VotE:Redux – Agriculture
Big lie – agriculture is impossible underground. But ofcourse that makes the whole setting a lie, which it is. Since VotE wasoriginally a ‘more-pseudo-naturalistic’ view of an underground world, acceptingand systematising that pseudo-reality just takes me closer and closer to thepoint of; “this wouldn’t actually work”.
You could never have enough rope. Never carry enoughlight. Never find enough to eat. Never stay warm enough. Likewise, you couldn’tgrow things underground. In a way it would be more honourable to accept a morehighly 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 beinteresting 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 broadlylike a man which feeds on the kinds of food men need, and also those who feedupon such men.
Omnivores like Humans, Cambrimen, Chaos Goblins, Dvargir,Knotsmen, Funginids (usually), Olm (though they are Uncivilised), RayMen, andTrilobite Knights.
Rare obligate civilised predators like Opal-WingedChiropterae, Soft-Heads, and Vampires. In particular there will usually only beone Soft-Head or Vampire in even a large city.
‘Non-Mortal’ in this sense means less ‘immortals’, butthose who are not part of an easily comprehensible food chain, or who simplyrequire no sustenance, like Golems (many Vizier of Deep Janeen), Aelf-Adal,Archeans, Silichominids, Substratals and the Dead. Though each or all of thesemay require abstruse or specialised sustenance, for which a complex mortalpopulation is usually a boon.
Populations
This is the most made-up part of everything. Citiesdefinitely couldn’t exist underground but we must build an illusory scaffoldingto make it feel as if they could. I base my estimations on a veryshallow understanding of desert-cities during the vague-medieval world andancient world. If I want to come up with figures about how many of such andsuch there should be, then I begin with the idea of places in a vastdesert, 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 besustained by, complex systems of power which will almost guarantee asubstantial non-mortal population. The functional population could be 40or 50 thousand.
Likely the seat of an Aelf-Adal Terror-Lord, or a Capitalfor some more-mortal power, such as Knotsmen or Dvargir. Should be thecentrepiece of a Campaign and/or the only or dominating major polity in a largeVolume.
· Roll two, three or four times on three or fourtime 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-mortalpopulation.
A large city(20k or more with a majority non-mortalpopulation.
· Roll once on ‘Rare & Singular’
· Roll twice on ‘Common Systems’
· Or; ignore ‘Rare & Singular’ and three timeson ‘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%) mortalpopulation.
A City (up to 50k) with a very low (1% to 3%) mortalpopulation.
· 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 specificallysupernatural 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, feedingall kinds of life, fungal forests indeed. If the runoff could be managed somehow (elemental or magical aid?) it might form the base of a valuable nitratesource.
Radiation
Plutos realm. A long-standing eruption of radioactivebasalt, or some strange and complex xenolith still humming with radioactivity.This could even be an Archean or Substratal Keep or Embassy, forming a kind ofculture-within-a-culture, or a quarter, while also generating energy for therest of the settlement.
Citizens farm black radiation-eating fungi like the massinside the Chernobyl reactor.
Migration Route
A huge and regular migration of flying beasts likeLamenters, Micro-Bats, Mega-Moths or some other stranger species that may livelargely on the surface, or even exist between realities, but which passesthrough this chokepoint at predictable and regular intervals.
Could be something as simple as airborne spores orfloating plankton from some higher realm.
Immaterial Exchange Environments
Rare Energy Exchanges can be the basis of an Underworldfood chain; entities that can convert something usually inaccessible to our realityinto real and consumable flesh.
(This helps get rid of all the ghosts and dreams fromthose 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 feaston the ghosts of insects. Perhaps these bats themselves are ‘harvested’ bysubtle nets, or perhaps the exploitation of their guano is a saner long-termpolicy.
This City then, must lie at some crossroads betweenafterlives, or be present at the vortex point of some long, slow, maelstrom ofsouls.
Mnemoculture
Snails which eat memory. Difficult to harvest or feed,but in theory, a renewable resource.
Harvesting directly via the individual would bedifficult, instead let each pay a memory tax, one teased from their skulls inthe manner of Severus Snape, then decanted and mixed into fertiliser and spreadinto the terraced gardens of Snails, which sustain in their turn, true gardensof fungi.
Psychoculture From Above
City feeds on literalised psychic emanations from above -depends on angst and trouble of surface cultures and works to ensure continuityof supply. May instrumentalise abandoned dErO tech, or similar, to producecrude psycho-slop for the masses and gardens.
From BelowCity feeds on literalised psychic emanations from below -likely eating the dreams of a mad god or chthulu-esque entity. Reliable supplybut drives everyone even more insane than usual.
(Rare) AutophagyCity feeds on own literalised psychic emanations. Ownculture tuned for maximum sensation & experience to ensure continuity ofsupply but they must feel or starve and jadedness-famine is an inevitableconsequence of high-intensity feeling.
Umbraculture
Darkness moves through the underworld like semi-sentientweather, harvested by wind-traps woven by hyperdimensional limbs, condensing,perhaps to lucent black mana, scraped and harvested from traps by guilds orbloodlines.
The pollutant in this case would be Eigengrau. Not thepredatory Caterpillar thing, but the colourless ‘back ground grey’ hanging overthe city like smog. (Though likely nearby volumes are infested withEigengrau-the-monster, drawn by the Un-Smog).
Somnoculture
The devouring of dreams sounds almost too-gentle amethod. But of course we don’t even know what dreams do, and so cannotunderstand their loss. Need the dreams come right from the head? Or could theybe harvested from ambient air in the manner of Gheists?
Passive SomnocultureAn Aelf-Adal Terror-Lord, (Tyranofictor? Tyranosomnia?),being composed party of dreams, might have a clear idea on the weather of suchdreams and where they might go, and might locate their Coagulation-City in justsuch a place.
The method might be via fields of pale gape-mouthedorchids like unreal pitcher plants. Harvested they deliver only a queerpoisonous sap which must be treated before it becomes a waxy tofu. Anothermight be the construction of ‘Dream Traps’ in the classical hippy style, butwoven by intelligent spiders imbued with a dangerous magical sentience, andemployed on an industrial scale.
Active SomnoculturePsycho-Serf Agriculture; City farms in dreams - orforces others to do so - usually children as they have the most fertile dreamsand are easy to terrify and control. Generations of surface children secretlymade slaves in their own unconscious until they fear to sleep
Mass Pscho-Raiding; City simply steals food frompeoples dreams. If you dream of having a feast, suddenly someone withnegative-image black skin or some hideous dwarf/gnome things are stealing yourfood and won't let you have any.
Dumping Grounds
Something dumps food, or nitrates, onto the city, eitheras a direct trade for worship or just by accident.
Sewage End Point; either hyperdimensionally, orthrough very long term ad careful engineering, the City has located itself atthe 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 maywash up in vast beaches of rubbish and shit, along with disposed-of people, tobe harvested and picked over by the City Below.
Offal-God; A divinity of some kind gains worshipabove, , for ‘consuming’ and disposing of such unpleasantness, and another formof worship below, for delivering mana.
Food-Malmuke Class
Slave Clerics; raised without eyes, sometimeswithout tongues or even fingers. Brought up in total ignorance of everythingexcept the one thing they are meant to believe. Ignorant, lobotomisedmass-produced holy fools. Cast Food and Water spells en-masse. Like parasiteson the love of a merciful God.
Indentured Mages; created like slave clerics,though more difficult to manage as some intellectual capacity is required. Druguse and superficially high status can be more effective means of soft control.They cast 'Create Light' and Summon creatures regularly, to be eaten. May bedepopulating 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 inany particular setting, or it will get boring.
Autophagic Urbanism Ouroboros City
City feed offtheir own past, sending forces back along their own loop to take resources andslaves.
They must keep growing more powerful so they can defeattheir own past but the cultural and physical destruction of their own historyforms unstable paradoxes and cripples them in many ways. They live in fear asthey never know when their own future will arrive to consume them.
'Looper' citySends forces into their own distant future to do thesame. They practice forced cultural decline, creating their own 'Dark Age' sotheir future selves are not strong enough to defeat their current-selves.Result is more stable and predictable as fewer paradoxes result, but the citiesfuture raiding-point and its current-self are continually creeping closer andcloser 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 overcycles of millennia with herds of nomadic sonic pigs and cave crickets guidedthrough the volume of the cities agriculture.
False Sun
A favourite of Aelf-Adal Terror-Lords
Usually based around a large, open central area withagriculture 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. TheFalse Sun held in suspensions of mighty chain in the centre.
1-3. A 'Ghost Sun' made from the dead souls of deceasedcitizens. Pale light and you can see the individual souls trapped inside. Allcitizens must give their soul to the Ghost Sun on death.
4-5. Imprisoned being - chained light elemental, fireelemental, angel or devil. Held in spiderworks of eternal iron.
6. Mechanical Sun - rare, often using hyper-dimensionalmechanics. Gnonmen Capital has a Futurist Clockwork Uranium Sun fed by rareheavy metals.
Inwardly-infinite Ontological Harvest
City is inwardly ontologically shattered like aschizophrenics dream. Golems and child slaves sent into its fractured core toscavenge food appearing from 'nowhere' i.e. dropped or created by people whodon't exist.
This has a substantial effect on the cities layout,making it in, effect a ‘ring’ around an infinite inner core, which is treatedas a private reaving and pillaging area. (Although, being infinite, may also besupremely dangerous).
May be related, connected to, or built upon a foundationtaken from, the ‘City of Infinite Ruin’, or the ‘Incoherent Isles’.
Kaiju-Mine
The City is build on, over, under or inside someHyper-Being, either its corpse, or one somehow still-living.
This might be some ancient Titan, Arch-Angel or God, or amore prosaic Kaiju. Could even be an Elder-God equivalent.
The nature of the ‘substrate’ will likely have asignificant effect on the character of the city. If people are eatingAngel-Jerky, or God-Stew, or gnawing on Shub-Nigguraths bones, it will effectthe psyche, culture, rituals, even the religion and behaviour of the citizens.
This is also a massive singular source of food and willlikely be carefully and relentlessly defended from the many raiders andscavengers who would also feed upon it.
'Kite' Nation
Far, far, up above, a polity which exists purely in orderto service the City.
This polity may drop down food directly, send it by riveror via more abstruse magical means. They may send tribute, and/or even theirsewage and cast-offs.
A common method is a culture hidden in high valleys orinaccessible mountaintops, almost impossible to reach from the outside worldand live in either terror and/or worship of their underground rulers. They maysee the City Below as the afterlife, Dreamland, or simply a source offrightening and/or magical power and authority.
In essence this would be a little exo-nationalinterruption of the culture of the Veins into the surface world. It would besecret. Its defences would be strange and dangerous; the City Below, would takea deep interest in maintaining their ‘Kite’. Though they could not send largeamounts of troops or material ‘Up’, and whatever they did send would functionlikely only at night, their forces would be potent, magical, unearthly andstrange. A good origin for a Lovecraftian story or an entry-point to the Underworld.
Fisher-City
The City controls a ‘Bermuda Triangle’ type zone ofDisappearances. Perhaps related to a storm, a strange moving forest of shadowsor similar. Ships, armies, pilgrimages, small towns, caravans and more are knowto irregularly disappear in relation to this phenomena, which may be boundedpartially or totally by area or circumstance, (only beneath certain stars, orwhen the moon is thus, or once a decade between the mountains or so-on).
These things or people may be transported by magic, oreven charmed or mind-controlled into feeding themselves into something like theDeep Carbon Observatory.
(Another Dero favourite as their mind control machinesallow 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 actuallybuilt, (i.e. ‘Samaris’), another city above ground.
Goods consumed by the ‘Samaris’ are simply dropped ortransported down to the ‘real’ city.
Though expensive, and rarely enough for survival on itsown, this is actually a relatively fair and sane method of sustainment. TheUnder-City isn’t supressing, subverting or dominating anyone, their economicexchange is quite real, simply executed through a ‘front’.
Stable Gateway Light Well
(Another favourite of Aelf-Adal; they like ‘light’ abovetheir dreamlike towers.)
Often above the city like a false sky, or a moon shiningdown, this is your classic stable large-scale warp gate to some other plane ordimension. Of course it might be a portal to somewhere no-one wants to go, likeone of the Hells. However, many Hells have quite a lot of Firey energy and somelight, as well as interesting sulphurous weather that can come through. Itcould also be to some Realm of Chaos, casting a warping light over the City.
In most cases the ‘end point’ of the Gateway is eitherinaccessible or carefully hidden in the other Realm. Sometimes somewherefortified or simply hanging high up in the air.
The culture of the City will likely have some kind ofexo-settlement in the other realm, and may even have diplomatic relationsthere.
(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 atnight, if they have night wherever ‘there’ is), and hunt whatever Megafaunathey 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, wheredreams and depth interweave. There are many worlds but one deep dark beneaththem all, all Veins of the Earth being an expression of that fundamentaldarkness.
Increasingly I have turned to the concept of the Veinsbeing, in a dim and wavy way, multidimensional. Not in a cool sharp-edgedwarp-portal way, but in a soft, dreamy and edgeless manner, in that PCs mightwalk between the underworld of one particular world, and into another, withoutever realising. For, everything being so strange, alien and beyondunderstanding
and the mentality of the veins being timeless, dreamlike;how would you know or understand that what you were seeing derived from someutterly Other world?
It makes sense that things combine, merge and overlay,the deeper and the darker you get. Maybe on level one things derive almostentirely from the world you know and understand, but as you go deeper anddeeper in, you descend not just into physical depth but an eternal metaphysicaldarkness, and it makes sense that the darkness is larger than the light, orseems so, that the Veins just goes on and on and on more than should bephysically possible for a series of tunnels held in the non-basalt continentalcrust of an ordinary sized standard-physical planet, where really, once you getfive or ten miles down, it’s just too hot for anything to really do anything.
Yet in the Veins we find oceans, literal hells, fallensuper-scientific mega-races, time travel, dream engineering, creatures from inthe psychoverse ruling over mortal, and once-mortal, souls; for there is toomuch 'stuff' in reality, in all the realities, too many ideas, too manyparadigms and dreams, too many heavens and hells. It overlays itself, it pilesupon itself in shimmering argosies. It is overwhelming, confusing, evencorruptive of itself.
Too many things, too much. Things must fade, must sinkand 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 intonew life, rich and compacted; thus the Veins, a place that is the inexorableend point of all places, a gathered and unifying darkness, a place oftransformation.
And this helps with the physical imagination of theagricultural organisation of the Veins. For here cities can feed on layers ofreality, 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 bepretty cold in many cases.
Security – for villages and small settlements, stealthand secrecy might be viable methods, for cities it will be based more on thepower structure of the city itself.
Light Control – more important for small settlements whowill 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 settlementdevelopment but should be considered.
Pollutants – important, but boring, but very importantfor campaign play as it embodies cities into their environment and gives themcomplex knock-on effects, (also explains why the Olm keep raiding), VeinsSettlements and cultures will tend to be obsessive recyclers; it’s a closedsystem after all.
The Price Drop is is still on!
https://falseparcels.bigcartel.com/
A Night at the Golden Duck = £5
Deep-Carbon Observatory = £30 (-£10)
Demon-Bone Sarcophagus = £20 (-£20)
Gackling Moon = £25 (-£5)
Gawain and the Green Knight = £15 (-£20)
Silent Titans = £40
Speak, False Machine = £40 (-£20)
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.
