Below the Line

The cage drops past sodium lamps and stops at Level 7. A painted line, a brass plate: 300 M. Step over it and the floor starts to hum. Something thirty metres long is listening.

Shaft Seven has been sealed for a long time. Your crew rides the cage down from the Headframe, a rusted steel tower on red earth under a sky full of stars, where the Lamp House hands out kits and the Tag Board shows whose tag is below the line right now. The Keeper runs the cage, explains each rule after you have felt it, and always leaves last. Below the line the cave walls glow, and a creature with an elephant's head, crystal tusks and a serpent's body lies in the dark. It cannot be harmed, and nobody tries.

Each shift needs proof: readings taken in stillness, records left by the survey team who came before, and stones from the glowing cavity. Readings and records are safe and slow. Stones are fast, and taking one wakes it. Creep, hold still, and carry what you can back above the line before your lamps fail. Three shifts make a contract, and the cave remembers what you took.

It hunts by sound, so running is the worst thing you can do. Its scales glow with its mood, from watching to assessing to a hunting green. One stone carried out is a tense walk; two are a chase. Or give every stone back, hold still together and leave in order, and the Settling makes the cave yours for the rest of the shift. You took it, you go first; the Keeper goes last.

The first release has two maps: Tunnel 7-C, which runs down from the line to a crystal cavity at 380 metres, and the Old Workings on Level 8, where the cage itself stops below the line. There are five kits to choose from (Lamp, Meter, Spectroscope, Pick and Rope), 24 records to find and 12 looks to earn. Crews of one to five ride the cage, and a solo shift has its own smaller target.

Only what you carry is ever at risk: banked proof, brass, kits, records and looks are never lost. Records rebuild a lost survey map page by page in the Headframe's cabinet, the crewmate with the most shifts wears a brass star and leaves last, and three Keeper's Requests each Saturday cost nothing to miss. The Deep Passage, the creature's own road, comes next.

Based on Grootslang by Ayo Adeyemi: the safe line at 300 metres, a creature that wakes when something is taken and settles when it is given back, a hunter that tracks sound and scales that glow with its mood all come from the novel.

Below the Line is a finished game design for Roblox, and Greenlight Games is looking for a studio partner to build it.