How can I get enough food into my underground empire?

I'd like to have a large underground world. Imagine the "Underdark" which will be familiar with DnD folks. A huge network of large and small caverns connected by winding passageways. The occasional vast underground lake.

I would like for this subterranean world to be populated with wicked denizens. Entire cities of thousands of people (or descendants of renegade elves, dwarves and such from the surface). Plenty of trolls and random monsters, the odd eldritch horror.

There's only one problem... food. It takes a lot of provender to supply an underground empire, after all. And on our Earth, the larder is pretty bare in underground ecosystems. I have a few ideas, but need some more.

• Way down in the deepest caverns extremophile bacteria are happily eating away at the rock -- after all, this is how the Downbelow grows. This provides a source of biomass slowly trickling up from beneath.

• There's some kind of critter which is like a cave-salmon. It is born in the caves as a little thing, runs around in the upper world for a few years to fatten up, then along with untold thousands of its kind, races back down to the caves to spawn. Grisly wars are fought over control of the best routes taken by cave-salmon.

• Um. Well. I hesitate to bring this up... There is a steady trickle of adventurer types from above, and ... um ... well, "meat's meat", y'know.

I'm not sure if these ideas are enough to fuel an overall population of let's say 100,000 human equivalent. So help me out here, my monsters are starving!

posted about 7 years ago

akaioi‭

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