Veins of the Earth, by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess, is a Lamentations of the Flame Princess…source book? Campaign setting? Whatever it is, it is a formidable book (357 pages!) filled with interesting and horrible ideas (in the good way).

Foremost among them is the elaborate and groundbreaking system for designing and mapping cave systems. Underground exploration in RPGs tends to be orderly and fairly linear. That isn’t something you tend to encounter in real world cave systems, which tend to be circuitous, dangerous, claustrophobic and disorientating. The mapping system encourages creating tight spaces, dead falls, loop backs and dead ends while several random tables provide colorful atmosphere. There are also clever rules for light management, spelunking and environmental hazards, all of which are novel and tending a bit toward the cruel.

Veins also populates this underground world with ecologies and cultures of a nightmarish sort. The section of new monsters weighs in at 170 pages – surely these caverns are close to the entrance to hell. Scrap Princess’ expressionistic art does much to emphasize the horror in the darkness.  

The downside is that the book, particularly the monster entries, is written in a tone that alternates between the Extremely Casual and High School Goth Poet, which I think clashes a bit with the oppressive atmosphere of subterranean horror that the material seems to want to convey. For me, the vastly imaginative ideas more than make up for this (and honestly, I have a soft spot for casual gothy poets, I guess), but you mileage may vary. If you want to inject your D&D dungeon delves with a hearty dose of the horror movie The Descent, then pick this up. And consider using the Angler Lich – that’s an instant classic of a monster…