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[thobal]

I dont know if its been suggested, but hows about a network of tunnels beneath the whole world that contain a strange half gobo/half dwarf race. And Instead of beak dogs, albino alligators. Like a giant sewer of the gods, lined with gold or platinum or steel or bauxite or something!

Just one more reason not to mine too greedily (or too deep!)

[Othob Rithol]

"Hole in the World" in any form won't get on the list - it is more of a game mechanic (end game) than anything else, and Guy was right - the player would 90% of the time just abandon.

Albino animals added as suggested above (but into an existing entry), but we'll leave the half breeds for the appropriate power goals.

edit: btw...it's called a cave crocodile....you just don't see them as much in 3d.

Any Wurm players interested, I'm now running a similar thread (on a different topic) here for that game, which is taking up my forum time.

[thobal]

What if the goblins, who we know have tunnels, are all over the under world, with huge underground highway systems you can accidentally breach, leading to a semi-permanent state of attack.

[Techhead]

In the water section, I am surprised no-one mentioned Artesian wells were an aquifer is trapped between two impervious layers.

If you go deeper into hydrogeology, you deal with a bunch of different properties of aquifer systems.

Porosity is the amount of water that an aquifer contains, per volume. Looser soils hold more water.
Specific Storage and Storativity are measurements of how fast an aquifer will release water. Some aquifers will hold onto all their water above a certain depth, and will only start releasing water once you dig further down.
Water Content is the total amount of water in a water table. Recharging aquifers will refill over time, while those composed of meteor water will not.
Specific Yield is the total amount of water an aquifer will release.
Hydraulic Conductivity is how fast water moves from one part of an aquifer to another. This is fairly complex and would be hard, but not impossible, to accurately model, not to mention resource-intensive.

For explanations of how these interact with each other, see  Groundwater Flow Equation and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundwater_energy_balance]Groundwater Energy Balance[/url]. A simplified version exists in the form of the Dupuit assumption.

[SirHoneyBadger]

I decided to do some work on fleshing out the troglodytes, since I'm not really interested in the ratmen.

D&D didn't have much to offer, other than that they're "vicious little lizardmen". Not very interesting. So, I did some research and some daydreaming, and decided they could be a race of cliff-dwellers that actually construct their homes along the sides of cliffs and chasms.

This was inspired by the architectural practices of the Pueblo people.

They probably wouldn't be capable of doing the kinds of advanced architecture our dwarfs utilize, but they *could* convert natural caves into actual buildings--smoothing stone, building short walls and doors on the fronts of the caves, etc.

That'd give them a good defensive positioning, as well as differentiate them from other species, while not giving them advanced tech, or making them enormously powerful.

Then I daydreamed some more and decided that maybe they're a society that's actually ruled over by some kind of undead (mummified?). The trogs are living, their upper political administration is not. This was inspired by the Bo society in China that lived along the Yellow River, in Yunnan and Sichuan, and hung their dead in coffins hundreds of feet up these vertical cliffs.

To tie the two together, I decided that the undead could actually be spiritual authorities, much more than political ones, with a religion influenced by the Kachina cult of the Hopis and Zunis, with the undead first worshipping (as priests), and then gradually becoming, the multitudinous "little gods" of the trogs.

The trogs themselves could have the technology base of an advanced neolithic society, and maybe do a limited trade for copper and other metals, which they might be able to cold-forge.

They might trade their skills as stone-knappers to our dwarfs, providing those obsidian scalpels that are all the rage. They might also do a profitable trade in lifestock, fish, spidersilk (woven or raw), mushrooms and mushroom alchohol, pharmaceutical and recreational drugs, and poisons (nobody knows the 'shrooms that grow in their territory like these guys). They could also be a good candidate for an underground species that uses bows, both for hunting and warfare (less risk to their undead rulers that way).
 
The undead influence, the static nature of their society, and their relatively indifferent attitude towards members of their society who are still living, could combine to keep them a particularly superstitious, backwards people, but not one without wisdom, or interest.

[B0013]

I'm bumping this since it seems april will be totally devoted to underground diversity.

[Mount]

Ok, I read through EVERY PAGE of this topic, and didn't see this suggestion (as such) so here goes:

Muck. Goop. It's kind of an expansion on the Snotite idea.  The stuff I envision is something like a "primordial soup" or mudpot/geothermal feature, with the following characteristics:

- "chunky" liquid, i.e. flows like magma (sorta-slow flow, doesn't normally flow uphill), and will "push" heavier items (similar to how water pushes clothes)
- highly corrosive to organic material:  does nasty acid damage to live creatures, destroys organic crafted items (even if it doesn't kill you, it'll burn the clothes right off'n ya!) but leaves stone/metalcrafted items alone.  Creatures killed by this stuff leave no corpse, and if not retrieved post-haste, the bones/shells/whatever will also 'burn away' leaving nothing.
- appears in hidden "pools" underground (smaller version of magma pool/UG pond but doesn't generate a wet/warm stone warning)

Possible additional features: 
- Reek:  as a disgusting chemical soup, this stuff could 'evaporate' into clouds of miasma.  Tapping a large pool could theoretically fill your entire fortress with purple clouds of stench. 
- Precipitate:  Evaporating pools of Ick leave harvestable resources.. something like spreadable fertilizer for your farms, or bottle-able acidic nastiness. 

[sonerohi]

Stimp: A goblin-sized, fire-impish creature that can (once implemented) jump very far and move very quick, but is small and weak. It hunts vermin and lives in caves, bottomless pits, and chasms, and uses it's leaping to snatch up bats and such mid-air as it leaps across. Rather like an underground frog. It's possible to have them trained as mounts for your dwarves, and they can mimic speech like parrots can.

Also for the magma plant areas, a new creature, the kresp. A lion-ish beast, with thick fur, it survives by feasting on the plant seeds when they're young, before they begin producing the flammable chemicals. It's fur creates alot of static electricity which will often spark the gasses in the chamber, causing the plants to spread their spores. This thick fur is fire-retardant and keeps the kresp safe. It has a small squirter underneath it's tongue that lets it spit out a luke-warm, mildly acidic liquid which has the main side effect of causing bad thoughts and making a dwarf naseous.

[zagibu]

Stimps would have to be pretty big to serve as mounts for Dwarves, though. Dwarves are obiously smaller than humans, but do usually have roughly the same weight.

[Cheshire Cat]

In the water section, I am surprised no-one mentioned If you go deeper into hydrogeology, you deal with a bunch of different properties of aquifer systems.

this sounds pretty good. but i doubt if it were implemented in any way toady would try to recreate the complexities of real life aquifer systems. it would probably be something like we have in water pressure, an aproximate system that emulates real life well enough to work within the game.

i also like the mysterious toxic slime pools with all their related strange properties. having several different kinds, or a pool of random properties of which a few are assigned to each pool would be great. adding a bit of randomness like that would seriously freshen things up after you got used to it.

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

I have an image of people messing with worldgen specifically to get an aquifer in a deep valley fed from the mountains to make a 100z-level superfountain.

[Techhead]

Well, I suppose basic aquifer dynamics wouldn't be too hard to code in.
Different soil/rock layers can have porosity and storativity determined in raws.
A region would have a water table level, nice and flat, put down at world gen. The total water content and specific yield will be calculated based on the the water table's height and the layers' propeties.
On the macro level, it would track the total amount of water in it, and add to it in two ways. Water would slowly seep in from outside the region, draining adjacent region's aquifers. (calculated quickly perhaps once/month) If it isn't isolated from the surface, rainfall would refill it in bursts.
On the micro level, water would flow out of it based on difference in water level (Modeling basic pressure) and the storativity of the material. Water that leaves the aquifer would subtract from the regions total level, and water that flows in reverse will refill it.

By tracking the soil's water content as a single handful of values in each region, it wouldn't have to calculate large amounts of flow data every turn.

[Pixelfish]

There was ONE article on troglodytes in dnd..

They actually do live around cliffs, and heat vents.

They need to eat a particular plant which produces their incredibly foul odor(anything that can smell or taste becomes nauseus around them)

Their also disease carriers but not sufferers, much like monitor lizards.

The stink they make would go with the reek idea, or, just simply have them be self generating miasma makers that leave little trails of miasma making goo.

[Foa]

How about fel chickens/goblins?

This following image includes fel goblins ( aka Armok-Worshiping Goblins ) and fel chickens... and a fel goblin priest sacrificing a normal goblin in an altar full of "Armok's" blood, crafted by a moody goblin using runes, and then threw a goblin baby into a vat of oil.

[Aldaris]

How about fel chickens/goblins?

This following image includes fel goblins ( aka Armok-Worshiping Goblins ) and fel chickens... and a fel goblin priest sacrificing a normal goblin in an altar full of "Armok's" blood, crafted by a moody goblin using runes, and then threw a goblin baby into a vat of oil.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

But, but, they'd be the good guys? Why would we kill people from a civ that... similar to player controlled dwarfs?