The Mines

Miles beneath the Heartland, where soft living soil gives out entirely and the Deephearth becomes a lightless labyrinth of granite, basalt and bottomless chasm shot through with precious metal. The Deepfarers work it, and are the only Gnomes the others describe as grim.

The Land

Sharp bedrock and jagged tectonic fissure, glittering with veins of raw non-ferrous metal and uncut gemstone that pierce the dark like cold stars. The silence is broken only by dripping mineral brine, the distant groan of shifting plates, and the skittering of primeval things along forgotten crags.

The wealth of the Mines is rivalled only by their lethality: sulphur vents, blind burrowing predators, razor rockfalls, and ancient territorial entities that guard the richest seams with unyielding ferocity. Ambient gloom here swallows ordinary torchlight.

At the lowest legal level stands Gate-Under-Stone, officially a customs post and in practice a bilingual market town where nobody's paperwork is examined, and below it the kobold Deepworks begin.

The Deepfarers

Stoic and vigilant, their skin the pale slate or soot grey of polished granite, their vision perfect in absolute darkness, their bodies wrapped in boiled leather, heavy canvas and riveted bronze plate against shrapnel and falling rock.

Masters of seismic magic, geology and cold excavation, with an earth-sense that hears stress fractures forming in a wall and feels the tremor of a deep-beast long before it arrives. Where the Tappers are jovial, the Deepfarers run to rigid company discipline, working with pneumatic chisel-picks, acoustic sounding stones and grappling rigs — and repelling, on a schedule, the things that crawl up out of the lightless deep.

Encounters

Roll d100. The dark is the encounter; everything below is what the dark contains. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.