the below sounds ominous, i wanna hear more
actually it somehow has the least fucked up things happening down there!
so basically there’s a big ol massive cave system that runs below a lot of the world, and that’s where the subterranean races live!
the larger natural caves are home to dark elf aka drow cities, the deep gnomes aka duergar tend to live in what are basically burrows and tunnels, and the ember dwarves live almost exclusively near sources of heat like magma or geothermal pockets
the drow actually have a sort-of gunpowder! there’s a kind of moss that grows in certain parts of the dark (as the drow call it - for them darkness has a positive connotation) called sparkmoss that produces, well, sparks when threatened (how it determines danger is when enough pressure is applied to it) that they’ve learned how to grind up and turn these little packets that they put into guns that are similar to renaissance firearms
guns are actually quite expensive in drow society due to regulations from those in charge, so having a nice firearm that both functions well and looks nice is a mark of nobility!
drow society has distinct classes, the upper class consists of the 19 Families (technically only 15 since 4 are dishonored) which provide various goods and services that are well worth the high price, the middle class tends to be the laborers and those that provide more affordable goods and services, and the lower class consists of what drow society considers “unskilled” labor and people in charge of things like food production and livestock
i could keep going about the drow unless you’d rather hear about the ember dwarves or duergar?
