In the small Kingdom of Guleress, a long forgotten dwarven fortress was discovered by miners, deep in the mountains. After several years of looting it was sealed off, until, with the dungeons overflowing, the king declared it a prison. Ordering the mages guild to construct a magical one way portal, he began secretly dumping the excess prisoners there. But like any good secret, people found out and began to exploit it.
At first it was the nobles, paying off the kings guards to look the other way while sending their political rivals or other undesirables in to vanish without a trace. As the years passed it became common practice and for the right price you could send anyone to the dungeon under the mountain, never to return. Mages were hired to enchant tracking collars so that their enemy, safe on the outside could watch thru viewing mirrors as their victims withered and died in the caves. Eventually it became a local custom to watch whenever it was announced that someone was being sentenced to the dungeon under the mountain.
Magic users of every kind were summoned and even those that studied the darker arts had a place in the dungeon under the mountain. They began delving deeper than even the dwarves had gone. Expanding the dungeon to epic proportions, they then began summoning monsters and creating constructs to haunt the dungeon’s halls. Mages specialized with earth work were in charge of expanding the dungeon, engineers and enchanters added traps and other dangers. Summoners, necromancers and beast trappers filled the dungeon with creatures of all kinds. With every new batch of criminals they would change the dungeon’s layout slightly ensuring that none had knowledge of what lay below.
At some point it became commonplace to bet on the condemned and as the years went on it was slowly turning into a death sport even more gruesome than the gladiatorial games were. Great warriors came to the king begging permission to test their might in the dungeon. Groups of heros flocked to the capital from across the land, placing all their worldly belongings into the hands of the local adventurers guild to be paid out to the first survivor that completed the dungeon and escaped. Many went in but none ever returned, and as they died, the death games popularity grew. Now all but the poorest of homes had a magical viewing mirror and many spent their evening meals watching men and women get butchered by the denizens and traps of the dungeon under the mountain.
The portal to the dungeon was moved to the center of town so that the entire population could watch as the prisoners were marched down the road from the castle's dungeons. Greedy merchants lined this road, offering their wares to the condemned at exorbitant prices getting every copper they had before entering the portal. This portion of road that the merchants gathered became known as death row. These merchants sold every type of item imaginable from swords and armor to survival gear and food, even foreign slavers were given permission to build a stall. The first building on the road was a gate house where the guards would strip the prisoner naked passing off all their items to the buying merchants. By royal decree these merchants were required to give fair value to the prisoners for their goods.
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Because the condemned could only spend money they had on them at the time of arrest. It became commonplace to risk the thieves of the city and wear your riches on your person at all times, just in case one of your enemies found a way to get you imprisoned. Though slaves were illegal in the Kingdom of Guleress the slave traders were allowed to place a single stall in death row allowing prisoners with enough coin to purchase extra bodies to enter with them. These slaves wore special collars that were magically tied to an owner's bracelet. The slaves couldn't walk more than 30 yards from their owners of their own volition without being magically yanked back as if on a leash. The same went for orders, collared slaves couldn't disobey a direct order from their masters. This form of legal slavery made being attractive in the lower classes less desirable since only the most beautiful slaves were taken to death row’s slave trading stall.
To force the condemned to go deeper into the dungeon and not just loiter near the entrance, mages placed spells on the walls. If any individual or party lingered for more than 24 hours in any one spot the walls would slowly begin to close in on them, and if they didn’t go deeper they would be crushed within an hour. Certain floors and many of the dead end tunnels were exempted from this trap and several of the more open floors had been colonised by the early prisoners.
These rough and often lawless settlements have to fend for themselves and rarely aid new prisoners unless they have goods or skills to trade. Food and metal weapons have become the currency of the dungeon since only some of the dungeons fungus and beasts are safely edible. It's said there is an end to the dungeon if your skilled enough to find it. The mages guild even confirm that the final room has a teleport pad that will return any who activate it to the platform in the center of town. None have even come close to finding it, not even the great heroes who still flock to Guleress in hopes of being the one to collect the enormous fortune for completing the dungeon.
The portal room is said to be the home to the final guardian, one of the first dungeon mages. Valter the lich lord who now rules the lowest floors of the dungeon. Choosing the life of a lich rather than dying of old age Valter swore an oath to his king. He swore upon his undying soul to never attempt to leave the bowels of the dungeon and in exchange the mages of the kingdom would allow him to live out the rest of his days in peace at the bottom of the dungeon. This oath was magically bound with a portion of his soul to an amulet that the lich can never remove, if he attempts to remove the amulet or leave the dungeon his soul will be destroyed completely with no hope of escape.
Centuries have passed since the dungeon came to be and the mages who operate the dungeon have mastered their craft. The dungeon under the mountain is the deadliest and most watched place in the known world. Now even the neighboring kingdoms send their prisoners to the dungeon. Long columns of barred wagons full of prisoners head to the capital of Guleress each month, to be march down death row and sent into the depths of the dungeon.