One of my favorite monsters is Kobolds. Speciffically the lore if them building undercities to feed on the city above... and sometimes even being secretly hired to build infrastructures and sewers for large cities because they are so damn good at mining and understanding stones even that even Dwarves would have to declare as "passable." Loving the real life examples here too caves were a massive part of culture for centuries. From water and cheese production. To hidey holes and even full living spaces... D&D parties need more archeologist and anthropolgists.
The way I see it, they are just as much master builders as dwarves... they only differ in ther views of themselves and their methods.. dwarves are often depicted as "proud" and a "starwart defender"... while kobolds know they are "weak and small" and preffer defending by being "crafty" and "agile"... their architecture reflect that, with dwarves making grand halls with intricate details, and with choke points in choice locations... while kobolds preffer hiding their presence with near natural tunnels, with traps and collapsable tunnels. About the "cities secretly hiring" kobolds.. that was the one line from ther 5e lore I picked up and ran with it on one of my settings, with a warren working for one city as their builders in exchange for iron tools and a chance to trade with them.. thus some nobles, merchants and guards were in with that knowledge, while the common folk were oblivious.. That was the same warren (I remember mentioning) on the "undead as workforce".. as it is the warren that employs their volunteers for a seccond life as skeletal kobolds, "the Eternals", working with their living siblings both underground.. and at night on the surface, as builders.
in DnD Baldurs Gate actively employed Kobolds to work and maintain the sewers specifically because Kobolds were very creative, adept at living underground and when given the opportunity and resources Kobolds were amazing inventors and built a lot of interesting things into the sewers including the boilers the pipes ect. just because Kobolds have a natural inventiveness. also on that note Kobolds are nolonger considered a monster they're now regarded as a race, and every race has an entry in the monster manual for some reason
Kobolds also make sense for sewer bargains because, like rats, they can live on almost any organic matter, and that includes faeces. That gives them a lot of incentive to build there (it isn’t great food, but there is a whole lot of it, and population growth is always a Kobold priority), and removes a lot of incentive to come up to the surface.
To perhaps play Chain Devil's Advocate here, I don't think the Underground City of Derinkuyu in Cappadocia Turkey was ever filled in, and it was rediscovered by some guy taking a sledgehammer to his basement wall in the 1960's... Now, to be entirely fair, the Underground city was still in active use until the 1920's, so there wasn't centuries of rubble to remove.
Smuggling can be a much larger factor than you implied. Many American cities developed quite the undercity during Prohibition, as the culture suddenly found it quite acceptable to build areas specifically for the distribution of illegal substances, hidden or barely interacting with the public infrastructure. A similar situation, where the ruler declares some common item illegal, could really build up an undercity fast with magic, criminality, and money intersecting
I think a big thing is if the "Undercity" is some buried dungeon, truly buried ruins in need of excavation or just part of the current city. I could easily see a magically competent city with a booming population that didn't have the luxury of outward expansion choosing to expand their city downward. The undercity doesn't have to be old, it could be the new development project for the city.
Cool! This one I can share with my husband, too, even though he's not really interested in D&D at all. (We are both engineers and he helped his late father to build our home, so all kinds of construction related topics interest us)
Love the references to real places, but disappointed that Rome was mentioned and Constantinople wasn't! The underground civil engineering in Istanbul is fantastic - the Basilica Cisterns are *massive*! Water storage is certainly a thing. Also, salt mines a la Krakow!
If someone is talking about history prior to the 1960s (which the commenter is talking about), Constantinople is the correct name. Furthermore, the choice of what to name something is a deep question of what constitutes a free society. The country we Americans call “India” is called something like “Bharat” (probably misspelled) by many of the people living there. However, due to America and other countries that are not India being free of Indian control, we are free to call it “India”. Similarly, Turkey’s President Erdogan wanted to change the name of his country to Turkiye (or something like that), and uses his complete power over his parliament to make it “official”; however, basically no one I know outside of Turkey has accepted the change, most importantly English autocorrect on iPhone and Android have not accepted the change. Similarly, the communists changed St Petersburg to Stalingrad, but a lot of people still called it St Petersburg, and that is defined by a noble standard of nomenclature that you should prefer honoring the names of good people like St Peter instead of honoring bad people like Stalin. Of course, we could go ahead and examine the morality of Roman emperor Constantine to see whether he is sufficiently worthy of respect to have a major city be named “City of Constantine” (Constantinople), but I presume that he was more moral than the Duke of York, for whom New York was named, but that is certainly an open line of discussion. In light of this nomenclature, it should be good to go ahead and use democracy the way it should be used, and send counting agents to speak to people throughout Turkey to find out what person they think is honorable enough whom they know about, and then run a poll with those names, and then the person whom people in Turkey overall find to be the most honorable has his or her name publicly proclaimed as the name of the city formerly called Istanbul/Constantinople. If we are going to change the name for something, we had better base it on something that is philosophically sound, rather than just take the first word on the issue from a brutal military leader.
@@evannibbe9375 St. Petersburg was Leningrad. Volgograd was Stalingrad, and Tsaritsyn before that. Constantinople was renamed in 1930. Turkey, or Türkiye, has managed to convince respected, English-speaking, international bodies to refer to it in Turkish.
Toronto has an undercity of sorts! Its called the PATH. It spans over 30 kilometers /18 miles under the downtown core and it connects with the subway system. I use it a lot and its super cool.
Nürnberg has a crazy undercity worth a visit. It dates back to the 14. Century, and was first installed to brew beer, of course. Four stories deep and interconnected.
thanks for this amazing video, I am currently working on a campaign in a city like Venice were the water mysteriously drops and reveals both dangerous creatures and ancients ruins of the city's pasts apperences
I once made a homebrew world where the main city of the campaign, Sul, was an old city built on top of an ancient, giant Ziggurat. This ziggurat had fallen into disrepair over the millennia (it self being over 20,000 years or more old) and was partially collapsed in places, and looked like a mesa for the most part by a great river. Part of the old chambers were even occupied as a rift had opened up on the west plateau. This exposed many levels that were rebuilt and occupied, now resembling a terraced city like the Incas. Some chambers around the sides were open, with some occupied. And new chambers were always being discovered and excavated by a clan of dwarves.
New York City is my go to for a real world undercity. There's tons of tunnels underneath NYC and we do not have all the tunnels all mapped out. The homeless are living there so it's still very much alive and active. They've got electricity, water, everything. You want an active undercity, look to them.
That's just wrong, they're mapped out, you just don't need to see the map bad enough. If you were in an industry where what's beneath you mattered, you'd have a list of numbers to call to find out
@@SicFromTheKush You're right. From my experience in the construction industry in NYC I know of 2 subway tunnels that don't show up on the regular maps. But they show up on the official MTA maps. However, sometimes it's a trick finding out who has the map.
Re: Chicago's tunnels. In addition to the Lower Wacker Drive sections that are so beloved by various filmmakers (in addition to Batman Begins, see also The Fugitive and The Blues Brothers), we have additional tunnel networks. There's the Pedway, a series of interlinked pedestrian tunnels connecting many of the buildings in the downtown area (and which does have points that can access the aforementioned Lower Wacker Drive, if you're feeling a little bold). And, of course, these in turn also link to the subway system at points, so you've got those tunnels as well. Beyond that, we also have the old coal tunnels--most of them long since sealed off, but which flooded a couple decades back, causing a good portion of downtown to have to shut down while the buildings had their basements pumped out and sealed more properly (most had originally just had brick and mortar walls put up, which were not meant to stand to a massive rush of river-water coursing through the tunnels). Those tunnels are now more heavily sealed, and in some places filled up, but others are doubtless still extant, though quite likely still at least partially flooded. And then, in addition to all of that, there's Deep Tunnel, which is an ongoing project currently consisting of 109 miles of massive tunnels connecting even more massive reservoirs, meant to absorb the worst stormwaters that Mother Nature can throw at us.
Paris is fameous for it's catacomb network that's basically unmines the entire city exept for the most recent part's. They even found a whole apartment with big home theater & such down there, which was likely a crimeboss base, before it was all gone literaly the next day after the police found it 😮. So there potentially is already a kind of under-City existing.
I'm surprised that u didn't mention the ancient underground Turkish city that archeologist still debate as to which group originally made it but it was clearly a place to hold up n hide longer term whenever neighbouring nations decided to invade the area. It was actually used for that purpose as recently as 1909, if I recall correctly.
I can't remember the name of the city in Eastern Europe, but they buried the old street level floors to accompany a 17th or 18th century flood control system. They just built the flood control engineering at street level and then burred it. After they built the new street, people added a new story on top of their existing houses.
one obvious thing you missed is natural cave systems! i grew up in St. Louis, MO, where there are numerous caves under parts of the city - under parks, under people’s houses, and even some under old breweries that were used to store beer due to the cold temperature! Most of them are sealed off (not the beer caves, you can take a tour!) but mainly within the last few decades. i’m pretty sure they were mostly used by teenagers to get up to normal teenager stuff, but people in a fantasy setting could come up with a lot more creative uses.
Dungeon Meshi, does a perfect example of an undercity built into the crumbling ruins of some megastructure, although its not really lived in by humans and is mainly occupied by demi-humans and monsters, however there is a lively market district at the upper levels of the dungeon that have this vibe. I kinda now want to build a great city similar to rome built upon the ruins of a forgotten dwarven city/excavation site which itself is built on a derelict alien space ship that is mysteriously intact in most areas. This labyrinth is infested with criminal gangs, cultists, anarchist rebels fighting back against the oppressive regime along with goblin scavengers, dwarven reclaimers, wild animals from the surface, eldritch horrors and ancient automatons. and don't worry about the modern sensibilities part, this world is post modern. Sure its very medieval on the surface but old world dieselpunk flying machines, zeppelins, and automatons are used sparingly by the most wealthy countries, plus the ancients were a post-scarcity space empire with technology to advanced to be replicated by today. I was kinda even considering the fact that most of the continental shelves of the planet have been warped over massive artificial superstructures by runaway terraformation projects. On the surface world, you can find rivers carving through skyscrapers so overgrown you'd confuse them for natural formations, and their are entire mountains full of the carved faces of forgotten heroes and kings of a bygone age.
in the case of the Mithraeum, those were actually built underground (or dug out), for religious reasons, so the 4th c church did not need to bury it, it constituted the foundations, and possibly a crypt, later forgotten.
There is an old midwestern town, Leavenworth that entire old downtowns street level is on the second story because of the flooding of the Missouri River right next to it. During prohibition the old first floor were used as speakeasies and tunnels were dug between the stores for smuggling.
one fictional city that does the excavation aspect pretty well is Ankh-Morpork from the Discworld novels. We don't go down there too often, but the hollow ruins made unstable by the river and relatively new Dwarf-made tunnels really make it an interesting thing to approach, effectively making it its own "gated" community that needs to be balanced right alongside all the other madness in the city.
I understand that all examples cannot be covered on a topic and countless examples can be made but I find it a bit strange, baffling even that the Byzantine underground cities were not mentioned. These were not merely built over and they kind of display that these fantasy cities most likely could exist maybe not to the extent that they do but they are possible even for humans of more primitive technology. I mean that would be my prime example if I did a discussion on this topic. More of an anthill vibe than the under dark for sure kinda reminds me of the mind flayer lairs I definitely think they deserved a mention. It just feels as if though Grungeon Master thinks only criminals and small holes and ruins can be found underground in a medieval setting hell even without magic with the right geography and human engineering you could get quite close to the underdark. Anywho great video though Grungeon Master and I apologize if maybe I am mistaken on your viewpoint of this topic.
After making this comment I looked in the comments section and saw a few people before me talked about the Byzantine stuff. A part of me was satisfied knowing that other people thought of bringing it up but I also now think people will just think I stole their comment and just rephrased it. To those said people I say this. "Nope."
@grungeon_master How do you feel about the way Bloodborne handled “Undercities” with their Chalice Dungeons? To me, that’s the most logical - if darkly fanciful - explanation for having “whole” cities in subterranean areas. You aren’t traveling to an actual physical underground location, you are communing with the past, but, as the past is buried, so is the civilization to which you descend.
This was super cool to see you actually going to the locations you talked about! I hope you had a lovely holiday while you were over there, the weather looks great!!
Bisbee, AZ, is an historic century old city which grew out of a mining camp. Many of the buildings backed onto smuggler's lanes. They were the normal freight routes so laborers didn't have to bring materials in through the front door. The surrounding hills are laced with mining tunnels. They completed a major renovation on their underground river a decade ago, separating and repairing the sewer system. Unfortunately, a big fire recently swept through downtown and collapsed the facade.
I regard 'just a big old sewer' as a step-up from those undercities that were just a big generic 'dungeon'. Still, what you've described is moreorless what I've done, using a modular approach. The posh part of town has some newish sewers. The cemetery has its catacombs. The old fortress was turned into peacetime civic structures but its dungeon is still there. Between all these are plenty of basements and - yes - tunnels can connect them together _but_ I'd also include a ton of frustrating dead-ends. For something grander, you could always go down the path of "my fantasy world is really post-apocalyptic science-fiction' a-la Shannara. Not to my tastes, but it would give you all the integrated undergrounds you want. Finally, for a US urban undercity in fiction, see the second Kolchak telemovie, the Night Stranger (1973), which uses the Seattle Underground.
An option that wasn't discussed is something like the Italian city of Orvieto. That city is on a butte and the population dug down into the tuff to build more on top since the Etruscans. As a result there is a massive many layered man made cavern system under it. Much of it was used as cellars and to breed pidgins.
Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere turns the London Underground into a fantasy undercity. The BBC made a TV version back in the 1990s. I can easily imagine a Drow city in which the supporting bones are made of huge fungoid "trees" with a matrix of branches and spider webs between them. The bulk of the city's traffic is along suspended walkways, with "buildings" cut into the trees and the matrix. The Ground level becomes an undercity inhabited by spiders, demons and the undead. Quite like Chicago really. In a lower fantasy setting the first subterranean level will consist of basements, sewers, underground river culverts, catacombs, crypts, and passageways connecting these.
I'm reminded that Montreal has a particularly well-developed Underground City. The Drow concept may be influenced by my time as a student at Bath University in the UK. The main campus concourse is flanked by the academic buildings and bookended by residential towers; the concourse is however on the second level. At ground level an access road runs the length of the campus under the concourse, appearing like a tunnel when you are in it. The Judges Guild package Wraith Overlord provided details of the underground environment in and around the more famous City State of the Invincible Overlord. It included basements, sewers, and catacombs.
@@Grungeon_Master Hopefully you get that budget to come to the U.S at some point. There's a lot here that could do with making its way into more fantasy (history of native tribes, stories of superstitious colonial towns or their western homesteading counterparts, varied and often deadly geography, etc.)
@@ethans9379 kinda had that in as under "stories of superstitious colonial towns or their western homesteading counterparts". Never underestimate the hoaxes/outright lies small towns will come up with to attract tourist money.
More urban post apocalyptic settings could use undercities. Old train stations, subterranean carparks and shopping centres, highway or bus tunnels, even sewers.
How about the Ancient underground cities in Cappadocia, Turkey. Some were able to house as many as 20,000 people. Fully carved underground beginning in the 8th to 7th centuries, and used up through the 14th century.
Great video as always - Loved the views from Rome. I immediately started typing a comment about San Clemente, before you mentioned it! I found it so emblematic of the whole city of Rome. Keep up the good work 👍
I think the fact that a lot of these things are sheer impossibilities and oftentimes populated with terrifying Critters is part of the terrifying charm of these things another good video
My hometown of Salem Oregon has this exact thing. A network of large tunnels (with one as wide as the whole street) designed for moving timber through the center of town day and night. Other private tunnels lead into the mass of cellars, basements, and of course old Chinatown (which no longer really exists).
Been bingeing your channel for the past view days and it's been so helpful! I'm working on writing a fantasy series and I'm in the worldbuilding phase right now, you've given me so many ideas, especially since my main character will be an anthropologist working for a university who finds an old map with strange markings on it which will kick off the adventure. It will also take place a bit later than the standard fantasy world, I'm actually thinking of a magical version of steampunk (instead of steam power, someone invents a way to use magic to technologically advance society instead) - but it will be earlier on in the era so this kind of technology will still be a bit limited. Now I just need to figure out a magical/fantasy version of carbon dating 😅 - still early stages so will get there. Thanks for all this info, it is super useful!
A very cool and interesting video, it was cool to see you at the locations, I do love some history. As for an idea to explore, would river based trade/travel be far more significant in a fantasy world full of monsters?
Love your deep delves into specific lore. When you talked about cities and swamps, I thought you might go to Venice, as you were already in Italy. The stone streets are literally built on to wood pilings, banged into the soggy ground. For tunnels closer to home, though, try Exeter. Used and repurposed since the C14th. Worth a visit.
Could you do a video on tree-related cities? My setting has two kinds: one with multiple trees with bridges connecting buildings between, and one where the entire city is built into a giant willow tree, with whole roads fitting on the branches, and the trunk having an internal network of lifts to reach the top, drawing on the tree's own inherent magic supply for power. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this concept.
The theme of underground is one where I feel a stronger than usual tension between metaphor and literality. "Going deep" to "dark, caves, and deep, tunnels" is a line so typical of guided ocidental meditation and self-hypnosis because it is easy to tie underground with unconscious (or "sub"conscious, if you prefer). Regardless of which school of Psychology we fancy. That connection feels so natural that author writing 'on top' of that trope mix the metaphor in the plot and descriptions almost inevitably. Takes deliberated effort and attention to avoid doing that. And actually describe an underground city as a city that is bellow, literal, ground. There is nothing wrong in use the lines from manuals of hypnosis as inspiration, and mix a lot of metaphor in the fantasy setting. That goes without saying. I suppose the only reason to make the effort of take the opposite road, the road of literality, in this case. Is precisely the fact that it is such a hard and (because of being hard) unexplored road.
One of my favourite undercities is Edinburgh. Not huge, but formed by an interesting series of decisions and changing political landscapes, that led to one of the most intriguingly laid out undercities in the world, and starting right in the medieval era.
I personally thought for a while now that a few of the closer to service underdark tunnels. Would be used readily by opportunistic traders. As a form of all year round weatherproof highway.
There is also a town under Glasgow station and a number of areas under Edinburgh like streets and suburbs. The world's first skyscrapers were in Scotland. Many, as the world developed, were knocked down and the bottom stories were used as foundations and the street levels were raised. Others were bricked up and new buildings built on top of when the black plague wrecked havoc because the people couldn't be helped so to stop it spreading they'd get bricked up in their homes and many are still bricked up after hundreds of years. Others were literally cut into the stone because the lowland Scottish population grew so fast they couldn't build up or out fast enough so they built down as well.
Seattle has tours you can take of their underground. The sidewalks are built with patches that have little windows in them to let light in, because people were still living and working down their long after it was built up.
What's the city at 9:00? Palomas? And the underground tunnels, how are they spelt? Cnatts? K'nats? Just want to be able to research more. I've tried searching different combinations of "Palomas tunnels" and different spellings of Chnats and haven't had kuch luck 😅
It's come up a few times in my games that, in any city or large town in which there is a significant population of gnomes, dwarves, kobolds, or goblins, there is, without any doubt, a tunnel network. Usually it's under the area of town that those residents live -- if they live all over, then it might connect the entire city. It's often made without bothering to inform or get permission from local authorities, though in some cases they do, usually they will just make a tunnel network b/c they are more comfortable having underground routes and meeting places, often even expanding their homes so a small cheap cottage on the surface might be one of the larger homes in town when you get into the basement. since they are done by citizens, with no central plan or authority, they tend to form organically and be a bit of a maze that really only the locals know how to navigate. (They also depend somewhat on these species being naturally adept tunnelers -- they have a degree of innate intuitive understanding of how to tunnel without collapsing the city overhead.) My last campaign, the party ended up calling in a favour from a dwarven party member's brother who lived in a city they got into some trouble in -- they knew there had to be a tunnel system because they'd been to a few other cities with similar dwarf populations and found one in each, but didn't kno where to enter this city's. Player's brother brought them into the tunnels and hid them in a room in an unfinished epansion of the tunnels for the day so they could rest before getting away from town.
Additional ideas for tunnels: Underground flood water diversion facilities - even fantasy cities are susceptible to flooding. Cities are often constructed around mines, there could be a vast complex of sealed and perhaps forgotten mineshafts under cities. Cave systems Coal tunnels used for distributing coal around city. Make up stuff for why there are tunnels - maybe there is an animal / monster that makes long burrows - giant moles, worms, ants, minotaur maze. Maybe there is a massive tree in center of city with hollow roots. Maybe the mountain you are on used to be giant creature / golem and the tunnels are it's blood vessels.
Actually, I think the idea of undercities comes from a more modern source: highway overpasses. If you've ever been to Philadelphia, and seen the absolute monstrosity that is the I-95 interchange, you can see where someone might get the idea for a whole city existing under another one. Kind of a combination of highway overpasses and those Dutch bridges with buildings on them. Some areas of Minneapolis are kind of like the dystopian "undercity": because the enclosed skyway passes over these blocks businesses don't last and therefore the empty storefronts attract criminals and addicts. The skyway of course exists because Minneapolis gets lake effect snow, which can easily bury street level doors. But the skyway prioritizes the wealthier neighborhoods and government buildings, because good old fashioned local government corruption.
There's a great example of a medieval sewer system in York. It's an open drain going down the middle of the Shambles (a 14th century street). In contrast, Nottingham was built on sandstone and the inhabitants dug numerous caves under the city. You can visit some of them. They have been used for hundreds of years as shelters, stables, brewhouses, cellars, wells, tanneries, temples, and eventually air raid shelters.
Robin Hobb's The Liveship Trader's Trilogy and The Rain Wild Chronicles have pretty much the same kind of situation that you described. Later culture finds out about a forgotten ruined city and "mines" it from its riches (mostly trinkets) that they don't mostly understand the use of and make a living by selling them. There are some dangers that you described and some that you didn't mention. Another example of a fantasy underground city that is somewhat making sense and working; is in Raymond E. Feist's Serpentwar Saga. It is established in earlier parts ( Legends of the Riftwar, IIRC). It has guild of thieves/smugglers whose boss actually has connections to the royal family. The age is set somewhere between enlightenment and ships-of-the-line days. Notably without muskets, though some black powder or similar. Hint: underground cities can be used to make lives of invading forces hell multiple ways. At least personally those were examples of a well thought out system. At least for their respective settings and for the other stuff going on in the world.
For the underground cities underneath a normal one, there are several cities where people kept building upwards as the buildings sunk underneath the normal ground level, often with things layered over it with the streets. For sewers, all you really need to have a massive sewer system is to have a lot of water involved, mainly with rain and similar where they are more of a storm sewer that the city might also use for actual sewage...and there's several cities where they buried even entire rivers under their streets.
As an History nerd and a wannabe fantasy writter, this video gave me a lot to ponder. Especially since I've considered making some undercities in my fantasy setting. On a side note, a topic that would interest me are anthropomorphic animals. Either as a whole, or some species or types in particular. (Lionfolk, Wolfkin... or more surprising ones perhaps, like Otterfolk or Dolphinkin?)
One thing I'm surprised you didn't mention is Derinkuyu! It's a real life under city, built in turkey in the 8th or 7th century bce. It's huge and could house as much as 20.000 people at a time!! It has consistently been used by people in the area to hide in times of war or persecution as late as the 1900s. Which they believe is the reason it was built in the first place. It had living spaces, schools, storages and all sorts of things. The architecture is also ao amazing because it has tons of features that allow it to survive a long time siege. The vents, wells and doors between levels are all designed to be able to be shut off from the lower floors meaning that in case the enemy found them and got into the top floors, the people could still retreat further into the ground. Its amazing!!! Thereason they were able to build such an intricate city underground is because of the rock that is soft enough to dig into but stable enough to hold together. There are actually several underground cities/shelters in the same area and some are connectes by tunnels. The entrances to the city were hidden which is why it took us so long to rediscover them! A farmer found an entrance hidden in his house I think.
Laughs in Derinkuyu, a guy in 1963 kept losing his chickens in a crack in his basement, found an entire intact city over 260 feet under his house large enough to house over 20,00 people, they even kept livestock down there and had a sewer system and a fresh water river below even that.
Another great place to take inspiration from is Mexicali’s underground Chinatown. Chinese immigrants preferred living in basements because of the Mexican heat, and gradually dug tunnels connecting everyone. At its height, the majority of the city population was down there. You can see a nice little video about it here: th-cam.com/video/u_NYN7pMC1Q/w-d-xo.htmlsi=tJt1v_RGHg04CYZ3 I would imagine that Dwarven communities in mixed-race cities would want something similar.
The best and earliest version of undercities in FRP wasn't in D&D, it was in Empire of the Petal Throne RPG, ALSO by TSR, ALSO from the mid-70's. The world presented there was VERY OLD and was a result of urban renewel carried out at regular intervals, where the city was ritually demolished and rebuilt on top of the ruins. previous underworlds were, of course, ignored. In the world of Tekumel, the deeper you go, the older the ruins are.
If you've ever visited a European cave you'll usually find records of it's different uses throughout history. I recall one cave in the UK had Cavemen, Druids, Romans, Witches, families living there, wine cellars for monks, and World War shelters in it
I am now interested in developing an undercity for one of my capital cities in my scifi/fantasy comic. The city is older than any of the living races, built by a race that came before. It would have the infrastructure of that early version. Sewers, transportation, laboratories, etc. But then their race fell to war, which would lead to underground bunkers. The city was the location of a major battle, leading to its devastation. The ruins of buildings would become part of this undercity. Nature reclaimed this city for thousands of years as a new empire rose from the ashes. Much of the city was burried, but with many towers sticking up above the ground, leading to excavation tunnels. This civilization would build a new city in this location, adding their own transportation tunnels, sewers, bunkers, and underground research centers. However, this civilization would also fall as their nobility's treatment of the lower class became too much to bear and a peasant revolt ripped this empire apart. Thousands of more years would pass, this second civilization's buildings wouldn't last like the older one's and eventually, early tribal humans would cross over from a portal that had been left open to Earth. The humans would take shelter in the city's ruins until accidentally awakening the ancient AI of the city. These AI would uplift these humans and the humans would rebuild this city over the layers of the old. As human civilization rapidly developed, they would launch a ship to the nearest star, however, this mission would awaken an ancient race of energy-based beings called the Espers. These beings wiped out the expedition and head back to the ship's origin. Back home, humanity quickly built bunkers across this planet and Earth to prepare for their arrival, some of which would also become part of the undercity. Humanity was nearly wiped out before a suit was invented that could absorb the esper energy and kill them. They mass-produced these suits across the bunkers and wiped out the Espers and rebuilt their cities on the surface, but the suits had an unexpected side effect and the esper energy altered the wearer's DNA, turning them into the first angels, due to the angels being the soldiers who saved them, there was no initial resentment and the two races spread and continued exploring, finding more races and allying with them. However, after some time, a faction of humans and angels were tricked by Lucifer into rebelling against the alliance, leading to a large scale war, and more underground bunkers and tunnels in the city. So those are all the events that would add to a crazy, massive undercity, though mostly unused. But I've got several ideas for stories that could take place inside them.
Walt Disney World in Florida has an extensive undercroft. The utility tunnels are built at ground level because basements are unfeasible in Florida and they're big enough for vehicles like garbage trucks to drive around.
Best example are mining sites. The city of Odessa Ukraine has a massive tunnel network as a result of stone mining for construction. It was so convenient that people used to dig the stone right underneath the construction sites for materials. This resulted in the tunnels run right beneath the city above and the tunnels are massive, they were used as weapons storage and partisan bases during WW 2.
Rome was not exactly an undercity. Catacombs were used for burials more than as living spaces. But your quest is not over : Derinkuyu, St Mercurius and Kaymaklı, Turkey. Real undercities, build somewhere around the fall of Troy, fascinating stories, several levels, some still unexplored... Meant to live in, to fight in, able to hold thousands of peoples, livestocks, industries... 1500 BC Nothing they've done can't be done by a modern civilisation.
For those curious about a psychological/horror aspect besides your normal underworld creatures, check out the movie "As Above, So Below" which can help break up your typical undercity aspects!
One of the things that runs through most undercities in fiction is the fact that they are *foils.* The Under-city is a dark, dirty reflection of the Over-city. A physical place given to the forgotten, the marginalized, and the unwanted parts of society. So while there *IS* great stories built into the excavation of old ruins, the main point of a fantasy undercity is narrative short hand. An easy way to show to readers that they are leaving the glossy overcity, and away from the tropes the genre inherited from Tolkien. A way of showing the reader that the things they are going to find here are things the society wants to figuratively bury by literally burying it.
what you could do is that the ruins silted over but an underground part of the river washed out silt at a lower level. You could even have the adventure begin with a street collapsing into a dark tunnel below.
See San Fransisco. You _can_ have undercities that are navigable, where you only have to break a few walls to get into open segments. I think a magical world can have a wide variety of disasters that could bury a city without actually filling in all the gaps.
Yup, some 1600s-1800s vuilt sewers and castle escape routes etc. are interesting stories, dad used to work in the yugoslav water works mostly around serbia's Backa and Banat areas, and Subotica for example had an unexplored half finisged victorian-pre ww1 era sewer system that had a lot of folks talk about turkish treasure etc. but nowadays everyone dismisses it... maybe for the better since the few times we run into it it's quuckly hushed. Some cities had fortresses with elaborate escape routes, Novi sad I think has those, or some othercaves closed to the public... But hey, excavation would be a long time to do.
What?! My guy out here like a BBC Carmen Sandiego getting first-hand footage. Mad respect! I was sooo excited when you said Chicago - hard cut to my crestfallen ass. Come to Chicago! I live here! Would love nothing more than to show you around the Loop while discussing the theoretical socio-economics of fantasy worlds. We can go spelunking the oft-whispered-of lower LOWER Wacker! Haha!
I like the idea of a setting where monsters have dug out a giant cavern underneath a major city, and it is only held up by pillars, but there is a single weak point that could bring it all down; They are now secretly holding the aristocrats hostage and forcing them to be corrupt and give them weapons and gold. They could even be funding the other side of a war that the same city is supposed to be fighting. It could give you all sorts of morally grey NPCs and choices for the players.
In Edinburgh there was a valley full of old medieval thick wall buildings that was inconvenient to the rich so they built arches, like viaduct over it and on top of them whole new district, it wasn't by mistake, it wasn't down to the passage of ages it was urban plan, and the undercity was den of crime, with many arcade still not excavated by archeologists we can expect to find burglar staches or murder victims still there.
1) Underground cities in fantasy are not on the ruins of other cities, such as Rome and Tyr. They are built from scratch, so to speak. Given that they're usually based in high-fantasy realms, it's not a bad assumption that magic (outright spells or summoned creatures) were used. However, they could be built up over time with excavated materials being used to build the city. 2) If an underground city is abandoned, there's usually a good reason for it, ranging from a successful raid, widespread disease, or even magical reasons. In some cases, it's just that a better location was found. 3) If you allow that urine has practical uses and feces can be used as part of compost, then there's no real need for a sewer system as those would be collected and dealt with by other means.
To be honest in ancient D&D cities, with a lot of buried elven or even eldritch ruins and high criminal activity. It actually make sense why criminals would dig in a lot of those ancient structures to run illegal operations and some cult warship. The only complain is that those should not be dig up entirely. Creators could take many inspirations also from New York Metro and illegal underground bars during prohibition.
There are over 200 cisterns of Constantinople the largest is 138 metres by 65 metres and 10 meter high. It was built in the 6th century and was in use for over a thousand years. Then utilized in various ways. On a smaller scale Eger with a population of around 2000 in the 16th century was built on top of a limestone hill. They dug vast cellars for storing wine, often breaking into a natural cavern system with underground lakes and grand halls. On top of the hill there is a fortress underneath a catacomb system was built, again breaking into the natural caverns.
One of my favorite monsters is Kobolds. Speciffically the lore if them building undercities to feed on the city above... and sometimes even being secretly hired to build infrastructures and sewers for large cities because they are so damn good at mining and understanding stones even that even Dwarves would have to declare as "passable."
Loving the real life examples here too caves were a massive part of culture for centuries. From water and cheese production. To hidey holes and even full living spaces... D&D parties need more archeologist and anthropolgists.
They're also one of the best ways to TPK an overzealous group of adventures.
I've said this a lot. Kobolds will build and maintain a sewer system for your city, and all you got to do is pay them and give them a little respect.
The way I see it, they are just as much master builders as dwarves... they only differ in ther views of themselves and their methods.. dwarves are often depicted as "proud" and a "starwart defender"... while kobolds know they are "weak and small" and preffer defending by being "crafty" and "agile"... their architecture reflect that, with dwarves making grand halls with intricate details, and with choke points in choice locations... while kobolds preffer hiding their presence with near natural tunnels, with traps and collapsable tunnels.
About the "cities secretly hiring" kobolds.. that was the one line from ther 5e lore I picked up and ran with it on one of my settings, with a warren working for one city as their builders in exchange for iron tools and a chance to trade with them.. thus some nobles, merchants and guards were in with that knowledge, while the common folk were oblivious..
That was the same warren (I remember mentioning) on the "undead as workforce".. as it is the warren that employs their volunteers for a seccond life as skeletal kobolds, "the Eternals", working with their living siblings both underground.. and at night on the surface, as builders.
in DnD Baldurs Gate actively employed Kobolds to work and maintain the sewers specifically because Kobolds were very creative, adept at living underground and when given the opportunity and resources Kobolds were amazing inventors and built a lot of interesting things into the sewers including the boilers the pipes ect. just because Kobolds have a natural inventiveness.
also on that note Kobolds are nolonger considered a monster they're now regarded as a race, and every race has an entry in the monster manual for some reason
Kobolds also make sense for sewer bargains because, like rats, they can live on almost any organic matter, and that includes faeces. That gives them a lot of incentive to build there (it isn’t great food, but there is a whole lot of it, and population growth is always a Kobold priority), and removes a lot of incentive to come up to the surface.
To perhaps play Chain Devil's Advocate here, I don't think the Underground City of Derinkuyu in Cappadocia Turkey was ever filled in, and it was rediscovered by some guy taking a sledgehammer to his basement wall in the 1960's...
Now, to be entirely fair, the Underground city was still in active use until the 1920's, so there wasn't centuries of rubble to remove.
Smuggling can be a much larger factor than you implied. Many American cities developed quite the undercity during Prohibition, as the culture suddenly found it quite acceptable to build areas specifically for the distribution of illegal substances, hidden or barely interacting with the public infrastructure. A similar situation, where the ruler declares some common item illegal, could really build up an undercity fast with magic, criminality, and money intersecting
I think a big thing is if the "Undercity" is some buried dungeon, truly buried ruins in need of excavation or just part of the current city. I could easily see a magically competent city with a booming population that didn't have the luxury of outward expansion choosing to expand their city downward. The undercity doesn't have to be old, it could be the new development project for the city.
The catacombs of Paris is well known. A lot of the otherwise homeless people live in the underground.
Paris was my first thought
I was very surprised that he didn't mention them.
@@thebreadbringerprobably because it’s in France
@@jonathanwells223 adequate point.
Theres a large number of people living under NYC too. They dont see the sun for months at a time.
Cool! This one I can share with my husband, too, even though he's not really interested in D&D at all. (We are both engineers and he helped his late father to build our home, so all kinds of construction related topics interest us)
Love the references to real places, but disappointed that Rome was mentioned and Constantinople wasn't!
The underground civil engineering in Istanbul is fantastic - the Basilica Cisterns are *massive*! Water storage is certainly a thing.
Also, salt mines a la Krakow!
Belgrade too has tunnels. After it fell to otomans, Serbian crews that maintained it's aqueduct were moved to Constantinople.
It's not Constantinople anymore. It's Istanbul. If you've got an issue with that, well... its no body's business but the Turks.
If someone is talking about history prior to the 1960s (which the commenter is talking about), Constantinople is the correct name.
Furthermore, the choice of what to name something is a deep question of what constitutes a free society.
The country we Americans call “India” is called something like “Bharat” (probably misspelled) by many of the people living there. However, due to America and other countries that are not India being free of Indian control, we are free to call it “India”.
Similarly, Turkey’s President Erdogan wanted to change the name of his country to Turkiye (or something like that), and uses his complete power over his parliament to make it “official”; however, basically no one I know outside of Turkey has accepted the change, most importantly English autocorrect on iPhone and Android have not accepted the change.
Similarly, the communists changed St Petersburg to Stalingrad, but a lot of people still called it St Petersburg, and that is defined by a noble standard of nomenclature that you should prefer honoring the names of good people like St Peter instead of honoring bad people like Stalin.
Of course, we could go ahead and examine the morality of Roman emperor Constantine to see whether he is sufficiently worthy of respect to have a major city be named “City of Constantine” (Constantinople), but I presume that he was more moral than the Duke of York, for whom New York was named, but that is certainly an open line of discussion.
In light of this nomenclature, it should be good to go ahead and use democracy the way it should be used, and send counting agents to speak to people throughout Turkey to find out what person they think is honorable enough whom they know about, and then run a poll with those names, and then the person whom people in Turkey overall find to be the most honorable has his or her name publicly proclaimed as the name of the city formerly called Istanbul/Constantinople.
If we are going to change the name for something, we had better base it on something that is philosophically sound, rather than just take the first word on the issue from a brutal military leader.
@@evannibbe9375 St. Petersburg was Leningrad. Volgograd was Stalingrad, and Tsaritsyn before that. Constantinople was renamed in 1930.
Turkey, or Türkiye, has managed to convince respected, English-speaking, international bodies to refer to it in Turkish.
Toronto has an undercity of sorts! Its called the PATH. It spans over 30 kilometers /18 miles under the downtown core and it connects with the subway system. I use it a lot and its super cool.
Is that the walkways you use in winter blizzards?
Nürnberg has a crazy undercity worth a visit. It dates back to the 14. Century, and was first installed to brew beer, of course. Four stories deep and interconnected.
thanks for this amazing video, I am currently working on a campaign in a city like Venice were the water mysteriously drops and reveals both dangerous creatures and ancients ruins of the city's pasts apperences
I once made a homebrew world where the main city of the campaign, Sul, was an old city built on top of an ancient, giant Ziggurat. This ziggurat had fallen into disrepair over the millennia (it self being over 20,000 years or more old) and was partially collapsed in places, and looked like a mesa for the most part by a great river. Part of the old chambers were even occupied as a rift had opened up on the west plateau. This exposed many levels that were rebuilt and occupied, now resembling a terraced city like the Incas. Some chambers around the sides were open, with some occupied. And new chambers were always being discovered and excavated by a clan of dwarves.
New York City is my go to for a real world undercity. There's tons of tunnels underneath NYC and we do not have all the tunnels all mapped out. The homeless are living there so it's still very much alive and active. They've got electricity, water, everything. You want an active undercity, look to them.
That's just wrong, they're mapped out, you just don't need to see the map bad enough. If you were in an industry where what's beneath you mattered, you'd have a list of numbers to call to find out
The NYC tunnel system is absolutely mapped out
@@SicFromTheKush You're right. From my experience in the construction industry in NYC I know of 2 subway tunnels that don't show up on the regular maps. But they show up on the official MTA maps.
However, sometimes it's a trick finding out who has the map.
Chabad tunnels 😭
@@levybenathome Not to mention the unused 50 meter stretch of highway under Chrystie Street.
Re: Chicago's tunnels. In addition to the Lower Wacker Drive sections that are so beloved by various filmmakers (in addition to Batman Begins, see also The Fugitive and The Blues Brothers), we have additional tunnel networks. There's the Pedway, a series of interlinked pedestrian tunnels connecting many of the buildings in the downtown area (and which does have points that can access the aforementioned Lower Wacker Drive, if you're feeling a little bold). And, of course, these in turn also link to the subway system at points, so you've got those tunnels as well. Beyond that, we also have the old coal tunnels--most of them long since sealed off, but which flooded a couple decades back, causing a good portion of downtown to have to shut down while the buildings had their basements pumped out and sealed more properly (most had originally just had brick and mortar walls put up, which were not meant to stand to a massive rush of river-water coursing through the tunnels). Those tunnels are now more heavily sealed, and in some places filled up, but others are doubtless still extant, though quite likely still at least partially flooded.
And then, in addition to all of that, there's Deep Tunnel, which is an ongoing project currently consisting of 109 miles of massive tunnels connecting even more massive reservoirs, meant to absorb the worst stormwaters that Mother Nature can throw at us.
Paris is fameous for it's catacomb network that's basically unmines the entire city exept for the most recent part's. They even found a whole apartment with big home theater & such down there, which was likely a crimeboss base, before it was all gone literaly the next day after the police found it 😮. So there potentially is already a kind of under-City existing.
I'm surprised that u didn't mention the ancient underground Turkish city that archeologist still debate as to which group originally made it but it was clearly a place to hold up n hide longer term whenever neighbouring nations decided to invade the area. It was actually used for that purpose as recently as 1909, if I recall correctly.
I can't remember the name of the city in Eastern Europe, but they buried the old street level floors to accompany a 17th or 18th century flood control system. They just built the flood control engineering at street level and then burred it. After they built the new street, people added a new story on top of their existing houses.
one obvious thing you missed is natural cave systems! i grew up in St. Louis, MO, where there are numerous caves under parts of the city - under parks, under people’s houses, and even some under old breweries that were used to store beer due to the cold temperature! Most of them are sealed off (not the beer caves, you can take a tour!) but mainly within the last few decades. i’m pretty sure they were mostly used by teenagers to get up to normal teenager stuff, but people in a fantasy setting could come up with a lot more creative uses.
Dungeon Meshi, does a perfect example of an undercity built into the crumbling ruins of some megastructure, although its not really lived in by humans and is mainly occupied by demi-humans and monsters, however there is a lively market district at the upper levels of the dungeon that have this vibe.
I kinda now want to build a great city similar to rome built upon the ruins of a forgotten dwarven city/excavation site which itself is built on a derelict alien space ship that is mysteriously intact in most areas. This labyrinth is infested with criminal gangs, cultists, anarchist rebels fighting back against the oppressive regime along with goblin scavengers, dwarven reclaimers, wild animals from the surface, eldritch horrors and ancient automatons.
and don't worry about the modern sensibilities part, this world is post modern. Sure its very medieval on the surface but old world dieselpunk flying machines, zeppelins, and automatons are used sparingly by the most wealthy countries, plus the ancients were a post-scarcity space empire with technology to advanced to be replicated by today. I was kinda even considering the fact that most of the continental shelves of the planet have been warped over massive artificial superstructures by runaway terraformation projects. On the surface world, you can find rivers carving through skyscrapers so overgrown you'd confuse them for natural formations, and their are entire mountains full of the carved faces of forgotten heroes and kings of a bygone age.
in the case of the Mithraeum, those were actually built underground (or dug out), for religious reasons, so the 4th c church did not need to bury it, it constituted the foundations, and possibly a crypt, later forgotten.
There is an old midwestern town, Leavenworth that entire old downtowns street level is on the second story because of the flooding of the Missouri River right next to it. During prohibition the old first floor were used as speakeasies and tunnels were dug between the stores for smuggling.
one fictional city that does the excavation aspect pretty well is Ankh-Morpork from the Discworld novels. We don't go down there too often, but the hollow ruins made unstable by the river and relatively new Dwarf-made tunnels really make it an interesting thing to approach, effectively making it its own "gated" community that needs to be balanced right alongside all the other madness in the city.
I understand that all examples cannot be covered on a topic and countless examples can be made but I find it a bit strange, baffling even that the Byzantine underground cities were not mentioned. These were not merely built over and they kind of display that these fantasy cities most likely could exist maybe not to the extent that they do but they are possible even for humans of more primitive technology. I mean that would be my prime example if I did a discussion on this topic. More of an anthill vibe than the under dark for sure kinda reminds me of the mind flayer lairs I definitely think they deserved a mention. It just feels as if though Grungeon Master thinks only criminals and small holes and ruins can be found underground in a medieval setting hell even without magic with the right geography and human engineering you could get quite close to the underdark. Anywho great video though Grungeon Master and I apologize if maybe I am mistaken on your viewpoint of this topic.
After making this comment I looked in the comments section and saw a few people before me talked about the Byzantine stuff. A part of me was satisfied knowing that other people thought of bringing it up but I also now think people will just think I stole their comment and just rephrased it. To those said people I say this. "Nope."
@grungeon_master
How do you feel about the way Bloodborne handled “Undercities” with their Chalice Dungeons? To me, that’s the most logical - if darkly fanciful - explanation for having “whole” cities in subterranean areas. You aren’t traveling to an actual physical underground location, you are communing with the past, but, as the past is buried, so is the civilization to which you descend.
This was super cool to see you actually going to the locations you talked about! I hope you had a lovely holiday while you were over there, the weather looks great!!
Bisbee, AZ, is an historic century old city which grew out of a mining camp. Many of the buildings backed onto smuggler's lanes. They were the normal freight routes so laborers didn't have to bring materials in through the front door. The surrounding hills are laced with mining tunnels. They completed a major renovation on their underground river a decade ago, separating and repairing the sewer system. Unfortunately, a big fire recently swept through downtown and collapsed the facade.
I regard 'just a big old sewer' as a step-up from those undercities that were just a big generic 'dungeon'. Still, what you've described is moreorless what I've done, using a modular approach.
The posh part of town has some newish sewers. The cemetery has its catacombs. The old fortress was turned into peacetime civic structures but its dungeon is still there. Between all these are plenty of basements and - yes - tunnels can connect them together _but_ I'd also include a ton of frustrating dead-ends.
For something grander, you could always go down the path of "my fantasy world is really post-apocalyptic science-fiction' a-la Shannara. Not to my tastes, but it would give you all the integrated undergrounds you want.
Finally, for a US urban undercity in fiction, see the second Kolchak telemovie, the Night Stranger (1973), which uses the Seattle Underground.
An option that wasn't discussed is something like the Italian city of Orvieto. That city is on a butte and the population dug down into the tuff to build more on top since the Etruscans. As a result there is a massive many layered man made cavern system under it. Much of it was used as cellars and to breed pidgins.
Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere turns the London Underground into a fantasy undercity. The BBC made a TV version back in the 1990s.
I can easily imagine a Drow city in which the supporting bones are made of huge fungoid "trees" with a matrix of branches and spider webs between them. The bulk of the city's traffic is along suspended walkways, with "buildings" cut into the trees and the matrix. The Ground level becomes an undercity inhabited by spiders, demons and the undead. Quite like Chicago really.
In a lower fantasy setting the first subterranean level will consist of basements, sewers, underground river culverts, catacombs, crypts, and passageways connecting these.
I'm reminded that Montreal has a particularly well-developed Underground City.
The Drow concept may be influenced by my time as a student at Bath University in the UK. The main campus concourse is flanked by the academic buildings and bookended by residential towers; the concourse is however on the second level. At ground level an access road runs the length of the campus under the concourse, appearing like a tunnel when you are in it.
The Judges Guild package Wraith Overlord provided details of the underground environment in and around the more famous City State of the Invincible Overlord. It included basements, sewers, and catacombs.
" Quite like Chicago, really" LMAO 😂
The book is actually a novelization (Gaiman wrote for the series as well)
How to sneakily show you got to have a holiday in Rome:
Lol. Fair point. I was very lucky to get some time away, but felt bad not making videos too! This is the result :)
He tricked us to watch his vacation movies 😄
@@Grungeon_Master Hopefully you get that budget to come to the U.S at some point. There's a lot here that could do with making its way into more fantasy (history of native tribes, stories of superstitious colonial towns or their western homesteading counterparts, varied and often deadly geography, etc.)
@@Vaeldarg Not to mention cryptid and alien sightings
@@ethans9379 kinda had that in as under "stories of superstitious colonial towns or their western homesteading counterparts". Never underestimate the hoaxes/outright lies small towns will come up with to attract tourist money.
More urban post apocalyptic settings could use undercities. Old train stations, subterranean carparks and shopping centres, highway or bus tunnels, even sewers.
How about the Ancient underground cities in Cappadocia, Turkey. Some were able to house as many as 20,000 people. Fully carved underground beginning in the 8th to 7th centuries, and used up through the 14th century.
Great video as always - Loved the views from Rome. I immediately started typing a comment about San Clemente, before you mentioned it! I found it so emblematic of the whole city of Rome. Keep up the good work 👍
I think the fact that a lot of these things are sheer impossibilities and oftentimes populated with terrifying Critters is part of the terrifying charm of these things another good video
My hometown of Salem Oregon has this exact thing. A network of large tunnels (with one as wide as the whole street) designed for moving timber through the center of town day and night.
Other private tunnels lead into the mass of cellars, basements, and of course old Chinatown (which no longer really exists).
The Grungeon master travel edition- Love this so much! Thanks for posting your thoughts on this subject matter for fantasy world builders!
Been bingeing your channel for the past view days and it's been so helpful! I'm working on writing a fantasy series and I'm in the worldbuilding phase right now, you've given me so many ideas, especially since my main character will be an anthropologist working for a university who finds an old map with strange markings on it which will kick off the adventure. It will also take place a bit later than the standard fantasy world, I'm actually thinking of a magical version of steampunk (instead of steam power, someone invents a way to use magic to technologically advance society instead) - but it will be earlier on in the era so this kind of technology will still be a bit limited. Now I just need to figure out a magical/fantasy version of carbon dating 😅 - still early stages so will get there. Thanks for all this info, it is super useful!
A really nice idea is using borrowing beast tunnels that have been stabilized to avoid the entire cities collapsing.
How about Edinburgh? New Town was literally built on top of the old streets that you can still visit in areas like Mary Kings Close.
Maybe i'm just an archeology nerd but this video was specially cool for me
A very cool and interesting video, it was cool to see you at the locations, I do love some history.
As for an idea to explore, would river based trade/travel be far more significant in a fantasy world full of monsters?
A video about underground cities without mentioning Derinkuyu or why the exclusion? Because it has no overcity?
Love your deep delves into specific lore. When you talked about cities and swamps, I thought you might go to Venice, as you were already in Italy. The stone streets are literally built on to wood pilings, banged into the soggy ground.
For tunnels closer to home, though, try Exeter. Used and repurposed since the C14th. Worth a visit.
This is one of the best channels on TH-cam, hands down.
I love this channel and its focus on the practical matters of worldbuilding
This was perfect timing for my game! Thank you!
There is a real life underground city network in the Middle East that is even grander then Rome or Paris. I forget the name but you can look it up.
The moment you first brought up swamps, I was wondering if you'd bring up my hometown of Chicago. And you did!
Could you do a video on tree-related cities? My setting has two kinds: one with multiple trees with bridges connecting buildings between, and one where the entire city is built into a giant willow tree, with whole roads fitting on the branches, and the trunk having an internal network of lifts to reach the top, drawing on the tree's own inherent magic supply for power. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this concept.
The theme of underground is one where I feel a stronger than usual tension between metaphor and literality. "Going deep" to "dark, caves, and deep, tunnels" is a line so typical of guided ocidental meditation and self-hypnosis because it is easy to tie underground with unconscious (or "sub"conscious, if you prefer). Regardless of which school of Psychology we fancy.
That connection feels so natural that author writing 'on top' of that trope mix the metaphor in the plot and descriptions almost inevitably. Takes deliberated effort and attention to avoid doing that. And actually describe an underground city as a city that is bellow, literal, ground.
There is nothing wrong in use the lines from manuals of hypnosis as inspiration, and mix a lot of metaphor in the fantasy setting. That goes without saying.
I suppose the only reason to make the effort of take the opposite road, the road of literality, in this case. Is precisely the fact that it is such a hard and (because of being hard) unexplored road.
One of my favourite undercities is Edinburgh. Not huge, but formed by an interesting series of decisions and changing political landscapes, that led to one of the most intriguingly laid out undercities in the world, and starting right in the medieval era.
What eldritch power allows him to teleport to all these different cities!!
Money
I personally thought for a while now that a few of the closer to service underdark tunnels. Would be used readily by opportunistic traders. As a form of all year round weatherproof highway.
I love how I said Chicago at the same time as you 😅
There is also a town under Glasgow station and a number of areas under Edinburgh like streets and suburbs.
The world's first skyscrapers were in Scotland. Many, as the world developed, were knocked down and the bottom stories were used as foundations and the street levels were raised. Others were bricked up and new buildings built on top of when the black plague wrecked havoc because the people couldn't be helped so to stop it spreading they'd get bricked up in their homes and many are still bricked up after hundreds of years. Others were literally cut into the stone because the lowland Scottish population grew so fast they couldn't build up or out fast enough so they built down as well.
ive asked this recently but what is the evolution of enchanted weapons and items, like how does it affect society in greater scale and warfare
Seattle has tours you can take of their underground. The sidewalks are built with patches that have little windows in them to let light in, because people were still living and working down their long after it was built up.
What's the city at 9:00? Palomas? And the underground tunnels, how are they spelt? Cnatts? K'nats? Just want to be able to research more. I've tried searching different combinations of "Palomas tunnels" and different spellings of Chnats and haven't had kuch luck 😅
Palermo, and Qanat (from memory). I probably butchered the pronunciation. Happy searching!
@@Grungeon_Master Thank you! ✨
It's come up a few times in my games that, in any city or large town in which there is a significant population of gnomes, dwarves, kobolds, or goblins, there is, without any doubt, a tunnel network.
Usually it's under the area of town that those residents live -- if they live all over, then it might connect the entire city.
It's often made without bothering to inform or get permission from local authorities, though in some cases they do, usually they will just make a tunnel network b/c they are more comfortable having underground routes and meeting places, often even expanding their homes so a small cheap cottage on the surface might be one of the larger homes in town when you get into the basement. since they are done by citizens, with no central plan or authority, they tend to form organically and be a bit of a maze that really only the locals know how to navigate. (They also depend somewhat on these species being naturally adept tunnelers -- they have a degree of innate intuitive understanding of how to tunnel without collapsing the city overhead.)
My last campaign, the party ended up calling in a favour from a dwarven party member's brother who lived in a city they got into some trouble in -- they knew there had to be a tunnel system because they'd been to a few other cities with similar dwarf populations and found one in each, but didn't kno where to enter this city's. Player's brother brought them into the tunnels and hid them in a room in an unfinished epansion of the tunnels for the day so they could rest before getting away from town.
Additional ideas for tunnels:
Underground flood water diversion facilities - even fantasy cities are susceptible to flooding.
Cities are often constructed around mines, there could be a vast complex of sealed and perhaps forgotten mineshafts under cities.
Cave systems
Coal tunnels used for distributing coal around city.
Make up stuff for why there are tunnels - maybe there is an animal / monster that makes long burrows - giant moles, worms, ants, minotaur maze. Maybe there is a massive tree in center of city with hollow roots. Maybe the mountain you are on used to be giant creature / golem and the tunnels are it's blood vessels.
Actually, I think the idea of undercities comes from a more modern source: highway overpasses. If you've ever been to Philadelphia, and seen the absolute monstrosity that is the I-95 interchange, you can see where someone might get the idea for a whole city existing under another one. Kind of a combination of highway overpasses and those Dutch bridges with buildings on them. Some areas of Minneapolis are kind of like the dystopian "undercity": because the enclosed skyway passes over these blocks businesses don't last and therefore the empty storefronts attract criminals and addicts. The skyway of course exists because Minneapolis gets lake effect snow, which can easily bury street level doors. But the skyway prioritizes the wealthier neighborhoods and government buildings, because good old fashioned local government corruption.
There's a great example of a medieval sewer system in York. It's an open drain going down the middle of the Shambles (a 14th century street).
In contrast, Nottingham was built on sandstone and the inhabitants dug numerous caves under the city. You can visit some of them. They have been used for hundreds of years as shelters, stables, brewhouses, cellars, wells, tanneries, temples, and eventually air raid shelters.
Robin Hobb's The Liveship Trader's Trilogy and The Rain Wild Chronicles have pretty much the same kind of situation that you described. Later culture finds out about a forgotten ruined city and "mines" it from its riches (mostly trinkets) that they don't mostly understand the use of and make a living by selling them. There are some dangers that you described and some that you didn't mention.
Another example of a fantasy underground city that is somewhat making sense and working; is in Raymond E. Feist's Serpentwar Saga. It is established in earlier parts ( Legends of the Riftwar, IIRC). It has guild of thieves/smugglers whose boss actually has connections to the royal family. The age is set somewhere between enlightenment and ships-of-the-line days. Notably without muskets, though some black powder or similar. Hint: underground cities can be used to make lives of invading forces hell multiple ways.
At least personally those were examples of a well thought out system. At least for their respective settings and for the other stuff going on in the world.
For the underground cities underneath a normal one, there are several cities where people kept building upwards as the buildings sunk underneath the normal ground level, often with things layered over it with the streets.
For sewers, all you really need to have a massive sewer system is to have a lot of water involved, mainly with rain and similar where they are more of a storm sewer that the city might also use for actual sewage...and there's several cities where they buried even entire rivers under their streets.
As an History nerd and a wannabe fantasy writter, this video gave me a lot to ponder. Especially since I've considered making some undercities in my fantasy setting.
On a side note, a topic that would interest me are anthropomorphic animals. Either as a whole, or some species or types in particular. (Lionfolk, Wolfkin... or more surprising ones perhaps, like Otterfolk or Dolphinkin?)
I'm surprised you didn't mention Derinkuyu and the other underground cities in what is now Turkey
One thing I'm surprised you didn't mention is Derinkuyu!
It's a real life under city, built in turkey in the 8th or 7th century bce.
It's huge and could house as much as 20.000 people at a time!! It has consistently been used by people in the area to hide in times of war or persecution as late as the 1900s. Which they believe is the reason it was built in the first place.
It had living spaces, schools, storages and all sorts of things. The architecture is also ao amazing because it has tons of features that allow it to survive a long time siege.
The vents, wells and doors between levels are all designed to be able to be shut off from the lower floors meaning that in case the enemy found them and got into the top floors, the people could still retreat further into the ground.
Its amazing!!!
Thereason they were able to build such an intricate city underground is because of the rock that is soft enough to dig into but stable enough to hold together. There are actually several underground cities/shelters in the same area and some are connectes by tunnels.
The entrances to the city were hidden which is why it took us so long to rediscover them! A farmer found an entrance hidden in his house I think.
Laughs in Derinkuyu, a guy in 1963 kept losing his chickens in a crack in his basement, found an entire intact city over 260 feet under his house large enough to house over 20,00 people, they even kept livestock down there and had a sewer system and a fresh water river below even that.
Yoo thanks for mentioning that, I'd never heard of it before so I googled it. That's really fascinating
Another great place to take inspiration from is Mexicali’s underground Chinatown. Chinese immigrants preferred living in basements because of the Mexican heat, and gradually dug tunnels connecting everyone. At its height, the majority of the city population was down there. You can see a nice little video about it here:
th-cam.com/video/u_NYN7pMC1Q/w-d-xo.htmlsi=tJt1v_RGHg04CYZ3
I would imagine that Dwarven communities in mixed-race cities would want something similar.
The best and earliest version of undercities in FRP wasn't in D&D, it was in Empire of the Petal Throne RPG, ALSO by TSR, ALSO from the mid-70's. The world presented there was VERY OLD and was a result of urban renewel carried out at regular intervals, where the city was ritually demolished and rebuilt on top of the ruins. previous underworlds were, of course, ignored. In the world of Tekumel, the deeper you go, the older the ruins are.
Another great video😊
If you've ever visited a European cave you'll usually find records of it's different uses throughout history. I recall one cave in the UK had Cavemen, Druids, Romans, Witches, families living there, wine cellars for monks, and World War shelters in it
Just a reminder about the underground city in turkey exists that was built during the era of the Byzantine empire, aka the Eastern Roman Empire
I imagine in a fantasy setting under most roads are tunnels used by dwarves who prefer not to go underground than face the outside
I am now interested in developing an undercity for one of my capital cities in my scifi/fantasy comic. The city is older than any of the living races, built by a race that came before. It would have the infrastructure of that early version. Sewers, transportation, laboratories, etc. But then their race fell to war, which would lead to underground bunkers. The city was the location of a major battle, leading to its devastation. The ruins of buildings would become part of this undercity. Nature reclaimed this city for thousands of years as a new empire rose from the ashes. Much of the city was burried, but with many towers sticking up above the ground, leading to excavation tunnels. This civilization would build a new city in this location, adding their own transportation tunnels, sewers, bunkers, and underground research centers. However, this civilization would also fall as their nobility's treatment of the lower class became too much to bear and a peasant revolt ripped this empire apart. Thousands of more years would pass, this second civilization's buildings wouldn't last like the older one's and eventually, early tribal humans would cross over from a portal that had been left open to Earth. The humans would take shelter in the city's ruins until accidentally awakening the ancient AI of the city. These AI would uplift these humans and the humans would rebuild this city over the layers of the old. As human civilization rapidly developed, they would launch a ship to the nearest star, however, this mission would awaken an ancient race of energy-based beings called the Espers. These beings wiped out the expedition and head back to the ship's origin. Back home, humanity quickly built bunkers across this planet and Earth to prepare for their arrival, some of which would also become part of the undercity. Humanity was nearly wiped out before a suit was invented that could absorb the esper energy and kill them. They mass-produced these suits across the bunkers and wiped out the Espers and rebuilt their cities on the surface, but the suits had an unexpected side effect and the esper energy altered the wearer's DNA, turning them into the first angels, due to the angels being the soldiers who saved them, there was no initial resentment and the two races spread and continued exploring, finding more races and allying with them. However, after some time, a faction of humans and angels were tricked by Lucifer into rebelling against the alliance, leading to a large scale war, and more underground bunkers and tunnels in the city. So those are all the events that would add to a crazy, massive undercity, though mostly unused. But I've got several ideas for stories that could take place inside them.
Walt Disney World in Florida has an extensive undercroft. The utility tunnels are built at ground level because basements are unfeasible in Florida and they're big enough for vehicles like garbage trucks to drive around.
Best example are mining sites. The city of Odessa Ukraine has a massive tunnel network as a result of stone mining for construction. It was so convenient that people used to dig the stone right underneath the construction sites for materials. This resulted in the tunnels run right beneath the city above and the tunnels are massive, they were used as weapons storage and partisan bases during WW 2.
Midgar (slums) is an example of an above ground undercity. There was even an example of the upper city being destroyed by taking out a pillar.
The the undercity in NY, Montreal, Turkey has a massive undercity built thousands of years ago. Undercities are quite common.
Rome was not exactly an undercity. Catacombs were used for burials more than as living spaces.
But your quest is not over : Derinkuyu, St Mercurius and Kaymaklı, Turkey.
Real undercities, build somewhere around the fall of Troy, fascinating stories, several levels, some still unexplored...
Meant to live in, to fight in, able to hold thousands of peoples, livestocks, industries...
1500 BC
Nothing they've done can't be done by a modern civilisation.
For those curious about a psychological/horror aspect besides your normal underworld creatures, check out the movie "As Above, So Below" which can help break up your typical undercity aspects!
One of the things that runs through most undercities in fiction is the fact that they are *foils.* The Under-city is a dark, dirty reflection of the Over-city. A physical place given to the forgotten, the marginalized, and the unwanted parts of society. So while there *IS* great stories built into the excavation of old ruins, the main point of a fantasy undercity is narrative short hand. An easy way to show to readers that they are leaving the glossy overcity, and away from the tropes the genre inherited from Tolkien. A way of showing the reader that the things they are going to find here are things the society wants to figuratively bury by literally burying it.
what you could do is that the ruins silted over but an underground part of the river washed out silt at a lower level. You could even have the adventure begin with a street collapsing into a dark tunnel below.
The city of Matera in Southern Italy is located next to a canyon that has caves dug into its walls. It has been inhabited for about 10,000 years.
The Chicago line. That was crisp
The Grungeon Master : "Realistic undercity should not be pre-excavated"
Paris : "hold my café-crème"
See San Fransisco. You _can_ have undercities that are navigable, where you only have to break a few walls to get into open segments. I think a magical world can have a wide variety of disasters that could bury a city without actually filling in all the gaps.
Yup, some 1600s-1800s vuilt sewers and castle escape routes etc. are interesting stories, dad used to work in the yugoslav water works mostly around serbia's Backa and Banat areas, and Subotica for example had an unexplored half finisged victorian-pre ww1 era sewer system that had a lot of folks talk about turkish treasure etc. but nowadays everyone dismisses it... maybe for the better since the few times we run into it it's quuckly hushed.
Some cities had fortresses with elaborate escape routes, Novi sad I think has those, or some othercaves closed to the public... But hey, excavation would be a long time to do.
Look at Waterdeep & Undermountain. There's all sorts of biomes and designs within that metropolis & mega-dungeon.
my man finally seen outside with good sound quality on top of that
What?! My guy out here like a BBC Carmen Sandiego getting first-hand footage. Mad respect! I was sooo excited when you said Chicago - hard cut to my crestfallen ass. Come to Chicago! I live here! Would love nothing more than to show you around the Loop while discussing the theoretical socio-economics of fantasy worlds. We can go spelunking the oft-whispered-of lower LOWER Wacker! Haha!
While I know it was pretty much all above ground, no mention of the Kowloon Walled City as a source of inspiration?
No mention of Seattle?
Or Portland, Oregon
Or Gaza tunnels
I like the idea of a setting where monsters have dug out a giant cavern underneath a major city, and it is only held up by pillars, but there is a single weak point that could bring it all down; They are now secretly holding the aristocrats hostage and forcing them to be corrupt and give them weapons and gold. They could even be funding the other side of a war that the same city is supposed to be fighting. It could give you all sorts of morally grey NPCs and choices for the players.
In Edinburgh there was a valley full of old medieval thick wall buildings that was inconvenient to the rich so they built arches, like viaduct over it and on top of them whole new district, it wasn't by mistake, it wasn't down to the passage of ages it was urban plan, and the undercity was den of crime, with many arcade still not excavated by archeologists we can expect to find burglar staches or murder victims still there.
A bit surprised that Edinburgh wasn't mentioned, nor the Parisian catacombs.
1) Underground cities in fantasy are not on the ruins of other cities, such as Rome and Tyr. They are built from scratch, so to speak. Given that they're usually based in high-fantasy realms, it's not a bad assumption that magic (outright spells or summoned creatures) were used.
However, they could be built up over time with excavated materials being used to build the city.
2) If an underground city is abandoned, there's usually a good reason for it, ranging from a successful raid, widespread disease, or even magical reasons. In some cases, it's just that a better location was found.
3) If you allow that urine has practical uses and feces can be used as part of compost, then there's no real need for a sewer system as those would be collected and dealt with by other means.
To be honest in ancient D&D cities, with a lot of buried elven or even eldritch ruins and high criminal activity. It actually make sense why criminals would dig in a lot of those ancient structures to run illegal operations and some cult warship. The only complain is that those should not be dig up entirely. Creators could take many inspirations also from New York Metro and illegal underground bars during prohibition.
London has also underground rivers. No sewers: rivers .
An entire neighbourhood of Bristol (UK) is built over a series of depleted coal mines.
There are over 200 cisterns of Constantinople the largest is 138 metres by 65 metres and 10 meter high. It was built in the 6th century and was in use for over a thousand years. Then utilized in various ways.
On a smaller scale Eger with a population of around 2000 in the 16th century was built on top of a limestone hill. They dug vast cellars for storing wine, often breaking into a natural cavern system with underground lakes and grand halls. On top of the hill there is a fortress underneath a catacomb system was built, again breaking into the natural caverns.
I did not know that Chicago is sinking, I thought about Venezia but that would be hard city to make undercity from