Go Underground

  Prompted by an aside that the Angry GM made the other day, I've been thinking more about caves. He was speaking about how we're not nearly so perceptive as we think we are, particularly with torches in dark dank caverns. I don't recommend anyone grabbing a torch and heading into the near crack in the ground, but most people in America live only 3-4 hours from a big impressive cave that has tours running regularly. If you've never gone, I can recommend that experience.
​  Most of these caves are good and deep, with multiple chambers providing a vast variety of pretty rock formations, which are the main focus of most tour guides. That's all well and good, but anytime I've gone on a big cave tour, what's struck me the most about these caverns is the stark and hostile environment, utterly alien to me or anyone else accustomed to the surface world. Caveman caves are almost cozy, never so deep as to lose sight of the sun. These deep caverns are completely dark, a dark so enveloping that when the torch flickers out it's instantly heavy, oppressive. Floors of caverns are typically either wet/underwater, or a wild jumble of rocks that would be trying to scramble over even in daylight. Mines are typically graded and a little better to walk in, but the oppressive dark of a preindustrial mine is still total and there you're more likely to run into patches of bad air, cave-ins, and rubble. There's nothing else like it above ground.
​  D&D players, and thus there characters, show a shockingly casual attitude towards the underground. For dungeon-delvers, exploring a new cavern or mine shaft is almost depressingly mundane, mostly a matter of tracking torch use and being annoyed at the game's assumed walking speed...but that's not how it should be. Miners, for whom going underground was their daily grind, were an incredibly superstitious lot, who feared and hated their environment even as it was normal. No matter how well-armed, your game's adventurers are going to be going even deeper than miners, into places known to hold monsters. If you've looked at a the ground in a cavern tour, imagine walking that with a single flickering torch, listening for monsters, trying to keep a formation...it's enough to make an adventurer mad.
  It's also a reason why dwarves often seem "too normal". The single oddest, weirdest thing about the dwarves isn't body hair, shortness, or a persistence of the Scots dialect...these people should be strange, they actually feel comfortable underground. Delving beneath the earth should feel as mundane for a dwarf as walking in a woodland for a human...dangerous, possibly, but not alien or unnerving just as an environment. Unfortunately, because your human fighter is just as blasé about the caving as Sean Rockhammer the Dwarf, there's not a lot of difference between the two. Functionally, all adventurers these days are dwarves.
  I don't know if there's a solution to this in all cases, but I do know that there's a pretty simple way to help your own imagination and add a real extra dimension to your games. Just...go under ground.

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