Underworld Ascendant "Curious Conversations" Blog Update
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The team at OtherSide Entertainment has once again penned an update to their blog, this time sharing some insights from two "curious conversations" that they've had about Underworld Ascendant during lunch. Time-telling in the subterrane and potential uses for a giant mushroom are among them:
"How do you tell time in the Underworld?"
Since the Underworld exists underground, how would its inhabitants know what time of day it was without a sun, moon or stars to go by? When this question was casually asked one afternoon it immediately spawned a slew of responses ranging from reasonable to ...unorthodox. And before we concluded that this wasn't necessarily an issue we needed to solve (after all, people got by perfectly fine in the real world for thousands of years without watches, even on cloudy days!) we went down so many design rabbit-holes we started growing cotton tails.
The first solution was to have a character, likely a dwarf, be the "Time Keeper" of the Underworld. His sole job, day in and day out, would be to watch the one functioning hourglass in the Abyss and to turn it over immediately when its sands ran their course. All other people in the Underworld would rely upon this esteemed figure to determine when to pull their bread out of the oven, or how long they had been on guard duty.
Reasonable but perhaps a little boring. So, someone brought up flatulence. What if Deepslugs, the Underworld's equivalent of domesticated cows, had gassy discharges every hour on the hour? Interesting solution, if an unpleasant one for Underworld herdsmen. This in turn spawned the idea of telepathic fungi that lets out a psychic scream every half hour that everyone in the Underworld can "hear", like a terrifying grandfather clock.
Predictable fissures, like Ole Faithful, came up, as well as plant life that blooms at exactly noon and midnight each day. Another solution was the idea of an increase and decrease to the flow of lava throughout the Underworld based on the time of day. Markings on the channel walls would let everyone know if it was "highlava" or "lowtrickle" time.
Who knows, some of these ideas might even make it into the game. Not the flatulence one, though. We promise.
