maybe it costs money to dig without unsheathing your weapons ("hire miners") but players who are in a hurry can risk being caught unarmed in exchange for digging extra (lending the miners a hand).

I think for combat I'll steal from Hero Quest and have special dice for attacking and defending. If you don't have special dice you can make your own out of regular dice in a pinch by sticking something over some of the faces, those little round stickers you can buy wherever seem to have been created for just such a purpose. I'm doing away with how combat skill works in favour for a single number that determines how many dice you roll. One die for each point. You roll your dice and how many land stickered side up will be a successful hit. Your foe rolls his defense dice (combat skill determines this as well) and for each one that lands stickered side up a hit will be defended against. Then when their turn eventually comes around the roles are reversed.

It differs a bit for fighting multiple foes. You will be allowed to divvy up your successes amoungst the group but all your foes get to roll their defense dice at the same time. If the Master Of the Mine doesn't intend for any of them to move in their upcoming turns they can all attack at once and you'll be stuck having to defend against every attack. You're telling me you can't roll that many dice? TS bro. I know that game masters can be complete bastards so you could say that I'm catering for them.

Let's start again form scratch!

- Instead of having a single or a small group of characters players now run a mining company which hires miners and soldiers to protect those miners. You can only do so much swinging a pick axe.
- Instead of mining into a mountain you now mine downwards so the closer you get to the centre of the earth the more densely packed minerals you run into but the more dangerous monsters you'll find.
- You have a little town on the surface which will expand as you start raking in the dough and will eventually offer up services that favour the more arcane subjects and can do stuff with all the otherwordly stuff you'll find deep down. There's always arcane and otherwordly stuff hidden deep underground.
- Advanced rules may include limited building materials (for ladders, lifts, supports and a supply of rations and booze to keep your employees happy) and caravans that will visit every so often to transport such things to your mining colony.
- Wouldn't it then be a larf if monsters decided to invade your town from that new shaft you just dug which opened a path into their home. Whoops exactly.
- Cave-ins. Undo an entire morning's work that lead to a dense vein of silver because someone used too much gelignite or didn't put up adequate supports or maybe coughed at the wrong volume. How this will be implemented is kind of up-in-the-air at this stage.
- Same with pockets of flammable gas and dust explosions (yeah, dust can explode. Bet you didn't know that one). Mining is a pretty dangerous business.

This is a good start.