More work on Megadungoning

I been working on a concept, and I think I have the concept I am going forward with.

The City of Harrowood once was a great city, good trade location, good farmland, and the rich mines under the city made it a center of wealth and culture, fine houses and great temples were built, as the mines went ever deeper to collect silver, gold, Mitral, and other items from the deep.

Soon the city was known as the Jeweled city, as goods flowed in and the guilds grew wealthy. However not all was well.

When miners found existing tunnels, they did not explore them, they blocked them off haphazardly and they continued to dig, and in greed, they dug a little too deep and little too much.

The metal was placed in the mythic age, before written history, to keep the many gates deep in the earth closed, as the site was a center for gates from all sorts of realms, many foul. Forty years ago enough was removed that the great device could no longer work, and suddenly the gates opened, and the depths was filled with horrors, who rose up the mines and the mostly unmapped passages, and in a week, Harrowood, the jeweled city, was in ruins.

A generation later, the survivors of Harrowood and new arrivals still hold on, while the city was mostly sacked, the old quarter, with its old keep and gates with the runes that predate history, and its solid walls held off the terrors, and now the people live in the shadow of the former city. The docks till holds traders, fishermen still bring in their catch, and brave and foolhardy free folks still venture out to collect wealth in the ruins.

In the day the surface is mostly safe, you might see goblin or orcs moving about, but at night it best to be in the old quarter or in another protected place, as dark things rise up on occasion, and sometimes a mist flows out from the ruined temple of the law that is in the city center. Which is a sign of true danger for anyone caught in the open.

Yet the Old city still lives, gardens in old building lots, chicken and sheep eating the weeds, traders still trade, and adventurers seek out the coin and treasures lost, bring much needed coin for the community.