The Deep
The party's own map of the upper Underdark, filled in by Bogani, by Felani, and by the Way. Click for full size.
A sprawling network of caves and passages beneath the North Watch, reachable from under Broken Spire Keep, from the Dawnforge Mountains, and from elsewhere.
This is where the campaign lives now.
Landmarks
| Landmark | Notes |
|---|---|
| The double doors | Massive stone doors requiring two keys — one taken off bandits, one off Dorakor. There is a rune on the floor that lights up and goes ding |
| The portal chamber | Where Kvothe destroyed the Derro portal to the City of the Glass Pool |
| The portal cavern junction | Where the party meets Bogani. The Rockhome path branches here |
| The Sanctuary of Whispered Stars | Safe rest, by the Keeper's leave |
| The crossroads | Intersection of the primary subterranean roads, where the Way met them the second time |
| The rickety bridge | Over an eighty-foot waterfall chasm. Site of the tentacle fight, and of a kuo-toa supply cache |
| The great lake | Fifty to sixty acres below the chasm, with a rock island about five hundred yards from shore. The party cached a strongbox on it, and a magical shield is somewhere in the murk |
| Outpost Crystal | A kuo-toa fortification the party took for its larder. Its position relative to anything else is not written down |
| The mushroom farms | Deep gnome ground, overrun by trolls, cleared by the party |
| The underground lake with the boat | Where passage costs a non-spellcasting prisoner |
| "The great magic" | The Way told the party to avoid it. There is no route through it to the City of the Glass Pool |
| The Glass Shores and the Singing Stones | Named once each, in a Derro note, near the City of the Glass Pool. The Singing Stones are a resonant crystal cavern where creatures heal faster and spellcasting is aided — and which attracts monsters. The party set out for it once and never arrived |
Travelling down here
The deep is run as a survival problem, not a dungeon crawl, and the party assigned themselves roles for it: cooking, scouting, hunting and gathering, and chronicling.
What that has meant in practice:
- Rations run out. A botched religious observance rotted the party's provisions and put them on six to eight rations a head, which is what made taking Outpost Crystal necessary rather than optional
- Foraging works. Ubo pulls supplies out of fungal blooms and subterranean flora
- Scavenging enemy caches works. Twenty seaweed-wrapped fish rations and a strongbox off one kuo-toa patrol
- Encumbrance matters. A hundred-pound strongbox got cached on an island rather than carried
- The womp womp reaches down here
- Herbalism matters. Dried Yew Claw bark gives +1d4 to Intelligence saves for an hour, and it is the reason half the party survived a Mind Blast
Rockhome
A hidden deep gnome city roughly the size of Fallcrest, carved into the stone.
The svirfneblin have kept it hidden for generations using illusion, stealth and labyrinthine defences. No enemy has ever located it, and that is the entire basis of their survival.
The party were blindfolded to get in. Bogani led them through concealed paths, past many guards and gates, and only removed the blindfolds inside. Rockhome's location remaining secret is the non-negotiable term of the alliance, and the map they were given is to be destroyed if captured.
The alliance was earned by killing twelve trolls that had overrun the mushroom farms.
| The party gets | |
|---|---|
| A silver bracelet | One-use group teleport to Rockhome, everyone holding hands. Lost if the wearer dies or removes it. Unspent |
| A map of the Underdark | Destroy if captured |
| Sanctuary and supplies | While in svirfneblin territory |
| Builders for hire | Including engineers to fortify Broken Spire Keep's tunnels |
The City of the Glass Pool
A stronghold in the deep, on or near a great underground body of water. Home to the kuo-toa, occupied by mind flayers, and served by loyalist Derro.
The party's current objective.
What it is for: prisoners. Bogani told them plainly after the portal fight that dozens had already been taken through, and he did not know why. Jaylin was minutes from going through when the party arrived. The party destroyed the portal that fed it, and Bogani warned a new one will likely be built.
Current intelligence, from the Way: kuo-toa and Old One activity has spiked, and the enemy is no longer merely occupying the city — they are hunting beyond its perimeter.
How to get in, per the Way:
| Approach | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Frontal assault | Explicitly warned against. "Get your affairs in order" first |
| Deception or disguise | Most viable. Penetrate the outer works and locate high-value prisoners |
| Guerrilla warfare | Destabilise internal infrastructure by targeting key combatants, not the population |
Voren the Green was taken by something in purple robes and has not been seen since.
In a city built on thralls, the Chain Breaker is not a side benefit. It is the plan.
The Old Ones
Everything the party knows comes from one conversation with the Way, at the Sanctuary, on 3 April.
The Old Ones dwell far beneath the City of the Glass Pool, in the sunless ocean.
They have been dormant for centuries. They have awakened, and they intend to dominate all life around them.
They are building towers, powered by magical forces fed by magical creatures. Completed, the towers will let them psychically control everyone within a radius of their city — a radius that reaches the surface.
That gives the party the purpose, the mechanism, the power source, a rough location, and the fact that the surface is in range.
He said towers. Plural.
The party have no name for them beyond the Old Ones.
Who is down here
The mind flayers — the Great Ones, in Vortikand's phrasing. They hold the alliance together. One demanded spellcasters as tribute from the party and settled for 200 gold. One took Voren out of his own tower. One found Kvothe scouting invisibly, said "There you are," and pulled a spell out of his head. The party have killed exactly one, on 7 August, by committee, at thirty feet, with the maths worked out first.
The kuo-toa — fish folk. Allied with the mind flayers. They worship Blibdoolpoolp, the Sea Mother, a lobster-headed goddess of madness who hates surface-dwellers and mind flayers in equal measure. A recovered note reads: "The Tide Calls. Deliver the Pale Ones by the seventh moon or face Blibdoolpoolp's wrath."
The Derro — and this is the thing that changed last session. Vortikand's distinction:
| His term | What he means |
|---|---|
| "Smart Derro" | His own people. Free-minded. Fighting the illithids |
| "Stupid Derro" | The ones serving the Great Ones — and not by choice |
| "Brain Capture" | Total psychic enslavement. What was done to the second group |
By Vortikand's account the Derro the party have fought — every horde, every ambush, the guards at the double doors, the ones at the portal chamber — were thralls rather than enemies. He did not put it as an accusation.
The alliance was already visibly fraying before he said it: a recovered note reading "The Alliance grows thin", Sylvara's captive intelligence that two Derro factions do not get on, and a Derro fireball that killed the kuo-toa leader in the middle of a battle both sides were supposedly on the same side of.
Darlakanand is named once, in that note, as the authority ordering increased patrols near the Singing Stones. Muranekk leads the rebels. Those are the only two Derro leaders the record names, and they are on opposite sides of the same civil war.
The Bloody Six — adventurers on the mind flayers' payroll. The party fought them once, on the long expedition, and they teleported out with a voice saying "It's time for us to be gone. It's not time for more of us to die." They had a ledger, prisoner transfer pages, and a warning about the party. They were taking Sylvara to something called "a maw." Verix, a twelve-foot ogre with religious tattoos, was one of them.
Also down here: troglodytes, trolls, chuuls, water elementals, oozes, purple fungi, a bulette Ubo sent home rather than kill, an enormous worm, a basilisk, a grick, a roper — and a Deep Dragon the party woke under their own keep and ran away from, which Bogani says later took over the Sunken Grove and can turn incorporeal.
Something in those tunnels also caught a wounded, invisible behir and snapped its neck within a few hours of the party fighting it. Nobody knows what.
The Starless Kindred
Also called the Third Path. Everything known about them is carved into the altar in the Sanctuary of Whispered Stars.
"In the time of the Sundering Choice, we who could not bear witness turned our faces to stone and shadow."
"The Silver Paths called, yet we walked roads of ember and ash instead."
"May our children forgive what we could not become in the hour of the Crimson Schism."
"We are the Third Path — neither the Bright Road nor the Dark Descent."
An ancient elven schism with three outcomes rather than two. They were not neutral by conviction — they were people who "could not bear witness" and withdrew, and the writing is full of grief about it. "May our children forgive what we could not become." It is an apology carved into stone by people who chose to survive rather than choose.
The Sanctuary is what they left: a circular chamber with a domed ceiling twenty feet high, walls lined with crystals that catch and reflect light, and a raised stone platform with an inscribed altar on it. It is very quiet, with a low vibration underneath.
- It opens to a hummed tone, not a key. Kvothe found the door by hearing it
- Resting there restores more than sleep — the party woke with advantage on Wisdom checks for the day
- Stand on the central platform and speak softly, and whoever you are looking at hears you clearly, and nobody else does
A chamber built for rest, for secrecy, and for conversations that cannot be overheard. It is the architecture of a people who chose silence.
Somebody is still keeping it. The Keeper and the Way both serve an unnamed "master." The party have the run of the place for rest, and Windsong is back on its pedestal.