Giant subterranean cities piled out far
under the sun-baked city streets. Byzantine, twisty layers of
rubble-choked tunnels (nee roads), cavernous temple fanes, forgotten
palaces piling on top of each other aeon upon aeon.
One of the elements I deeply love about
Tekumel is that hot and forgotten world's vast undercities. In the core play area empire
of Tsolyanu, a long-standing tradition called ditlana in which
cities—at least in theory—are razed every 500 years and built
over. Part sprawling megadungeon, part still-active underbelly of
city life, they have had a fascinating pull on my imagination. Not
surprsingly they have been long something I wanted to incorporate
into my classic D&D campaign, yet I have never been quite able to
pull it over the conceptual hump.
Why? Undercities on a Tekumelyani
scales are seriously spatially-challenging beasts. I've had
small-sized versions for many years, neighborhoods of cities
conveniently bracketed off with cave-in's or very compact and sealed
off little settlements (let me count the number of domed cities
sitting in lakes I stole from the Holmes side-view example). But the
truly sprawling undercity that matches and supersedes the larger
environs of the city it sleeps under? Intimidating.
“...The first level of the Jakállan
Underworld is drawn on a 17” x 22” sheet of graph paper, 10
squares to the inch–and each square is ten feet in measure(!). Thus
it is assumed to cover an area roughly 1700 feet by 2200 feet –
almost 1/3rd by 1/2 a mile in size, centered largely under the ruined
Temple of Hyáshra in the City of the Dead. If you consider the map
of Jakálla, each hex has been said by Prof. Barker to be 50-100
yards across. To be fair, Prof. Barker has also said that the map is
“semi-representational,” i.e. more important buildings appear
larger on the map than they really are. Even so, the top layer of the
Jakállan Underworld would require several 17x22 sheets to cover the
entire city. This suggests that it would be difficult to actually map
the entire Underworld...”
It's just not the horizontal hugeness of such a beast, you
also have any number of other complications to conventional mapping
to deal with: miles and miles of “empty space” (old roads,
side-tunnels, etc.); the vertical dimension of historical layers that
increase the total size many times; large numbers of entry points
from the surface; and of course the potential active use of the upper
levels by humans and other surface dwellers (thus also giving it the
more complicated social dance of urban adventuring).
One could find a massive piece of
architect's graph paper and laboriously fill each exacting section of
your undercity in piece by piece, all the while trying to allow for
the mental trick of knowing that your map still doesn't reach. I'm
not going to do that.
What follows is less tutorial—as you
can tell I am no expert—and more of me grasping for a method in
designing undercities on a grander, more thoroughly thought-out
scale.
Part I: Mapping the Layers
As much as I hate timelines and all the
attendant setting-bloat whoha when tackling a undercity it undeniably
makes for a practical starting point. I work better answering a
series of leading questions while futzing with some kind of
schematic.
How old is the city?
How many civilizations flourished here
and for how long?
I am going to start with a young city
by Tekumel standards, 5000 years, as my world is not quite as
ancient. I am going to say perhaps five different civilizations each
spanning a convenient millennium.
Who first founded it?
How did they order their city? What did
they think was important?
Were they displaced or did they just
evolve historically?
What lead to the city being buried? Was
it a fiery cataclysm, a more gentle abandonment, or intentional
process? Did anything survive on the surface?
How large of a surface area was it when
it was abandoned? What structures survived being buried?
Who replaced these city-dwellers?
[Repeat question set above again and
again until you have finished with each succeeding phase of the
city.]
I take a standard piece of graph paper
and start to draw out length wise the layers as I answer them. My
squares I am going to say are roughly 250 feet a pop to give me room
to work with. I would ratchet these upwards and downwards in scale
depending how vast of a city I want, but the exact ground scale is
really not so important to me as I am mostly just trying to grasp the
overall vertical, horizontal, and historical relationships with this
process.
The founding layer is naturally the
bottom and I place it there. I color code it for use later (blue in
this instance) to help distinguish it from the top layers. I am going
to go with my perennial “lost civilization” favorites from the
Hill Cantons, the Hyperboreans. They constructed a fairly compact
city with cycolpean walls. The city was submerged by a vicious
sorcerous deluge a 1,000 years into its life leaving the large stone
structures encased in a preserving 30-foot thick layer of mud.
The original citadel, high on a bluff,
survives and was incorporated into the next phase of the city (I mark
it on the right and make sure it is visible in my next layer) by the
Latter States who built a broader, yet less grand city on the site.
I draw that layer on my side-view with an orange color and no space
between the layers due to the relative shallowness of the layer.
Exactly 1000 years later, a Space Elf
host burns and ravages the city near completely with only some of the
larger, more durable. This city is larger and far grander than the
other layers with giant plazas, massive pyramids, aqueducts, etc.
Foul serpent women (from the future) encase this city again a 1,000
years into its life in a giant bubble of amber and collapse a
mountain over it for good measure. I draw in a thick layer to
represent the deep burying.
For mysterious reasons known only to
their serpentine minds, the serpent women hollow out a space in the
mountain rubble and construct a massive underground ceremonial space
(colored in maroon) only to abandon it nearly intact after a
millennium. The current human city of Dobre Rajetz rises on this
spot.
And this is what I am left with (click to enlarge) a simple but functional cross section--and more importantly a conceptual idea of what structures, flavor, and size each layer of the undercity has (and roughly where they fit in relationship to each other).
In Part II, I take up exploring how to
use my pointcrawl ideas to capture both the sweeping horizontal and
vertical dimensions of the space.
