The Hollows

The Hollows lie off the edge of the map: no border leads there. They are rolling downs for levels 4 to 7, a kilometre across, walled in by high ground at their edge, with Lantern Hall at their southern end.

What sets them apart is underfoot. The ground here is hollow:

• Caves open on the hillsides and wander back into the hills, some of them branching. They keep well under the land above them, so a cave can run beneath a path, and in places one passage runs beneath another. You can walk in at a mouth and out of another one somewhere else on the downs. It is dark inside away from the mouths, and you carry a light. Ore veins grow only in the caves, on their floors.
• The Sinkhole, in the middle of the downs, drops straight into a great cavern far below. Two long passages climb out of the cavern to the surface; walking down one of them is the way in.
• Natural arches stand over the open ground, and ledges jut out from the steeper hillsides with room to walk underneath them.
• Rivers rise on the ridges and run down the downs into lakes, shallow enough to wade. One runs to the Sinkhole and falls over its rim into the cavern, onto a pool on the cavern's floor; the pool is deep enough to swim, and the ground round its edge is waded.
• A castle stands on the downs, garrisoned like any castle in the open world: take its Castellan and it is yours, until the planet comes for it. A quarry is cut into a hillside, its ramp walked down to the floor among the cut blocks.
• Roads run from Lantern Hall to the castle's gate, the quarry, the Mycelium Deep's door and both graveyards, bridged where they cross a river, with signposts where they meet.

Creatures come up out of the ground to roam the surface, and they will follow you into the caves. A roof between you and a creature blocks its sight and its shots, as a hill does. Walk off the edge of an arch or a ledge, or down into a cave's mouth, and you fall to whatever is below.

Lantern Hall has its innkeeper, trader and quartermaster, and its people have work for you, ending with a call into the Mycelium Deep, the fungal dungeon whose door stands on the eastern downs. If you die, you wake at Lantern Graves or Highcairn Graves, whichever is nearer.