The Tunnels (CTD)
The Tunnels are a Home Realm for the Sluagh.
Overview
When Myrmitown was built, the boggans made a series of sewer-tunnels underneath their cities. The sluagh expanded upon this basic framework to create their realm.
The Tunnels are a labyrinthine underground network. It is very easy to get lost here; there is little to no light, and there
r are vast chasms that have opened up on the ground recently. Even sluagh familiar with the area sometimes get lost, as formerly traversable passages become impassable because of a gorge or a rockfall. There are also many dangerous chimerical inhabitants. Most are friendly to the sluagh, but occasionally attacks against the sluagh by insane chimera are not unknown.
Non-sluagh are strictly forbidden, and the few entrances wide enough for non-sluagh to slip through are guarded by chimerical giant rats and alligators, the latter spawned from the urban myth of sewer alligators. The other entrances are so small that only a sluagh could get through them. These entryways include Occam's Razor, a long, thin wedge of a tunnel, about 6 inches in diameter and 70 feet in length, that leads into the Tunnels' Great Hall. It is called Occam's Razor because sloping planes descend to carnivorous chimerical stalagmites hundreds of feet below on either side of the tunnel-wedge. Anyone who attempts to get across by creeping along the slopes is likely to slip into the pit below (Dexterity + Athletics, Difficulty 9; each success gets you 5 feet closer, and a botch means you fall in). There are many such traps in the Tunnels. Most of these traps are not mechanical and many rely upon dangerous natural formations in the rock. The sluagh are clever, but they are not as good with their hands as are boggans, and they do not trust Myrmitownians enough to ask them to come into the tunnels and install some traps (would you?).
The Tunnels are an excellent place to go for sluagh when pursued by non-sluagh enemies, or when they seek sources of information. There are fewer than 40 sluagh here at any time, as the Tunnels provide little in the way of food. The only sustenance available comes from barter with the other Home Realms (for information, which the sluagh are loath to do, as they always feel the "outsiders" are trying to rip them off), from what the inhabitants can bring in, or from the rare, desperate killing of a giant gator for meat (and cool boots).
The most significant feature of the Tunnels is the Great Hall, a massive area with ceilings so high that no amount of light illuminates them. Sound echoes terribly in this place, and any communication above a whisper is impossible to understand. Non-carnivorous stalagmites in various sizes randomly dot the floor. Some of these are carved into unusual sculptural shapes by sluagh of an artistic bent.
Also on the floor is a series of sewer grates. These grates have their perspective reversed, so that the downward view through a grate reveals things as if one looked up from below it. The grates randomly shift views among many scenes from above many grates, in and out of the Dreaming (no one knows if the grates ever showed a scene from Arcadia). The view through the grates is uncontrollable, and it switches randomly. A patient sluagh can learn a lot of "secret" tidbits through these grates.
The permanent inhabitants of the Tunnels are happy here. It is the perfect home for a sluagh: lonely, barren, alternately dank or stuffy, cold, dark, and haunted, of all things, by a chimerical ghost. This ghost is relatively harmless. It sticks to the usual popular conceptions of ghosts: chain rattling noises, blood dripping from walls, moaning in the halls, etc. It resists all attempts to communicate and runs away from people who try to overpower it.
References
- CTD. Dreams and Nightmares, p. 89.