Not in a collum. Just one stretching down to that small archipelago. It might have even fallen, from its original underground location. Enough fiddling with a unstable bit of rock would cause it to collapse.
Instead of something dreadful, the labyrinth could shelter something soothing, hidden from unworthy eyes. Or maybe just nothing. If it has been there for so long, surely we cannot be the first captains to venture there.
Especially if we tie the dwellers from Visage to the minoans and the labyrinth. We are not the firsts to fall, nor to explore the Unterzee.
I would not dismiss so easily the Minotaur. He is after all tied to Poseidon. And if the Labyrinth is indeed Minoan related, it was built for him.
But… I don’t know. I find the Minos lead a bit too easy. While not impossible, it does not seem to me like the most interesting/surprising idea.
Does anyone have an zubmariner screenshot of the area? This might give us some more clues.
Speaking for myself, I think that I would use the Labyrinth as the opening chapter of a longer quest for knowledge.
I’m pretty sure the zee floor in the Snares is your basic generic zee. However, I certainly could see moving from the islands, to exploring the underzee before moving on to some other location.
Ultimately, I’d say the specific origin of the Labyrinth is mostly irrelevant from the standpoint of setting a story there. How many islands in the Unterzee have an explicit backstory that a player can learn with 100% certainty? The Kahnate is the only one that comes close and you still need a fairly good grasp of Fallen London lore outside of Sunless Sea to really have a good idea of what’s going on there.
Even the Empire of Hands doesn’t explain why the Pentecost Apes were exiled to the far side of the Unterzee. They know what they did!
Defining a background for the Labyrinth is mostly an academic exercise. I’m sure that Failbetter’s “story bible” has a line or two about it, but it’s just as likely that even they haven’t given it any great thought beyond it’s existence.
From a flavor standpoint, creating a background is interesting but from the standpoint of exploring the islands in the here and now, the current state of the Labyrinth is its most immediately interesting feature.
I wonder about the exploration.
There’s no wind to speak of in the Neath. There’s no evidence in Sunless Sea that any culture aside from possibly the Khanate has the technology to explore the Unterzee beyond rowing along the continental coastlines.
The Khanate has electric lights but that doesn’t automatically translate to electrically driven ships.
Maybe the reason that the other population centers seem so insular is that they didn’t have the technology to be anything else until Londin arrived and brought steam engines and later a path to the surface.
I wouldn’t bet on that. Between Tomb colonists, Chelonites, Khaganian, Devils, Pirats, Tigers, and all, it seems unplausible at best that no one ever explored the Neath before. And even if we stick to londoners, we can safely assume that zee captains have charted the unterzee quite extensively to establish the settlements to even the remotest places such as frosfound, savior’s rock, or contact older settlers in varchas or on the carnelian coast.
Yes and no. You can certainly do without it, but your story will be all the more coherent if you have a ditinct idea of were you come from and were you go. But since it’s your mod, it’s entirely up to you to choose how to proceed. I’m only trying to help by throwing wild ideas :)
edited by Machallan on 6/27/2017
Ah, I was taking "we" to mean "Londoners in general" rather than "Our player characters".
As for the others, I find it interesting that despite some of them inhabiting the Neath for thousands of years, that only London seems to have spread throughout the Unterzee. Even the Khanate seems to have settled into its new home pretty thoroughly after the Exodus. The arrival of London appears to have given them something to compete against, but while there are plenty of Khanate corsairs showing up around the pirate lairs and London’s outlying settlements, you don’t find Fourth City colonies around the Unterzee; even though it’s lousy with Fifth City colonies.
Of course, that could just mean that London is still new and that if it had several hundred years in the Neath to rise and decline before having the Sixth City dropped on it that that it WOULD decline and most of its outlying colonies with it; to leave its mysteries behind like Castle Clare or the Labyrinth of Eels.
My gut feeling, though, is that the steam engine revolutionized Neath exploration in a way that previous fallen cities weren’t able to manage.
Couple notes here.
- The Presbyterate definitely predates the Bazaar’s arrival - but not necessarily Stone’s arrival. After all, the Bazaar and the Sun couldn’t have created Stone if the Bazaar had already hidden down here. (I also have the impression that Stone is the reason there’s human life on Earth, not sure where that came from.)[/li][li]Visage is probably an offshoot of the Second City, with Flourishing of Years being Hatshepsut. Here’s one discussion about Visage; pretty sure there’ve been more over the years but it’s the only one I can find.[/li][li]Nuncio isn’t necessarily an indication of human habitation pre-Bazaar. Given the postal theming, the Center-Stone may well be a piece of the Bazaar that attracted humans after cities fell.
That’s a good point. If you investigate the "basement" with a mirror-catch box of sunlight (as opposed to one of the other means of investigating it), you deduce that the Center-Stone is an artifact that once knew the light of the Sun. At the least, it’s an artifact from the surface that was brought below. My assumption was that it must have come with whoever set it there and built the lower-most levels of storage, but it’s just as likely that it fell and called its original acolytes to it from across the Unterzee.