The Roots
The warm heart of the Deephearth: earthen corridors, loam galleries and burrows built around the colossal exposed roots of the High Forest above, which feed the whole sunless ecosystem. The Hearthkin — everyone calls them Tappers — keep it, extend it, and sell its produce upward.
The Land
Massive timbered root pillars, thick as stone arches, twist through ceiling and walls, weeping luminous sap and pulsing with raw vegetative vitality. Where other underworlds are cold and stagnant, the Roots are warm: bioluminescent moss cushions every path, fungal lanterns bloom amber, and domesticated burrowing beetles share broad avenues with the roots themselves. The air is rich, humid and smells of wet compost.
The Motherstone — a great geode chamber where the crystal runs down into water — is where the moot meets and the nearest thing the province has to a capital. Tallow boils sap into sugar and smells permanently of caramel. The Ninth Hearth is the largest single clan-cluster.
The Hearthkin
Deeply communal and warm-hearted, with earth-brown skin and attire woven from layered bark, cured lichen and root fibre. They live in bustling multi-generational warrens where dozens of siblings, elders and burrow-pets share one hearth.
Their name comes from the work: tapping the living root arteries with non-ferrous bronze taps to draw sap, then redistributing that nourishment to outlying fungal gardens and subterranean fields. They excavate gentle loam channels to connect isolated grove systems, coax alien underground flora into bloom, and send heavily laden trading escorts up to the surface with distilled root nectar, medicinal shelf fungi and truffle cakes, coming back with silk, spice and courtly luxuries.
Encounters
Roll d100. Warm, crowded, and mostly full of people working. The Roots kill by accident more often than by appetite. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–09 | 2d6 Hearthkin on a tapping round, who will feed you before asking your business | — |
| 10–16 | 2d8 springtails turning litter in a compost gallery, and glad of an audience | 0 |
| 17–23 | 1d4 earthworms hauling tunnel-freight, running late, and blaming the sap crews | 2 |
| 24–29 | 1d6 hornworm caterpillars out of a fodder pen and eating the wrong gallery | 2 |
| 30–35 | sapfall from a tapped artery — hot, sweet, and deep enough to drown in | — |
| 36–41 | 1d6 young woodlice strayed from a nursery pen, and a frantic Tapper child | ½ |
| 42–47 | 1d4 dung beetles on sanitation rounds, entirely unbothered by anything | 2 |
| 48–53 | 2d4 earwigs in the bedding warrens, deserving most of their reputation | 1 |
| 54–59 | 1d3 rove beetles on a carcass, tails raised, meaning don't | 1 |
| 60–65 | a collapse in a loam channel, with bloodveil already growing on the fallen ground | — |
| 66–71 | 1d3 ground beetles night-hunting the broad avenues | 2 |
| 72–77 | 1d2 wolf spiders in the corridor loam, young on their backs | 3 |
| 78–82 | 1 shrew in the warrens, which must eat constantly or die and knows it | 7 |
| 83–87 | 1 giant water bug in a flooded channel, ambushing from under the line | 7 |
| 88–91 | 1 frog in the sump water at the gallery's end | 9 |
| 92–95 | 1d2 moles — neighbours, seated at the moot, and hungry today | 11 |
| 96–97 | 1 rat in the truffle stores, organised, polite, and not leaving | 12 |
| 98–99 | 1 gigantean centipede in from the deep galleries, following the warmth | 16 |
| 00 | 1 badger that has found the Roots, and nothing here will stop it | 23 |