HYPERBOREA / Thickness of Hyperborea

**Posted by Will** 7/06/2014 5:59 pm

Has anyone ever thought about how far "down" Hyperborea goes? The question is based on dungeons; the classic "megadungeon" is several levels deep and can carry people who knows how far from the surface. What if a megadungeon was horizontal instead of vertical? I think this idea fits both megadungeons and Hyperborea specifically, especially when you are not in mountainous regions. You can account for multiple entrances/exits easier, as well, when most of the "levels" actually lie on the same horizontal plane. Just a thought.

**Posted by Chainsaw** 7/06/2014 7:12 pm

Yeah, interesting idea. You may want to consider checking out Barrowmaze I and II, as these two dungeons basically riff off of that concept.

**Posted by chrisj** 7/06/2014 10:15 pm

I've used Barrowmaze in my campaign a bit. It's a big horizontal dungeon. In a vertical dungeon, deeper generally means more difficult/dangerous. Without those clues, my players found themselves wandering into parts of the dungeon that were well beyond their capabilities without realizing they were doing so. Just something to keep in mind.

**Posted by chrisj** 7/07/2014 8:39 am

I really like the idea that Hyperborea isn't very thick and that it is possible to reach the " bottom side" via Underborea. I wonder what adventurers would find there?

**Posted by Ghul** 7/07/2014 8:48 am

I hate to be evasive, but I'm not quite ready to "show my hand" on this score yet, because it directly relates to how I intend to present my own mega-dungeon for Mount Vhuurmithadon.

**Posted by Agricola** 7/07/2014 11:39 am

Very interesting. Meshes in with my on-again off-again project of Hyperborean Bathymetry. Extremely interested in a Mount Vhuurmithadon mega dungeon.

**Posted by Benoist** 7/07/2014 9:56 pm

I like Barrowmaze a lot. I am actually using it in my own campaign, as part of the Hobby Shop Dungeon environs!

Another dungeon that uses that "vertical plane" approach is the self-proclaimed "World's Largest Dungeon", which is not that great, to tell you the truth, but does include some pretty cool bits in places.

I'm personally not a big fan of the concept on its own, as a megadungeon itself. I like it when it's part of a wider and deeper complex (see above allusion to my own campaign), When used on its own, I feel like it's just one big level and not a "real" dungeon.

**Posted by Will** 7/07/2014 10:06 pm

My main thinking is this: the further you excavate down, the further you have to carry dirt to the top. One big sprawling level that maybe rises or falls no more than 50 feet from the surface and uses secret doors and teleportation to separate "higher" and "lower" levels is better for me. That's why mountains make some sense to me; you can basically hollow out a cone. Regular megadungeons that just go down forever don't interest me as much; plus, I find it easier to drop in other dungeon modules. Also, it has some relevance to hexcrawling, which I think is neat.

**Posted by mabon5127** 7/08/2014 7:52 am

chrisj wrote:
I really like the idea that Hyperborea isn't very thick and that it is possible to reach the " bottom side" via Underborea. I wonder what adventurers would find there?

Might be the best place to hang out in the year of the Bat!

**Posted by The_Great_Lestrade** 7/08/2014 11:43 am

I've gone for pretty deep in my campaign. Using the 7 Geases as inspiration I imagine it being at least a a couple of tens of miles deep. I haven't really defined a bottom.

"he further you excavate down, the further you have to carry dirt to the top"

a constant problem in Dwarf Fortress, which has just had a 2014 release.

**Posted by Chainsaw** 7/08/2014 12:17 pm

At the risk of sounding dismissive, I really do not worry too much about the realities of megadungeon engineering. Isn't that a long way up to carry up dirt during construction? Don't walls need to be thicker to support the structure? What about a proper ventilation system? What about plumbing and waste removal?

If you enjoy thinking through those issues, maybe because it sparks creative output or because you enjoy the challenge of making it work "realistically," then that is all well and good. Personally, it's just not that much fun for me, so I chalk it up to "because mythical underworld" and focus more on creating interesting rooms and monsters and situations.

**Posted by chrisj** 7/08/2014 2:22 pm

I generally make my dungeons as otherworldly as possible to make it clear that the usual rules don't apply. That's mainly because I'm too lazy to try to figure out a way to make it all seem plausible.

**Posted by Blackadder23** 7/08/2014 3:04 pm

Maybe ancient Hyperboreans built the mega-dungeon. Or Atlanteans. Or Lemurians. Or snake-men. Or dwarves. Or Xathoqqua and his kin. Maybe the "worms of the earth" toiled tirelessly for countless centuries with flint tools to shape some lightless abyss.

The point is, you're not really limited to what medieval guys with shovels could do.

**Posted by Yora** 7/08/2014 3:57 pm

Great. This thread reminds me of a planned dungeon for my setting which I hadn't added to my notes and not thought about for years.

Basically an extremely long winding stair that effectively has lots of small dungeons branching off it.

**Posted by Geffyl** 7/08/2014 6:56 pm

Here's a page from one of my Hyperborea notebooks. At the bottom is my estimate for continental and oceanic crust thickness.

Ciao,
Geffyl

**Posted by Chainsaw** 7/08/2014 8:05 pm

Impressive!

**Posted by Agricola** 7/09/2014 6:56 am

That is extremely interesting! Can you go into depth about how you arrived at this. Thanks for posting that!

**Posted by Ghul** 7/09/2014 8:45 am

Geffyl is actually touching on what I was imagining when I came up with the hexagonal cut of Hyperborea, with a black obelisk at each point. The separation of the continent from Old Earth remains a thing only vaguely alluded to in the descriptive text of the setting material, but one thing I did study while making some of these choices was the continental shelf of the Arctic Ocean, specifically the depth of its basins and sub-basins. Imagine, if you will, that entire basin having been at one time occupied by a continent that roughly conforms to our Hyperborea's size, and maybe close to connecting to Greenland. Now, imagine that "plate" ripped from, or teleported, or launched from (whatever yhou might imagine!) Earth, leaving behind a series of basins of substantial depth. At present, the deepest of these basins is nearly 4,000 meters. That's almost 2.5 miles. These numbers do not need to dictate how we imagine the depth of the oceanic and continental crusts, but they are (to me!) interesting points of reference.

**Posted by Handy Haversack** 7/09/2014 8:51 am

Blackadder23 wrote:
Maybe ancient Hyperboreans built the mega-dungeon. Or Atlanteans. Or Lemurians. Or snake-men. Or dwarves. Or Xathoqqua and his kin. Maybe the "worms of the earth" toiled tirelessly for countless centuries with flint tools to shape some lightless abyss.

The point is, you're not really limited to what medieval guys with shovels could do.

Nietzsche wrote:
There would be no science if it concerned itself only with that one naked goddess and with nothing else. For then its disciples would have to feel like people who wanted to dig a hole straight through the earth, and each of them sees that, even with the greatest lifelong effort, he is in a position to dig through only a really small piece of the immense depths, and that piece will be covered over in front of his eyes by the work of the person who comes after him, so that a third person would apparently do well to select on his own initiative a new place for his tunnelling efforts. Well, if someone now convincingly demonstrates that it is impossible to reach the antipodes by this direct route, who will still want to continue working on in the old depths, unless in the meantime he lets himself be satisfied with the possibility of finding some valuable rock or discovering some natural law?

**Posted by Geffyl** 7/09/2014 9:08 am

Ghul wrote:
Geffyl is actually touching on what I was imagining when I came up with the hexagonal cut of Hyperborea, with a black obelisk at each point. The separation of the continent from Old Earth remains a thing only vaguely alluded to in the descriptive text of the setting material, but one thing I did study while making some of these choices was the continental shelf of the Arctic Ocean, specifically the depth of its basins and sub-basins. Imagine, if you will, that entire basin having been at one time occupied by a continent that roughly conforms to our Hyperborea's size, and maybe close to connecting to Greenland. Now, imagine that "plate" ripped from, or teleported, or launched from (whatever yhou might imagine!) Earth, leaving behind a series of basins of substantial depth. At present, the deepest of these basins is nearly 4,000 meters. That's almost 2.5 miles. These numbers do not need to dictate how we imagine the depth of the oceanic and continental crusts, but they are (to me!) interesting points of reference.

I try my best, Ghul.

I admit to not being a master of tectonophysics, but I researched the general information available on continental crusts (avg 25 - 40 km) and oceanic crusts (avg 5 - 10 k m). I also looked into several of Old Earth's larger mountain ranges, noting the "root" thickness of the tectonic plates, which are nearly double of the average thickness for the rest of the planet.

I imagined Hyperborea to be removed almost like a lense from an eyeball, generally concave in a hexagonal shape. Afterall, Old Earth wasn't left with a flat top. More likely, any violent removal may have left Old Earth filling in the wound as much as it could beneath molten core and the settling oceans, leaving basins of a seeming lesser depth than the original land's removal.

Magical and extradimensional forces withstanding, it's not a perfect estimate. YMMV.

Ciao,
Geffyl

Last edited by Geffyl (7/09/2014 9:13 am)