Isometric cave maps

While reading about caves with massive vertical drops, I found a some isometric maps of caves around Mount Velebit in Croatia.  First, Lukina Jama, the deepest pit in Croatia.

Lukina Jama, from the Croation Speleology Server.  Click through for full size.

At the bottom there is a system of ponds that houses one of the largest colonies of subterranean leeches.  Now, what exactly are those leeches feeding on (apart from lost explorers)?

The trogolobitic leech, Croatobranchus mestrovi.

Second, Velebita.  This has the longest single vertical drop – 516m.  I love that this map seems to have included diagrams of where the ropes go, and pictures of trees and boulders at the surface.  Are they like markers to help you find the place: “it’s easy to spot, there’s a big fir tree there and a rock that looks like Groucho Marx’s nose – you can’t miss it”.

Small sample from the Velebita map, again from the Croation Speleology Server. Click through for full size.

These caves, and several others, are all clustered around the one location in the Sjeverni Velebit national park.  This cross-section shows just how close they are to each other – shades of the Caves of Chaos?

Cross-section, click through for full size.

The Miao Keng shaft

The 500m deep Miao Keng shaft, image via the Daily Mail.

The area around the mountain village of Tian Xing seems to have an incredible assortment of caves.  It has the four deepest cave systems in China and “numerous 200m+ vertical shafts” including the 491m Miao Keng shaft.  A half a kilometre (1600 feet, for the metrically challenged) of sheer vertical drop.

At the bottom of the shaft, the lights are the cavers’ headlamps.  Via Daily Mail.

The descent down this shaft takes hours, all performed abseiling on a single rope, and this particular team of cavers spent a week exploring the area.  As long as this drop is, it’s not quite the longest in the world: there are several in Croatia and Slovenia that are somewhat longer than it.

Those pictures of the descending cavers are spell-binding.  Descending a shaft like that must take some serious nerve, a real act of faith in the strength of your equipment.  Would your characters have what it takes to face a thousand foot drop into the unknown?  Would they even be able to deal with the logistics of traversing it?

Sprawling monastery and gigantic caverns, part 2.

In part 1 I described the hillside cave-monastery of Vardzia in the eastern European country of Georgia.  Now let’s turn our attention to the second part of the title, the vast cave complex of Krubera (aka Voronya).

The Krubera caves are the deepest yet found (depth measured from the cave entrance rather than against sea-level).  At its lowest point it is 2,191m below its sole entrance, making it the only known cave beyond the 2000m mark, and the total extent of the caves is over 13km.  It was only discovered in 1960 and the initial explorations only descended 60m

Since 2001 teams from the Call of the Abyss project have explored the caves out to their current extent and to do so they need to treat the caves the way alpinists treat mountains.  From the BBC's article on the 2004, 56-member team expedition:

Carrying about five tonnes of equipment, they had to negotiate vertical drops and freezing torrents of water. They were also forced to blast rubble from passages that were critically narrowed or blocked by "boulder chokes".

They set camps at depths of 700m, 1,215m, 1,410m and 1,640m, where they cooked meals, slept up to six people to a tent and worked for up to 20 hours at a stretch.

The cavers kept in touch with the surface base camp by rigging nearly 3km (two miles) of rope strung with a telephone wire.

The level of organisation that these teams have is something that no game I’ve been part of has ever considered.  I also think that it’s interesting to see how many repeated visits the teams make.  They don’t simply go the once, look around, and declare the job’s done; in these huge and complicated environments they make visit after visit, exploring places that they’ve already been to see if they missed opportunities to reach even further and newer sections of the cave.  They spend weeks at a time underground using a variety of techniques to map the area, including using coloured dyes to determine how the water flows through the caves (put purple dye in a stream, and if you don’t see the purple in other parts of the cave, you know the stream is going somewhere else).

Now, the reason that I linked posting these caves and the Vardzia monastery together wasn’t just because they are both in Georgia, but because I first read about each of them in a terrific post on the “architectural speculation” blog BLDGBLOG.  That post was what really put the idea of a blog like this in my head, when towards the end he mentions that there is no connection between the monastery and the caves, but:

… how exciting would it be to discover that Vardzia had, in fact, been constructed as a kind of architectural filter above the stovepipe-like opening of a titanic cave system, and that, 800 years ago, monks alone in the mountains reading books about the end of the world might have sat there, surrounded by fading frescoes of saints and dragons, looking into the mouth of the abyss, perhaps even in their own local twist on millennial Christianity standing guard over something they believed to be hiding far below

I won’t steal any more of his thunder, but in the paragraph after this he throws out an idea that I sincerely hope someone turns into a game.  Enough said, go see for yourself.

Sprawling monastery and gigantic caverns.

The eastern European country of Georgia is home to a pair of remarkable places: the Krubera Cave, the deepest caves in the world, and the hillside monastery of Vardzia.  Vardzia was originally both built into a hillside, digging caves into the rock, and built out alongside the rock-face.  It was devastated by an earthquake that destroyed most of the external structure, but exposed the structure within.

Photos via wikipedia

The wikipedia entry claims that the monastery would have been 6,000 rooms spread across 13 levels; even now there are still some 300 rooms.

I really like the three-dimensional quality of the layout too: there are levels and partial levels, there are stairs that skip a whole (or multilple) levels, there appear to be many vertical connections as well as lateral.

Notice too that many of the stairs end right where the next begin, in contrast to so many dungeon maps where having arrived at one level you must search for the entrance to the next.  It’s also interesting that the building stretches a long way across and up the hillside, but not very far into it.  In all this layout, very tall and narrow, is quite different to the shallower, broader maps of my youth.

Photo via Wikipedia

Lest these images fool us into thinking that the monastery was a primitive one, let’s finish with some showing remnants of the fine stonework and mosaics that once covered this whole structure.

 

All images via wikipedia

The sub-surface skyscraper

Open-cut mines dig massive, massive holes out of the earth, leaving behind the problem of how you go about remediating the site once the mine is spent.  Washington University in St Louis student Matthew Fromboluti designed Above Below, a brilliant proposal to take Arizona’s 900 feet deep Lavender Pit Mine:

The empty mine, via evolo.

And build within it an “inverse sky-scraper” as a self-sustaining underground building.

The interior and the surface of Above Below, via evolo.

The holes on the surface allow light to reach the lower levels, while the central column allows warm air to escape from the structure, driving wind turbines near the top.  The lowest level acts as a reservoir to collect rainwater.

Schematic of the interior, again from evolo.

The pictures don’t really suggest how vast this would be.  At 900 feet (274m) deep, that central tower would be the height of a 60-storey building.  The surface covers 300 acres, which is roughly a kilometre wide square.

While the design looks immediately useful as a futuristic location, this had me thinking about that old fantasy trope of dwarves living in mines.  That almost always seems to mean rickety deep mine shafts, but this offers an alternative model.  And the damage to the surface that digging out such a large structure makes could be the cause of enmity between these miners and woodland elves: the dwarves as hard-headed business men, the elves as eco-terrorists.

Will Insley’s ONECITY

Image from ONECITY, via the nonist

Will Insley is (was?) an artist, architect, and engineer.  These images were taken from a collection of his that were exhibited back in the early 80s at the Guggenheim.  As the NYT reported at the time:

“ONECITY,” the chief project in the show, has, the artist says, “very little to do with advanced planning theories of the present” or with the “utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity.”

Image from ONECITY, via the nonist

An imaginary labyrinth 650 miles square, symbolized by a floor plan that paces off at about 30 feet, it … consists of many 2 1/2-mile-square structures, each divided into an “Over-building” and an “Under-building” and each containing nine arenas.

It's clear, however, that the city's inhabitants are segregated into day people, wholesome types who study at home with their children by means of electronic devices, and night people. “Tattered ghosts in phosphorescent clothing,” the night people sound a lot like the more Felliniesque denizens of the Lower East Side, being given to masks and elaborate makeup; they “mutter a lot” and “often carry around personal abstract structures” that they exchange “according to mysterious rituals.” And while they have homes in the Over-building, they frequently sleep in the cubby holes of the Under-building, ignored by day people going about their business.

Image from ONECITY, via the nonist

The article goes on to suggest that there is an allusion here to New York’s homeless (being the night people to the middle class day people).  But when I see these drawings of a claustrophobic city -especially something about it’s dense, square shape – I think of Howard’s Red Nails.  The description of the day/night people each moving through the city reminds me very much of the town of Kingsport from Lovecraft’s The Festival.

Amongst that NYT article, there is also a fleeting mention of the city’s ‘“Opaque Library”, which no one may enter’.  It’s not at all apparent to me what this ‘library’ actually is, but that name deserves to reappear in some gaming material, preferably attached to some Borgesian archive or information store.

The sewer divers of Mexico City

Via Edible Geography, stills from a National Geographic video.  Carlos Barrios is lowered into the murky depths

Mexico City has the extraordinary history of being built, essentially, on top of a lake.  The water feeding into it was drained away by the Conquistadors (the better to invade Tenochtitlan) and the modern city gradually grew in its place.  But the city is gradually sinking and as a result some of the city’s 650 kilometres of sewers no longer drain as effectively as they should.  They are terribly prone to clogging and with seasonal thunderstorms that means flooding.

Keeping these floods under control means keeping the sewer pumps free of blockages, and to do that they have a team of divers.  Their job is to go into the sewers while the pumps are still running, find the material that’s causing the problem, and remove it.  Generally that’s just rubbish that’s been swept up off the streets, but as a Washington Post article mentioned it could also be something much worse:

At least there were no human bodies today, like the two he found floating by recently.

…

He never found out who they were, because they were carried off in the flowing waters. The police were not called. The divers, who periodically encounter bodies because sewers are popular spots for dumping murder victims, only call police when they bring a body to the surface.

The cage lowers into the filth.

I imagine that it takes a special kind of person to do this work; apart from the filthy conditions, apart from the occasional encounter with dead bodies, the water is so dark and polluted that they can’t even see.  They inch their way through the sewers feeling ahead of them until they reach the blockage that will typically be up against the blades of a pump that’s still running and start reaching around to try to dislodge it.

We’d love to be able to see down there, but the water is so dirty and it’s got so many particles in it that the light reflects off everything and bounces on your eyes and you still can’t see. Eight hundred watts—one thousand watts even—and I can’t even see my own hand in front of my face. Apart from something that could help me see down there, I can’t think of anything. Fancy things like a robot or a submarine wouldn’t really help with the kinds of things I do. And we’d still be in the same situation: we can’t see anything down there, so we have to feel it

(From Edible Geography)

It is a fabulous scenario for a horror game – who knows what could be hiding down there? – but it’s got me thinking about a fantasy version.  Underground locations are commonplace; underwater locations are much less common but there are some; I can’t think of much at all by the way of games that have combined the two.

The tunnels of Chicago

Artificial caverns under Chicago.  Image via BLDGBLOG and Tunneling Online

Big cities produce, and need, big infrastructure.  Chicago is built in a location that has significant problems with flooding, and in response the city has been building a huge network of storm-drains and sewers at a grand scale.  The TARP (Tunnels and Reservoir Program) project has now built a little over 100 miles of tunnels under the city, varying in width from 8 to 35 feet wide, ultimately leading to reservoirs that will contain billions of gallons of fluids.  And in addition to this, some of the tunnels connect back into a further 60 miles of freight tunnels.

The idea of the “megadungeon” has made something of a return to respectability, but in my mind there is still that nagging doubt about how exactly a largely underground location would come about.  Projects like this suggest a potential origin story – they are remnants of an advanced former civilization.  Post some ancient apocalypse, the city is gone, but its hidden bones remain.

If you think about the areas that have typically been called a “megadungeon”, they will hardly scratch the surface of the monumental scale of a project like this.  Beyond the simple number of 106 miles of tunnels, consider the number of access points or connections back to the service that the system must have as well.  Imagine a tunnel that you would take a day to travel down, and that you could march along it 6 abreast.  Or reservoirs with volumes measured in the hundreds of millions of cubic feet (imagine a cube 300’ x 300’ x 300’, that’s the kind of volume we’re talking about).

A 13-storey house of wood

image via Inhabitat

Built in the northern Russian city of Archangelsk, this enormous wooden tower was originally going to be a simple two-storey house.  For one reason or another, over the course of 15 years owner Nikolai Sutyagin continued to add level after level until it reached a height 144 feet.  In 2008 authorities finally stepped in -– he had no building permit for a structure like this -– and declared it needed to be removed as a fire hazard.

The wild structure of this building is very compelling, the shapes all seem familiar, but are extended to absurd dimensions.  And the way that the pieces aren’t perfectly finished -- the way that the central tower bends perilously one way and then the other, for example – certainly emphasizes the impression that not all is well in such a place.

And why not have the same wildness on the interior of the building as well?  Not just that level one joins to level two joins to level three, but a three dimensional labyrinth.  In a typical “dungeon” going deeper means moving to the next stage of the adventure; perhaps in this building the levels are not layered one on top of the other, but one within another like a Matryoshka doll.

As to why someone would build something like this, at the end of the Atlas Obscura entry there is a mention that he may have built it for his betrothed.  Personally, I was taken with the idea that it wasn’t built by anyone per se, but that the house itself was somehow responsible.  Even better, put those two ideas together – someone built a magical house for their beloved so that they can always have a house around them, one that can repair itself and perhaps grow to accommodate their needs; but something is wrong and from a simple cottage it grew into this rambling tower.  Perhaps, deep inside, that original cottage is still there?