Understreet
It is said that Ghearas is a city of a million souls, but in truth it is impossible to tell just how vast the population of the city is; for there is no administrator foolish enough to try and take a tally in the depths of the below the city. Below the roads and buildings of Ghearas and huddled amongst the pipes running steam and water through the city, living in something like the realm of urban legend, lies the Understreets.
Demographics
All the people of the Understreets are either vagrants, barely scraping by on what they can find, and the only slightly more prestigious pipe-workers. That it, those that upkeep the sewers, the steam valves, and the water pipes of the city. The majority of these workers are duergar, drow, svirfneblin, or the occasional, slowly decaying human; the reason for their death usually being extreme lack of sunlight and sustenance.
Government
There's technically a small governing body in Last Step, the only somewhat-ordered district or larger group of "houses" in all of Understreet, that being the chief of the pipe-workers guild who by extension has to make sure his workers aren't starving to death (a frustratingly difficult task). There's not really any attempt at taxation, as there aren't any sort of near-decent records of who lives down there.
Districts
Last Step - A collection of some few hundred half-decent houses, shops and stores with just enough food, and something like actual civilisation far in the depths of Understreet. The guy in charge here is a deep-gnome, or svirfneblin, named Jorh, who's also the chief of the Pipers Guild.
Guilds and Factions
The Pipers Guild - This is the only reason the Ghearas government takes any sort of interest in the depths. Informally subservient to the Guild of Heat, seeing as those are the ones with all the coal, the Pipers Guild are the people that make repairs, upkeep, and occasionally do the work of digging and expanding the system warming and giving water to Ghearas.
Geography
There are two types of tunnels in Understreet. There's the Maintenance Tunnels, perfectly cylindrical, relatively wide, grey stone tunnels built so that the brass pipes running under the city can be maintained. These are also something like the main arteries of Understreet, and the safest way of travelling between different points of interest. Then there's the Shafts.
The Shafts are roughly hewn, barely a meter and a half wide things which range from going perfectly horizontally, to slippery slides of jagged rock, to sheer, terrifying drops. While these tunnels are connected to the Maintenance Tunnels, and provide incredible shortcuts in comparison to their grid-like structure, the Shafts are simultaneously dangerous. Most of them are older than the last few governments of Ghearas, and some have been completely untouched for even longer. It is impossible to know what might have emerged in these depths.
Other than these two types of tunnels, there are also larger caverns; usually filling some sort of function such as living space or steam engines. These range from perfectly hewn, smooth domes, lit by industrial lanterns, to natural caverns formed by the dripping of limestone.
Founding Date
???
Alternative Name(s)
The Passages
Type
Underground / Vault
Population
At least several thousand
Location under
Comments