Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #4 is from a list by Shadowfray - "Infrastructure & Logistics." - with special thanks to Walfalcon for unsticking my writers block with their own post on the topic. For my contribution we return to the Dwarf Roads and the things you find down there.
Long ago, during the Membrane Wars, the dwarves retreated from the Last Star and built the under-roads in a frenzy to reconnect their scattered holdings as their previous airship-empire failed beneath the tainted light. Their alchemical-botanic mastery was turned to wringing fuels from the blood of the earth and they ground out the under-roads then fought the cult of the Last Star to a standstill in the dark.
The roads are now long abandoned, ancient defences still lurk and automata still roam but some things have made their home and some brave venturers traverse the paths once more. Few are good to meet.
Whatever else is found, there are usually dazzler walls - they make shadows leap and dance confusingly to the light of a normal flame but even unlit they are glaringly irritating to those with darkvision rapidly inducing headaches and making anything requiring vision exhausting and difficult.
Traps
1. Bulwark doors - Most renowned aspect of the Dwarf roads - known as Gnashing Doors for their fail-closed multiple redundancies
2. Darkness cascade - stinging chill showers of liquid darkness, typically matched with slopes and spiked pits
3. Lightning Arcs - discharging along dazzler walls in blinding torrents
4. Turret traps - throwing a variety of poisons, incendiaries, and caustics
5. Mellified beast release - honey-bottled monsters in arcane stasis, released. Basilisks a favourite
Hazards
6 - Maintenance golem - ever-burning elemental core heat the great rock-scrapers it has used to shore up the tunnels these past millenium
7 - Haunted train - a near intact war-borer train - too intact for the dead crew will rise to defend their charge
8 - Hypnotic archives - missing interface psychadelics might be found and information gleaned
9 - Unstable magazine - alchemical fire, night bombs, seeker swords - lethal things stored uncarefully by soldiers under pressure
10 - Breached fuel unit - dripping caustic and flamable pools, clouds of noxious gas fill the local area
Monstrous residents
11 - Weretoads - loners, often heard long before seen croaking low-wave messages along the roads
12 - Crocodile cultists - pale, trogoldyte forms, highly territorial of their glorious depths
13 - Dwarven shades - death has not released them from their dutiful defence
14 - Giant spiders - keeping the giant flies down
15 - Myconids - inheritors of the dwarves deep-botanical endowment
Intruders
16 - Humanoid raiding team - soldiers of one of the realms above, trying to outflank their foes from beneath
17 - Questing adventurers - pursuing something or someone that has fled here
18 - Blockade runners - smugglers trying to worm their way past surface hostilities and customs barriers
19 - Treasure Seekers - trying to search out some last forgotten coin
20 - Dwarven Reconquistadors - reclaiming their ancient birthright
We have visited these roads before with Small god: Lady Deephome (GLoGtober 2 '23).
Other references:
The Last Star - Bearded Devil
Jungle Dwarves of Forgotten Gorzu - Lizardman Diaries
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