Underhollow Ecology

Flora

• Green plants are rare in the Underhollows, growing only in ash elf vaults where the light of sun stones allows them to live. Some benefices have great farm caverns, while others maintain decorative flora. In both cases, the plants also keep the air in the vaults sweet.
• Darklight flora is a broad category of plants which are sim­ilar in structure to green plants, but with dark, purple leaves which arcosynthesise, using the pervasive energies of the Underhollows to create food and oxygen.

Other

• Moulds and Slimes are highly primitive, semi-mobile fungal bodies capable of reacting to stimuli. They are a natural hazard of the unoccupied caverns and darkening, and clearing them from occupied areas is a critical, full-time job.
• Oozes are bodies of self-replicating, acidic protoplasm, animated by a high concentration of non-material energy. Regardless of the type of energy, oozes are driven by a need to consume matter that is too primitive to even be categorised as hunger.

Animals

• The Underhollows teem with large insects and spiders, some with unnatural power. Jaskinisse herd and milk root aphids, while the symbiotic relationship between the Kindled and their spiders - the steeders that they use as mounts, and the stalkers that they use as hounds - has become infamous since the Betrayal, when a faction of ash elf benefices became corrupted by the Demon Prince Lilith.
• The Under hollows are also the home of most species of giant, tunnelling mammals, such as moles, weasels and badgers. The jaskinisse tame some of these for use as digging animals.
• Larger tunnellers, such as Umber Hulks, Kruthiks and Worms are responsible for many of the larger cavern passages, but are also a serious threat to travellers in the Tunnels. Some of these creatures are hunted for meat, but most make poor eating and are only hunted when they become a threat to traffic.