Veins of the Earth

(2017 ENNIE nominations for Best Monster/Adversary, Best Rules, Best Writing, and Product of the Year!)

THE ENDLESS DESCENT

At the deepest point of the dungeon, behind the throne, beyond the rooms where the battles took place, after everything is done and the enemy dead, there is a crack. A black empty space where the wall joins the stone floor, a foot and a half high and three wide. A breeze comes out. You’d never notice it. You could lie on your belly and fit inside.

IT NEVER ENDS

You have existed, up to this point, on the illusion of a plane, bordered by mountains, rivers, seas or the politics of maps, and this life has been a lie. Its borders are made up, its seas are gateways, its mountains are cradles of deep life. There is no plane.

You were raised within a history running back through recorded time, written in ink, carved in stone, scooped from clay, hidden in songs. Your primal myths are an eye-blink of the memory of that place. Your history is a candle burning out.

The real world, the deeper, more true world, is bordered only by light above and fire below, and perhaps not even by that.

When you loathe gold for its weight and count your wealth by a radius of illuminated rock and think yourself lucky to do so, then you have passed into the VEINS OF THE EARTH.

Expertly written and profusely illustrated by the veteran team of Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess (Deep Carbon Observatory and Fire on the Velvet Horizon), VEINS OF THE EARTH is the most important and comprehensive guide ever published for gaming in the depths of the earth. Included in this essential work:

• A detailed survey of over fifty new monsters and a half dozen cultures that lurk in the Veins.
• Procedures for Referees to generate both small and large-scale maps and locations within.
• Expanded rules for players navigating a realm that has never seen the sun.
• Full descriptions of the different types of light and the different types of dark.
• The worst kinds of fear, madness, and nightmare.

VEINS OF THE EARTH is a setting sourcebook for Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Role-Playing and other traditional role-playing games.