The inhabitants reasoned that since they were going to spend all their days digging into the earth searching for ores and precious stones, they might as well build their homes there. Thousands of them lived in small but comfortable dwellings. Everything necessary for a normal surface life was provided for. Storage rooms, halls to receive traders, a place for their kept animals and cisterns for water.
I was told that planning had also been put into how to defend the city but of course that would only be necessary if the entrance were to be discovered by their enemies. As you might guess outsiders can only be led to the entrance location when blindfolded.
- An Account of Sundaland by Alom Takal
Every game needs some underground locations for adventuring and treasure hunting. Personally I never really liked the idea of generic dungeons. Mines and underground homes like Moria are great but an underground complex filled with traps and monsters just as a convenient location for players don't make sense to me, even in fantasy settings.
I need something a little more grounded and luckily there are real world locations that can provide inspiration for adventure locations.
One example is the various underground cities in present dat Turkey. Özkonak for example consists of 10 floors going down 40m and it could hold up to 60,000 inhabitants. It was also connected to another underground city, Kaymakli, underground tunnels 50km away.
Two articles with photos and maps:
In my research I also learned about huge underground rooms that have been carved out of the rock in Southern China. So far 24 of them have been found around Longyou covering an area of 30 square km. Most likely they were for collecting water but it shows what people were capable digging with comparably primitive tools.
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