20XX Excavate

UNDERNEATH us the secret world awaits. Unknown wonders and terrible Horrors writhe in the sacred earth. Little holds you on the surface anymore. So down you go to dig. Deeper, ever deeper ...

This is a module for Jason Tocci's 24XX game system. It is heavily inspired by the Underground in Chris McDowall's Electric Bastionland as well as Emmy Allen's Esoteric Enterprises and the song Excavate by Assasun. Text and cover art were created by Ossulgarnen under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0).

In this game you play real world losers and loners that have decided to crawl beneath their city and dive into a mysterious underworld full of wonders, secrets and hazards. Maybe you are a criminal that is in desperate need for a shot of earthblood. Or a nerd that learned some rip-off spells on a shady website. Or a jobless nurse that was touched by a Termite-God. Or maybe you are one of those Horrors from below and you just want to return home. Let's climb into the next cellar and find out.

To make preperations for this game, take a map of a city of your choice. Mark some locations on that map with a symbol (I use triangles for entrances to the underworld and circles for locations that can't be reached directly from the surface). Connect some of the marked surface-locations with different colored, branching lines. Make a symbol at every point where the lines branch, bend, end or cross each other. The symbols are the locations of the underworld below the city and the lines are the tunnels and crawl spaces that connect them with each other. Fill them with strange stuff, lurking hazards and weird creatures by using the random tables in the PDF or any other source of inspiration.

Like every game that was grown from 24XX this is an open kit for making your own game. It can be easily adapted to your liking and it is compatible with any other module based on Jason Tocci's framework.

If you would like some starting points for that, here are some ideas:

- Use the Alien Traits of Xenolith for lone horror PCs and the spells in Legends for additional spells or gifts of Patrons

- Use the anomalies in Zone for creating interesting hazards and traps. And use the  artifacts of Zone for creating ... well, artifacts. The Alien table of Eos might also help in creating interesting inhabitants of the underworld.

- Use the stress mechanic and scary bits like "Observations" and "kickers" from Orbital Decay to give your game more of a Horror movie feeling.    

Disclaimer:

Every 24XX game highlights the importance of savety messures and the communication about what you want in your game and what not. This game is no exception in that regard. Before you start playing or building your Characters, please talk about how you all would like to handle things like violence and horror in that game. Only because your PCs will most likely encounter things underground that they are not comfortable with, doesn't mean that it has to be something that you folks at the table are uncomfortable with.

With that all said, have fun!