The Underforge Vaults are the forges and chambers beneath Argentum, worked over a volcanic rift called the Everfire, which supplies the city with heat, power and industry. The city’s coins are minted there.
Description
A vault is a sealable section of the Underforges. Vaults are numbered and vary widely in size. Luma understood most of them to be about the size of a large warehouse.1 The deeper the vaults, the hotter they get.1
Maintenance Tunnels
The maintenance tunnels run close to the surface and carry feed lines of everfire, steam and water from the vaults. They are not vaults themselves.1
Valve Halls
The Valve Halls are reached by a stairwell in the Hall of the Anvil, which winds down below the maintenance tunnels and the lowest of the city’s sewers.1 In late Coldrise the surface in the heart of the city was in the mid fifties, and the Valve Halls in the upper sixties.1 They are open chambers about forty feet high and roughly a hundred by a hundred and fifty feet, full of copper pipes and valves, where the Vaultsmiths and members of the Guild of Sparks check pressures and reroute lines.1 Touching a valve without knowing what it does could cause an explosion.1 The last of the Valve Halls is Vault 6, from which tunnels lead to other vaults.1
Minting Vaults
Part of the vaults is given over to minting, and not everyone who works below is authorized to enter it.1 The minting vaults hold old coins, relics and artifacts, which are melted down for their metal. The master coiner, Dalric Ironmark, works there.2
Sealed Vaults
Below the Valve Halls, a wide staircase cut into the stone descends steeply past branches to higher-numbered vaults, most of them heavily guarded.1 Some vaults were sealed about five hundred years ago, and the Vaultsmiths have not been inside them since.1 A 1714 PSF work order for two sections of them warned of bad air and toxic gas, of structural and seismic instability that might have opened new passages, and of old security mechanisms that were never deactivated.1 One of the two sections is entered from the basement of the Silver Archives.1
Kessa Tumblebrim believed Vaults 13 to 16 had been foundries or forges.1 They are entered through a round cast-iron door about twenty feet high, with a Guild of Sparks lock of newer, lighter metal set about four feet up.1 Behind it, the air is hot, dry and stale and smells of copper, and a ten-foot passage of carved dark stone and pale tile leads on to the four vaults in turn.13 The carved walls and pillars were well kept until some disaster shattered the pillars and scorched the chambers, and they have gone untended for several hundred years since.3
Vault 13 is a vast dark chamber with a sixty-foot ceiling, massive carved pillars and walls cut in brutal geometric patterns. Ruined forges, foundries, quenching troughs, anvils and tools lie about it, with heavy valved pipes running from the forges.13 Hot air moves through the vents in its floor. On its east side, rock has cracked up through the floor and still glows. A pool of lava has leached out of one drain, with fire snakes living in it, and gas from below burns in another.3
Vault 14 is narrower, with a forty-foot ceiling. It was a showroom for weapons, armor and tools, now nearly all rusted away, and the old armor there bears an emblem like the Vaultsmiths’, but with the flame rising from the anvil. rust monsters had the run of it, and had eaten through the portcullis at its north end.3
Vault 15 is the grandest, a hall of workshops with workbenches on locking wheels. It has a trapped floor plate beside a scorched drain, old spiderwebs, and three suits of animated armor in a decorated passage.3 A smooth section of wall in the passage before it is an old repair sealing off a natural cavern, where a tunnel dug by burrowing creatures drops out of sight and branches into others.3
Vault 16 is the most damaged. Its floor has melted, its pillars sag, and puddles of metal lie hardened on the floor. A massive hole in its southwest corner drops hundreds of feet to a glow of lava, and embers pour up out of it. A passage beyond is caved in.3 The Living Everfire possessed a melted suit of dwarven armor there.3 The hole is a chasm several dozen feet across at the top, as though a volcanic eruption blew up through the floor, and shards of rock around it still glow, holding their heat unnaturally.4
Vaults 17 to 19 are reached from the basement of the Silver Archives, down narrow stairs in the pragmatic stonework of post-Starfall Argentum, past passages labeled with the vaults they lead to.4 Vault 17 is entered through a round door made entirely of modern steelwork. Stairs lead down twenty feet to a hallway of fine dwarven stonework, ten feet wide with a seven-foot ceiling, and the hallway is the vault.4 Doors along both sides open onto apartments, each with a traditional dwarven clan mark over its door. Their occupants took their things and left in a hurry, though not a violent one.4 One was the home of the Deepdraft clan, where Riswynn Deepdraft left a note under a bed.4
The hallway continues round and down twenty feet to Vault 18, behind a round cast-iron door with a steel lock set into it.4 The air there is staler and the dust thicker. Wooden signs or barricades lie tossed aside, and there are a few cracks in the walls.4 The Vault 18 graffiti covers the walls of its hallway.4 Its apartments are in more varied states than those of Vault 17. Some still hold their owners’ belongings, and others were cleared out, many of them carefully or slowly.4 A dwarven smith's journal in one of them describes the fire that destroyed the lower foundries.4 In another, a hammer on a crafter’s tool rack opens a secret door to a hidden workshop, where two stone defenders stood guard.4 Luma took the cast-iron doors of the vaults to be the originals, with steel locks added later.4
Below Vault 18, past any lock of the modern city, stairs lead down to Vault 19, a communal kitchen fifty or sixty feet across, with a central stove under a hooded chimney, counters, cabinets, barrels and shelves of jars.56 Its stores include Everfire honey, mined rock salt and rock bread, and a box of Dwarvish recipe cards.5 Booted footprints no more than a month or two old cross its dust. Behind a cupboard, a tunnel cut by hand runs about a hundred feet to a storeroom with a locked iron door, where the Tarnar Syndicate left a cache of supplies.5 A route given in a Syndicate note runs from there to the Fardrimm Gate, miles below.6
A narrow passage from the kitchen leads to a dwarven shrine, whose stone pillars are carved as hammers resting on anvils, with the old anvil-and-flame emblem on its back wall. A great stone anvil at its center holds a bowl of prayer stones and coins stamped with crescent moons.5 A double iron door on the far side of the kitchen opens on Vault 20, a gathering hall about eighty feet across, with pillars, stone benches and a thirty-foot ceiling, and another closed double iron door at its far end.56 A cloaker and three darkmantles lay in wait on its ceiling.5 Their darkness hid the Vault 20 mural, a night sky painted on the ceiling.6 The iron door at the far end leads down to the forgemasters' tomb.6
History
Session 9
Luma was hired to survey two sections of the sealed vaults, and hired the rest of the party as her security.1 On 30 Coldrise, 1714 PSF, they went down through the Valve Halls and opened the door to Vault 13. More than a hundred feet inside, firelight glowed from behind the pillars.1
Session 10
The party surveyed all four vaults of the first section on 30 Coldrise, 1714 PSF. They fed coal to the fire snakes, killed the rust monsters and the animated armor, and destroyed the Living Everfire.3 Luma left the old emblem and the vaults’ contents out of her report, and Iva and Temerity took the pair of dwarven hand axes from Vault 16, which the work order forbade.3
Session 11
Luma finished mapping the four foundry vaults on 30 Coldrise, 1714 PSF. Her survey covered exactly those four chambers, and she suspected another vault lay past the cave-in.4 She resealed the door behind the party.4 On the Vigil of Remembrance they entered Vaults 17 and 18 from the basement of the Silver Archives. Luma took ten platinum dragons from a lockbox in Vault 17 and left ten crowns in their place.4 She judged a pair of silver mugs there to be at least fifteen hundred years old, and could not square that with the work order, which said the vaults were sealed about five hundred years ago.4 In Vault 18 the party found the graffiti and the smith’s journal and destroyed the two stone defenders, and Luma kept the Golem Control Rod and the Masterwork Dwarven Pistol from the hidden workshop.4
Session 12
The party explored the kitchen, the Syndicate storeroom and the shrine of Vault 19, and the hall of Vault 20, on the Vigil of Remembrance, 1714 PSF.5 The rock bread in the kitchen was no more than a couple of hundred years old, which Luma could not square with the vaults having been sealed more than five hundred years before.5 At the shrine, Hazel saw a vision of a vast eye when she left a prayer.5 In the hall the party killed the cloaker and the three darkmantles.5
Session 13
On the Vigil of Remembrance, 1714 PSF, Luma realized that the hall was Vault 20, one beyond her work order.6 With the darkmantles dead the party found the mural, then picked the lock of the iron door beyond it and went down into the forgemasters’ tomb.6 From the Syndicate storeroom they followed the route to the Fardrimm Gate, and on the way back up they relocked the vaults behind them.6
Session 14
On 1 Nightdeep, 1714 PSF, Dalric Ironmark told Luma that no one had authorized her survey of Vaults 17 to 19, the residential vaults.2
Session 16
On 3 Nightdeep, 1714 PSF, Amber Deepdraft read Luma’s full report and said it confirmed what her group suspected: the residential warrens were sealed about as long ago as the Synod says, but hold things that have to be from before the Starfall.7 On 6 Nightdeep Thaddeus Marwin told Luma that the forge vaults were sealed because of dangerous seismic activity that meddling could set off, and that the residential vaults could hold poisons and other unknown hazards.7