The Deep Delvings¶
The mine below the mine: the Highreach's true underlevels, struck by dwarves before the Company had a name and abandoned by everyone but one assayer, her lamp, and the creatures that stayed with her. Levels 16–25 — the hunting country past Old Graven, and the shallow margin of what the old charts call the Veins.
The air grows warmer as you descend. The Forgefellowship's final survey said everything the north needed to hear about that: "It was warm, and it should not have been."
Getting in¶
Both doors are locked, and both keys are GM-spawned relics (highreach-adit, delvings-winze) — ask around when an opening is announced.
| Door | Where | Lands you at |
|---|---|---|
| The Iron Gate | The Highreach minehead, past the ore yard | The Incline — a long rail-grade descent (rats & spiders, 16–17) |
| The Boarded Winze | The timbered gallery in the Delvings proper | A laddered drop straight to the Sixth-Level Junction |
Both roads meet at the Sixth-Level Junction, the crossroads of the whole country. There is a stone plinth there. Leave something on it going down. The object matters less than the act.
The Stayer's Stand¶
West of the junction burns the only lamp below the sixth level: Hesk Undermantle, the Forgefellowship assayer who filed her resignation by not leaving. Her stand is safe ground and a full base of operations:
| Service | Detail |
|---|---|
| Bounties | BOUNTY — cull and skin writs against everything in the deep, at deep rates |
| Quests | She has work, and opinions about who returns from it |
| Trade | Lamp oil, iron, healing stock; buys everything at honest weight |
| Pelts | Buys skins at 145% — rat to Gnaw-plate |
| Training | CHECK IN — the assay back-room is the deepest classroom in the world |
| The cistern | One landing down: a warm spring and a recovery node |
The ladder down¶
| Ground | Levels | What hunts there |
|---|---|---|
| The Incline | 16–17 | Grey-bristled seam-rats, pale tallow-spiders |
| The Tallow Galleries & Warrenworks | 17–20 | Gaunt deep delvers and their delve-reeves |
| The Sump Road | 19–21 | Blind white sump eels in the warm flood |
| The Vein Margin | 21–22 | Armored vein-crawlers; the tallow-shades on their endless shift |
| The Gnawed Galleries | 23 | Stone-hided gnaw-whelps, teething on the mountain |
| The Gnaw's Round | 25 | The Grey Gnaw — see below |
Skinnable: seam-rats, eels, crawlers, whelps — and the Gnaw itself. Boxes run richer than on the surface; so do the gems.
The Warm Seam¶
South off the vein margin's walk lies the chamber the old crews would not work: a road-wide vein radiating hearth-heat and slow light. It is the strongest recovery ground in the known world (a greater node), and the dwarves left offerings at its threshold. Nothing bothers you there. No one yet knows what is owed for that mercy.
The Grey Gnaw¶
The creature that chewed the galleries: a hall-filling grazer of ore-veins, jaws like ranked millstones, older than the mine and less finished with it. Single spawn, long respawn, a hoard of sorted ore in place of coin, the most valuable skin currently in the game, and a level-25 fight that expects you to have brought the rest of your answer with you.
Listen on the way down. The chewing is the weather of the whole country. When it stops, stop too.
The mercy of depth
Death down here is far from the chapel — a party cleric with spell 318 can raise you where you fell at half the sting, and your unabsorbed experience survives. The deep is exactly where the rescue road pays for itself.
The bore in the Gnaw's hall continues down, wider still, into a warmth with a light in it that is not fire. It is not sealed. The lore page says what little anyone knows about what is below the below.