive polearms and cleavers of their motorplated surface counterparts for tactical rapiers and parrying daggers (or T-RAP and P-DAG, after the iconic discontinued military models that are still extremely popular on the secondary market). They have matte-steel machetes with sawteeth for wire-cutting, punch daggers, butterfly knives, batons, tonfas, and war-picks—the latter of which is a favorite recipient for various aftermarket pneumaspike mods.
They’re generally obsessed with compressed-air and pneumatic tech for its silence, low price, and abundance; they argue endlessly about artisanal handpumps or high-end autocompressors and which of them makes you more of a poseur; the most daredevil of them build custom body-harness maneuver rigs that approach 3D Maneuver Gear territory, with all the attendant ways that can go very, very wrong.
Their preference for tacticool gear means that when you see one loaded down with antiques and “costume pieces” they’re either an aesthetic rebel or a very, very successful salvager.
They like their guns cut short; a favorite joke goes that in mine towns, they sell shotguns with a dotted line already drawn around the barrel labeled saw off here. Standard vs. bullpup magazine loading is another bizarre cultural shibboleth - surface martial types think that bullpup rifles look ridiculous and will mock them loudly, which often results in a brawl. There’s a bit of a class thing going on, but in a way that’s finely-grained and highly specific; outsiders’ attempts to butt in usually results in a temporary alliance to kick their butts right back out. Crossover duels between saber-wielding legionnaires and rapier-wielding crawlers are a classic derby fight that rarely occurs “in the wild” but is still put on semi-regularly for televised spectacle. Technically illegal under modern dueling law, these fights are mostly conducted in free-duelling sanctums like Boncloud and the Dagger Islands and are a big attraction point for the new jet-set.
The old word for them is ‘katabatistes,’ and their exercise ‘katabasis.’ It has always been done in some capacity, even in periods of active sequestrationism, but the social basis of katabasis has morphed over time. During periods where mining concerns were often owned and overseen by aristocrats, it was common for the aristocrats to furnish specialist retainers to perform forward scouting operations—in fact, an obligation to do so was often baked into the coronal charter under which the original mine-owners were allowed to open the vein in the first place. It was fairly common for skilled thieves to have their sentences commuted to be indentured or enslaved for this role, resulting in the profession’s association with the noble art of the pentadactyl discount.
In the 98th and 99th century, katabasis became known in fashionable Azimuthi and Ormilláis circles as donjonisme, from whence the modern term ‘dungeoneer’ is etymologically descended. The term katabasis is still frequently used in official titles, in guilds, societies, sodalities and tongs more than a few centuries old, in historical fiction, and to lend a sense of pomp and tradition to what is generally a fairly undignified profession. The katacafe and katabateka or katabatheque are obvious examples of modern use in branding, either for establishments aimed at dungeoneers or for those courting an audience of groupies, wannabes, armchair adventurers &c.
Solidarity
In the early 100th century, the formation of the UDW resulted in the creation of a different stripe of professional descent specialist. “There’s always a plan if you’ve got a UDW man,” the old slogan goes, and this is generally true. Investors and spectators complain about the slow pace of UDW digs; the UDW responds with a shrug and a gesture at their ten-times below-average mortality rate.
In order to maintain the symbiocombinist united front politics the combination has agreed to blacklist all digs that would require uncompensated relocation of native intelligences. This is still seen as a cowardly and conciliatory stance by ardent symbionists, and this is a major pain-point in unitfront politics.
You can always spot UDW dungeoneers by their hi-vis armor, their heavy-duty backpacks with their characteristic cordage- and wire-spool panniers, and their massive fucking flamethrowers. Unlike your more conventional dungeoneer, the combies have no hesitation bringing massive gear and stationary artillery down there—their methodical style and logistics focus makes unwieldy equipment much less of a liability.
The Down
While the topside was weathering the Flood, the underside was subjected to the tribulations of the Millennium Drought. Many escaped Protomen settled there and, we now know, intermarried extensively with the local humans after a period of seemingly voluntary segregation. Others used some remnants of their semiotic inheritance to treat with Slaad and install themselves as wizard-kings, kind or cruel. These were basically Sword & Sorcery times, kind of a real Dark Sun of a chiliad, and are a favorite of underside authors as a rhetorical device, representing either a period of foreign oppression under the hyksos or a heroic age of grit, guile, and resilience, depending on the scribe’s leaning.
Things hypothesized to originate from Protoman influence include: the cross-cultural recurrence of hero-cults, the Scholars (tone: reverent), the Scholars (tone: conspiratorial), the popularity of absinthe over hashish, harmonic music, and the cold sauna.
Because of the harshness of the climate, the scarcity of food, and the brutality of the surviving polities (sometimes called ‘ark-states,’ mostly in topsider analysis) drove many underground, literally, and so there has always been a much larger human population. A parallel migration was presumably impossible for the bulk of antediluvian topsiders on account of their inability to breathe underwater and reach the bottom of the Hex-spanning ocean in order to get down there in the first place.
The dungeoneer exists as a profession insofar as there are ‘local guides,’ but the literal physical space of the subsextene is embedded far more thoroughly into the undersider oecumene. They could even be described as a kind of Balkans, a long-settled but often fractious borderlands region where the most successful undersider state projects interface and clash with their Interdark counterparts. In this context, the dungeoneer and the soldier are united—the dungeoneer is simply a soldier, scout, guide, etc… who works underground. Something of a jianghu, too.
Still, the terrain lends itself to irregular warfare. There’s a certain kind of specialist, skilled in traversal and dirty war, who resembles the topsider dungeoneer in generalities, if not in specifics. They train in urban and subterranean environments, consider basic skills of disguise, stealth, ambush, lockbreaking and entry to be essential tools of the trade, and often turn their expertise to less-than-legal ends. When politically-motivated, they are partisans, but when they are mercenary, they share an appellation with their topside counterparts.
Up, down, east, west, north, south, left or right, if you’re one of these tricky buggers, you’re called a
Rogue
A: Certified for Katabasis, Pragmatics, +1 Move/Round
B: Alert, Ultravision, +1 Hit
C: Improved Pragmatics, +1 Hit
D: Uncanny Dodge, +2 Save
A: Certified for Katabasis
In order to be a board-certified Rogue, you need to demonstrate expertise in:
- Lockpicking, device-tinkering, appraisal, and legerdemain.
- An unassisted climbing speed of 10’ per six seconds on up to sheer surfaces.
- Ability to move on a surface you are grappled to as though horizontal.
- Proficiency with modern move-by-wire grappling rigs and airjet RCS.
- Proficiency with all firearms and one-handed melee weapons (a fumble is disqualifying).
Since you are a board-certified Rogue, you naturally have all of those things.
A: Pragmatics
You are trained to engage with minimum risk for maximum impact. There’s no space for heroics down in the tombs.
If at least one of these conditions is fulfilled, attacks add +1d4 to hit and damage. For each additional condition, the die is increased by one step - 1d4 → 1d6 → 1d8 → 1d10 → 1d12 → 1d20:
- Your target is surprised.
- Your target is panicking.
- Your target is stunned.
- Your target is in a prepared killzone.
- Your target is entangled.
B: Alert
When you are spotted by someone you’d rather not be seen by, activate a trap, fall into an ambush, or otherwise enter a moment of high peril, you can make a single reflexive action - either a move or an attack.
B: Ultravision
Your eyes sparkle with blacklight glow. You have ultravision, which is like infravision but better. In addition to seeing in pitch dark, ultravision offers several benefits:
When viewed under ultravision , people's eyes emit cones of light like bullseye lanterns, revealing their line-of-sight. The color and intensity ranges from dull red to blinding white depending on the acuity of their vision and their level of attentiveness.
The footsteps of non-Rogues appear blue-glowing and lightly smoking, and their fingerprints glow with faint phosphorescence. These traces are wiped clean with the touch of sunlight.
Treasure emits an inviting buttery-gold glow, like soft firelight, which can often be seen through the crack of a closed chest or the aperture of a keyhole.
Other Rogues of fewer templates than yours are blacklit.
The information gained through ultravision is conveyed in spoiler tags, ||like this||. Ultravision is fundamentally the power to perceive secrets, and so you too are bound to secrecy. If you directly tell anyone else what you've seen with your ultravision you lose the power for a day and a night—you, and you alone, have to figure out how to act on the information you've gleaned.
C: Improved Pragmatics
When you are in the position to use your Pragmatics, your critical range is expanded by 1 for each condition you fulfill. If you fulfill all five, your target simply Fortitude Saves vs. Death on a critical.
D: Uncanny Dodge
Split your perception in two - close one eye to anchor half in place. For the next minute, you exist in a superposition of reality and simulation - if you open your eye, it is revealed to have been fantasia and you return to the moment at which you closed it. Otherwise, you may open it safely once the minute has passed to confirm the truth.
You can do this once per eye per day. To others, this appears as you occasionally blinking and then stepping back as if you have miraculous foreknowledge of the swinging axe that would’ve otherwise cleaved you in half - an uncanny dodge.
